Retirement?

I heard at a young age to enjoy my life because before you know it...not sure I listened to the complete message. Now here I am and the thought of retirement is on the table. Not sure where all the time went but pretty sure that was the warning sent down to me by my elders. I've had a life well lived with lots of memories and now I'm in the third quarter of life. It's a great place to be and I am excited but also finding things out about myself.

I found out I'm scared to retire. Crazy right?! I poured myself into every job I had for 35 years and now I don't want to enjoy the fruits of my labor? Not exactly. My fear is what the hell am I going to do when I retire. I can't sit around, I'll go fucking crazy - I need something to do! This has dominated my thoughts of retirement and at times making me very anxious.

I don't want to work forever. Let me clarify that a bit, I don't want to work for someone else forever. I can see myself owning a small consulting firm or business where I choose my clients and my schedule carefully. I would call that semi-retired. Just enough work to keep that part of my personality happy but still plenty of time to do other things. I could probably do this for 5 to 10 years which would bring me right up against full retirement.

Where I get hung up is perception, specifically my perception of what retirement should be. In my head it was you stop working cold turkey and your time is spent on hobbies. I don't have any solid fucking hobbies so this is where the anxiety kicked in. I need to get a hobby before I retire oh crap!! What I'm learning and starting to understand is retirement is whatever I want it to be. There is no hard and fast rule so it gets down to what do I want to do and how do I want to spend my time. It really isn't any harder than that.

While I don't have my plans set I have figured out one thing, what I want the most is control over my time. I am very much looking forward to the days when my schedule is set by me for more that two days a week.