A friend gave me a sashiko kit, consisting of indigo cloth with traditional, stylized Japanese wave patterns outlined in ready-to-embroider stitch marks,  a needle, and white cotton thread.  The intent was to give me a relatively easy-to-complete craft project to ease me into retirement.  I’ve not yet started to embroider.  It took me 3 hours to untangle the cotton thread, which I had yanked out of the plastic wrapping assuming it was multiple pieces of thread, and not a single, endless one. 

During my sometimes peaceful and sometimes infuriating attempts to pull one thread through a few hundred tiny holes within the web of knotted threads I had in front of me, a tangle that made Medusa’s hair look tidy, I started to see my early days of retirement as being part of their own tangle.

I realized that I was trying to turn retirement into a job, complete with goals, deadlines, and measures of accountability  I had followed Mr. Morton’s advice (Independence Day) and started a list of what I wanted to learn, never reaching the 50-100 items he suggested, but still pushing for a “promotion and a raise” by including mastering Spanish, writing a book, sewing a quilt, maintaining a full weekly calendar of tai chi, zumba, yoga and Bollywood dance, and maintaining this blog.   I even had trouble sleeping last night, fretting over some complications in a volunteer job.  After all, if I have only 14 years to live, I’ve got a lot left to accomplish.

I’m smiling as I wrap this up.  Clearly I have not made a successful transition from work to retirement, but it’s very fun to be aware of these different phases the process is taking me through.