As I am at the age where I can voluntarily do something else with my life, I like the word retirement less and less. Retire is what I do at the end of a very full day. I go to bed and become unconscious for seven or eight hours. Retiring in this way is not how I want to live the rest of my life. In fact, if I could find a way to not get tired, I would be the first to give up sleep and not ever retire at or around midnight.

So, now that I have chosen to voluntarily leave my work and receive a pension, I prefer to think of it as graduating … graduating from a job that I have done for 31 years.

When someone graduates from school, we ask them the question, “What are you going to do next?” That is what I plan on asking myself. I already have started to think about my post-graduation plans.

Clearly, my focus is on doing things. I am not interested in a retirement community, which leads to a rest home, which is just down the street from the cemetery. I plan, for as long as I can, on living and learning.

I want to keep both an active mind and an active body. I want to share both of these with others for as long as I can. Wisconsin Public Radio and Television, along with a computer, will be my next classroom. Reading something for pleasure early in the day as opposed to reading with half-closed eyes sounds appealing to me. I plan to keep doing, for as long as I can, all the things I enjoy doing: curling, biking, hiking, cross-country skiing, dancing, snow shoeing, kayaking, fishing and attending movies, plays and concerts.

Some of these things I will do alone, but many of them I hope will involve people that are intimately connected to my life. I hope to have more time for all of these things because these activities define who I am. Like most people, I want to travel some. Forty extra hours a week should help with that. I will have more time for slow food. I want to bake bread more often, and I want to garden a bit more. Those 40 extra hours a week should give me more time to redefine my life.

The idea of increased degrees of freedom to make choices about what to do with prime-time daylight hours excites me. I also want to challenge myself to do one new thing each month so that I can be different. I don’t ever want to stop stretching. Who knows? I might even take some time to work for awhile in another job.

I am looking forward to graduation. I believe I should make it. I have been a pretty good “C” student in life.

Like all graduates, I have mixed feelings. It will be hard to leave a place that has been so much a part of my life for more than 30 years. This is particularly difficult knowing how much I have enjoyed my work – in my case, counseling and teaching college students has been such a joy.

The last 31 years have flown by. Time flies when you’re having fun. It was that way when I was an undergraduate in college many years ago. But in the sadness there is the gladness of knowing how enjoyable it has all been. There is also an excitement about what kinds of living, loving and learning the next part of my new schooling in life will bring me.

So indeed, although graduation is bittersweet, it is something that I am really looking forward to.