Work hard, play hard. Retire from what? What difference does it make if you love what you do and life has rewarded your passion?<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Jimmy_Buffett_on_USS_Harry_S_Truman_cropped.jpg-217x300.webp\")
<\/a>Jimmy Buffett on the USS Harry Truman, 2008. Photo from Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n
Jimmy Buffett died at age 76. At 73, I can easily imagine living many more years, but I doubt that I will become a billionaire, nor do I care. Life has, in my humble view, already rewarded my passions just by letting me continue to enjoy what I do. One friend and colleague said, \u201cwhich is never,\u201d when in a jousting, friendly conversation, I allowed that maybe, just maybe, there would be a day when I would stop working.<\/p>\n
The only question for me is whether I work for pay or for the love of the challenge. Life since I \u201callegedly retired\u201d (my phrase) from the American Planning Association<\/a> more than six years ago has mixed both elements, as I expected, though the specific combinations of activities and assignments has shifted in unexpected ways. I realized when I left that I had reached a point in life where my wife and I could live well enough with our \u201ccushion,\u201d the pensions and Social Security and IRAs we had earned and invested. Everything else was a bonus, though sometimes that bonus gets used to help family and special causes.<\/p>\n I have done far less book writing than I planned, my teaching has paused at the university level but morphed into professional training, and, as readers have noticed, I took on the challenge of learning how to manage a documentary film operation<\/a> and develop the script, while using long-standing interview skills to capture content. I am volunteering my time on the film because we are developing it on a shoestring (to get started, at least) and because the whole point of this labor of love is to change hearts and minds about planning for disasters and climate change without worrying about getting paid for it. Put another way, it was in large part my idea. No one asked me to do it, though many have been grateful for the opportunity to be part of it. But I still get paid to teach and to consult, though I am dialing back the latter to make room for the work of passion. Recently, I spent a couple of weeks writing a grant proposal that may allow a church to install a solar rooftop. More on that later if we succeed. A higher power can thank me for helping lead his people into the paradise of renewable energy and mitigating global warming.<\/p>\n \u201cRetire from what?\u201d<\/p>\n As long as the work puts a smile on your face, as long as you can blur the lines between work and play, and take pride and joy both in whatever you achieve, who cares whether anyone calls it retirement. Yes, as we get older, health issues start to take a toll. In another month, I will be forced to sit back and recover from some serious surgery, but I was 69 before I faced the first surgery of my life<\/a>, for cataracts. (Don\u2019t worry. In the tradition of making lemonade out of tropical lemons, I have decided the coming convalescence is perfectly timed for watching the Cubs in the National League playoffs.)<\/p>\n Jimmy Buffett died too soon, in my opinion, but a higher power than I gets to make those decisions. We do not live forever. Make your time worthwhile and let it make you happy until the very end.<\/p>\n \u201cRetire from what?\u201d<\/p>\n Why do people think I coined the term \u201callegedly retired?\u201d Passions add value to life. Live your passions while you can. And remember to eat a cheeseburger in paradise<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/DSC00209-Copy-300x199.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n