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White Papers from the Gold Coast Institute Fellows |
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Giving Meaning
to the Rest of Your Life by Gordon Burgett Want to ... jump-start your
life, a quick-fix of new energy and purpose? * stop running in five directions at once? * get in sync with your mate? * find some life balance, harmony, and
meaning? Maybe it’s time to take
control. Like making a no-nonsense plan for the rest of your life. Somewhere between about 45 and
60, we must take inventory. (Although it’s never too soon to start
banking that 401k.) By 50, nature is through with
us. We’re on borrowed time. We’re being thrown out of the beauty
contest and squeezed from our jobs. Our spouses look different. Our kids
aren’t as cute. Even the dog has started to growl. We need a personal
“time out.” It’s about time! We live 30
years longer than our grandfolks. With life expectancy of 48 in 1900,
most of them never got a chance to retire before they died. We get two
whole lives before our due date, at 78. We still have another life
waiting to happen! Our first life is when we pay
our human dues. We survive birth, procreate, and help our children do
the same. Somehow, during that sexual mist, we also get educated, find
jobs, and even become responsible. Then the mist rises and,
horrors, we still have 30 years to go! Even if we wanted to, we
couldn’t be kids again. Instead, we gathered a kitbag of experience, a
ton of baggage, and lots of unrealized dreams. What we don’t have are
plans. Of course, we don’t need plans
to live longer. It’s a bimillennial blessing that we get a “second
life.” We can just bop along, doing less of what we’re doing now,
with less money, less vigor, and less direction until we just give up
and start rocking. According to Gordon Burgett, in How
to Plan a Great Second Life: Why not live fully every day of your extra
30 years? Your parents, certainly theirs,
subscribed to the “declining philosophy” that said from midlife on
it was all downhill, the party was over, dreams unrealized were just
that. But today that’s as out of date as your prom dress or 8-track
tapes. People now don’t just curl up and die when they reach the
50-yard line. In fact, most bloom like never before. Better yet, they
have the skill, strength, wisdom, and experience—sometimes even the
money—to make their second half the joyous completion of what the
first half prepared them to do. We will almost certainly live
longer, and surely better, though, if we do set some time aside and
create our own “super second life” plan. Why bother? Burgett says that (1) Having a plan is a
stress-breaker. Every slight, every disappointment, every slowdown in
advancement gets magnified when it lacks perspective. Yet planning makes
those activities part of a long-range vision that sees jobs, positions,
and challenges as transitional and experience-building for a continually
rewarding second life later. (2) Life plans put more value in
every action. What you are doing right now will look different when
sifted and evaluated through a life plan. Then those actions you
continue to do, or add, will make far more sense and will be an
investment in the days to come... (3) With a life plan you’re
always in control. From the day the planning takes place, you can
measure time, direction, and choice by purpose. By creating a standard
for decision-making, you simply ask, “Is this consistent with my
plan?” (4) Life plans create greater
spousal unity. Who wants to live 30 more years as half of a pair tugging
different directions? Getting on the same life page takes spousal
planning, first to discover what each wants to do both together and
individually, then creating mutually supportive paths to make that
happen. (5) A life plan gives you more
choices. The earlier you plan, the more choices and chances you have.
Want to teach at college later? Get the degree now. Want to write novels
in Brazil? Start writing—and learn Portuguese! So what if you must
janitor or care for kids in between? What does Burgett, a 66-year-old
speaker and writer who shares his own life plan in his book, suggest
that you do to create your life map? First, survey your present
financial and health status. Then (1) Create a dream list: what do
you want to do, see, learn, or share in the years to come? What kind of
person do you want to be in your second life? (2) Prioritize those dreams,
then list them in appropriate time brackets, so you have the ability and
wherewithal to make them happen when you wish. (3) Have your spouse or mate do
(1) and (2) as well, to get your individual and joint dreams expressed,
then in harmony. (4) Reduce those dreams to
specific Action Steps that break each dream down into its logical and
doable components. Inject the needed financial and health planning into
each set of action steps, so you can afford to make them happen and will
have the energy and well-being to enjoy the endeavor—without so
depleting your coffers or corpus that there is nothing left for future
dreams. (5) Take all of these dreams
(broken down into affordable and realizable action steps) and from them
create a final (but always modifiable) Action Plan! We’re only alive once—but in
2001 it’s for the longest time in history. The living model we grew up
with no longer works. Extra years are a blessing, but only when they
lead to a progressively better and more satisfying life, one that at
least offsets the inevitable increased physical limitations that
longevity brings. Nobody expects that every plan
we make today will come true later, nor that all will unfold precisely
as we now envision them. And, yes, often the grandest part of a journey
is the travel rather than the destination. But if we don’t plan now,
there will be no real trip at all, except by chance. Ours will be just a
mindless passing. We deserve more. We deserve joy, excitement, and
life-long fun and purpose. We deserve a dozen dreams to wake up to.
Those come from planning. Alan Harrington caught the
spirit: “We are all, it seems, saving ourselves for the Senior Prom.
But many of us forget that somewhere along the way we must learn to
dance.” Dance lessons start now! Or at
least plan when you will sit down to create your own "super second
life," those extra 30 years that can make the last 40 or 50 years
spin with envy! Gordon Burgett is the author of 1700+ printed articles and 27 books, including five selected as top choices by the Writer’s Digest Book Club: Sell & Resell Your Magazine Articles, Travel Writer’s Guide, Publishing to Niche Markets, How to Sell 75% of Your Freelance Writing, and Query Letters/Cover Letters: How They Sell Your Writing. Gordon has offered 2000+ keynote or workshop presentations, and currently speaks most about his latest book, How to Plan a Great Second Life: What are you going to do with your extra 30 years? He can be reached at (800) 563-1454 or at Gordon@super-second-life.com. |