Retirement is more than a date: what happens before you retire matters too

I think often about the word retirement. I have written about it before. It is so much, and yet not enough.

It is not an ending only. It is a change, a transition, a movement. One we may get to plan for.

Even when retirement comes through redundancy, whether voluntary or not, there is something significant about the ending and what comes next. We may need time to make some peace with what has gone before, what is here now and what lies ahead.

And perhaps that is why I am interested in what happens before retirement as much as what happens on the day someone stops working.

Imagining life beyond work

When people start thinking about retirement, there is often a moment when they begin to imagine life beyond work. I see it when I speak to people who are approaching a transition. They can tell me, often with real glee, what they are going to do when they retire. They will travel, they will walk, they will spend more time with friends, they will take up something they have always wanted to do. They will finally have time.

I love that part of the conversation. There is something powerful about allowing yourself to imagine a life that looks different from the one you have been living.

What will your days look like? Who will you spend time with? What will matter to you? What might you want more of, or less of? Perhaps most importantly, who might you

become when work is no longer shaping quite so much of your life?

I think imagination matters. Before we can move towards something, we often need to be able to picture it.

But then there is the in-between.

What happens in the years before?

I met someone recently at an event who had spent four years practising being retired. They had reshaped their life around work, but they didn't simply count down to the day they would stop. They went into the mountains and walked. They gave themselves space to think about what they wanted. They made new friends, walked into new hobbies and spoke to friends and family. They had conversations. They imagined. They used those four years.

I have thought about that conversation quite a lot, because there is a difference between waiting for retirement and using the time before retirement to explore the life you are moving towards.

That doesn't mean starting retirement early. Work is still part of your life. It may be something you value, something you enjoy, something you need, or something you are simply not ready to leave. It is about the in-between.

The countdown can change things

I wonder about the countdown. Five years, three years, eighteen months, six months. When retirement becomes a date on the horizon, it can be very easy to start living towards it rather than living where you are. How long until I can finally stop?

And perhaps, without noticing, the countdown starts to suck some of the life out of the here and now. Work becomes something to endure. The present becomes something to get through. But those years are still your life.

So perhaps there is another question worth asking: How do I want to spend the time between now and retirement?

Not because you need to fill every minute with preparation, and not because you need a five-year retirement plan. But because there may be things you can explore now that tell you something about what you want later.

What can you bring into your life now?

This is where I often find myself asking, quietly, why wait?

Not in the sense of, “What are you waiting for? Go and start your retirement.” It is subtler than that.

If you imagine having more time with friends, is there a small way to make more time now? If you imagine being outdoors more, could you find a way to bring a little more of that into your week? If there is something you have always wanted to try, what might happen if you experimented with it before retirement?

Sometimes a small step towards something we imagine for the future starts to shape us long before we get there.

I think about my own running here. It started as something I did. Over time it became part of who I am. It has shaped my friendships, my experiences and the way I see myself. I couldn't have known all of that when I started.

And that is the interesting thing about experimenting. We don't always know what something will become.

Because the future doesn't always wait for us

There is another reason I think the in-between matters. We can say, I'll spend more time with my friends when I retire. I'll travel when I have more time. I'll do that when work isn't taking up so much of my life.

And perhaps we will. But life doesn't always unfold according to the plan. Our health can change. Circumstances change. Relationships change. Sometimes the person we imagined sharing that future with isn't there when we arrive.

I don't say that to make us fearful of the future. Quite the opposite. Perhaps it is an invitation to notice what matters to us now. To imagine the future, certainly, but also to recognise that this life, now, matters too.

Retirement preparation is about more than the date

Financial preparation matters. So does thinking about where you will live, what you can afford and what you might need. But there is another kind of preparation: the preparation of the person who is going to live that retirement.

Who will you be when work changes? What will give your days shape? Where will you belong? Who will you spend time with? What will you do with the parts of yourself that have been waiting for more space?

Perhaps these aren't questions that need to be answered all at once. Perhaps retirement is something we can begin to imagine, then explore, experiment with and create. Not because we know exactly what is coming, but because we don't.

What if the years before retirement aren't simply the countdown to the next chapter?

What if they are part of the chapter too?