As the country-western song says, I'm "too old to die young." The challenge of planning and having a meaningful retirement seems to have snuck up on me. Bertrand Russell wrote that "to be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level." Although I don't think we have any more successfully completed this task now than when he wrote it in 1930, we are getting ready to try. We Boomers are getting ready to indulge in a mass-retirement the likes of which the world has never seen.
This is our last chance to get it right. We are the same generation who turned our children over to franchise daycare and let the passive, mindless entertainment of television suck up whatever energy was left after our two-career work week. We've abandoned our religions, hometowns, and spouses at an alarming rate. We've made divorce, single-parent homes, and only children commonplace.
I think that these could all be symptoms of one central problem - the inability to prioritize, to see the difference between things that are important and things that are merely urgent. Walking the dog after work may be urgent, but having a valid will is important. Yet the dog rarely goes unwalked, but few people I know have reasonably current wills. Our lives are so full of urgent clutter that without a clear vision, one gets bogged down before ever getting to life's important tasks.
Will Rogers said, "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." That was also written in 1930 - maybe people turn more introspective in financially hard times.
I accept the challenge, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." Or die trying.
