Retirement is not only a moment of rest from your professional career, but it also represents a blank page, an opportunity to focus your life and free time in a new direction. Precisely for this reason, there are those who face it with enthusiasm, but for other people it causes some fear, vertigo or anxiety to face this vital stage that is unknown to them.
After a life of dedicating our time and effort to our work, redirecting our daily lives, entertaining ourselves and rediscovering ourselves is posed as a challenge. The writer Gregg Levoy reflects on this, in an article published in Psychology Today, who states that “retirement can confront you in the most profound and often disturbing way with who you are, how you operate in the world and how attached you are to your models. “mental”. Based on this premise, the author highlights his approach to the beginning of retirement.
Levoy argues that, after the effort of a lifetime of work, that drive to improve does not stop when we stop working. The writer notes that publications about retirement often focus on the challenge of losing one's sense of identity, urging one to find another occupation as soon as possible to fill "the alleged voids" that the person may feel afterward. the cessation of his working life.
In this regard, he believes that “little importance is given to the arduous human work of making peace with the emotional and existential blow it entails and the need to shamelessly confront ourselves within that void.” “It's true that if your sense of worth is tied to visible achievements and external validation, you will be scared by the prospect of retiring,” Levoy adds.
In this regard, the writer and speaker considers it essential to understand that “even if you identify enormously with your work, you have loved it and you will miss its blessings, it is not your identity, nor is it the tip of an iceberg. “Leaving a career is not abandoning your real work in the world, not if you have what people call ‘a mission statement for your life.’”
Levoy invites you to conceive the beginning of retirement as a break, taking the opportunity to reflect on new circumstances, celebrate your work contributions and even manage the “pain” to let them go. “I want to consider that retirement is not a problem to solve but a passage to travel, and that I am certainly not going to retire from evolving, or continuing the work of becoming myself, but rather transcending myself,” he summarizes.
In short, what Gregg Levoy expresses is that we must banish the feeling of emptiness when we enter retirement. Instead, he invites us to conceive of it as a blank page on which to rediscover who we are, leaving aside our professional career, since it does not define us as people.
