Retrirement -- Be Prepared

For two or three years in my pre- and early-teens I was a Boy Scout. I attended Monday evening meetings regularly in the basement of Central Christian Church, I went on weekend campouts mostly in the summer but occasionally in the winter as well (snipe hunts were best in winter), I attended a National Jamboree in the Colorado Rockies (the altitude and water and stress gave me an ugly case of cold sores covering my mouth that took weeks to heal), I learned to tie knots and carve wood and paddle canoes and build campfires and a little bit of first aid. I actually achieved the rank of Life, the penultimate level in scoutdom, though more out of endurance than effort (just showing up was 90% of the accomplishment). And I had joined and endured only because of the camping and games and it’s what my friends were doing. But I realize that through that experience those many years ago I must have absorbed and retained what is at the heart of the scouting experience, as expressed in the motto – Be Prepared.

Occasionally someone who knows I’m retired will ask me how I’m doing and, especially if they’re in their 50s or early 60s, how they might look forward to their own retirement years. I guess I’ve become something of an expert on being retired if only because I am. Experience is wisdom. And whenever I’m asked, my advice always reverts back 50 years to my Boy Scout days – Be Prepared:

Laziness – Hopefully this is something that you’ve developed over years. It’s the umbrella of skills necessary for the life of retirement. If you aren’t lazy – and comfortable in your laziness – you aren’t properly ready for retirement. All else follows from it.

TV – TV is your friend, day and night. We live in an age of hundreds of stations with nothing on worth watching. Our generation has cultivated and preserved this “vast wasteland.” Embrace it, support it, even if only lying on the couch, passed out, drool seeping from the corner of your mouth, the 40” HD set illuminating the walls and droning into the night.

Beer – Or wine or gin or Scotch, whatever, though beer is less aggressive and dulls the senses more easily. You don’t want to spend the day drunk, and certainly not passed out, only morose. And because you’re retired you don’t have to drive.

Sports – This sort of unites the above three. There is some sort of sports programming on 24-hours a day (and night), even whole channels devoted to nothing but sports. You might every once in a while attend a live sporting event, though you don’t need to. And if you do there are TV monitors scattered around most sporting venues these days as well as plenty of beer stands, making the experience just like you were at home.

Reading – OK, this may sound a bit too cerebral. But I’m not talking Shakespeare, Proust, or Joyce. It’s often good to break up the routine of nothing during the day, and reading can be a good break. Especially if you’re lying on the couch, a baseball game on TV, a beer in hand, and a book about the 1961 Yankees across your lap.

Internet – It’s little known, but the Internet was originally developed for the gratification of retirees. All else is ancillary. You’ve got email, newspapers and magazines, blogs, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and all kinds of other ways to waste your remaining days. Enjoy.