Are you retiring now?
If so, are you saying, "Where did the last few years go?
How did I get to be sixty-five so fast?
What do I do now"?

Yes, retirement seems to creep upon you suddenly.
Somehow we old-timers never figured we would ever retire.
We always thought we would die with our boots on.
Out of the blue comes talk of pension plans.
Compulsory retirement at sixty-five looms on our horizon.
Still, it seems in the far future.
Suddenly, one day, up it pops!
Sixty-five years and you've had it!

So, now what?
Oh sure!
You've thought about it before in a hazy sort of way.
But!
It never seemed real;
never seemed as if it could happen to you;
only to the other fellow.

Now!
Here it is!
How am I going to live?
What am I going to do?
Where do I go from here?

A great many retired people are the so-called white collar workers.
Are you one of these?

If so, you are of the old school.
You are conscientious, hard working, honest, accurate, a good penman, and a stickler for a job well done, with no loose ends.
Everything must balance to the last penny.
Also you can spell, without consulting a dictionary for every other word.
You never are late for work and seldom absent.

Actually, you can take no special credit for this.
It is the way you were taught and your way of life.
All this is standard equipment for a man of your day;
your stock in trade;
your livelihood.

However, the last few years of your life, things seem to be changing.
Your way doesn't seem to be so darned important any more.
You realize you are getting in the old fogy class.
To put it bluntly, you are getting out-moded.

What's happened?
The answer is a new era.

Now, looming on the horizon are such things as estimated totals, calculated risks and I.B.M. machines.
The Planning Dept. comes into existence.
All sorts of plans come to life.
This is followed by a boom in conferences.
Yes sir!
Conferences become very popular.
When a plan burst its seams, hasty conferences supply the necessary patch, and life goes merrily on.
That's called progress!
The new way of life!
Let's face it!
You had your day and it was a good day.
Let this generation have theirs.
Time marches on!

Well, to get back to the problem of retirement.
Every retiring person has a different situation facing him.
Some have plenty of money -- some have very little money.
Some are blest with an abundance of good health -- some are in poor health and many are invalids.
Some have lovely homes -- some live in small apartments.
Some have beautiful gardens -- some not even a blade of grass.
Some have serenity of mind, the ability to accept what they have, and make the most of it (a wonderful gift to have, believe me) -- some see only darkness, the bitter side of everything.
Well, whatever you have, that's it!
You've got to learn to live with it.

Now!
The question is "How are you going to live with it"?

You can sit back and moan and bewail your lot.
Yes!
You can do this.
But, if you do, your life will be just one thing -- unhappiness -- complete and unabridged.

It seems to me, the first thing you've got to do, to be happy, is to face up to your problems, no matter what they may be.
Make up your mind to pool your resources and get the most out of your remaining years of life.
One thing, I am sure of, you must get an interest in life.
You've got to do something.

Many of you will say, "Well, what can I do"?

Believe me!
There are many, many things to do.
Find out what you like to do most and really give it a whirl.
If you can't think of a thing to do, try something -- anything.
Maybe you will surprise yourself.

True!
We are not all great artists.
I, frankly, can't draw a straight line.
Maybe you are not that gifted either, but how about puttering around with the old paints?
You may amaze yourself and acquire a real knack for it.
Anyway, I'll bet you have a lot of fun.

Do you like to sew?
Does making your own clothes or even doll clothes, interest you?
Do you love to run up a hem, sew on buttons, make neat buttonholes?
If you do, go to it.
There is always a market for this line of work.
Some women can sit and sew, crochet, tat or knit by the hour, and look calm and relaxed and turn out beautiful work.
Where sewing is concerned, I'm a total loss.
When you see a needle in my hands you will know the family buttons have fallen off and I have to sew them back on, or get out the safety pins.

Then again, there's always that lovely old pastime of hooking or braiding rugs.
Not for me, but perhaps just the thing for you.

Well!
How's about mosaic tile, ceramics or similar arts and crafts?
Some people love to crack tile and it's amazing what beautiful designs they come up with as a result of their cracking good time.

How about the art of cooking?
Do you yearn to make cakes and pies, or special cookies and candies?
There is always an open market for this sort of delicacy, in spite of low calorie diets, cottage cheese and hands-off-all-sweets to the contrary.

Some people can carve most anything out of a piece of wood.
Some make beautiful chairs, cabinets, chests, doll houses, etc.
Perhaps you couldn't do that but have you ever tried to see what you could do with a hunk of wood?
Outside of cutting your fingers, maybe you would come up with nothing at all, but then again, you might turn out some dandy little gadgets.

