A Review of My Time – retirementtransition

One of the elements I love about retirement is the ability to set up my days to align with my retirement lifestyle vision, which is based on my values and hopefully my natural inclinations and strengths. These past months have been a blur and I felt the need to relook at where I’m spending my time. I want to be living with intention and not simply frittering time away, letting life happen, or allowing distractions to fill my time. Yes, there is still recovery needed – both physical house and emotional me – but I feel a need to get back to living the retirement life I love.

I also wanted to understand how I am living as a “Wild Woman” already, as I want to recognize that part of me (link to blog about who that element is). In fact, as I think about who I am, I’m finding there are multiple elements of my unique self. Yes, there is the responsible “Good Girl”, who’s doing all the adulting and house recovery and often feeling not good enough at accomplishing things there. There is the “Sage”, the wise woman who likes to research and share knowledge. I do have an intuitive “Wild Woman” inside me who doesn’t always follow the rules; she is one that needs more recognition! And then there’s also my inner “Bohemian Faerie”, who likes to dabble in metaphysical things and play with crafts and plants.

Before looking at my time spent (what is reality the past couple of weeks) I needed to re-think on what I want my life to look like. I’ve been struggling with the idea that since I’ve been focused on being the “Good Girl” since my teen years, doing the should and meeting expectations, do I really know what I truly want?

What does my soul crave?

A slow natural wake-up in the morning, drinking coffee, and writing in my journal without any sense that I need to rush to do something. Feeling a sense of freedom for my days – able to set boundaries on my time, able to say no, engaging in the things I love to do without guilt. I realized that I did have as sense of the “shackles coming off” when we moved to Florida, but I still struggle with boundaries and doing what’s expected.
- A return to doing the things I love.
  - Actively engaging in cardio drumming, yoga on the beach, regular bike rides, and beach walks.
  - - Sharing a substantive conversation with a friend, with coffee or wine or food, or even floating in a pool.
  - - Time spent reading a book in the sunshine, dabbling in the garden or with crafts, and making a healthy dinner. It’s about the engagement in activities, not the mastery of them.
  - - Regularly going to arts & crafts markets, dining out at great restaurants, and going to live theater.
  - - Having a thought-stimulating passion project that I can summarize and share with others
  - My retirement lifestyle vision statement is still true – Active Body, Connected Heart, Creative Spirit, Contemplative Mind. What activities can I return to now, while waiting on house recovery?
- Things I wish for going forward:
  - Eating healthy meals with lots of fruits and veggies and managing portion control better. Not avoiding things like ice-cream or dark chocolate or a glass of wine (because I’m active and am not needing to worry about weight gain).
  - - Having a place where “everybody knows my name”.
  - - Feeling comfortable having people over to our home, for easy dinners or time on the water. Having a close circle of couple-friends, as well as girlfriends.
    - Getting comfortable in being authentically me. Over at Deb’s World (a wonderful blogger I follow), she talked about accepting your uniqueness. (link here to her blog.). She said, “When it comes to authenticity, learning to embrace your weird isn’t just about accepting imperfection…..It’s about learning to unapologetically celebrate your passions, ideas, quirks and sense of humour. Owning what brings you joy.” My quirlks? I am an over-thinker, a synthesizer of information, the responsible one, an avid dabbler, and a bit unconventional. I want to be more spontaneous, work on boundaries, and trust my intuition more.

This introspection on Who I Am has been helpful to recognize it is okay to be a bit unconventional as I always have been! I didn’t take the typical route – mine was a degree and career in the engineering field, childless by choice, a strong independent woman, and the primary breadwinner. I have dabbled in passion projects throughout my retirement – positive psychology, enneagram, history of religion, archetypes, tarot, chakra, spirituality, salt tolerant plants… where will I follow my “Sage” curiosity next? And yes, the responsible “Good Girl” is present and accounted for with all the adulting needed for house recovery. I just need to allow her to be human and feel “good enough!”.

What have I done to allow the “Wild Woman” and “Bohemian Faerie” elements of me out the past couple weeks?

Ordered “hippie clothing” (not arrived yet) and wore dresses more often.
Indulged in meals without money worry. I ordered surf & turf with wine for our anniversary dinner plus lava cake for dessert; then had a lobster roll for dinner one night. This was huge for me to not worry about cost!
Put crafting on my calendar and re-engaged in garden work on our property. OK, it was mostly pulling weeds but it felt so good to get my hands in the dirt.
Took a long solo shelling beach walk and did another walk & phone-talk on the beach.
Kayaking with girlfriends; a spontaneous (and hilarious) pool party with some of the same group.
Pedicure with a friend and long lunch conversation. A challenging one as she informed me their house has sold and they are moving away. It’s hard to be happy for them as my hearts breaks in losing that friendship – the reality is the friendship is too new to withstand a 1.5-hour distance.
Did a day trip visiting metaphysical stores and booked a sound bowls event.
Created vision boards – here’s the one I did on our new house color palette:

Yes, I also continued the adulting… builder’s risk quotes, figuring out insurance for “no house” (seriously, it’s needed for a number of reasons), finding a new lawn service and getting expectations set, Medicare & Medicare Advantage sign up (OMG!), following up on loan/grant information and build permit issuance (worrying takes up lots of mind-space!).

The days continue with joyful up moments and crying meltdowns. Looking back past couple of weeks, more ups than downs, which means healing is happening. We are approaching the 9-month post-catastrophe mark and hurricane season 2025 just began. Our house recovery continues slowly. But I am re-focused on living life with intention.

Do you embrace your quirks? Do you look back at what you actually do to see if it aligns with how you want to intentionally live your life?

Picture Credit: me on that kayaking trip!