One Year On …

So, a year has now passed since this blog went live, in the sense that it became visible to Google and people found out about its existence. Which also means it’s now a year since I retired from work as a hospital doctor.

Last night, the Boon Companion and I cracked a bottle of champagne to mark the anniversary, so you can perhaps deduce that things have gone well.

None of the dire predictions that were intoned during the months before my Final Day turned out to be accurate. Going from full-time work to full-time retirement was effortless—I handed in my pager, walked out of the hospital, and simply stopped thinking about medicine. I haven’t missed it for a single moment; but nor, interestingly, has there been any sense of relief, either. I just flipped into a new way of living. Honestly, it’s difficult to see what all the fuss was about. I can clearly recall the last time I was bored, and it was during my second-last day at work.

This is not to belittle the plight of those retired colleagues who I know have struggled to adapt to their new way of life—the ease with which I made the transition makes it clear that there was either something different about the way I related to the job, or something different about the way I related to the rest of life, or perhaps a little of both. Whatever it is, it would appear that I was born to be a retired person—I do believe I’ve finally found my natural aptitude.

9 thoughts on “One Year On …”

  1. Me too !
    Except I meet ex-colleagues for lunch betimes and keep up to date with the gossip etc. and I get invited to the parties as do other retirees
    Sent your Christmas parcel Nov 12 and Christmas delivery not guarenteed as I was late. Sorry, I was more organised when working ! No calendar this year as there are no nice ones in NS.

    1. Well, I always seemed to be the last to know any gossip in my department – scandals would have come and gone and I’d find out six months later. So I’m not really missing the gossip!

  2. Well, it’s worked for me. For both of us. Mostly She chose early retirement. I, um, had early retirement chosen, by the work sort of petering out (I was a mining geologist, consulting for the last 15 years or so, so it was easy to pretend to look for work at the end).

    She has a good pension (state employee), I have my savings and IRAs. We’re both thrifty. We bounced around quite a bit the first few years, in NM & AZ, always in nice places & nice houses, that seemed to need a LOT of work to make them Really nice. We weren’t flippers, but had the comfortable illusion of the prices of our nice houses always going up.

    This worked well up until the lead in to 2008, and didn’t work at all then. She has always had asthma, which turned into COPD, which meant: low altitude, clean air. So, coast of California.

    Both houses we owned then (near Sedona, above Taos) sold for WAY less than what we had in them, including an awful lot of work in NM. The AZ house sold for about half what we paid for it. Pretty shocking.

    What we could (barely!) afford out here, was an O.K. house: 1200 sq ft on a 3500 sq ft lot. The LOT is smaller than our HOUSE was in NM! Oh, well, nice town, nice climate. But the notorious California Premium applies to Everything. Which is why people leave here when they retire. Or at least think about it.

    Well, we haven’t gone broke yet. I’m still healthy (early 70s), she’s not. But hanging in there. But, health. Big Deal. As you know, Dr, Oikofuge.

    Where we are:
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/29050464@N06/

  3. I retired at 72 (8 years ago) and have found nothing better to do than have tea with friends, read, buy books, give books away, occasional travel, write, walk, woodcarving & daydream. I just discovered this blog and now it is one of two that I can add to my limited activities.
    Thank You, (so far)
    R Lee Smith

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