Читать книгу Creating a Happy Retirement - Dr Ronald W. Richardson - Страница 10

It might seem that we are making retirement sound like work. That may be true to the extent that being a better person and living a better life requires work. However, the payoff of happiness and satisfaction with one’s life makes it worthwhile.

The psychologist Erik Erikson, who studied the human life cycle, described the time of retirement as a psychological battle between integrity and despair. One aspect of retiring is a tendency to look back at what we have done with our lives and ask, on balance, “Has it been a life of integrity? Can I feel good about my life?” If it has not been a life well lived, then we are tempted to despair, feeling as if we may have wasted our lives.

In the Third Age, we are still creating our lives. Life is not over. Part II of this book has some life review exercises. Doing these will give you clues for how to proceed with your planning in this new part of life. Of course, this stage of life is not simply about looking back. Retirement is a transition to a new beginning, but what you have done previously will have a great deal to do with what you do next.

We are our memories, including the unhappy ones, but we are still creating memories. We learn from our previous experiences, even our failures. We do not want our lives in this new age to be a repetition of previous failures, but a life of wisdom and satisfaction. We are still writing our story, and the question now is, “Where do I want to go next in this story of my life?” None of us knows how long that story will be, but it doesn’t hurt to plan for the longest time possible, keeping in mind the possibility of declining health or income in the later years.