The 4 "P"s of Retirement

Purpose, Patience, Problem-Solving, and Planning

A year ago, I wrote a piece musing about whether retirement felt more like freedom or a free-fall. It was so useful for me to make sense of my year that way that I wanted to try it again, with another year under my belt. With luck, my experiences may trigger you to think about your own life. Just like last year, there’s no single overarching theme to this, just some thoughts about purpose, patience, problem-solving, and planning. And this year, it’s goodbye to status anxiety.

Purpose

There’ve been stretches in my life when I’ve been driven by a real sense of Purpose¹. Capital P purpose, the kind that carries you forward on a wave of motivation and also acts as a North Star when you’re a little lost. When I was pursuing a Ph.D. years ago, I had a Purpose. Later, when I was part of a team shaping our company into a major player in our domain, I was similarly motivated.

My greatest Purpose—and truly, my greatest achievement as a human—was raising two independent children … and they have exceeded my expectations in so many ways. This Purpose was the most complex, and the one for which I can claim the least “credit.” It was shared wholly with Sara, and it required and was utterly dependent on the participation of Conrad and Louisa, who were always going to be who they are. I call it my greatest Purpose, but in many ways I was along for the ride. Still, parenting well, parenting with intent, filled my life with meaning. I can’t take credit for the outcome, but I’m mostly pleased with how I acquitted myself along the way.

I’ve been without such a Purpose since retiring. While there’s no single passion project that I’m pursuing, I’m not sitting around watching The Price Is Right. Instead, I have what I think of as multiple purposes ... all Little P purposes. Making good food. Exercising as much as my body allows. Writing this Substack. Trying my hand at various “odd jobs” and volunteer opportunities, testing whether these might offer some lasting fuel for my yet-to-be-quenched desire for meaning (I’ll get to that).

Interestingly enough, the most meaningful activity in my life is supporting my wife Sara as she pursues her burning Capital P Purpose. When Sara and I retired, she set herself to a single goal: to become an artist capable of creating work that met her lofty standards. Not work that anyone else told her was good, but work that she thought was good. She’s been working toward that goal with a sense of commitment and an intensity that I deeply admire for three years. I don’t want to try to tell her story—I could never tell it in a way that would do justice to her efforts, and it’s her story after all. She wouldn’t tell it with words, in any case; she’d tell it with her art, viewable here. I’ve included just a couple recent drawings below to illustrate what she’s doing, but if you want to learn more, Rick Foerster just featured her in his series here:

Waiting Decades to Finally Follow Your Dreams

Many years ago, Sara and I faced a kind of crossroads. We both had high aspirations: we wanted more advanced education which we expected would lead us to challenging jobs. But we also wanted a family. For a time, we thought we could have both, and that’s what got us both to Purdue: I’d pursue my Ph.D., she’d get her M.B.A., and we’d find help watching the kid(s). But it only took a couple interviews with potential childcare providers to realize that we couldn’t entrust our baby to a stranger. So Sara did the most selfless thing I could imagine: she postponed her education so that she could take the lead on raising Conrad (and then Louisa) and so that I could focus my attention on the Ph.D. At some later point in our life, we promised each other, we’d prioritize her aspirations.

And then 30 years passed. Thirty really fruitful years, with Sara launching the book-packaging business that we both ran for years, then parlaying those skills into a career as an organizational change management consultant. She made it fine without the M.B.A., but she still had a burning desire to do something even more challenging. We just never knew when that chance might come up. Now we do.

For Sara to pursue the kind of Mastery she’s after now, it became obvious that she would need to step back from her share of the domestic duties that we had largely shared for most of our adult lives. Planning and shopping for meals, looking after the yard and garden, managing financial matters—all the stuff that required forethought and planning, stuff that we generally shared pretty evenly—would now fall to me.

Soon enough, the transformative power of this mutual decision became evident: she could focus all her thinking on her art, and I could approach my “domestic” duties in a spirit of service and appreciation for her that offered me a good bit of meaning. I really like taking care of the yard, and I dig thinking up, shopping for, and preparing delicious meals. I pop into her studio to tell her dinner’s ready and she has no idea that hours have passed. What I like most of all is that my actions enable Sara to pursue her dream, her Purpose. The next best thing to having a Purpose of one’s own is serving the Purpose of the love of your life.

