My New Book Released December 1, 2012
Retirement: A Memoir and Guide
How you, like Boyd Lemon, can make your retirement the most fulfilling and happiest time of your life. Through action to take life more slowly, meditation, developing spirituality and finding his passion, among other things, Boyd describes how he lives, and you too can live, a fulfilling and happy retirement.
Available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Click here to buy: Retirement: A Memoir and Guide
Table of Contents and Excerpts
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: I’m Going to Retire: Then What?
Chapter 1: My Father’s Son
Chapter 2: Preparing Emotionally
Chapter 3:Preparing Financially
Chapter 4: The Importance of Place
Chapter 5:Minimalizing
Chapter 6: The Exceptions
Chapter 7: Slowing Down
Chapter 8: Knowing Who You Are
Guide to Preparation
Part 2: Controlling the Mind
Chapter 9: Meditation
Chapter 10: Being Present
Chapter 11: Expectations
Chapter 12: Happiness and Gratitude Through Mind Control
Chapter 13: Learning and Growing
Chapter 14: Spirituality
Guide to Controlling the Mind and Spirituality
Part 3: Developing a Passion
Chapter 15: Knowing Who You Are and the Path To Find Your Passion
Chapter 16: How I Found My Passion
Guide to Developing a Passion
Part 4: Developing and Nurturing Relationships
Chapter 17: Adult Children
Chapter 18: Friends
Chapter 19: Romance
Guide to Developing and Nurturing Relationships
Part 5: Facing Some Challenges
Chapter 20: Eliminating or Redirecting the Need to Achieve
Chapter 21: Establishing a Structure
Chapter 22: Dealing with Loneliness
Chapter 23: Dealing with Worry, Impatience and Complaining
Chapter 24: Dealing with Alcohol and Sleeplessness
Chapter 25: Dealing with Exercise and Nutrition
Guide to Facing Some Challenges
Part 6: Appreciating the Beauty in the World: Art and Travel
Chapter 26: Appreciate the Beauty that Surrounds Us 1
Chapter 27: Travel
Chapter 28: Planning and Preparation for Travel
Chapter 29: My Longing to Travel
Guide to Appreciating the Beauty in the World: Art and
Travel
Part 7: The Joys and Challenges of My Retirement Travel
Chapter 30: Life in Boston
Chapter 31: Living Abroad
Chapter 32: Italy and Farewell to Europe––for awhile
Chapter 33: Going Home
Chapter 34: Since Living Abroad
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. Want proof? Take a look at my memoir, Digging Deep: A Writer Uncovers His Marriages. In retirement, however, I have done a lot right, and in this book I’m sharing it with my readers. I was a lawyer, now leading a fulfilling retirement and having the time of my life on a relatively modest income.
For the first time, I take life slowly and notice and revel in the beauty in the world. I have learned something about who I am and what I care about, and feel at peace most of the time. I have always loved to travel and now have time to pursue that love. I have found my passion, writing. Writing, traveling, learning, eating good food and drinking good wine fulfills me. What other people do, think, or how they choose to live their lives doesn’t concern or worry me. I have family and friends that I care about and who care about me. I am engaged with life and love it. Challenges arise; worries and fears intrude—and I’ll tell you about those too, but I deal with them without feeling overwhelmed, broken or hopeless.
Many people are miserable in retirement because they don’t know what to do when they no longer work full time. They are not growing or learning and feel they have no purpose or direction. It doesn’t have to be that way. Retirement raises new and scary issues, as well as opportunities to begin a new life. Having planned for adequate financial resources, it is how we deal with the emotional issues and invite the opportunities that bring fulfillment.
Retirement is more than leisure time. Too much leisure time is often an expressway to boredom, frustration and unhappiness. Although decades of earning a living give us the opposite impression, loads of leisure time can be as unfulfilling and as fraught with stress and sadness as overwork.
Studies have shown that retirees who work even part time, volunteer to help others or are learning new activities are happier than those with a lot of leisure time and insufficient interests to take up that time. Most retirees must develop interests and engage in life to feel fulfilled. Knowing or finding out what interests you, what you are passionate about, is critical. The prize of retirement is not the leisure. It’s the opportunity to begin anew in a direction that reflects who you’ve become. I will tell you how I seized this opportunity and discovered my passions in retirement.
My life’s work as a lawyer was not as fulfilling as I had hoped. It seemed as if, when someone asked me to do something, I operated on the principle that they had asked because it was important. I succeeded as a lawyer because I so rarely declined any request made of me. Retirement provided me with an opportunity to start a new life in which I learn, create and do what I want, not what someone else wants. I am who I wish to be without regard to what society, a boss or anyone else requests or expects. For many of us there is no other time when this is a practical option.
