Three Cartoons & What They Tell Me About Retirement

Start Today to Have a Great Life

There is a comic strip I like called Ziggy. It is written and illustrated by Tom Wilson and Tom II, and features an every-man who suffers an endless stream of misfortunes. The weekday version contains just one frame. Recently, it showed Ziggy at some Lost and Found window getting this response from the clerk, “You’ll have to be more specific than, ‘Something in my life is missing.’”

Another comic strip I like is called Zits, written by Jerry Scott, and illustrated by Jim Borgman. It features a seventeen-year-old boy named Jeremy.  In a recent comic, Jeremy told his mother, “I’d do anything to get eight hours of sleep.” The mom responded, “Put your phone in a drawer, turn off your laptop. And go to bed at ten.” He replied, “I would do almost anything to get eight hours of sleep.”  

I use both of these cartoons to address the topic of what to do in retirement. If indeed we feel like something is missing in our life, we often know the steps we have to take to correct the problem, but like Jeremy, we’re not always willing to take those steps.

This issue becomes important thanks to a question my friend, Sue, asked recently. She is sixty-eight and has a ninety-seven-year-old mother. She wondered aloud what she would do if she had thirty more years to live, how many TV shows and YouTube videos could she watch?

As I try to answer this question for Sue, for myself, and for other relatively new retirees – not to mention widows and widowers – I turn for inspiration to my adult children and to my long-deceased father. Combined they give this answer:

Busy-up your life! Let me explain…

Lessons from the kids:

All three of my kids have children living at home. When any of these families come to dinner at my house, they almost always come in two cars. There have been a couple of situations when time was so tight that we had less than forty-five minutes to eat and the dessert went home with them as carryout. What I am describing here are busy people who are going in lots of directions and jamming loads of things into their lives! I am grateful to be one of the things they fit in. And I am grateful for the example they set for having a very full life.

Granted, as an empty nester, I don’t have so many activities naturally built into my life. But the truth of the matter is that the more I do, the more I can do. And it is also true that the less I do, the less I can do. For a healthy, happy, long life, it behooves me to do more, to busy-up my life.

Lessons from dear old Dad:

In retirement, Dad had a fixed schedule. If it was Monday, he mentored a child at the local elementary school. If it was Tuesday, he volunteered at Temple. If it was Wednesday, he went to a lecture series, etc. When my mom died after a five-week illness, I like to say that he did not know what to do with himself! But that was not really true, because if it was Monday, he met up with his student, if it was Tuesday, he went to Temple and so forth.

This is a simple recipe for happiness and relatively easy to put into place. Yes, it takes some action on your part, but not a lot. Commit to making one phone call or Google search a day until you have figured out a meaningful calendar that works for you. Here are a handful of examples:

• Call the YMCA, JCCA, the public library, or your place of worship for adult programming.
• Check into adult education at your public-school district or local university.
• Search VolunteerMatch.org for volunteer work near you.
• Go on field trips – check out TripAdvisor’s “Top Attractions” in your city or in a city within a drivable distance.
• Or make a list of new restaurants within a 50-mile radius and visit one each week. (This is the one I am trying for my sometimes-boring Saturdays.)

Yes! It really is that easy to busy-up your life in a meaningful way. You just can’t be like Jeremy in the cartoon above. This is logical advice. Take it.

Just one caveat here. It’s a good thing this game plan is so easy, because “one and done” is not the nature of this beast. We will need to rework our schedules as our capabilities change through the years. But dear old Dad modeled this too. When he lived in a retirement facility, no longer able to drive to the elementary school, temple, etc., he combed the retirement home’s weekly calendar of events, wrote out a list of every activity that appealed to him, kept it in his breast pocket at all times, consulted it frequently, and lived a full life. Trust me, he never knew he’d enjoy bingo or bell ringing, but he gave it all a chance.

Ok, I promised three cartoons, so here is the last one. Speed Bump is created by Dave Coverly and is another cartoon with just one frame. A recent one showed two cats resting on the floor in front of a window while one complained to the other, “Hey! You’re hogging the sunbeam again.”

I like that comic because it describes my mostly sunny life. Indeed, I am often hogging the sunbeam! But more important, whenever the sunshine fades, I can use this trick to find it again.

*****

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