Reviews of my book; Finding Joy in Retirement: fourth one.

As Oscar Wilde remarked, youth is wasted on the young and those many among us who were students of The Happy Prince, did our darndest not to waste those halcyon days.
We laughed in the face of age and risked all for wisdom and experience. Perhaps following the exhortation of The Who, we had a shot at dying before we got old and mocked the sober senior souls around us. Now our inner puck chuckles from his cowslip as we hesitate before crossing the river Styx.
Glass and Kennedy provide a guide to navigating that crossing.
The book is structured around advice, guidance and exercises in reflection. It poses the question, ’Would you not plan for retirement as you would for any other phase in life?’
Work, as we all know, provides meaning, routine, identity and satisfaction. Where will these things derive from in retirement?
A coach or guide can assist in finding meaning and, through reflective listening, can elicit your concerns; what the authors call the four Ms, missing, measuring, meaning and mastery.
They go on to discuss aspects of life you will miss; understanding that life beyond work is not a wilderness, finding motivation, structuring one’s life and defining one’s role in the world.
The authors encourage the reader to commit to retirement and embrace the assistance of a coach to get the best out of it, to reflect with others on its challenges. This involves managing time, energy and space, establishing new forms of validation and carpe diem seizing the time.
All of us, like Frank Sinatra, have had a few regrets, but retirement is a time to move beyond regret, to do what you didn’t have time to do before, to value your friends and cherish your values. It is a time to discover your true personality, your rhythm, your relationship to wealth and the possibilities of self-creation.
The authors conclude by exhorting the reader to take risks, to master their goals, to divide life into its components, adjust their dependency relations and begin to learn anew. Most importantly they suggest this process of self-assessment should be done vis-a-vis the goals of your partner in life.
As Joni Mitchell said, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’.
But it hasn’t gone yet, not by a long shot. And if you want to know the secret to making the next stage of life as good or better than the last, this is the book for you.