By Elana Rabinowitz, Next Avenue
“We call it pretirement,” a woman said while gushing about her new life in the affluent resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York. The smile on her face was impossible to hide.
“Pretirement?” I asked, as if she made a verbal typo.
She explained that it’s a phrase she and her spouse created to describe their new softer life as transplants to bucolic Upstate New York from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan.
“Sometimes we check our calendars and if we can we kayak during lunch,” she continued. How dreamy this seemed compared to my five-day in-person work week shoveling down my Tupperware lunch between classes.
“We worked in the city for years and now are fully remote,” she confessed.
Part gloating, part apologetic. She acquiesced.
I also have a house upstate and am beginning the countdown to my actual retirement. In a way, I, too, was slowly preparing for a form of pretirement without even knowing it, transitioning to a new way of life, surrounded by more trees than buildings.
I have only a few years of teaching left, and then bliss. No more coverages, no more early wakeups. Just hiking and the Hudson. How idyllic, I thought. But could I really just sit back and chill after all these years of hustling?
This is the dream I have set in motion, and it is only now that it’s close to becoming a reality that I am starting to question if I am actually ready for this radical change in lifestyle. Ready to leave teaching? Yes! Ready to really retire? These days I’m not so sure.
With so many new types of work possibilities, I want to see what is out there first. Maybe I will get a new job, reinvent myself; maybe I will take up kayaking.
For the first time in over 23 years I get to rethink what I actually want to do with my one precious life. While one part of me is ecstatic, another part is filled with fear. When I think of looking for a job, I immediately return to that overconfident college graduate who spent endless hours circling want-ads in The New York Times, only to realize that the communication degree that seemed so promising in college translated into absolutely no jobs in real life.
Wondering About the New Work Environment
What if I can’t make it in the new work force? What does the new work environment even look like?
I’ve never been one to limit myself by age. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 24, didn’t get published until I was in my 40s, and certainly am not going to stop pursuing my dreams in my 50s. I just have to figure out how that translates in a new post-Covid-19 society.
One of my greatest pet peeves is when people use the phrase, “I will do that when I retire,” whether they mean travel, relax or learn to play an instrument. As if all of life’s pleasures should be spent in bulk, instead of sprinkling them throughout our lives in doses. I have ensured that I have thus far lived a life, filled with all these things. I want to savor them now, not only in my golden years.
The truth is, I never planned on becoming a teacher, I had more creative pursuits in mind, but when 9/11 hit, I found myself desperately in need of work. Since I already had a background in teaching from working abroad, I went for an interview at a middle school and to my surprise got the job immediately.
I didn’t plan on staying. I never thought I’d like it, but I did. Yet, to retire in my 50s, while financially feasible, leaves me wanting more. While I am ready to give up the stress of commuting in the city, I am not ready to stay at home full time. What’s next?
I am a bit nervous about the whole transition. Sometimes scary is good.
While it fills me with angst thinking about what lies ahead, it also fills me with hope. I never got the chance to pursue the career I truly wanted and now with so many varied options out there, perhaps I finally can.
Ease Into Preretirement
Maybe I will be an entrepreneur, maybe I will finally write that novel or screenplay, or maybe I will take some time off and live abroad again. I am still deciding. In the meantime, I will ease into my pretirement. Take some more classes (although teachers make the worst students), explore options, and spend time outside with nature; she is my greatest resource these days.
When you’re a kid and your teacher is absent you are thrilled at first, then, when they are out for a few days, less so, and sometimes when they are on leave you actually miss them and the routine.
After more than 20 years of teaching, I wonder who I will be when I am not getting up early to motivate children. Not carrying an oversized tote bag filled with school paraphernalia. I am a tad nervous, but excited to find out.
Pretirement, here I come!