This one thinks "retire" is a four-letter word

   

Steve and I, in Des Moines.
He's better at retirement than I am!

     Retire?

    Not so fast, says this workaholic who used to cringe at the word and now says it aloud with fingers used as quotation marks.

    I like to stay busy and many smart folks have told me truly ...  I need to stay busy.

    There are some others in my Cox family who also stay busy so I know this is not unusual. The difference, these days, is that the time is of one's own choosing. Some of us choose more activities than others.

    It was 2018 when I was laid off from as a daily newspaper reporter. The family rushed to comfort me as they knew this career was one I had chosen at 18 years old and managed to stay in for almost four decades. 

    (This blog got a lot more urgency when two friends were laid off from the newsroom. I remain an avid newspaper reader.)

    I still start each day by reading the daily newspaper. I have lists of what need to be accomplished, but some have more value than others. For example, I now have time to put "family first," and that means attending various activities of the seven -- soon to be nine -- grandchildren. Most of the kids are here in the Quad-Cities, while one family is in Ankeny, about 2.5 hours west of us.

    I exercise a lot and have grown to enjoy "running," or fast jogging, and I do that, five days a week. I also lift weights, twice a week. I participate in 5K races.

    I try to volunteer as much as possible, such as with the Scott County Library in Eldridge, Iowa. I serve as the president of our neighborhood association.

    I garden in our large yard, write two blogs, feed birds and now have 40-some scrapbooks that are regularly maintained.

    This schedule developed after the trauma of having a career ubruptly end. Life changed on a dime and I was not psychologically prepared, to say the least.

    After reeling for a year I earned my substitute teaching license and enjoyed that gig until the recent pandemic. I've taken the past couple years off substituting and am unsure when to start up again. Daughter Kirstin is expecting twin girls later this summer and she's going to need her mom's help, certainly.

    According to the Pew Research Center, a growing number of adults are retiring, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2021 article, more than 50 percent of those ages 55 years and older said they had retired and were out of the labor force.

    The pandemic, Pew reported, represented a significant change in long-term stable trends about retirement rates in older adults.

    This seems to help explain losses in the overall labor force; older workers retire (or are laid off), and younger workers may choose education over immediate employment.

    Experts are unsure if the pandemic-induced trends will continue, or not, Pew reported.

    There is life after "retirement," I told a friend. It just takes time to figure out.