How Many Lives Does The Cat Have—and Other Timely Questions

Only a few months ago, my friend Kathie and I were remarking that we’d both noticed a steadiness in our lives, as if our days were finally starting to come together. We’d both done our share of the retirement reinvention work—scanning job boards, considering new endeavors, sitting through the “next chapter” seminars—trying to find something that would help us feel engaged without overdoing it. And now for the first time since we began our regular Zoom meetings several years ago, we weren’t talking about the big outward things we’d been considering. This time, we talked about the small pleasures we were letting back into our days that made us feel like something had fallen into place.

There were things we’d stopped doing. Kathie turned off job alerts as she settled into her volunteer work. I turned off notifications from a retirement coaching association I’d lost interest in. And, surprisingly, there were small things we’d both returned to—puzzles and a little afternoon TV. We even laughed about how we used to tense up at the sight of an open calendar. I let myself think, cautiously but with a bit of pride, maybe we’ve arrived. After all, I was on a path—not a glamorous reinvention, but a good trajectory. Kathie was finding her own rhythm, too.

But I should have known better. Just a few months later, I began feeling disturbances in the air. Ah, how quickly that sense of arrival departed. Flickers of restlessness, spells of disconnection, an occasional tightening in my stomach. I thought I’d found the thing that anchored me: writing. But now I felt something stirring. Where do I want the writing to go? Does anyone care what I’m writing about? Will my volunteering be enough as is? Is there more I want?

All of it led me to an unmistakable sense that the path I’d been taking wasn’t quite working the way it had been. Just when I let myself think the small shifts had signaled something steady, life reminded me that arrivals are always temporary. And I later found out that Kathie felt her own version of this disorientation, too—different from mine, but the same pattern. It was as if the ground we’d both been standing on had tilted a few degrees.

Maybe it was a case of whiplash, but I didn’t greet the flickers with a what’s up? I went straight to here we go again, and I caught myself assuming that what I’d chosen to do was unraveling. I thought I’d reached a comfortable landing—that I’d finally found what could carry me through this stretch of my life. But with a clearer head, I realized it wasn’t a setback but a reminder: this stage moves too.

There’s more in the background now than before: losing a sister, entering a new decade, saying goodbye to the last one. There was also the dissonance of watching my own cohort—people my age and in their “next chapter”—announcing their accomplishments and successes on social media as they finished out their sixties and saluted the years ahead. My sixties were reshaping years, not at all what I expected. Nothing for me to brag about.

And I was tired—not just from the changes themselves but from all the retirement books I’d read and reinvention seminars I’d taken. They were helpful until they became their own kind of pressure—all that reframing of purpose and identity. But reframing is just seeing it another way. I wanted something that would actually take, not just offer another way to think about it. None of those books said the simplest thing: you try something, it works for a while, it might stop working, you make adjustments. It takes effort. That’s not unraveling. That’s just life.

Kathie and I will be comparing notes again soon, as we always do. Perhaps our retirement lives are more like the proverbial cat—nine lives, maybe even more.