Retirement is just another state of life. It is time when you step aside of the workforce and make room for others to step in. In addition, you can make retirement gainful in many ways. One effective way is to become a consultant on a part-time basis with your former employer.
Taking on jobs that are project based or related to specific issues can be a challenge. You get in, finish the job and then get out. Stay away from the bureaucracy and red tape. Avoid proposing big organizational changes as that is engaging in internal politics and bureaucracy. If you of course, want to make a point, you can try writing to an office publication. Moreover, if your point of view is not critical of current management, then you do not risk been not hired. However, the difficulty of being rehired if the UN is your former employer is not easy, as they do not have a good pre-retirement program. Those in employ may want to work out some tips for a good UN pre-retirement program to help ease you into retirement, which I must warn is not easy.
Many people want to keep on working beyond retirement. These days, that anxiety is even greater as corporate pensions and benefits are becoming less generous. However, in developing countries with very high unemployment levels, it does not make sense for a 60-year old to keep working when the 20-year old next door is unemployed. Accepting that retirement as another state of life is difficult for most people to muster. Nevertheless, beware, that your former employer will hire you only for a few years after retirement. So, do not count on working for your former employer for a long time to come. Of course, as always, there are exceptions, and you may be one of them.
All people are different and each person has a different set of values in life. Some like to get back to work because there is a financial necessity, to be in touch with people, or their services are just much in demand. May God bless such people and give them strength to carry on as long as possible. However, the point I wish to make is that people’s intentions change rapidly as they grow older. At 40, you may be up and firing and would feel the same at 60 years of age. Twenty years of elapsed time, did not change your attitude. Human values, unfortunately still cling to the belief that knowledge must be sold and that a fee must be attached to the way you spend your time, and you must carry a hefty title to win and retain the respect of society.
However, be not surprised if your attitude to life changes big time from 60 to 62 years of age. At 60, you may feel of entering a new career and at 62, you may think that was a big mistake. What is the big problem with people at this age? It is the transformation into old age.
Have you not heard that great complement when you were 50 years old that you had not changed at all in the past decade. Now, that can be an honest complement because the biological rate of aging is less in your younger years. From 60 to 65 years of age, a person may age more than he may or she did from 40 to 50 years of age. Using the aging process as an analogy, your attitude to life also changes faster in your older years.
Some are still clinging to an identity of the past, while others are willing to let it go. Each person has a different motivation to work and the aging mind will set limitations on the type of work that we do in old age. However, you have much power in your hands to exercise your brain and body to make retirement a happier occasion for you.
In the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward Fitzgerald) the poem reading:
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too in the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End!
I would not say that you must drink of the cup to overflow. However, in some perspective, when working most people are like caged animals forced to abide by some corporate culture and supervisory control. In employment most people have not the opportunity to exercise freewill however legitimate and proper. I agree with Jeffrey Goldfarb when he said in the Politics of Small Things that people who play the corporate script will often flourish, while those who do their job do not. The "office players" do the expressive work that keeps an institution functioning and are rewarded for it.
With retirement you are now free to roam and roar. You are now free to state your case to those who may listen. Take the jobs you like and turn down those you dislike. And with today's broadband technology, communication over mountains and oceans is never a problem.
Quote:
You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live.”
JOAN BAEZ
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