Retirement is only another chapter in the pilgrimage of life if you view it as the next chapter in your story.
It is legitimate and even healthy to grieve what you are leaving behind in retirement. It is even healthier to review the chapters you are closing with gratitude, laughter, and grace.
But retirement, as one of my friends puts it, is less about deciding what it is you are retiring from, than it is a matter of deciding what you are retiring to.
In making that decision, in opening the next chapter, retirement becomes a pilgrimage of faith and hope. Faith that God will open new doors, enrich your life, and deepen your wisdom. Hope that what you are retiring to will be filled with the same kind of joy that was there at each of the earlier stages in your life.
Many of the struggles people encounter in retirement lie with their vision of the experience. Some think of it entirely in terms of loss. Some think of it as a vacant lot, a place where people are parked for a time, having lived otherwise useful existences. Others enter retirement armed to the teeth with their minds filled with defensive provisions for the financial and physical well-being. And some think of it as golf.
To see it as another chapter in our pilgrimage along side God is to place it in context. We have walked through radically different chapters in our lives. The ones behind us are nothing like the one we experienced immediately before retiring. It is time to trust and to hope — for something new.
My retirement role model is Miss Lillian, the mother of former President Jimmy Carter. A nurse, she joined the Peace Corps at age 67.