Plotting and lusting after a playful retirement
The feeling of entering a new stage of life and taking it by the joyful reins
I have found myself thinking a lot about the next stage of life. I like to gaze, dream and make plans, but am also well trained in holding them lightly. This balance has been key to not being disappointed in life, which often is just that. To feel like I am taking my life by the reins with a healthy dose of openness and realism tucked away in my back pocket, I move forward with hope but a strong ability to expect the unexpected. Part of what makes being a ‘grown-up’ hard at this time in history, is the unpredictability of life. The future of work, the economy, the housing market, the environmental condition of the planet, the healthcare system and education all feel like they have a big question mark over them. Progression could be awesome. Or it could make life very difficult. Or something and everything in between. Previous generations experiencing the journey to adulthood had their own challenges, but for them, the future was more stable; working towards goals in small logical steps in a linear direction was a viable strategy, and it worked for many. This is not the case for millennials and beyond who have arguably had a convergence of both increasing options but decreasing availability to take them. But still, despite hurtling toward the unknown with everyone else, I continue to simply adore the feeling of designing my life, it’s a practice my imagination feasts upon and I find it juicy and delicious to play with it. I suppose some people describe this as manifesting and I share some cross-over with this concept, but my process is more about the imaginative exploration of possibility versus asking for a specific thing. It’s an ongoing practice of asking ‘what if?’ by joining dots between my intuition, experience and creative desires and being open to these possibilities as I move into different life stages.
It could be said that I have made a life of being slightly ahead of where others might typically enter into specific life stages. My experience of this has been wholly positive. I do not mean that I have got ahead of myself too quickly in that I abandoned my youth or freedom or aged myself prematurely, quite the opposite, I took my inner kid with me wherever I wanted to go without the constraints of what I should or should not be doing in life right now. Perhaps this is an unknown benifit of a life a play, you take your childlike wonder anywhere and so the expectations fall away.
A few years back in my mid-late 30s, I found an explosive joy in gardening. More than a few people chuckled in passing that I’d prematurely arrived in my garden years. I have thought about this a lot, how activities by cultural influence, can be tied to life stage. This is a huge miss. What might be missing out on because we assume it’s for a different demographic or stage in life? When I see parents sitting on the sidelines of their kids' classes, I consider how strange it is that kids, natural seekers of novelty, who are always upskilling and trying new things are the ones always being observed by adults doing these activities who by contrast rarely get to try anything new and possibly need it in their life even more than the child. The toy market also tells us an interesting story with overall sales for kids toys in decline, but sales for adults in growth. Has our misunderstanding of play led us to make assumptions about certain activities and recreational behaviours that wipes out the opportunity for certain groups of society to even consider trying them? I think this is a massive subject and one that requires a longer deep dive, but play at its heart is universal and we’d be wise to remember this in our pursuit of what we feel compelled to try, do and take part in.
Ben and I were the first of anyone we knew to get married and have children by quite a long way. Of course there are many aspects of these kinds of life decisions that are out of our hands, luck, health to name a couple, but nevertheless it’s curious to reflect on how this experience of going first shaped us. I enjoyed the naivety and glancing back am grateful for it. At our wedding we had no expectations or reference point, I myself had only been to one wedding in my entire life. It was cheap, unorganised in places (I forgot to buy my own shoes but we were on the beach, so whatever), I was pregnant, it absolutely chucked it down, the taxi left without me, we forgot to make a seating plan. I look back and laugh at how amateur it was, and yet it was also…perfect. Guests who were there still mention it to me all these years on. It was playful because the stakes were lowered; the goal was to get married and have fun, which is simple really. In our early parenting years whilst I did find the loneliness at times intense and the ongoing efforts to find other parent friends exhausting at best, and depressing at worst, I still enjoyed the bubble of no comparison. There were no insta-mums or tiktok parenting experts back then, it was intuition and experimentation and becoming a mum again for the third time 10 years later I could not be more grateful for that experience.
I started my business, a global insight and consulting agency at 27 and I was out and done at 37, a fairly unusual trajectory given what I had built and the potential for future earning. But I wanted freedom, peace and play more than anything else. And so I find myself at 41, a few years after that exit and birth of baby number 3 wondering about the big stage of life. This will likely involve some new and potentially challenging times. I find myself regularly in conversations with friends who are worrying or caring for parents. I know quite a few people in the thick of really sad and distressing times, a time which comes for us all. I am truly enjoying my 40s; it is my most favourite and liberating era, but I also feel aware of the fragility of life in a way that I did not before. I think a lot about my own health and that of my husband and have this burning desire to stay healthy and well, not for how I look in the present, a vain motivation my younger self had, but for future preservation of my being so I can experience the future at it fullest with our adult children and be strong and available for our ageing parents. As I get older I’m surrounded by more messages of women struggling with the effects of ageing and whilst I do feel them, I find the spotlight on appearance increasingly something I don’t relate to and am less interested in exploring. This is because health to me now sits in the context of energy and relationship with my loved ones. The physical and emotional are completely entwined, like my well-being is shared. I understand the impact I have on my family and I want to protect and continue to work on it for them.
So to our future retirement. It’s hard to even think of not living with little people, I know Ben will find it very difficult. I worry about him more than myself, as I know how much joy I find in creative pursuits. I’ll also probably need to work till I die to pay for the lifestyle we have built. Lol. But I do have a knack for finding fulfilling work and hopefully that will continue to evolve. I have been curious to read about the trend for ‘friendship communities’, essentially planning for later life with friends and relocating together. I think this makes so much sense. Have you seen the viral account the Old Gays, labelled as TikToks most influential pensioners? There is something very compelling about these guys hanging out as buddies around the pool. Actually just seeing so much fun, joy, colour, diversity and silliness at this life stage I find very aspirational.
I have loved everything we’ve done in life to date, and we have taken advantage of every benefits that comes with the type of life we’ve followed, from working flexibly and pursuing career and lifestyle, family and career goals, but everything, and I mean everything, always comes with a cost. Having time, specifically facetime for friendships as an adult has been hard. We used to be the busy ones, and now we’re not quite as much, it feels like everyone else is. Friendships fall away and new ones don’t always blossom in their departure. That said, I have made more ‘real’ friends post lockdown than I have since becoming a parent, which is interesting for me to consider. I had lots of friends before but made the mistake of assuming these were authentic rather than circumstantial and convenient as they turned out to be. I will try not to make that mistake again as every time it’s happened it’s been, well, heartbreaking actually.
At this point in the present, I feel well equipped to take charge of the dream design for the future and am having great fun coming up with all kinds of potential scenarios I would never have imagined a few years back. I find it exciting and the more scenarios I allow myself to imagine the more optimistic I feel. Again, the trick is to hold them lightly and play with them. It not only affects life when I get there, but I find the practice influences my decisions and mindset now. It’s encouraging me to chill out, enjoy this time now and remind me that actually my vision for the next stage is fairly simple. It’s stripped back, charming; it’s about community and kindness and being available, and to get there I really don’t need an over complicated route to find my way there.
That’s beautiful Emma, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. It‘s refreshing (and fun!) to read about your approach to life.