Currently, I am single, but, despite my three divorces, I don’t rule out the possibility of a relationship with a partner or spouse. I receive life as it comes and decide what I want. My experience in creating a fulfilling retirement can be helpful for retirees with or without a spouse or partner.
Many retired people become clinically depressed, unable to deal with the fear of not being “useful,” or of impending death or other worries.
For an excellent article and citations to other sources on recognizing and treating depression in older adults, seewww.helpguide.org/mental/depressionelderly.htm.
This is not a book about health issues—but the cliché about not having anything if you don’t have your health is true. Men in my and previous generations commonly have resisted seeing a doctor even knowing that something is wrong, and many do not have annual physical examinations. This is insanity! Tragically, many men die of heart attacks and prostate or colon cancer unnecessarily because they did not have regular checkups or see a doctor as soon as symptoms appeared. Men, as well as women, should be religious about annual, complete physical examination, and be aware of their bodies. If I detect a possible health problem, I see a doctor immediately. I will not wait until it kills me. That doesn’t mean I won’t have health problems, but I have a much better chance of surviving them because I timely seek diagnosis and treatment.
The definition of retirement has expanded in recent years. As I use the term, it is a lifestyle of not working fulltime for pay, but it includes a choice to work as a full or part-time volunteer, or part-time for pay. The important element is a choice independent of any need to work full-time for a living. Retirement, by my definition, excludes changing from one full-time job for pay to another; most of the issues I discuss in this book do not arise while working full-time for pay. Although I consider some of what I do to be work––believe me, writing is work––I am living, and discuss here, a lifestyle in which I do not work full-time for pay.
Since this book is, in part, a memoir, it is personal. I am going to tell you as truthfully as I can how I have approached, and live in retirement––my successes and failures.
You probably won’t want to do exactly as I have done, but you will get some helpful ideas from this book, and I hope you will enjoy reading about my journey.
The names of some of the people in my story have been changed, and others I have not named, to preserve their privacy.
Part 1.
I’m Going To Retire. Then What?
Chapter 1
My Father’s Son?
I remember sitting in my beach chair a hundred steps from my front door, fine, cream-colored sand caressing the bottoms of my feet. My field of vision drifted from the stark silhouette of Anacapa to the purplish browns of Santa Cruz, two of the Channel Islands off the coast of California, 70 miles northwest of Los Angeles. I was officially in the city of Oxnard, a place with an ugly name that fails to hint at this serene beauty, in a neighborhood that hadn’t been discovered by the hoards from Los Angeles. Serene as the scene was, and despite the loosening warmth of a half-imbibed gin martini in my right hand, I felt a tightness in the pit of my stomach and radiating up to my chest. I was almost 63 and thinking about retirement at some future time.
I visualized my father 40 years earlier, sitting in his forest green easy chair in the living room of my childhood home as I studied a book on torts during my first year of law school. The Los Angeles Herald Express, an evening paper that he had read six evenings a week since I could remember, was in his lap, still folded up. He stared into the space between him and the front window. After working for the Southern California Edison Company for 35 years, Dad had grudgingly retired at the mandatory age of 65. Three years later he had developed no new interests. Once in a while he went to the horse races at Santa Anita or the poker parlors in Gardena, as he had before retirement, but afterwards he didn’t have the income to go often. Mom had told me that she was worried about him. “He just mopes around the house,” she said.
A few days later I was in my bedroom putting on a clean shirt before leaving to visit my girlfriend. Dad’s bedroom door, across the hall from mine, was partly open. I saw him reach into his dresser drawer, pull out a whiskey bottle, unscrew the cap and take a long swallow. It was ten in the morning. I had never seen my father take one sip of an alcoholic beverage. I turned my head away. I didn’t want him to know that I saw, and I never told my mother. Less than a year later he died.
Hoping to walk off my tenseness, I put my martini glass in the cup holder, dug my hands into the sand beside the chair, pushed myself up on my feet and began to walk toward the roar of the white-capped waves as they rushed in at high tide. I turned right, parallel to the water, and headed toward Ventura Harbor.
I’d walked about a hundred yards when I noticed an older couple, holding hands, walking toward me.
“Hello. Beautiful evening,” the woman said. We stopped walking.
“Indeed.” I said. “About as close to paradise, as you can get.”
She smiled and nodded. “Do you live here?”
“Yes, over there,” I pointed. “I just moved in last week.”
