GRANNY GEAR. Anyone who’s learned (or re-learned) to bicycle knows it. Anyone who’s a happy amateur uses it — a lot. It’s the lowest gear you can get your bicycle into, the one that allows you to sweat and curse your way up a steep hill, very slowly.
It’s the gear that gets you there.
I’ve never been ashamed to use it. After all, I’m severely asthmatic. Just getting myself out on my bike is a victory and a delight.
But now that I’m middle-aged, retired, and an actual granny (or “Nana” in my case), I’m downright proud of riding in granny gear. If I’m in granny gear, I’m pushing myself. I’m out in the air and sunshine. I’m keeping myself as active and involved with the world as I can realistically be.
And that’s what this blog will be about: us retired people keeping ourselves engaged, active, involved. I will invite friends with gray hair (even if the gray is hidden!) to reflect on what the challenges of retirement are and what solutions they’ve tried. I want to create a space for us to talk and reflect about how our lives are working once we’re no longer working.
I don’t mean how our lives are working financially. That’s for each of us and our financial advisers to work out. It affects almost everything else, of course, so I expect the topic of finances to show up from time to time. But I would like for this to be a place where we can talk about our actual experiences of retirement — about the ups and downs of trying to keep this stage of life as lively, juicy, exciting, and vivid as earlier stages of our lives. (Also as genuine, connected, socially conscious, intellectually stimulating, and — of course — complicated . . .)
So, let’s talk. Send me drafts of blog posts on subjects you think are important, or send me an email with your thoughts, or write comments below the posts. Let’s try to talk honestly — as honestly as we can in a public setting — about what we fear, hope, and experience about retirement.