Retirement prep - year -3 Practicing stillness

Transcript

If you're still a few years out from retiring, it's a great time to test your skills at doing nothing or relaxing. Once you're in retirement, you'll find that doing nothing can include fishing, mowing the lawn, things that you truly enjoy that don't feel like exertion, but that don't take a lot of mind energy. But before you can really get to the place where you can enjoy those things in a healthy way, I feel like you have to get good at just being with yourself and being quiet. So something you can do to work on whether or not you're going to struggle with that is weekends, holidays, vacations. Try and take some time, like at least two hours at a go, and just sit. Just relax. Don't have your phone out. Just sit and relax and just think about stuff. Let go. Let your muse take over and find yourself bored. If you can get yourself to a state of boredom for a couple of hours straight, check in on how that feels. Not that retirement is all boredom, but I've found that some of the juiciest parts of retirement happen when we get comfortable just being quiet with ourselves and just sitting and relaxing. If you can't do that, you miss out. I'm one of the most important and rewarding parts of retirement. So take a little bit of time in those few years before you retire and practice relaxing and measure how good am I at just sitting with my thoughts.