The first reaction I had when I stopped working was surprise at how much more free time I had during the day. My first reaction was: “Where did all this free time come from?”
It brought on two conclusions:
1. My time has been so busy when I was working: getting up early every morning, fighting the commute, working at an office, the pressure of trying to do a good job, trying to fit in everything I needed to do during my few free hours. The normal state of a working person is harried and stressed.
2. It is important to have things to do to fill my newly found free time. And I was not at a loss here as I had several projects in motion and also planned. But it was easy to see how much some unexpected free time can be disorienting if a person is not used to it and is unready for it.
I quickly adjusted and found my comfortable pace in this new world.
The first thought that comes to mind once this post-working person (me, that is) started to adjust to the new pace: I wondered if I could have done it earlier. Once I got to the age where I realized I could stop working without panicking about money, I was ready to stop; but could I have done it earlier?
If I gauge myself on how I felt once I stopped working, then the answer is yes, I could have stopped earlier. However, if I stop and recollect on how I had felt during most of my working life, I have realized it would have been emotionally very different and very difficult… namely, no, I would not have been ready. I did frequently fret and worry about money. While I lived without debt for many years except for a mortgage, I felt there were enough demands on me financially to prevent my feeling capable of stopping work prior to when I did. I was a child of the “You Need A Job To Survive” school of thinking.
So when I say “there were enough demands on me financially…”, I am admitting that many if not all of these demands were of my own making, not from others. I felt burdened by my own thinking and determinants, not from any objective analysis. Truth be told, most of my working life I was probably unable to perform any kind of objective analysis about myself anyway. This is because, like perhaps most, I was captive to my own rigid thinking.
Other demands of my own making include external pressures that I allowed myself to be subjected to. One included FOMO, a condition to which youth is particularly subject. I know I am not alone in thinking that in my youth I squandered much time and money for short term purposes that provided no real lasting benefit.
Fear
Another was the fear that I was going to “fall behind.” Fear that my ability to take care of myself and family financially would be insufficient. At first it was about earning enough to survive, then it became whether I would earn enough to save and invest enough to initiate retirement. The fear of the future unknowns caused me to live in fear, and to live less fully.
One of the latter main stress-relievers was that I able to pay off the mortgage about a year prior to stopping work. No longer having that burden was a major relief, and in addition it allowed me to increase my savings for that last working year.
But the real most long-lasting stress reliever was the slow realization in the recent years of my own presence in the world. I accepted myself for who I was. I accepted myself that I was and as I would be. Not that I would never change or I was cemented in place, but that wherever I went or whatever I did, I had myself and my outlook with me. By being who I was, over the years I had proven myself to myself by just being myself, and didn’t need to prove anything else to myself or anyone else.
Eventually I became comfortable with my own open-minded way of thinking, my way of perceiving and reacting to the world. I became confident in my own presence.
The world is full of people who have conformed, and the world is full of people who have paved their own way. Fear is not the factor that shows that divide; it is how we respond to fear that separates the conformed from the free. I don’t really believe that fear can be eliminated, just tamed and put to sleep.
Acceptance of fear makes us conform, acceptance of fear but doing it anyway lets us be ourselves.
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