Retirement? Maybe Not Ever

We were all waiting for our dinners to arrive, when the young couple sharing the restaurant table asked us about the blue wristbands. We’d been at the Desert Botanical Garden’s Las Noches de las Luminarias, which is a beautiful holiday experience. They were both civil engineers planning on driving across the desert tonight to be in Los Angeles tomorrow.

“Are you guys still working?” they asked anxiously. When I confirmed that we were, and that we both owned businesses and weren’t planning on retiring, we got “the look.” After all, a lot of people move to Phoenix to retire. So why aren’t we retired? Retirement is the reward you get after hating your job for 30 years. How horribly sad that thought is.

Many of my friends are taking early retirement. Tired of the work world and

Mural of birds on a wall in downtown Phoenix.

filled with a desire to travel, garden, or enjoy their houses, they are bailing out of the rat race, because, they tell me, the rats are winning.

For the first month, retirement is bliss. Often, though, the dreams about retirement begin to thin out. It’s hard to live without a regular income. Most of my friends aren’t wealthy, and the lack of a regular paycheck can’t easily be replaced by penny pinching.

For the retirees who are wealthy, there is often a vacuum created by a lack of identity. We are our jobs after a while. It’s how we think of ourselves. It’s what we do most of our waking hours. And often, it’s what we ignore our families for.

When your hobby, which was fit into stolen moments, suddenly has to bear the burden of making you feel worthwhile, it can’t hold up its side of the bargain to amuse, entertain, and keep you busy.

At that point, retirement doesn’t look like the promise you’ve pursued all your working life.

I love what I do, and because I do several things–develop training courses, teach those courses, coach creative souls (and those who think they aren’t), and write—I don’t get bored. Work is fascinating because I’m endlessly curious and problem solving is a major part of my work.

Retire? Not me. Working, learning, exploring all fascinate me. I don’t have to work crossword puzzles as long as I’m figuring out how to solve a training problem for one client, researching an article I’m writing, and figuring out what to ask a client who wants to transition into retirement. And I like the boss.

––Quinn McDonald helps people figure out how to change their lives, in retirement, or in the middle of their careers. She did, and will live longer for it.

 

Postcard Swap

The postcard swap iHanna is running is in full swing! I got my postcard list today, and I’m ready to go. Here are the postcards I made, grouped by color or subject.

I made two predominantly red postcards. Red is way out of my comfort zone for me, I own no clothing or shoes in red. So I had to try it. Watercolor and pen.

Then I made three pears, also in watercolor and when I got tired of pears, I resorted to a horned toad, because one of the names I got was in Switzerland and they probably haven’t seen one of those.

Finally, I did a words-and-image with feathers and, of course, to complete the group, a bird. All of them are watercolors–the Brusho dye colors I wrote about earlier. I’m loving this medium for its unpredictability. Hope they travel well!

If you’ve counted, you’ll see there are nine and 10 are needed for the swap. I have another pear and another feather, but there was going to be too much of a good thing. Can’t wait to see the other postcards! (You can get a sneak peek here).

—Quinn McDonald loves a good postcard swap.

Thanksgiving With a Crowd

You will be having a houseful of people for Thanksgiving. You think you will all get along, be nice, and have a happy time that you will preserve forever in a scrapbook filled with pumpkin-colored paper. What a nice thought. And for some people, that may happen. But for people I know–not so much.

Many people’s family’s run more along the lines of the characters in  Rachel Getting Married. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a good glimpse at a just-like-real-life wedding. Everyone acts out, wants attention, brings up old hurts, needs, and faults. Sound familiar?

Here are some tips to make it through:

1. People say the first thing that comes to mind. You know better. So think before you speak, and let go of the thoughtless comments you are asked. Your Uncle Harvey with the hearing aid has perfect hearing, he just uses it as an excuse to ignore people. You can do this, too.

2. Be literal. Do not assume that being asked “Are you seeing anyone?” is a mean nudge from your step-mother to make her a grandmother, or the question, “How is your job?” is the reminder that you haven’t held a job for more than nine months in the last six years. See them as ways to fill dead air space, which is probably what it is. Answer the question simply and directly, just as it was asked. Even if you doubt the intention.

