| A Peacock today, a feather duster tomorrow |  |  |
Things look pretty glum. You are in the age bracket or have reached the mandatory retirement age. There is this feeling of anxiety, of resentment and rejection. Even with the five figure salary you are drawing per month, you are just able to get by. You claim to be miserable but still in comfort. Now the future prospects seemed bleak. You have heard of currency devaluation. Now this is going to happen to you. You are going to be devalued overnight. A peacock today, a feather duster tomorrow. Most of you cannot even remember telephone numbers, as there is no need to. Your faithful pal will track down anybody you wish to speak to, in any part of the world. Some of you over the years do not even know how to use the self-service at the gas stations, check in at an airline counter or how to pay bills, let alone complete your income tax returns. As a medical doctor said in some other context" you don't use it, you loose it ". Overnight these things are no more the expected and the routine. You are now mr. Nobody. This is a pretty tough scenario. Is it necessary to be so?
One of the phases that a retiree may have to go through after the initial resentment phase of retirement, is the feeling of rejection. When he is tired of coping with the anger that comes from his perceived rejection, he tries to reduce his pain by creating what i call emotional numbness. He withdraws form society. Accepts no invitations. Does not entertain visitors, he becomes very unsociable. By identifying these phases, we can intervene and eliminate the potential problems before they balloon into destructive patterns that threaten our post retirement lives. Continue to socialize, create new network of friends and maintain the old. Share with others your experiences. Touch other people's lives to make a positive difference in them.
If you accept that you are a has-been, then mentally, emotionally, physically, socially and spiritually you give up. Your super computer in your brain box starts to program for a shut down. Within 1,000 days, if you are on the metric system, and 3 years if you are non-metric, you exit. You have to get hold of yourself now and set up to reprogram for you to re-tyre yourself. You may not want to go onto the fast track again, but there are equally challenging avenues for you to play a role. You cannot just sit down waiting for something to happen. You must make things happen. This is the time to activate your networking. Some may not want to know you. Leave them alone. That is their prerogative. You cannot allow yourself to stagnate. Like the car in the garage. If you choose not to start it for a week, what happens to the battery? It goes flat. Get a move on.
Spiritual development
As solomon said, "as a man thinks in his heart, so is he". If you think you are beaten, you are beaten. If you think you can and will make it, you will make it. Sometimes you meet some pitfalls, immediately the word failure comes in. This is often times being re-enforced by your close members of your family. Be committed to what you set to do and do it. It is not a failure, but your success is just being delayed for the better. When things do not seemed to be right, this is the time to sit back and reflect and use your own spiritual power to communicate with the almighty to show you what went wrong so as you may take corrective action.
You have a direct link to the almighty, use it. Most of us, at some point in our lives, have been brought up on the diet of prayers and reading the holy book. But few of us know how to tap into this super energy source of power. When you are in commune with the almighty through prayers, you should be able to visualize what you are seeking for. Now it leaves you to energize the program you set up to do in order to actualize whatever you wanted. The 'prayerize', visualize, energize and Actualize procedure exerts a profound power force in the experience of the individual who has the wit to employ it.
In my life there are enough 'spiritual' experiences of employing this creative principle which has been responsible for seemingly incredible outcome for me, to guide me in my career and life path. You can go back and try this procedure for yourselves to actualize what you want. There is a passage in the qur'an that says that god helps those who help themselves. Prayers help us to visualize and energize what we seek from the almighty. This type of trying that has worked wonders must also involve the relaxed attitude towards effort when that is indicated. Sometimes we push ourselves too hard that it becomes stressful and without attaining the goals for which they have been put forth. Take a break. Time to review the physical side of our development.
Physical development
Many of us take too lightly the physical side of our being. This includes nutrition, what we eat, drink and smoke, and keeping ourselves fit and healthy. We are what we eat, drink and smoke. There is enough literature on this. What i want to emphasize here is that we have to be selective in what we eat and in moderation. Have your nasi lemak, gulai daging and your roti canai, but not everyday. For our sedentary type of work, we do not require more than 2,000 calories of food intake. You have to join your staff at the canteen to see some of the heavier set of staff eat. They have the full course plus their teh tarik and they complain of being overweight and develop symptoms of je [jantong expiring]. If they do not have this as yet, they complain that their sugar, cholesterol, and pressure levels are elevated. They wonder why.
Some on this diet, seemed fit. They play badminton, squash and do weight lifting [not body building] and collapse. To me they are fit but not healthy. Conversely some may be healthy but not fit. You need to have a combination of both, being fit and healthy. Some of the sports that we do are more anaerobic than aerobic. In anaerobic exercise, we do not use oxygen and consequently we maintain our weight, no matter how much workout we do. In the more aerobic sports, like walking or sports that involve a lot of deep breathing weight reduction is more pronounced.
Remember, we are not limited by our age; we are liberated by it. The most exciting news of all is that, like all patterns that give us pleasure, moderate exercise can become a positive addiction. Many of you may want to avoid exercise. You will be more powerfully drawn to it once you discover how pleasurable it is to work out properly. I bet you that if you exercise consistently for a period of time, you will form this positive addiction for a lifetime. Even if you got off track for a while, you'll always return to a consistent exercise regimen throughout your life. We all deserve the physical vitality that can transform the quality of our lives. Our physical destiny is intimately related to our mental, emotional, financial and relationship destinies. In fact, it will determine whether we have a destiny at all!
