Where to begin? I suppose the journey begins with fleshing out the idea of when we come to it.
In July 2018, my family and I traveled to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It wasn’t a bucket list. I’m not a mountain climber. It was a trip arranged by my son’s science teacher. It wasn’t even a school sponsored trip. I think we committed to the idea when my wife came home and said something along the lines of “I like to hike…”
A funny thing happened on the way to the top of the mountain, or perhaps it was on the way down, or after we left. We started talking. And thinking. And planning. And that is how changes started.
A year and a half later, I am 46 and retired. We have started a new path with talks centered on giving back, finding true happiness, learning what’s important, and teaching our children with our successes and failures along the way.
It’s a master plan – full of uncertainty. But we’ll cross those bridges, when we come to it.
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we come to it is a new blog to chronicle our journey of early retirement, exploring volunteerism, recording experiences, and recalibrating goals. I can’t see the end point, and I can’t be sure this will work. But, as Dr. King notes, we will take the first step.
Hopefully there is more than just chronicles of uncertainty to this blog. Over time, I hope we can explore our travels – a first trip with Health Volunteers Overseas to Tanzania is being arranged. We can review early retirement – is it really drinking coffee on the porch with nothing to do? Perhaps other folks may contribute their musings. Importantly, we can think.
Having time to think and find simple pleasures has been the best change of “retirement”. The daily grind became so entrenched in our path that I forgot to smell the roses. My boys are growing up, and soon will become their own independent men. The years literally fly by and somehow I wasn’t taking note of the small positives and negatives of each day. I was wildly successful, yet my tunnel vision of the workday prevented me from seeing it. No one smiled about work, family, and life. Fortunately, we stumbled into recognition of this stagnation and we realized a chance to change. Priorities were recalibrated. Finances were restructured. We now find time to breathe, focus, and think.
So here I am starting a blog. I’m not a writer, but perhaps I can structure a sentence of some worth. Perhaps we can learn together. I have no idea where the staircase leads… but we’ll know it when we come to it.