Dealing with life after retirement is a dilemma many face at their career's end. If you're wondering what to do when you retire, here are some tips to make those precious years fulfilling and joyful.
Sadhguru: The experience of life leaves most people wounded instead of wise. But if people with so rich life experience behind them could make their life's experience into wisdom, their wisdom could be useful for the world in so many different ways. Life after retirement can be productive on a different level.
What To Do When You Retire?
Different people retire at different stages, but generally, one retires when the body has reached a certain level of incapability. So you reduce your work to a lower level simply because if you push it beyond that, you may "retire" in a different way too soon! And that's when the question comes up: "What do I do when I retire?"
Once you retire, there must be a shift of focus from economic and family concerns to something more spirituality oriented. The physical body has come with an expiry date. Once you are over a certain age, however well you have taken care of your body; you are still a fragile life. Tomorrow morning the whole equation of your life can change, physically. We hope it doesn't happen to you, but it is a possibility. Millions of people are going through it. Thinking it won't happen to you is living in a fool's paradise. Knowing the possibility and doing the right thing so that it doesn't happen to you is more sensible.
So it is time you activate those dimensions of life which are beyond this physical body. That is the spiritual part of you. For a person who knows only the body, old age is the greatest fear and a source of misery. Everything becomes meaningless and burdensome when the body is threatened and begins to creak and groan. But if you have tasted something beyond the physical body, old age will not be a problem, it will be a blessing.
Life After Retirement - Make it a Blessing
Once you reach a certain point in your life, you must invest at least a certain quota of your energy and life into a spiritual process. If you put the whole of your life and energy in that direction, there is nothing like it, but at least a little bit of your life should seek that.
You should have done it right from day one because if you are a keen observer of life, from the very day you were born, there is a reminder of your expiry date. If you are not such a keen observer, by the time you are fifty there are sufficient reminders. As the body becomes more fragile as days and years pass by, not taking these reminders into consideration is a foolish way to exist. It is time to look beyond the possibilities of being physical.
In any case, if you have kept yourself vibrant, old age just won't matter to you. When the moment of death comes, you can smile and go without any sense of loss because it is not a loss.
If life happens, death is a natural process. Being afraid of a natural process is unnatural. This fear happens only because of a certain sense of ignorance and unawareness. We have become so deeply identified with this body that we are no longer in touch with reality.
And this has happened because we have not explored other dimensions. No matter what kind of teachings others give you, whether someone tells you that you are the soul or whatever else, if your experience of life is limited to the physical body, the fear of losing it is natural.
If we had explored and established ourselves in deeper dimensions of experience, the body would not be such a big issue. It becomes an easy thing to handle. Life or death won't make such a big difference.