Mental development
Mental development must go on. Cultivate the reading habit. Our public libraries are seldom used. I surround my reclining chair with books and magazines and pick whatever reading material according to the mood that i am in. My interests range from comparative religions to geography, autobiography, battle epics from the crusades to the war in Kuwait and of course the flying magazines. Sometimes i listen to books on tape and wished i had their command of the language, whether it is in Bahasa (Malaysia), French, English or just rubbish.
Reading something of substance, something of value, something that is nurturing, something that teaches you new distinctions every day, is more important than eating. Read a minimum of thirty minutes a day. You may miss a meal, but don't miss your reading. By reading you are not limited to your own personal experiences as life references. You can borrow the references of other people. You may want to focus on those who had made it against all odds - Nelsen Mendella - who had succeeded and contributed and is impacting people's lives in a major way. Read the biographies of successful people and learn that regardless of their background or conditions, when they held on to their sense of certainty and consistently contributed, success eventually came their way.
The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. During those magical moments while you are immersed in reading "Papillon", you are Henri Charriere. I am attracted not so much on its sensational appeal as the autobiography of a convict, but rather on its rare quality as a tale of courage, endurance and man's unquenchable thirst for freedom; the biography of Fred Meijer who started a chain of general stores in the us, you cannot but be impressed by what he said, "live your life so you can look in a mirror and be proud of what you see".
You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page. You constantly need to expand your references.
Just to digress a little, many have asked me why i took up flying. Flying gives me a chance to learn something new that i have never been exposed to before. I wanted to learn how to handle this mechanical monstrosity and make it respond to my commands. Moreover i had to learn subjects that have never been part of my life- subjects like aviation law, general aeronautics, radio telephony, navigation and meteorology. Let me emphasize here flying is not important. What matters is the mental, physical, emotional, social and spiritual coordination that it provides. Other sporting avenues might provide the same challenges. Find your sporting niche and do it with passion and enthusiasm.
Emotional development
In our daily lives and more so when we are about to have a late life career change, we need to take conscious control of our oscillating emotions and consciously and deliberately shape our lives. There is no success without emotional success. Emotional stability starts at home. If there is tension in the house, which there will sometimes be, you will have to sort this out with your partner. A veteran of 45 years married to the same person, to maintain your sanity, you have to make your relationship one of the highest priorities in your life; otherwise you will be taking a back seat to any or all of the other things that are happening in the work place.
Sometimes emotional conflicts come from your own makings with your other family members, your own children. You want to mould them in your own expectations. Being the authoritarian father that you are, you give them no choice but an ultimatum. Your love for them becomes conditional to their submitting to your fancies. We forget that our children were born with their own talents and interests. Our responsibility is to prepare them to face the world when we are no more around. Give them the tools to meet these challenges. After that let them express their talents and interests to the fullest within the accepted norms of society. There shall be no withholding of our love for them. In this way we create an environment of love and respect for each other and minimize emotional conflicts. To quote Antonio Porchia, "in a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing". You are the source of all your emotions. Nothing, and no one, can change how you feel, except yourself. If you find yourself in reaction to anything, you and only you, can change the situation.
In everyday life, who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? It is you, and nobody else. You get up in the morning, you have a choice - whether to be happy or unhappy. The choice is yours. When i was a kid, my grandmother was very particular how we started our day. We were chided not to start the day with a long face. Now this made sense. If you programmed yourself saying that "it's going to be a tough day today" the first thing in the morning, what else do you expect the day to be? I recall reading somewhere that Abraham Lincoln said that people were just about as happy as they made up their minds to be. You can be unhappy if you chose to be. It is the easiest thing to accomplish. Go round telling yourself that things are not going well, that nothing is satisfactory, and you can bet your last ringgit of being unhappy. But say to yourself, "things are going well. Life is good. I choose happiness," and you can be quite sure of having your choice.
Conclusion
Many of us make life unnecessarily difficult for ourselves and this has a snowballing effect as it affects others as well. We need to stop feeling resentful and rejected and get peaceful, if we are to have power to live effectively. We do not realize how accelerated the rate of our lives have become, or the speed at which we have driven ourselves. Many of us are destroying our physical bodies by this pace. What is even more tragic, we are tearing our minds and souls to shreds as well. Retirement or a late career change could be the opportunity of our first step to reduce the rate of our pace or at least the tempo of our life style, and appreciate this wonderful gift of life. We could continue to contribute to society in many other ways and ask the almighty god to make use of us until we are completely used up. Those who have retired or about to and are having difficulties coping with this new situation, need to have an attitudinal change. They have to take this as a blessing for giving them a new lease of life, thus enabling them to re-tyre themselves for their new role.
Lastly we have to remember we are mere actors acting out our roles on this world stage. In acting out our roles, we make our entrances and at the appropriate time make our exits. Commit yourselves to acting out your roles in life with gusto and deserving success and you will find a reward you have not bargained for - a crowning glory of a full life well lived.
BY Ani b. Arope
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