“We live about a mile that way.” She pointed up the beach behind them. We’ve had a summer home here for years, but we just sold our home in the San Fernando Valley and retired here. Oh, I’m Doris, and this is my husband, Jack.”
After a brief chat, Jack stepped forward. “Well, enjoy your retirement,” I said.
“See you soon I’m sure,” said Jack.
As I continued walking, I realized that the mention of retirement had heightened the tightness in my stomach and chest. In about four years I’ll be 67 and maybe ready for retirement, I thought. I had already cut my workweek to about 30 hours. I was burned out practicing law. I have plenty to do now, but what am I going to do when I retire? I don’t like golf or bridge or any of the other things that old folks do, except travel. But I can’t travel all the time, can I? Well, I guess I could—learn to sail and sail around the world, or buy a motor home and travel around the country.
I kept walking. What do I want to do? Volunteer to work for some organization that protects the environment? They’ll just want me to do legal work. That’s all I know how to do. Work at a food bank? Doing what? I had a feeling that I wanted to do something to help others. I thought it would be different from what I had been doing all my life, but would it be? Working at a food bank or for some environmental cause was still serving others, as I had been doing. I would be trying to achieve, to perform, to gain praise, doing what others expected or demanded of me.
I had to think of something to do that did not measure success by money, prestige, or praise, but by whether I felt fulfilled––inner-directed, not other-directed. Though it was not productive, I couldn’t help lamenting that I didn’t discover and pursue a passion when I was young. I knew for many years that practicing law did not fulfill me, but I did nothing about it. I didn’t see a way out. I could not change the past; but I could create my future. I was blessed that finally I had become aware that I needed fulfillment.
The image of my father taking that drink of whiskey, and his funeral soon after, stayed with me for more than 40 years. I didn’t want to end up like him, so depressed during my so-called golden years that I drank to numb the depression.
I have never been very good at transitions. I’ve lived as if expelled or dragged from one life to another––to law school when I had to do something after college graduation, to work at a prestigious law firm that brought me little fulfillment, from one marriage to the next. Each life seemed irreversible. I was determined to make the transition to retirement thoughtful and deliberate.
As I walked beside the crashing waves, I looked up at the Mandalay Bay Power Plant on my right. I had walked about three miles. It was getting dark, so I jogged back. By the time I got back to my chair, my right knee ached. I wondered how much longer I could jog. I picked up my glass, downed the last of the martini, folded up the chair and walked back home. I fixed another martini. I don’t remember if it occurred to me that I might be walking in my father’s footsteps. I doubt it.
Table of Contents and Excerpts
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: I’m Going to Retire: Then What?
Chapter 1: My Father’s Son
Chapter 2: Preparing Emotionally
Chapter 3:Preparing Financially
Chapter 4: The Importance of Place
Chapter 5:Minimalizing
Chapter 6: The Exceptions
Chapter 7: Slowing Down
Chapter 8: Knowing Who You Are
Guide to Preparation
Part 2: Controlling the Mind
Chapter 9: Meditation
Chapter 10: Being Present
Chapter 11: Expectations
Chapter 12: Happiness and Gratitude Through Mind Control
Chapter 13: Learning and Growing
Chapter 14: Spirituality
Guide to Controlling the Mind and Spirituality
Part 3: Developing a Passion
Chapter 15: Knowing Who You Are and the Path To Find Your Passion
Chapter 16: How I Found My Passion
Guide to Developing a Passion
Part 4: Developing and Nurturing Relationships
Chapter 17: Adult Children
Chapter 18: Friends
Chapter 19: Romance
Guide to Developing and Nurturing Relationships
Part 5: Facing Some Challenges
Chapter 20: Eliminating or Redirecting the Need to Achieve
Chapter 21: Establishing a Structure
Chapter 22: Dealing with Loneliness
Chapter 23: Dealing with Worry, Impatience and Complaining
Chapter 24: Dealing with Alcohol and Sleeplessness
Chapter 25: Dealing with Exercise and Nutrition
Guide to Facing Some Challenges
Part 6: Appreciating the Beauty in the World: Art and Travel
Chapter 26: Appreciate the Beauty that Surrounds Us 1
Chapter 27: Travel
Chapter 28: Planning and Preparation for Travel
Chapter 29: My Longing to Travel
Guide to Appreciating the Beauty in the World: Art and
Travel
Part 7: The Joys and Challenges of My Retirement Travel
Chapter 30: Life in Boston
Chapter 31: Living Abroad
Chapter 32: Italy and Farewell to Europe––for awhile
Chapter 33: Going Home
Chapter 34: Since Living Abroad
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. Want proof? Take a look at my memoir, Digging Deep: A Writer Uncovers His Marriages. In retirement, however, I have done a lot right, and in this book I’m sharing it with my readers. I was a lawyer, now leading a fulfilling retirement and having the time of my life on a relatively modest income.
