It really does take a village to accomplish things successfully – from raising healthy children (where the saying originally came from) to accomplishing your career goals to navigating retirement. The old proverb implies that the entire community should provide for and interact positively with children for them to reach a state of healthy adulthood.
In these first months of my retirement, it has become clear to me that aging people become set apart from the mainstream rushing past us. When did the village pick up such speed? Like, do you sometimes feel like a burden to everyone around when you’re trying to get through the grocery till? Setting all those items on the moving counter while trying to determine if you’ve remembered everything, then having to ask the cashier to repeat the question because you can’t hear over the tinny echoes of music, chatter, clanging cans of soup. Usually the question is either ‘What’s your membership number’ or ‘Do you need a bag’, so I alternate between appropriate answers for each and hope I’m landing on the right one.
And I am a young senior – I can only imagine the daily strikes to your confidence as you push ever older. That’s why we have to stick together! The village around us may not have discovered the grace that humanity can provide, if humanity chooses to. I’m pretty convinced that the village isn’t intentionally directing its daggers at us aging people, I think the daggers are consistently and randomly delivered at pretty much everyone. I think maybe we just feel them a bit more, now that even we notice ourselves hiccupping around our days a bit.
So it was with this sensitivity in mind that I gathered young people around me recently to help create my retirement website that I’ve been thinking about since I launched this column. I’ve worked with the web designer at a college in the past and she has helped me with several high profile freelance contracts over the years. It’s different, though, when it’s your own site and you come at it with your own reality. I just want to write and share stories about what other people are doing, but she encouraged me to engage in a fuller array of communications tools. As a long-time communications professional, you’d think that would all come naturally to me. Well, I needed help from this young friend who lives in the online world, who was ever-patient as she led me onward over the last few months even with small children and a new baby requiring her attention all the while.
In our final meeting a few weeks ago, I busily switched my view between two laptops - one that carried our online meeting and the other that held a draft of my new site. I tried to keep up with the platforms she was clicking into on her shared screen. As she darted through pages complaining about her slow internet, I wondered if the rapid scrolling was going to ignite my vertigo. I felt like I did in New York recently, when I saw stars in front of my eyes for an hour after visiting Times Square, as though someone had taken a hundred bright flash pictures in my direction. My head was spinning by the time the virtual meeting was done, but after lots of discussion and months of focused effort, I had my new website! Partly because someone nudged me out of my comfort zone and I let myself go there.
Not every undertaking is successful, but you never know where a small interest may take you! When you tap friendly, helpful people from your village to lend you a hand, the odds are even more in your favour!
Visit Sandy’s website at www.LifeInRetirement.ca
