For a Resilient Retirement, Let Nature be Your Guide
By: Wendy Eisner
Tags: Retirement, Change Your Life, Resilience, Inner Journey, Nature

For a Resilient Retirement, Let Nature be Your Guide

Photo by Matthew Bargh on Unsplash

This September makes it five years since I retired. This is fifth autumn that I haven’t had to wake up early in the morning, teach classes and attend interminably long faculty meetings. That means we can stay at the cottage, far away from the city (I know, lucky us!). Now we can watch the changes: the hummingbirds are leaving, mushrooms are popping up, the trees are taking on that undefinable yellow-green tinge and geese are flying overhead: heading south. A small thought comes up: how many more beautiful autumns will I see? The day darkens as I notice a little uneasiness tinged with sadness, like a cloud passing over the face of the sun. Just a slight turn of thought and I move from contentment to sadness.

The transition into retirement isn’t all about our Golden Years, is it? It’s also about loss. What do we lose? Our job, of course, but also our sense of identity. We may notice, or continue to notice, a falling away of those mental and physical abilities we took for granted, like our razor-sharp memory or our ability to eat whatever we like without gaining weight. Society isn’t very kind to the aging process either. We are expected to look young, embrace the newest modes and not mingle too much with people outside our age group. When we get too old, we’re not treated like the wise elders of our communities; we’re hidden away in retirement homes.

What we gain is a bleak view of our future. We may try to distract ourselves from those thoughts, but they persist.

I am suggesting an expansion of our viewpoint, a relaxation of our former way of doing things…

Fear not: there is a way to turn this perspective upside down, although not the way you may think I’m going to recommend. This isn’t about saving your money wisely (a good idea), or exercising (another great idea) or finding your new Dream Job (although that’s getting close to what I’m driving at). I am definitely not going to talk about the Secret to a Happy Retirement. As a matter a fact, let’s leave the happiness expectations at the door for now and I will come back to that. I am suggesting an expansion of our viewpoint, a relaxation of our former way of doing things and embracing a flexibility of mind or spirit.

Here is a suggested approach on how you might cope with and even enjoy retirement and aging; not always, but sometimes. It’s a strategy from our natural environment. There is a concept in ecology called resilience. Psychology uses this term as well, defining resilience as how easily a person can bounce back from difficulties. But this definition has been overused and carries all sorts of negative baggage including the necessity of having grit (tenacity). If you’ve got it, you’re a success but if you don’t, you’re a failure. This judgmental attitude really turns people off.

Let’s look at another way to approach resilience and see if we can make it more tolerable, omitting the grit. The more resilient an ecosystem, the better it can recover from disturbance (change). The most resilient systems have more species and more diversity, which means there are more complex webs of interactions between animals, plants and soils. Okay, that’s the science part, but how does it work? Imagine a field of corn: at its the best, it looks beautiful and robust with the promise of a bountiful harvest. Then a blight hits the field, the corn shrivels and the entire crop is decimated. The problem is, this is an ecosystem with many individual plants but just one species, probably just one strain (this means they’re all pretty much clones of one another). This is a “monoculture” which has less resistance to disease and invasive species because they are all equally susceptible to whatever chooses to attack it.

Natural ecosystems, on the other hand, are better at handling disturbances, because there are so many different species and so many interactions and connections between species. Say a disease attacks only the paper birch of a particular woodland. While the paper birch trees struggle to survive, its cousin, the yellow birch, is unaffected. Birds can build nests in its branches, its seeds provide food for animals and its roots stabilize the soil. So even though one species is in trouble, the natural, resilient ecosystem continues to thrive. Even some individual paper birch in that natural system will probably survive because they’ve dealt with small disturbances before and have better immunity. It can be argued that human societies also thrive where there is more diversity (it’s not just a Leftist, liberal thing). But we’ll focus on the smallest scale: you and me.

The more we allow change into our lives, the more resilient we become.

