Retirement: A Full-Time Job

Where Am I going to Find Ten Thousand Hours?

(Photo Details:  Cupcakes at my Uncle Jim's 80th birthday.  Hopefully I'll be playing jazz piano at mine.)

Ok, I really am going to kick off the new series of then-and-now posts next, but I just had to share a current-day challenge of retirement while I’m experiencing it. 

Last night, we went to a jazz concert at the wonderful new SF Jazz Center.  We saw Hiromi.  She is the most amazing jazz pianist.  This is the fourth time I’ve seen her and I will never tire of seeing her live.   I can’t think of any other word but amazing.  How can I describe it?  The whole concert I felt like I was going to explode.   Because that’s exactly what she’s doing—exploding.  I watched her hands dance across the keyboard, actually her whole body dances—she can’t even stay in her seat.  There’s just too much energy coming out!

Before the concert, we attended a reception showcasing SF Jazz’s education programs for kids in public schools.  The woman that runs the education program teaches jazz piano so I barraged her with questions about how they teach kids to improvise.  She knew what I was really asking--it wasn’t really about the kids.  It was about me.  How will I ever get good?  And of course she gave me the answer that I already knew:  10,000 hours.  Practice.

So while I was watching Hiromi, I was doing a little math.  If I practice one hour a day every single day, that’s 365 hours in a year.  At that rate it would take me 27 years to get really great.  Which is kind of what I was thinking when I took up piano in the first place.   My dad took up trumpet a few years ago, which is what inspired me to get started now.  My theory was that by the time I’m his age, I’ll be awesome.  He’s 78, so that is precisely how the math would work out for me. 

But while I was watching Hiromi, I kept thinking, I don’t want it to take 27 years!  So then I started recalculating—how could I do it in 10 years?  Ten thousand hours divided by 10 years—that’s almost three hours a day of practice.  Sounds fine in theory, right?  I am retired after all. 

But then add in time for sleeping, eating, exercising, seeing friends, cleaning the house, gardening, volunteering—oh yeah, and writing blog posts, never mind a book—and you see my conundrum.  Well I'm not sure those of you that are not yet retired see it.  But back me up here retirees--do you actually have three hours a day to spare?

Related Posts:

            Using Retirement to Get Really Good at Something

            Improvising Retirement

            Believing in the Dream

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Retirement Then and Now

 (Photo Details:  Above-Sydney with work friends at her retirement party in 2008.  Below-Sydney with Dad and Doug eight years into retirement.) 

 

I’ve been retired for nearly eight years now.  Over that time I’ve worried about money, and then stopped worrying about money.  I’ve gone from wanting to travel all the time, to wanting to stick closer to home.  I’ve gone from having no pets, to being adopted by a sweet kitty.   I’ve taken up, and then given up a part-time job, hot yoga, and knitting.  My interests have evolved over these years.  And so have my concerns about retirement.

In fact I don’t really have many concerns with retirement these days.  Early in my retirement I had concerns that many new or soon-to-be retirees share.  Do I have enough money?  How do I fill my time?  What will make me still feel relevant, important, and productive?  How do I talk about my retirement with friends and new acquaintances?  Should I be volunteering?  And how do I deal with guilt about not working anymore?

I can’t say when it happened that I don’t really think about these things anymore. But now I’m perfectly happy gardening, cleaning my house, writing, playing the piano, napping, volunteering, visiting with friends and family, and even doing nothing in particular.  Which is probably why the frequency of my postings here on the blog has dwindled. 

But I still receive wonderful emails from people contemplating or beginning their retirements asking those same questions I asked myself all those years.  And many of those folks tell me they’ve gone back to read all those old posts, to get an idea about the transition into their own retirements.  Or just to know that what they are experiencing is absolutely normal, even as they may be totally excited to be retired.

So I thought I’d take the next few weeks, or months, or whatever to go back through my old posts and do a series of then-and-now posts.  I’ll take up some of those old issues—how retirement felt for me back then--and update them for what that’s like now, nearly eight years later.

I’ll include excerpts from those old posts and even some of the comments—good and bad.  We’ll see how true some of my commenters’ predictions turned out.  Hopefully this will be fun for readers both old and new.  I know it will be fun for me!

 

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