One of the conundrums that people in the FIRE community puzzle over is the problem of imagining what life will be like beyond the 9 to 5. Most of us have worked our entire adult lives so we haven’t practiced owning our own time. We tend to try to see it as an endless vacation, because vacations are the only time we are not working. But we also know, and perhaps fear deep in our hearts, that it is not going to be like an endless vacation. We know we cannot lie on the beach every day, or ski every day or just watch Netflix every day for the rest of our lives and be sure we will be happy. I think it is up to us who have made the transition from the corporate world to try to explain what “retired” life is like, particularly what it is like for young or young at heart, active people.
My Independence Day from the 9 to 5 was over three years ago and I’ve lived over a thousand days of my new life since that first day. I think it is safe to say that I’m way over the honeymoon phase and I’m well into life 2.0. Today, right now, I’m sitting at our kitchen table, just after enjoying an amazing rib barbecue that my incredible wife put together, thinking back over today. Today might be the single best day of the last thousand but not because it was particularly special. In fact, it was spent doing things my wife and I do frequently and we never were more than 15 miles from our house at any time during the day. It wasn’t special in any way, but it was magical in that redneck, athletic sense that she and I cherish.
At about 6:15 AM she got out of bed. It was an unremarkable night, we slept well as usual but having gone to bed pretty early, sleeping any later wasn’t a possibility. After she got up, I played with the idea of sleeping a little longer. But no, I was well rested so I got up and made the bed. And there’s a thing right there. We have a house rule. The last one out of bed each morning has to make the bed. So that was me, and I did it with a smile. Then I shaved and got dressed and wandered down the hall to the kitchen and asked her if I could fix her anything for breakfast. She was fine without, so I had a nice egg and sausage and hash brown breakfast, cooked by me, for me and it was wonderful. We had discussed bass fishing this morning because at one time the weather had been forecasting rain and clouds, which is when bass bite best. However, they had changed the outlook to all sunny skies at bedtime so we had cancelled that plan. But here it was, morning time and the sky was dark and radar showed rain coming our way, rain but not storms. So, we tossed around the idea, why not go fishing? We had tennis set up at 1:30 PM but we could still squeeze in a couple hours at our friend’s private lake about 15 minutes away. So, we threw some drinks in the cooler, grabbed our rain-suits and took off across town with our boat in tow.
We launched and it started to rain lightly, and the fish went crazy. We caught bass after bass on top water baits. If you aren’t a bass fisherman then it is hard to convey how much fun it is to catch fish on topwater lures. You cast your plastic floating bait out next to shore or a floating weed bed, then you twitch it and the bass plunge up out of the water in a huge explosion and the fight is on. For two hours we had a lifetime day of catching fish and then the rain and the fish stopped. We loaded the boat back on the trailer and headed home where I cleaned the fish. Then we had a nice fish taco lunch with fresh guacamole. By then the sun had come out and dried off the tennis courts so our tennis doubles match was still on. My wife and I are pretty good tennis players, we both play on tennis teams with people much younger than us. It is rare that high school team players can win a match against either of us and sometimes we even pull off a win against college team players. But this match was different. There are three older players, 70 and 80 plus year old players that aren’t as fast or as good as they used to be but playing is good for them mentally and physically. It is fun for us to get them out on the court to compete. My wife plays on one side and I play on the other and we run down the shots the older guys can’t get to. It’s just a wonderful time to keep those guys in the game and I credit my sweet wife for making it happen. Me and Doc won today over my wife and Alan and it was close and fun and it really mattered to those guys that someone is interested in playing them. I hope when I’m that age and less capable than now, someone is helping me stay in the game. But if not, I’m proud to have helped do it for them.
All in all, it was a great morning fishing and an awesome tennis match, on many levels, and then it just kept getting better. I got a call from the foundation I chair in one of my non-paid charity gigs and they couldn’t get payroll out unless someone could sign the checks and as board chair I was the only one in town with check signing authority. Threw my sweaty self into my car and drove across our little city and signed the checks. Just to be able to solve one little problem for the foundation employees felt good and it exemplified the super power of time flexibility that comes with retirement. Usually if anyone needs a hand you can lend it and just rearrange your schedule at will. When I got back home my wife had picked up ribs on sale for super cheap and she threw them on the grill, fired up her riding mower and proceeded to cut the neighbors lawn and the other neighbors lawn just for fun while I watched from our patio, with an adult beverage, and guarded the ribs on the grill. Her mower is one of those fast zero turn models since we have a very large yard, so she was back in no time after mowing about three acres of grass. I cooked some baked beans and we had a feast, with a little Malbec thrown in. She also took a plate of ribs next door to our recently widowed neighbor who we’ve adopted as a favorite older sister. After dinner I started writing this post.
A perfect day. A day that started out with very little scheduled but ended up being pretty busy with things we both loved to do, and some we did separately. We had a one in a thousand, exciting fishing trip, we had a great tennis game that was about much more than winning or losing, we fixed a feast beyond the imagination of the kings of yore and we helped our friends and neighbors along the way.
Is every day in early retirement this good? No, of course not. But so many are! Imagine no alarm clocks. No assignments. No eight AM start and five PM finish times in an office. No emails about work, no texts about work, no calls about work. For me it is just being together with my best friend and lover, helping others and having fun. It is good. It was a good, good day. Tomorrow will be different, no idea really what we’ll do after the five thirty AM Thursday run with our friends. It might get exciting right there. A large black bear was spotted where we usually begin our runs and we had to relocate our route to stay out of his way last time. I’ve got a few projects around the house and will probably finish this blog post but other than that my calendar is open for whatever opportunities to play or serve might appear. I think it is going to be another very good day!