You and I will adapt to disturbance better and recover faster if we cultivate resilience for ourselves. And how do we do that? We encourage a diversity of strategies for survival, just like an entire ecosystem. We can think of each behavior or activity or personal relationship as one species, so exposing ourselves to more of these makes us more diverse. The more we allow change into our lives, the more resilient we become. Right away, I should tell you that you have to work at it and find your own answers. One size does not fit all. To use another nature metaphor, I can’t tell you what to plant in your garden or how to make things grow. You have to decide what flowers and vegetables will flourish in your particular soil, given your personal climate. And you also have to figure out what you want to grow. Just don’t plant a monoculture.

What does the human version of a monoculture look like? Doing one thing and not changing any comfortable, or even uncomfortable, habits. We tend toward entrenched behaviors that dig us in deeper: we become ever more extreme and resistant to change. Our culture encourages the monoculture: just look at how social media and even online shopping steer us toward listening to the same music, buying the same stuff and talking to people with similar interests.

Monocultural behavior is habitual and familiar. One of the big challenges of the pandemic has been that people’s routines become monocultural as their perceived options shrink. You can try this: contemplate your habits and what is familiar in your life. What do you feel comfortable doing and how would you feel if you lost one of those comforts? Then think about what your natural, diverse, resilient world might look like. I recommend that you think about this over a period of time, no rush. It could be as easy as remembering what you liked doing when you were a kid, before you started working. What pulls at you? What calls to you?

Another suggestion is not to come up with only one new thing you want to do or learn or get involved in. Again, there is value in diversity. Some people planned to travel when they retired, or go to plays and concerts and parties. Obviously, although these plans could’ve worked out great under normal conditions, they weren’t viable options during the pandemic. Learning a new language, planting a garden, playing the guitar, joining an on-line book club may be more suitable activities during this strange time in history.

Resilience is also about pushing the limits of your tolerances by nudging up against what makes you uncomfortable. I am lucky (very lucky) to have a husband who keeps me challenged by putting me in situations that I might otherwise avoid: blearily waking up at dawn to go fishing, stumbling across rope bridges that traverse wild canyons. I would have never experienced those joyful sunrises and the thrill of breath-taking vistas if I hadn’t been forced to test my abilities. But resilience is not just about what is going on outwardly, it’s also about what’s happening inside your head. Can we face our fear of change? Can we recognize and accept our resistance to being disturbed or agitated?

We don’t like change but it doesn’t matter, change is what it’s all about.

Here’s the secret: everything is going to change and you are going to change with it, whether you like it or not. Some changes may be too gradual to notice. Or you will notice the changes because they abruptly invade your life. You’ll make plans for your dream retirement and a pandemic comes along and makes all that moot. You will plan an adventurous biking tour and find you’re not strong enough to achieve what you planned. You may find that you’re a little frightened of the unknown future. By the time you get to retirement, aging and illness are closing in. You’ve avoided thinking about these big changes your entire life. That’s the unspoken secret, and the question is: how resilient do you want to be to meet the unknown? We don’t like change but it doesn’t matter, change is what it’s all about. It’s the one constant in the universe.

My response to retirement has been multilayered, and it hasn’t always been easy. As I pursue my passion for painting, I’m often hyper-critical of my efforts. My intense love of nature and my dream of traveling with my husband have been curtailed to small-scale hikes because of the pandemic. On the other hand, what is always available to me and where I can fully satisfy my curiosity is in the exploration of my inner life: the mind. What is this whole world going on inside of me? How can I learn more about myself? Meditation, contemplation, reading, writing: these are a few tools for transforming and expanding our inner world. Again, my path is different from yours so I can’t supply you with a Google route map. For you, there will be challenges on your journey that will be quite different from mine. The interior landscape is a very diverse ecosystem, full of wonders and distractions and beauty and danger.

Retirement forces us away from our familiar ways of being busy. Retirement insists on some level of resilience. Will I be happy? I don’t know. I do know there is an invitation here. An invitation to re-evaluate old ideas and habits. I can look back on my life before retirement and review what brought me happiness and contentment, but some of those habits and patterns are less useful in this new world. It’s time to push past the old barriers, embrace new ideas and new perspectives. Create my own resilient ecosystem. This could be the most important phase of my life.