Sara Pendergast, Self Portrait 2024, charcoal, 11x15

Sara Pendergast, Tom's Attention, charcoal on toned paper, 13x21

This sounds awfully noble and self-effacing, doesn’t it? Especially coming from a selfish bastard like me. Well, before you call bullshit on me, just remember that I hate to bullshit myself, and I’ve pressure-tested my actions enough to tell you, it’s real. I’m honestly and legitimately enjoying being of service to this person I admire. It feels very purposeful, very meaningful, even if it is not quite my Purpose. Just don’t tell me I make a good wife.

Patience

If I can think of one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s patience. I didn’t seek patience out, mind you. It found me and bent me to its will. I may have made the choice to get my knee and then my hip replaced in the span of five months, but little did I know the recovery process would teach me some pretty profound lessons, lessons that are already paying dividends in other parts of my life.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned that these surgeries would be pretty traumatic. You can’t sugar coat slicing open your leg, sawing off the bottom of one leg bone and the top of another, hammering metal and plastic parts into place, and then sewing you back together. But I figured I’d handle my recovery like I handle everything: full speed ahead, do more than the doctor advises, and it will all work out fine.

My body had different ideas.

I’m not saying my recoveries have gone badly. They haven’t. I’m hiking quite regularly and will be heading to Patagonia in January for a major bucket-list trip. But good lord, has it been slower and more painful and difficult than I imagined. More incremental. On most days, I’ve had to explain to myself that I am in fact better today than I was a week ago, and that the general trajectory is upward. The only answer to my incessant demand that I get better NOW is “patience.” Patiently, my body has forced me to allow healing to happen at its own pace. Slowly, I’ve learned to relax, not push so hard.

I find myself applying this simple quality, patience, to other parts of my life with good effect. I’ve started working with a group of six middle-school kids in something we call “Book Club.” It’s a volunteer thing, sponsored by the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization. It being “Book Club,” I assumed we’d read a bunch of books and spend each weekly session dissecting the books. Well slow down, Charlie. It’s not like these kids are just going to open up and start discussing books. They’re 13 years old! One day we just talked about the different languages they spoke at home. Last week we made braided bookmarks—Aryana taught me how to braid—and talked about books that had been made into movies. Little by little, I think they’re coming to trust that I am who I seem to be. I’m slowly coming to realize that it won’t matter how many books we read, as long as these kids build more confidence in talking to adults and in thinking about the kinds of problems they’ll have to solve in the years ahead. I like these kids a lot.

Now that I’ve gotten through the hardest part of my joint-replacement recoveries, I’ve got the mental space to focus on getting my weight into a more optimal range. I’m doing it the only way I know how: via the tracking of key data points (daily weight, protein, carbs), then studying the results over time. My new friend, Patience, helps me see that a single day doesn’t matter, it’s the trajectory, the direction of the arrow. What choice do I have, really, but to be patient? When I was a young man, I could drop 10 pounds in 2 weeks no problem ... but my body doesn’t work like that any more. And that’s okay. I’ve got time.

Problem-Solving

These big surgeries constrained my aspirations for experimenting with different kinds of work this year, so I stuck with my two “side gigs” from the previous year: running the booth for the Snohomish Bakery at the Issaquah Farmers Market every Saturday, May through September, and then working for Stocker Farms during the Fall Festival, six weeks ending at Halloween. The details of these gigs don’t matter much, but I’m trying to draw lessons from them as I tune my quest for more meaningful engagements in the future.

Here’s one thing I know for sure: It’s next to impossible to find something mentally challenging and interesting when you also require that it not ask too much of you in terms of time or commitment. Duh, right? I’m trying to have it both ways, and I can see that’s not going to work, at least not very easily. I know I don’t want the demands of a full-time job, a job where I could be wholly committed to making it a success. I don’t want work to ask so much of me, because I treasure the ability to fart around and do what I please. But I also know this: I want my work to ask more of me than following a recipe for making vast qualities of fudge, or driving a tractor that pulls kids round and round. If this last stint at Stocker Farms taught me anything, it’s that I need some kind of mental challenge, or some sense that what I’m doing involves skill or acumen, for me to find it worthwhile.

What I want is what I’ve always wanted: interesting problems to solve. It’s just so much harder to find these problems when I place these other constraints on them. Oddly enough, running the market stand is a fairly decent fit: it’s highly social, which I find very enjoyable, but the essential nut to crack is estimating how much “product” to bring on any given day. We track when different items sell out, the weather, the events in the surrounding area, and then try to be sure to bring the right product mix every time. Now that’s a fairly interesting problem.

Writing a Substack newsletter remains the most satisfying thing I’ve done so far. Expressing myself in writing has always been the most interesting problem I could solve, and the fact that it comes along with interactions with a fine group of readers is icing on the cake.

