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Editor’s note: In the next few weeks, the Harvard Press will be introducing you to the bloggers who post on our website, www.harvardpress.com, and we’ll be debuting a feature, “From the Blogs,” which will update you each week about what’s new from them. We’re starting this week with an introductory column by Harvard resident Chuck Yanikoski, who blogs about retirement planning. Visit his and the other Harvard Press blogs at www.harvardpress.com/aboutharvard/harvardblogs.aspx.
Two older people, each of whom I know well, take radically different views of what life offers. One is in her seventies, but suffers from a disease that increasingly disables her. She reacts with dread to the idea of having to live more than another year or so.
—Chuck Yanikoski
The other person I am thinking of is in his nineties, but still gets around on foot with the help of a cane, and despite (or perhaps because of) a stroke that has impaired his memory, he enjoys his simple life, faces every new day with gratitude, and hopes to live for quite a few more years.
Neither of them is wealthy, and neither life is shaped primarily by money. But despite these financial similarities, their quality of life, even their desire for life, are radically different. (Actually, since I first drafted this, the second person died. Fortunately, it was in a quick and painless fashion.)
The point is: of course money matters, but only to a point.
In my own life, as well as in the blog I write for the Harvard Press website, I do take financial issues seriously. I have some 35 years in the financial industry, in one guise or another. But even so, I realize that non-financial issues matter at least as much. Living our lives wisely and well goes far beyond how much coin we can pack into our pockets, and how long we can keep it there. Pervasive as money issues are, and as enabling as money can be (and crippling as its absence can be), other factors are equally so.
For most of us, love—our connection with others—is just as pervasive and more fundamentally important. Retirement is a time when we eventually lose many relationships because of distance or disability or death, but we cherish and strengthen other ones, both old and new (if we are smart).
Our beliefs, values, spiritual practices, integrity, self-determination, and other such intangibles also pervade everything we care about, and everything we do. Retirement is often a time to re-focus on these items, and re-evaluate and re-integrate them in view of our changing lives, the realities of aging, and the inevitability of dying.
Many of us understand physical and mental health as pervasive issues, too. The whole quality of our lives can depend on health, and as we get older, dealing with illness or disability can become the most dominating concern we have. Whether we are well or ill, though, health is at least as fundamental as money is, when it comes to our constructing and maintaining a good life for ourselves.
New articles are posted on the “Retirement Your Way” blog every Thursday. Collectively, they cover all six stages of retirement:
- Preparing ahead for retirement: what do you do during your working years to position yourself to retire “successfully” when the time eventually comes?
- Making the transition to retirement: whether you are fully retiring, or just trading your primary career for something less demanding or closer to your heart, how do you decide what the right time is, and how do you make the other key decisions that you face during that process?
- Adapting to retirement: so you had your retirement party, everyone said how much they’d miss you, and it’s the first day of the rest of your life – what do you do now?
- Taking advantage of retirement: many of us will have twenty or thirty or even more reasonably healthy years in retirement – how do you envision what to make of this opportunity, and if you do have (or discover) a dream for that time of life, how can you make it real?
- Coping with the expected and unexpected in our retirement years. We all know that people get old and eventually die, and usually have to cope with a variety of surprises along the way. We don’t like to picture this happening to us. What methods and resources are available when it does, though? And for that matter, how do we help our parents or others get through it first, if the need arises?
- Learning to let go – where do we find the wisdom and strength to age with grace, to bring our story to its end in style, and to leave behind the best we can for our families, our friends, and our community?
There is a lot to chew on, here. I hope you’ll check out the blog and add your own thoughts to the items posted there.
Chuck Yanikoski lives and works in Harvard.