3. Avoid fixing old hurts. With all the cooking, kids, pets, travel stress, there is little time to be introspective and contemplative. Old hurts require both for healing. To get to the hurt, you will have to bring up some background for context, and you will look like you are digging up past history to “win.” Even with good intentions, repairing old wounds is a complex task, best handled one-on-one and alone between February and May–not at Thanksgiving.

4. Act ‘as if.’ Act as if everyone is nice. Act as if you are everyone’s friend. Act as if you are having a good time. Act as if you care about other people’s feelings. When you act “as if” you are a nice person who cares about others, you will choose behavior that demonstrates that. And you will become that. What a nice transformation!

5. Stay in the present. Kiss your difficult aunt and tell her that you are glad she is here. Tell your step sister that you are happy to spend some time with her. By staying in the present, you will not be tempted to dig up old hurts and display them for everyone to see and help you fix. The present is a nice place for Thanksgiving. Enjoy it.

6. Listen and nod. People tell stories at Thanksgiving, and they tell them the way they remember them. In your stories, you are the hero. In theirs, they are. Let them. Suppress the urge to “correct” people so their memories match yours. It’s not important. It’s just a story. Listen and nod. Smile. Let it go. Even if you are made to be the villain. “Oh, I’m so sorry you have that unpleasant memory,” is a nice bland answer. If someone asks you if that really happened, you can say, “Well, for June, this is how it happened. Everyone has her own memory of an event.” Resist the urge to tell your side.

7. Beware bad news dumps. Not everyone at your table may be at a happy time in their life. They may spill it in your lap. Or out loud at the table. You do not have to fix everyone’s misery. Acknowledge that it sounds like a tough spot to be in, but you don’t have to offer a solution. Bring it back to the present moment. “I know you are having a tough time, but I’m so glad we could be together today,” takes the responsibility off your shoulders.

8. Bring a book, music, or other activity that will help keep you in a safe space. You may have to take a walk, sit in the bathroom, or run a fake errand to get out of the press of too many people. Having something that keeps you grounded during someone’s argument, or general tumult is important.  Just make sure you do it without drama. No storming from the table, yelling, “I have to get out of here,” or other attention-grabbers.

9. Be prepared. Thanksgiving has some traditional chores–photographs, toasts, prayers and going around the table giving thanks for special events. Prepare a simple prayer appropriate for the group. If the guests are of different religions, offer a prayer of thanks that doesn’t mention a specific deity. Dress up for pictures. Bring a change of clothes if you want, but be prepared for pictures. Have a simple toast prepared, so you don’t find yourself caught off guard. Same thing for having something to be thankful for. Keep it short, under 30 seconds.

10. Take the big view. It’s easy to get wrapped around your own axle and not be able to see Thanksgiving as a holiday that has an end. Keep your eye on the big picture. It’s OK if some things go wrong. The big picture is that you have family and friends to fill your house, and no one expects you to do everything all by yourself. Ask for help, and know that everyone goes home soon.

–Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach who helps people discover their creativity and wrestle it into their lives.

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving for One

Today’s post is for people who are going to be alone on Thanksgiving. Dealing with a huge family fest will be posted tomorrow.

Going to be alone this Thanksgiving? No problem, unless you are dreading it. There is a cultural press to partake in some sort of perfect Norman-Rockwell-fantasy dinner, with food magically prepared and shared by a big, friendly, supportive, charming, happy family. The fact that this fantasy is exactly that–a figment of someone’s imagination–does not ease your pain. In your head, it is what you deserve, and you are feeling bad because you don’t have it.

Some years ago, I was alone at Thanksgiving. I’d moved to the Southwest ahead of my husband and was house-sitting for a friend. I didn’t want to mess up someone else’s stove, and part of me didn’t want to admit I hated being alone. But I also didn’t want to be at someone else’s table, feeling like the fifth wheel. I created a fun day for myself, and still remember it fondly. It makes me smile to think that there are many people around me who do not remember last Thanksgiving fondly, or can’t remember exactly what happened at all. And I can remember Thanksgiving 2007 with great joy.

Here are some suggestions to help make Thanksgiving a good day for you:

1. Plan ahead. Decide the kind of day you want to have and work on creating it. No Thanksgiving comes together without planning, and you don’t want to wind up standing in the grocery store aisle half an hour before the store closes.