Planning

Sara and I were hiking up the La Luz trail in the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque the other day when we came to a junction in the trail. Directly in front of us was a sign naming the trails that intersected … but the sign was without arrows! “How weird,” we mused. “How are we supposed to know which trail to follow?” We used our best judgment and our Gaia map and took the left fork; it was the correct one.

An hour or so later, on our way down, we came to the same intersection and there to our right, plain as day, was a metal sign clearly pointing out which trail had led which way! We had stood right next to it and totally missed it. What the hell had we been thinking?, we asked ourselves.

This kind of thing happens to we humans all the time, of course. We’re so focused on doing or thinking or looking one way that we completely miss the signs in front of us. You’ve undoubtedly seen the video that asks you to pay attention to people passing a ball and find that you don’t notice that a man in a gorilla suit has run through the middle of their game. That’s what I’m talking about.

There was a period during my last year of retirement when I was convinced worried that I was missing the gorilla.

This “what if I missed something” attitude was all about money. “What if we didn’t account for something, something very expensive?,” I wondered. “What if we don’t really have enough money to make it for the long haul?” For a time, this made me really tight with money. I insisted we only go to cheaper restaurants. Instead of taking the kids out to dinner, I insisted on cooking at home. I determined to make my worn out shoes last a little longer.

I call it my miser period.

And all the while, I kept an eye on our financial plan and it always looked JUST FINE. So we’d get on a call with our financial advisor and we’d ask, “What are we missing? Is there something—health care, taxes, anything—that we haven’t accounted for?” And Naomi would assure us that we’d planned for everything she knew how to plan for, that we were in good shape.

Of course we were! If I think of one thing that made early retirement possible for Sara and I, it was our planning. For years before we pulled the trigger on retirement, we studied our finances carefully, weighing how long we expected to live against how much money we needed and how much money we wanted, and we also carefully weighed how we valued time versus money. Between the financial roadmap and our labyrinthine budgeting spreadsheets, we planned our escape meticulously.

Eventually, I’ve come to accept that we had planned well, and that I could relax and “live the plan”—which meant I didn’t need to worry so much about money. Still, looking past that sign in the mountains, I wonder if there’s something lurking in plain sight that I’ve not planned for? It seems to me that every year that our plan plays out as intended, I’ll be more comfortable. But I’m still looking out for the gorilla ...

Status

In the first year or so of my retirement, I was painfully aware of how my status in the world had changed. And then, in the last year, my awareness of status evaporated entirely. It was as if I had once believed in God and then suddenly ceased to hold that belief at all. How could I ever concern myself with a silly illusion like status?

How do I know that status no longer mattered to me? Well, I bought a Miata!

Once I had scoffed at Miatas: they were “lady cars,” vaguely effeminate, and I was a man’s man. A real man wouldn’t drive a Miata; he’d drive a high horsepower man’s car. Look, I’m not trying to defend this attitude, just report it. In fact, I find it kind of embarrassing, so much so that I probably shouldn’t even share it, but I’ve made a compact with myself and with you that I’m going to report the harsh truth, even if it makes me look like a … well, you supply the label.

I missed having fun in a car, and one day when we were heading to the gym in our Volvo EV I saw this cute little maroon Miata parked alongside the road and said to Sara, “I gotta look.” Two hours later, after contacting the owner and taking a test drive, I was leaving my bank with a wad of cash to buy my first convertible.

I told my friends and their reactions were as I’d expect. Scott calls it my “vagmobile” and my son asked how I can stand a car that wears such a daffy grin.

But Sara and I found a back way to the gym along some curvy country and we drive with the top down and feel the air cool as we dip into the valleys and smell the manure as we pass a horse farm. The world feels closer in the Miata, the sun warm on our shoulders. Sure, the car is small and it’s no fun to go top-down on a busy freeway, but what do we care? We take the back roads every chance we can. It didn’t take long for both of us to fall in love with the car, and honestly, I don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks about the car. I like it.

Status is only real if you care what other people think about you, if you need to show others that you’re a big deal because of the clothes you wear or the car you drive. But if you let go of those cares, you can truly get in touch what matters most to you.

I’m sure there are people who live their whole lives not caring about status, about what other people think of them. I’m coming to it late … but I’m sure glad to be here.

As always, I’d love to here the thoughts of those who are at different points on the path. And I’m always happy for you to share my writing with someone who might like it.

1. Credit to Rick Foerster and his “The Way of Work” newsletter for tuning my ears to this way of thinking about purpose.