Real Retirement

This is 30 years of stuff.  Now I need to go through it again to see if I really need to keep any of it.

Everyone asks, "What are you going to do when you retire?"  I came to hate that question!  I would answer, "Oh, I'm going to sew on my new sewing machine or I am going to finish my quilts that I have started, or clean my house, or stockpile books from the library and just saturate myself in reading.

All my life I have had automatic goals.  When I was a child my mother sent me off to school.  When I was a teen I had to finish high school.  When that was done this 18 year old had no choice but to go off to college and even then my only choices at that time were education or nursing.  Nursing didn't work because I didn't have the stamina to understand chemistry.  So with a science minor I headed into the field of education.  I did well at BYU and had a good student teaching experience.  I was a teacher now and ever after.  So with a contract in hand I had to get up every morning and again go back to school.  When I married my goal was to raise a righteous family and when the children were on their way it was back to school for the rest of the 30 years.

What I am trying to say is that there has always been a reason or a goal for me to essentially perform my duties.  I couldn't be a slacker.  But now I have been cut off from all of that and now I am on my own.  It is up to me and the Lord to figure out what I am going to do with my time.  I have to decide how to spend my days.  Its not like I don't want to make these choices its just that in a way they have always been made for me.  And that makes it difficult because I don't want to just read.  I don't watch TV, fortunately.

My goal now is to sit down and decide what it is that I really want to accomplish in my marriage, in my home and for me.  Maybe my list should begin with me.  For the last year I have gone every 3 weeks to have my eyebrows done but I missed my last appointment and now that I don't have a reason to get them done,  I haven't made a new appointment.  This is a silly thing but I can see now that these kinds of things are important and I need to do them for myself.

Today I made time to take a computer class up at Gateway to learn more about my new computer.  There are some good things down the line having to do with family history and I want to be a part of that.

I have sounded off and have made myself feel a little better about moving on.  I'll be OK but I've got to put a lot of thought into this new process.