|
Home is Where the Heart is
|
| |
| |
By Cathy Severson, MS
What are your retirement goals? Is it to travel around the country or the world? Is it to volunteer and make a difference in your community? Is it to play golf, fish or other outdoor activities?
Regardless of your retirement goals, you need to take a new look at your home and how it’s going to serve as your primary base from here on out. There are a few hearty souls who sell their home and hit the road, usually with a RV or other mobile type home. For the rest, which is most of us, home takes on an increased importance in our lives.
The most extraverted and involved person will more spend more time at home than they did when they were working. Even if you fill your initial retirement years fully engaged in volunteer, leisure activities and travel, there were eventually come a time when you will want or need to slow down.
Your home can start feeling like a prison if you have never developed any activities, hobbies or interests you enjoy doing at home. If you don’t have activities you enjoy doing around the house, now is the time to start. With a passion you can engage without going anywhere, home can be a place that renews your spirit and stimulates you mentally, physically or emotionally.
It is critically important for people who have spent their adult years working away to look at home as more than a place to hang your hat. It’s especially essential for men who may look at home as the domain of his wife. Not only does a newly retired man need to find activities, hobbies or interests around the house he enjoys, but he needs to have a space he can claim as his own. If his province was the office away from the home, he needs to have a room or corner that he can do with as he pleases. He needs to feel that there is a part of the home that is his alone.
The first few years of retirement are often seen as a time to get out to see the world and do things you weren’t able to do when you were working. As you age, most people slow down. Illnesses can affect the ability to be out all the time or finances may diminish. Having taken the time when you were in your younger retirement years to generate home based activities and interests will make the transition into elderhood much easier.
These activities, hobbies should hold your interests, be intellectually, or physically stimulating. They should use your creativity. You know you’ve found the right activity when time flies, when you look up at the clock and what felt like five minutes was actually two hours. It may take some experimentation to find activities that will be worth your energy. The key is not get sucked into spending all your free time at home watching television.
Cathy Severson, MS helps you make the most of your retirement. Find out how to make the rest of your life the best of your life with the complimentary e-book 7 Ingredients for a Satisfying Retirement at http://tinyurl.com/8moymb
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
