Chapter 7: Wake up - it’s the first day of the rest of your life!

On the first day of the rest of my life, I slept horribly. 

I lay there tense and tight in my brain, my throat, my knees and feet, paralyzed with a dopey, undefined sense of alarm that is usually reserved for my dreams about trying to drive my mother’s station wagon from the backseat, with Kentucky Fried Chicken snack packs where my feet should be.

This, of course, made no sense, because according to my detailed retirement prospectus, the first week after ending work should be one of blessed relief, with long naps, mid-morning cocktails and general puttering about the house in aimless, bra-less bliss. 

Shrieking, suffocating brain terror was not pencilled in until week 8. 

Now, years of work-stress insomnia have taught me that 2:30 am is the absolute best time to make a methodical inventory of all my life anxieties. Did I leave the stove on? Are the dogs in the house? Did I get distracted and forget an appointment to destroy one of my mortal enemies today? You know, the usual stuff.  I scanned my mental horizon for the meetings and deadlines that were gnawing at my gut, or some other way that I might fail to deliver on a promise or plan. But of course, there was none. 

As of July 18, I am a woman without a plan (and a total palindrome fail). And that, on this very first day of freedom forever, turned out to be the one thing that completely freaked me out. 

Those who are wise in the ways of retirement will tell you to do nothing - NOTHING - for six months. Make no commitments or big life changes; don’t sign up for college classes, build a jungle gym or, for the love of god, even think about switching your nail polish colour.  Instead, find a cottage, a yoga mat or a well-worn dog bed, and hibernate while your work-weary soul unshackles itself from the old ways and old worries. 

Perhaps the trick of it all is to add by the same degree that you subtract. Take away a schedule full of corporate meetings, add morning strolls through the park. Finish your last performance evaluations, then volunteer to do something good for your community without expectation of reward. Sleep through the night without angsting about what you should have said to a treacherous colleague, treat yourself to a long overdue coffee date with an old friend. 

As I lay awake in the early hours of that first Monday and contemplated the gaping abyss of freedom that would mark every single day of the rest of my life, I did the only sane thing I could think to do. Panicked, went online, and at 3am bought myself a bright, beautiful wall calendar with big, open squares waiting to be filled with the gentle minutiae of a new, better life.

Or so I think, since I then fell back asleep with only the vaguest notion of a very dull dream about stationary, and a lingering suspicion that I might need to check my Amazon account in the morning...

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