A Novel Plan
I had an interesting conversation among friends the other day... suddenly one of our group, Amy, announced that she wanted to retire in three years.
We all laughed. The punchline being that she is only 34 now. But then we all realized that actually it was a great plan. It's not that we're lazy, we love to work, but we also want time for other activities... and we want what we do as work to not be dependent on making money.
Though it may seem a little odd to retire before 40, I think the source of our retirement scheme is to remove the pressure of making money.
We want to make good money, we want to live well, but we do not want it to be the dominant factor in what makes us enjoy or feel successful with our work or our lives.
The Way Things Tend To Be
"Doing what you love is complicated," says Gracie. "The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy."
A New Kind Of Lifestyle
Gracie, me and the rest of the group gathered together that evening, have all opted out of life's usual path. While other sisters in Europe and America are on a career path with a mortgage and/or the family plan; my Goan womenfolk are all living seasonally, as nomads. We touch down in Goa for five or six months where we run small businesses and focus on spiritual growth and then we all jet off to try and make it work for the other six months either in Europe or somewhere Eastern.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder 'what on earth I am doing?' having walked away from a very promising career path in London.
Though I love my life, live in a friendly community and commute to my yoga teaching job only seven steps (from my back door to my garden,) and have time to watch sunsets, I do live simply. I have very few savings; and I do not, like my London-based sisters, own property.
Creating Your Own Life Plan
Occasionally in the middle of the night, I wake up and worry. About finances and babies and whether I'm living in a dream world or whether I am in fact rather lazy. Honestly, many times I think the life I'm living is not ‘real' life, that maybe its rather naïve and childish, and at some point I'll probably have to go back and live life like a grown-up, focused on a bank account and covering a mortgage.
And this is echoed by 'grown-up' friends and family. They thought it was a little odd when I wanted to strike out for a year and travel India, odd but within the parameters of a sabbatical. But now four years down the line, most people want to know what I'm doing with my life, and 'I don't know' is a very shocking answer to people with a five-year plan.
Sometimes the judgements are so loud, I start judging myself and then I remember the words of Kahlil Gibran - "Work is love made visible…and if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."
So what's with the early retirement plan? Amy, the one who suggested it, wants to continue doing what she's doing - designing and making jewelry - but she also wants time to do yoga, write, be in nature, meet friends, and generally, have a life. And she might discover an even more extensive to-do list when she does have more time.
I have another sister in London who also likes to design and make jewelry, but this friend works as an associate director of a financial company with a beautiful highly-mortgaged flat in central London. Her plan is that when she marries her rich husband, who has not yet been met, she will start to design and make jewelry. Though her associate director role puts her in the right circles, she still hasn't met her rich husband to be.
Priorities
Often we find we are doing the things we love but for the wrong reason; we quantify our success with the money earnt and not the joy fulfilled. Even sometimes when teaching yoga, I do a quick headcount and multiply that by the cost of the class. In an ideal world my yoga classes would be free. I would teach for the joy of teaching… and money would grow on trees!
Worrying about money and worrying about paying the bills, limits our potential. It limits our abundance.
The other day, surfing on the net, I found a blog from someone wanting to retire by 40 (although they were only 21 at the time!) and they said "One thing I want to clarify is that retirement here is not about the money. It's about removing the distraction of the money from the scheme of things and introducing the flexibility of whatever I want to do into the situation at an early stage in my life."
I'm not at such an early stage in my life but I wholeheartedly applaud someone so young trying to cut the ties that bind them to money, and the inherited social baggage of the work ethic. When we loosen the ties and the associations, we create space for limitless potential. It's about opening up our perspective. The more we open the more we attract. So I have no cunning plan, especially not a five-year one, other than to stay open to all possibilities!