2. You don’t have to cook an elaborate meal for 10 and eat it all by yourself. Kent McDonald, a personal chef in the Phoenix area, has some suggestions for an easy, special Thanksgiving meal you can make without a lot of fuss. Yes, Kent is my husband and he’s cooking this year.

3. Ignore it in style. Stay out of the kitchen–or the entire house–during the dinner hour. Go to the movies, take a bubble bath and give yourself a pedicure, plan that big art or craft project, take a walk with your camera, go to the library now and check out a book or DVD, and spend the time doing something appealing to you. Time to spend on yourself or your favorite pastime is precious and rare, use it with delight.

4. Plan a project. Paint the kitchen, or your bedroom. Organize your closet, your desk, your attic, your garage. Tackling a big project will make you feel organized and satisfied. Not a bad plan.

5. Make the turkey dinner happen. Let friends know you’ll be alone. Make it sound like you are available rather than desperate. Offer to help cook, clean up, bring a dish, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself useful and you’ll be eating with a big, noisy, arguing dysfunctional family before you can say ‘turkey.’

The secret to having the Thanksgiving is to decide what you want and create it. Don’t let others define your joy.  Decide what you want, and make it happen, traditional or not. Celebrate yourself and allow yourself to enjoy.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach who has celebrated a lot of different Thanksgivings.

–Image: The First Thanksgiving, reproduction of an oil painting by J.L.G. Ferris, early 20th century. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZC4-4961)

 

Healing the World, One Star at a Time

Over the table in my studio hangs a hand-lettered sign. Sometimes it hangs up there for a day, sometimes for a month. It’s not an affirmation, it’s a question. It helps me think while I work. My studio is my Place Without Noise–no music, no TV, just silence. The question right over my head is sort of  mental chewing gum.

The most recent question is “How Will You Heal the World?” No doubt the world needs healing–Ferguson, Missouri is just one town in a big country with its share of injustice, unfairness, and social imbalance. My own state, just 100 years into statehood, wants to shut down its borders and pretend that Arizona was not part of Mexico or that native tribes did not have a different idea of land ownership.

There is no shortage of damage in the world–in every town, city, country.  Isn’t is ridiculous to think I can help? Me, with no skills in sociology or law?

My mind was a smooth blank as I pulled a piece of paper toward me to cut into shapes for a collage. The paper was a map of the night sky, and there, on one side, was Orion. The hunter himself didn’t have an auspicious, happy beginning among the gods. Orion was born from an ox-skin that various male gods had urinated in. He was blinded by his father-in-law, revived by the goddess Artemis, and then angered the Earth goddess Gaia, who sent a scorpion to kill him. Gaia then placed both Artemis and Orion in the sky as a warning to others not to harm the earth.

Not much healing there, and I don’t want to think about our punishment for all the plastic bottles we put in Gaia’s earth, either.

What I did notice was Orion’s sword. You can see a pinkish star in the knife at his waist. That’s not really a star, it is a whole nebula–an incubator for new stars. The young, forming stars are hot, and heat up the gas around them, causing it to fluoresce–so what we are seeing as a star is a cloud of gas and tiny hot stars 1,500 light-years away.

Maybe a small kindness, a prayer offered when someone asks for one, a small, unexpected generous act, maybe all that is the equivalent of a tiny hot star that helps light up the nebula. Without the star, and others like it, there would be no fluorescing nebula, no sword in Orion’s belt. And of course, if you are a star in a nebula, you don’t see all of Orion. You see something else when you look into the universe–dark sky with distance points of lights.

As my hands smooth over the paper, looking for a spot to cut into the paper, I wonder if the way you heal the world is one tiny, glowing act at a time. They add up over time, and eventually you have a constellation of healing put into the sky as a lesson to everyone else to help out, too.

Here is an excellent article about 12 actions anyone can take to reduce injustice.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, creativity coach and artist who thinks art heals by scattering stars into the sky, one at a time.

Thanksgiving Week

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Free of gifts, religious strife, or guilt, it is a holiday to give thanks and share meals. Oh, wait, that was 20 years ago. We have now managed to crank up even this holiday with angst, fear, and stress.

