A Proper Eulogy for the In-Between

It’s been eight years now since I retired, more than enough time for my early disorientation to find some footing. These days, I notice I'm growing tired, even irritated, by the talk I used to devour about the “crisis” of retirement: the loss of identity, structure, purpose, even mattering.

It feels like someone is diagnosing a condition I no longer have, though I’m not quite sure I’m cured. What I do know is that much of the talk skips the simple truth I’ve learned the slow way — that you come to understand this stage by living it. Or, as Robert Frost put it, “The best way out is always through.”

I can recall how much I missed a sense of direction after I left my job and how badly I wanted to get to the other side of that “in-between” time — the endless researching, the roller-coaster emotions, the constant restlessness. But what I feel now is for something that’s gone: a bit of appreciation, a wistfulness.

There was an intensity to that time — a kind of drive I couldn’t fully welcome then. I never took a walk without a podcast in my ears or let a new retirement book pass me by. Now I see the force in all that mess — alive and a little crazy. And I noticed its passing.

Perhaps it’s time to issue a proper eulogy. So here goes: I’ll miss the energy, the possibilities, the fickleness. Thinking I wanted to be a retirement coach one year and deciding the next I didn’t. Or joining a discussion group based on the notion of “breaking free” only to want back into the fray. It was a time that did what it needed to do. It gave me room to find writing and to build a life that feels like it has a rhythm again. Amen.

So here I am — not asking where the time went but realizing I’m standing in the next phase: a steadier time, a time to build, one that demands discipline again. Not the grit-your-teeth kind, but the decisive kind, the kind that puts limits on my wandering and asks a little more of me.

The kind that commits — even when it’s easier not to.