Let me elaborate on the paragraph near the end of the previous post. I said my retirement life is great, but it has become routine and lacked spontaneity. I really looked forward to escaping my Ordinary World to the special world of Santa Fe. I needed a break from my routine.

I am not complaining about retirement. When I left Corporate America, I did not want to work in my industry again. I did not want to work in any industry again, certainly not in a job with the excessive structure I had lived with decades. I had other interests I wanted to pursue. I was very tired of the demanding structure I had been living in for more than forty years.

My career was somewhat demanding, but I’m not going to complain. There are a lot of people who have much harder jobs than I did. Still, I was busy. I worked from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM. I was a single father to three growing daughters. I shared custody with their mother. They were with me several nights per week and every other weekend. When I came home I spent half my nights cooking, making lunches and going to school events. There was always a school reading challenge or oral language competition. sports events like volleyball or basketball. Weekends were often spent at a baseball diamond or in a gym watching my daughter compete in gymnastics. I was not a full-time dad. I had breaks. I do not how good a job I could have done without having breaks to recharge.

I got up at 5:00 AM to have time to myself before work to drink coffee, journal in a Moleskin and catch up with the news. A mad scramble began when the girls woke up; eat breakfast, pack lunches, get dressed, feed the dogs, and get my girls to school. I felt like the character in Jackson Browne’s The Pretender. Wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, lay my tired body down, get up and do it again. Life had been hectic for a long time.

It was hard work, but as the saying goes, but it was rewarding work.

***

I had a vision of living an unstructured life in retirement. I was tired of having my time dictated by others. Most of the weekdays were dictated by the requirements of my job and the needs of my children. Where I had to be, when I had to be there and what I needed to do. I wanted freedom. I wanted time.

I started investing with my very first paycheck to plan for the day when I no longer had to do the 8 to 5 thing. I dreamed about having unlimited freedom to do the things I had not had enough time to do. Hiking, skiing, wine tasting, reading books and listening to music. Painting, playing piano, exercising, drinking wine by the pool. Learning Spanish and traveling to Mexico and Spain to speak it. Writing the great American novel. I had a long list of things I wanted to spend time pursuing.

***

I was too naive to realize how big a change retirement is. I thought I would leave the building and the very next day be able to live a spontaneous, unstructured life. I thought I would reach my number, walk out of the building one evening and begin living a completely different lifestyle the next morning. This turned out to not be the case.

I want to say that retirement is as big a change as the transition from being a dependent child to becoming an adult, crossing from Act I to Act II. But that would be incorrect. The change to the retirement stage of life is much bigger. Think about this. When you retire you bring forty years of experience, forty years of behaviors, forty years of rules of how things work into the next stage of life, and many of those rules and behaviors are not what you need to have a successful retirement. Success in Act II looks different than Act III. The big experiences from Act II (e.g. I buying a house, marriage, divorce, progressing one’s career, acquiring stuff) are not the big experience of Act III. It is a whole new stage of life, and I think there are fewer guidebooks for how to live in Act III than in Act II. I was assimilated into Act II much faster than I was into retirement.

***

Life is funny. Human beings like structure. We are not meant to live unstructured lives. There are very few people who can actually be a bird flying on the thermals, taken whichever the wind blows.

I underestimated how the structures and habits that served me well during my career and raising my children would impact the next stage of life. I had trouble at first with the lack of structure. My body was still used to waking up at five, sitting at a desk all day, stopping work at five. I was used to taking weekends off and when I had free time doing chores and errands, etc., this had been a 38 year process of establishing and living that structured life.

I had a long list of things I planned to do when I retired. It took me awhile to realize that I was not “programmed” to do those things. None of the things on my list met my definition of productive when I worked.

For example, I became an avid reader after I graduated from college. I discovered Stephen King in my twenties and Hemingway and Fitzgerald in my thirties. Once I had children and my career demanded more of my time, most of my “reading” was an audiobook in the car or on walks, often non-fiction books related to business. I wanted to start reading fiction again when I retired. I made a goal to read at least fifty books a year. There are times I am sitting on the couch reading or painting and something begins nagging me to get up and get to work. to do something productive. The same thing happened when I tried to learn Spanish, listen to music, and learn to play piano. I still haven’t shaken the habit that I need to be productive. I have read more than fifty books per year since I left the day job, but most of them have been audiobooks.

***

It’s taken me almost seven years but I have created a new routine in Act III. I usually wake up much later than when I worked in corporate America. I spend part of the morning drinking Mexican coffee while reading Apple News, lingering on the couch slowly waking up over a period of a couple of hours. I am in no particular hurry. My day will include time spent meditating, practicing yoga for flexibility, and walking at least four miles in the farmland and almond groves near my house. I often listen to an audiobook while I walk or use my walks to think or dictate blog entries or ideas into Apple notes. At this point it’s approaching 2:00 P.M. I have probably done a couple of chores around the house and yard. I will likely go to the store to buy groceries. A couple of hours later it will be 5 o’clock and one corporate America habit I have yet to break is that I feel like I’m done with work. It’s time to relax. I often have happy hour calls with friends while I drink a glass of wine. My days can also include, though not routinely, breakfast or lunch with friends and occasional happy hour. Of course there are days when I’m going to leave my routine behind and go to places like Santa Fe or hiking in Anza Borrego.

That is the retirement routine I have created. My routine is filled with positive activities; exercise, meditation, yoga, story, painting and some writing. I have a daughter and grandson who live with me so I also spend time with them.

I’m happy with the new routine I have created. This routine is infinitely better than the one I had when I was in corporate America. But the intrinsic need for structure has resulted in having a somewhat rigid routine. What’s the definition of routine? A sequence of actions regularly practiced, a fixed program. Doing the same stuff every day. I practice of good sequence of actions, but once the actions became a routine it felt like I was subject to the tyranny of routine. A cry went out for something less structured with more freedom, more time spent on the things I was interested in but didn’t feel I had time to do. How ironic.

When I went to Santa Fe I had an epiphany. It wasn’t the first time I had this epiphany. I have it every time I am away for a few days. I am in a hotel far from home. I can’t do any chores. I don’t need to go to the store to buy groceries. I can’t help my daughter or grandson. I’m back to having 24/7, the freedom to do whatever I want. Without the distractions of chores the days in Santa Fe were spontaneous and carefree.

I’m not suggesting I want to live a spontaneous lifestyle without responsibility or routine. The epiphany? I need to bring more freedom and spontaneity into this lifestyle. I need to find a happy medium. It’s not a simple thing to do, at least it hasn’t been for me. I’m still fighting basic human tendencies and forty-year old structures. As Ray said to Lulu in Something Wild, “old habits are hard to break baby!” I have confidence that sooner or later I will reach that happy medium and Act III is going to be even better than it already is!