For the first time, I take life slowly and notice and revel in the beauty in the world. I have learned something about who I am and what I care about, and feel at peace most of the time. I have always loved to travel and now have time to pursue that love. I have found my passion, writing. Writing, traveling, learning, eating good food and drinking good wine fulfills me. What other people do, think, or how they choose to live their lives doesn’t concern or worry me. I have family and friends that I care about and who care about me. I am engaged with life and love it. Challenges arise; worries and fears intrude—and I’ll tell you about those too, but I deal with them without feeling overwhelmed, broken or hopeless.
Many people are miserable in retirement because they don’t know what to do when they no longer work full time. They are not growing or learning and feel they have no purpose or direction. It doesn’t have to be that way. Retirement raises new and scary issues, as well as opportunities to begin a new life. Having planned for adequate financial resources, it is how we deal with the emotional issues and invite the opportunities that bring fulfillment.
Retirement is more than leisure time. Too much leisure time is often an expressway to boredom, frustration and unhappiness. Although decades of earning a living give us the opposite impression, loads of leisure time can be as unfulfilling and as fraught with stress and sadness as overwork.
Studies have shown that retirees who work even part time, volunteer to help others or are learning new activities are happier than those with a lot of leisure time and insufficient interests to take up that time. Most retirees must develop interests and engage in life to feel fulfilled. Knowing or finding out what interests you, what you are passionate about, is critical. The prize of retirement is not the leisure. It’s the opportunity to begin anew in a direction that reflects who you’ve become. I will tell you how I seized this opportunity and discovered my passions in retirement.
My life’s work as a lawyer was not as fulfilling as I had hoped. It seemed as if, when someone asked me to do something, I operated on the principle that they had asked because it was important. I succeeded as a lawyer because I so rarely declined any request made of me. Retirement provided me with an opportunity to start a new life in which I learn, create and do what I want, not what someone else wants. I am who I wish to be without regard to what society, a boss or anyone else requests or expects. For many of us there is no other time when this is a practical option.
Currently, I am single, but, despite my three divorces, I don’t rule out the possibility of a relationship with a partner or spouse. I receive life as it comes and decide what I want. My experience in creating a fulfilling retirement can be helpful for retirees with or without a spouse or partner.
Many retired people become clinically depressed, unable to deal with the fear of not being “useful,” or of impending death or other worries.
For an excellent article and citations to other sources on recognizing and treating depression in older adults, seewww.helpguide.org/mental/depressionelderly.htm.
This is not a book about health issues—but the cliché about not having anything if you don’t have your health is true. Men in my and previous generations commonly have resisted seeing a doctor even knowing that something is wrong, and many do not have annual physical examinations. This is insanity! Tragically, many men die of heart attacks and prostate or colon cancer unnecessarily because they did not have regular checkups or see a doctor as soon as symptoms appeared. Men, as well as women, should be religious about annual, complete physical examination, and be aware of their bodies. If I detect a possible health problem, I see a doctor immediately. I will not wait until it kills me. That doesn’t mean I won’t have health problems, but I have a much better chance of surviving them because I timely seek diagnosis and treatment.
The definition of retirement has expanded in recent years. As I use the term, it is a lifestyle of not working fulltime for pay, but it includes a choice to work as a full or part-time volunteer, or part-time for pay. The important element is a choice independent of any need to work full-time for a living. Retirement, by my definition, excludes changing from one full-time job for pay to another; most of the issues I discuss in this book do not arise while working full-time for pay. Although I consider some of what I do to be work––believe me, writing is work––I am living, and discuss here, a lifestyle in which I do not work full-time for pay.
Since this book is, in part, a memoir, it is personal. I am going to tell you as truthfully as I can how I have approached, and live in retirement––my successes and failures.
You probably won’t want to do exactly as I have done, but you will get some helpful ideas from this book, and I hope you will enjoy reading about my journey.
The names of some of the people in my story have been changed, and others I have not named, to preserve their privacy.
Part 1.
I’m Going To Retire. Then What?
Chapter 1
My Father’s Son?