Some women get a real thrill out of housework.
They love to dust, scrub, polish, wax floors, move the furniture around from place to place, take down the curtains, put up new ones and have themselves a real ball.
Maybe that's your forte.
It certainly isn't mine.
I can look at furniture in one spot year in and year out and really feel for sure that's where it belongs.

Perhaps you would like to become a writer.
This gives you a wide and varied choice.
Will it be short stories, fiction, nonfiction, biography, poetry, children's stories, or even a book if you are really ambitious?

Ever since I was a child, I have always had a yen to try my hand at writing.
If you do decide to write, you will soon become acquainted with rejection slips and dejection.
Don't be discouraged!
This is just being a normal writer.
Just let the rejection slips fall where they may, and keep on plugging, and finally you will make the grade.
Few new writers have their first story accepted, so they tell me.
But, it could happen, and it may happen to you.

Then there's always hobbies, collecting stamps, coins, timetables, salt and pepper shakers, elephants, dogs, dolls, shells, or shall we just say collecting anything your heart desires?

I can hear some of you folks protesting.
You say, "But it costs a lot of money to have a hobby.
I haven't got that kind of money".

True!
It does cost a lot of money for most hobbies but there are hobbies that are for free.
How about a rock collection, or a collection of leaves from different trees or shrubs and in different colors?
Then, take flowers.
They are many and varied.
Also, there's scrap books, collecting newspaper pictures and clippings, or any items of interest to you.
It's getting interested in something that counts.

As for me, I am holding in reserve two huge puzzles (I love puzzles) to put together when time hangs heavy on my hands.
So far, the covers have never been off the boxes.
I just don't have time to do half the things I want to do now.

So in closing, fellow retired members, I advise you to make the most of each day, enjoy each one to the n'th degree.
Travel, if you can.
Keep occupied to the point you are not bored with life and you will truly find these final days and years of your lives to be sunshine sweet.

Good Luck!
To one and all -- Good Days ahead!
An important criterion of maturity is creativity.
The mature person is creative.
What does it mean to be creative, a term we hear with increasing frequency these days?
When we turn to Noah Webster we find him helpful as usual.
"To be creative is to have the ability to cause to exist -- to produce where nothing was before -- to bring forth an original production of human intelligence or power".
We are creative, it seems, when we produce something which has not previously existed.
Thus creativity may run all the way from making a cake, building a chicken coop, or producing a book, to founding a business, creating a League of Nations or, developing a mature character.

All living creatures from the lowest form of insect or animal life evidence the power of creativity, if it is only to reproduce a form like their own.
While man shares this procreative function with all his predecessors in the evolutionary process, he is the only animal with a true non-instinctive and conscious creative ability.
An animal, bird or insect creates either a burrow, or nest or hive in unending sameness according to specie.
Man's great superiority over these evolutionary forbears is in the development of his imagination.
This gives him the power to form in his mind new image combinations of old memories, ideas and experiences and to project them outside of himself into his environment in new and ever-changing forms.

It has been truly said that anything man can imagine he can produce or create by projecting this inner image into its counterpart in the objective world.
In our own time we have seen the most fantastic imagery of a Jules Verne come into actuality.
The vision of a Lord Tennyson expressed in a poem 100 years ago took visible form over London in the air blitzes of 1941.
In fact all of our civilized world is the resultant of man's projection of his imagination over the past 60 centuries or more.
It is in this one aspect, at least, that man seems to be made in the image of his Creator.

Not only can man project his imagination out into his environment in concrete forms, but even more importantly, he can turn it inward to help create new and better forms of himself.
We recognize that young people through imaginative mind and body training can become athletes, acrobats, dancers, musicians and artists, developing many potentialities.
We know that actors can learn to portray a wide variety of character roles.
By this same combination of the will and the imagination, each one of us can learn to portray permanently the kind of character we would like to be.
We must realize with Prof. Charles Morris in his The Open Self that "Man is the being that can continually remake himself, the artisan that is himself the material for his own creation".

So far in history man has been too greatly over-occupied with projecting things into his environment rather than first creating the sort of person who can make the highest use of the things he has created.
Is not the present world crisis a race between things we have created which can now destroy us and between populations of sufficient wisdom and character to forestall the tragedy.
Is it not the obligation of us older citizens to lend our weight to being creative on the character side and to hasten our own maturing process?

Sir Julian Huxley in his book Uniqueness Of Man makes the novel point that just as man is unique in being the only animal which requires a long period of infancy and childhood under family protection, so is he the only animal who has a long period after the decline of his procreativity.