The article author for Costa Women writes how the “shine” eventually “rubs off” from moving here and you begin to question what you are doing and even who you are.
The Costa Tropical is a fabulous place to live, we’re blessed with days of sunshine, the occasional blessing of rain – isn’t it wonderful how green it is right now – and a place we can call home that affords us a beautiful life. There are many younger families moving into the areas nowadays creating community but also bringing their own expertise and business to the area.
It is also a place where a lot of people think about coming to retire. Coming to such a beautiful place is exciting but I’ve seen over the years of working here that actually retirement takes some planning. Just stopping might be nice for a while, feeling like we’re on permanent vacation, but after a while we need some kind of purpose.
There was a very interesting talk by a man called Ted Childs on the TED website about retirement. He said there were 4 stages, first comes the vacation stage – that lovely time when suddenly your time is your own and you are on this rather long vacation. Now for some people that works and continues to work because they’ve planned what they what they wanted to do in their retirement and so this vacation morphs into these new interests.
However, for others once the shine has worn off around the vacation phase the loss of identity becomes very apparent. Think about it, for years one of the first questions you’ve been asked when you’ve met somebody new is ‘what do you do?’ and you’ve always had an answer. Suddenly, when you’re retired you no longer have an answer to that question. So, then a very different question looms in your mind of “Who am I?”
The reaction to this phase is often the need to find something else or get another job. But in fact that’s the worst thing you can do. Why? Because this is an opportunity to step back and really understand who you are and what you want this next phase of your life to hold. Look back through your life; what bits of you have you lost along the way that you’d like to bring back in? Give yourself time to discover who you want to be in this beautiful phase of life. Only then can you move to the next stage of retirement of going out and living this new you.
And I don’t think this has to be a world changing thing, we each have our own different things of what we love to do, how we like to express ourselves. Often it’ll have a feeling of contribution and meaningfulness to it, and that could be family orientated to a global cause, whatever feels exciting for you. This is one of the most wonderful places to retire there’s so much opportunity and the climate to go with it. And, as a plus there’s great local communities to join like the Costa Women Costa Tropical group which is a group for socialising, learning new things, meeting new people and, if you are still business minded, there’s the business side of it too.
Whether you’re already retired and feeling a bit lost, or just thinking about it, my counsel would be to plan it, stop and take time work out exactly what your vision for your retirement is – who you want to be, what you want to do and just how you want to use this very special time. And then go do it!
By Jessica McGregor Johnson
(Feature: Women’s Association, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)
Keywords: Women, Retirement, Advice
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