I remember sitting in my beach chair a hundred steps from my front door, fine, cream-colored sand caressing the bottoms of my feet. My field of vision drifted from the stark silhouette of Anacapa to the purplish browns of Santa Cruz, two of the Channel Islands off the coast of California, 70 miles northwest of Los Angeles. I was officially in the city of Oxnard, a place with an ugly name that fails to hint at this serene beauty, in a neighborhood that hadn’t been discovered by the hoards from Los Angeles. Serene as the scene was, and despite the loosening warmth of a half-imbibed gin martini in my right hand, I felt a tightness in the pit of my stomach and radiating up to my chest. I was almost 63 and thinking about retirement at some future time.
I visualized my father 40 years earlier, sitting in his forest green easy chair in the living room of my childhood home as I studied a book on torts during my first year of law school. The Los Angeles Herald Express, an evening paper that he had read six evenings a week since I could remember, was in his lap, still folded up. He stared into the space between him and the front window. After working for the Southern California Edison Company for 35 years, Dad had grudgingly retired at the mandatory age of 65. Three years later he had developed no new interests. Once in a while he went to the horse races at Santa Anita or the poker parlors in Gardena, as he had before retirement, but afterwards he didn’t have the income to go often. Mom had told me that she was worried about him. “He just mopes around the house,” she said.
A few days later I was in my bedroom putting on a clean shirt before leaving to visit my girlfriend. Dad’s bedroom door, across the hall from mine, was partly open. I saw him reach into his dresser drawer, pull out a whiskey bottle, unscrew the cap and take a long swallow. It was ten in the morning. I had never seen my father take one sip of an alcoholic beverage. I turned my head away. I didn’t want him to know that I saw, and I never told my mother. Less than a year later he died.
Hoping to walk off my tenseness, I put my martini glass in the cup holder, dug my hands into the sand beside the chair, pushed myself up on my feet and began to walk toward the roar of the white-capped waves as they rushed in at high tide. I turned right, parallel to the water, and headed toward Ventura Harbor.
I’d walked about a hundred yards when I noticed an older couple, holding hands, walking toward me.
“Hello. Beautiful evening,” the woman said. We stopped walking.
“Indeed.” I said. “About as close to paradise, as you can get.”
She smiled and nodded. “Do you live here?”
“Yes, over there,” I pointed. “I just moved in last week.”
“We live about a mile that way.” She pointed up the beach behind them. We’ve had a summer home here for years, but we just sold our home in the San Fernando Valley and retired here. Oh, I’m Doris, and this is my husband, Jack.”
After a brief chat, Jack stepped forward. “Well, enjoy your retirement,” I said.
“See you soon I’m sure,” said Jack.
As I continued walking, I realized that the mention of retirement had heightened the tightness in my stomach and chest. In about four years I’ll be 67 and maybe ready for retirement, I thought. I had already cut my workweek to about 30 hours. I was burned out practicing law. I have plenty to do now, but what am I going to do when I retire? I don’t like golf or bridge or any of the other things that old folks do, except travel. But I can’t travel all the time, can I? Well, I guess I could—learn to sail and sail around the world, or buy a motor home and travel around the country.
I kept walking. What do I want to do? Volunteer to work for some organization that protects the environment? They’ll just want me to do legal work. That’s all I know how to do. Work at a food bank? Doing what? I had a feeling that I wanted to do something to help others. I thought it would be different from what I had been doing all my life, but would it be? Working at a food bank or for some environmental cause was still serving others, as I had been doing. I would be trying to achieve, to perform, to gain praise, doing what others expected or demanded of me.
I had to think of something to do that did not measure success by money, prestige, or praise, but by whether I felt fulfilled––inner-directed, not other-directed. Though it was not productive, I couldn’t help lamenting that I didn’t discover and pursue a passion when I was young. I knew for many years that practicing law did not fulfill me, but I did nothing about it. I didn’t see a way out. I could not change the past; but I could create my future. I was blessed that finally I had become aware that I needed fulfillment.
The image of my father taking that drink of whiskey, and his funeral soon after, stayed with me for more than 40 years. I didn’t want to end up like him, so depressed during my so-called golden years that I drank to numb the depression.
I have never been very good at transitions. I’ve lived as if expelled or dragged from one life to another––to law school when I had to do something after college graduation, to work at a prestigious law firm that brought me little fulfillment, from one marriage to the next. Each life seemed irreversible. I was determined to make the transition to retirement thoughtful and deliberate.
As I walked beside the crashing waves, I looked up at the Mandalay Bay Power Plant on my right. I had walked about three miles. It was getting dark, so I jogged back. By the time I got back to my chair, my right knee ached. I wondered how much longer I could jog. I picked up my glass, downed the last of the martini, folded up the chair and walked back home. I fixed another martini. I don’t remember if it occurred to me that I might be walking in my father’s footsteps. I doubt it.