The whole Black Friday thing? I avoid it entirely. I don’t shop at any mall on weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Reduces stress. When I do go (during the week), I am determinately cheerful, greet strangers, and help people carry packages. The look on their faces are worth the effort. Sometimes I need a nap when I get home.

I refuse to pick fights. I let people cut in front of me in line, take that parking spot I had in mind, and refuse to engage in any hate speech. Which means when I say “Happy Holidays,” and someone snaps at me, “It’s ‘Merry Christmas’ and NOT Happy Holidays,” I tell myself that this is their problem and not mine. I’ve told myself that three times already and it’s not even Thanksgiving.

What stuns me is how much people complain about Thanksgiving and Christmas. How much they claim to hate it, while decorating up a storm and baking themselves into a frenzy.

The food we eat, the diet we follow is both personal and public. I struggle between being an advocate for a healthy diabetic diet and not making anyone change their way of eating for my sake. Which means I bring my own food if I am invited to dinner. I love eating and I don’t want to offend a hostess–and who doesn’t have at least one delicious carb-fest dish on a Thanksgiving table?

A former acquaintance used to “prove” how silly people’s diets were by putting sugar in dishes for diabetics and serving pork to religious Jews and Muslims and insisting it was veal. I no longer visit her. In fact, I don’t speak to her anymore.

This is the week that we choose how much stress we want to handle. You don’t have to be a hero; you can be quiet, change the subject, laugh along, stand up for yourself, set boundaries, don’t take crap from anyone, or go on the attack. It’s all up to you. Just remember what the holiday is for and keep an eye on that.

—Quinn McDonald is looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner and the amazing sandwiches afterwards. Without the bread.

 

Small Shreds of Life

Poetry takes a small shred of life and makes it important. Even if it is unimportant. Even if it is something we don’t know and still wonder about. That’s why I love the poems of Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.

In the last several weeks, I’ve given some thought to death and dying. No, no, nothing is wrong, but several of my friends have had friends die recently, or a spouse, or someone they loved. And while I conducted the memorial service, I thought how little we know about the dead and their lives.

I love the descriptions in David Brockmeir’s  A Brief History of the Dead--that as long as someone tells stories about the dead, they live in a place much like earth, where they know they are remembered. And the day the last person who knew them dies, they move into a different dimension. And then there is Billy Collins’s take on death, one that is kind and funny. And that had to be hard to write:

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

©  All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge.

–Quinn McDonald loves reading poetry that makes meaning.

Check That Progress

To-do lists are my saving grace. I love them. I keep them, work them, check them off and grin. Occasionally, I am guilty of putting things on my to-do list that I have already done, just so I can check it off and feel like I’ve started doing something.

The trouble with that, of course, is you are never satisfied, always living in the next step, and striving ahead without a break. It’s exhausting. And I still love them.

Which is why I started a to-don’t list, often before I travel, so give myself permission to put some work on hold so I can actually live in the present and do the work at hand–traveling.

Now I’ve come up with something almost as fun as a to-do list: a “it’s done” list. Research shows that a real boost to meaningful work is keeping track of progress. What went right. What you did that was smart. What worked well. Most of us don’t do that. If things work out, we just keep going. There’s no learning in that.

True, I learn a lot by making mistakes. The reason? When things go right, I just breeze ahead. When I stumble and fall, I have to figure out what went wrong, how it went wrong and how to notice it early enough next time not to do it again.

Imagine if you did that for getting it right. Progress is an important step in meaning-making. Knowing you have made progress and admitting it, even taking satisfaction in it, is another thing entirely. Give yourself a break. Allow yourself to keep track of what went right. Your good decisions. Your progress. See if more of them don’t start showing up.

—Quinn McDonald is moving forward on several projects.

 

 

Take the Fresh One

It was 3:00 in the afternoon and I was hungry. That horrible mid-afternoon munchy that makes you think you are starving. I headed for the fridge for my usual snack–a red pepper. Sometimes it gets a dab of peanut butter, sometimes a smear of soft cheese. Other times, just plain. A sweet red pepper is a perfect thing.

As I reached into the crisper drawer, I noticed a wrinkled pepper, older, slowing exhaling its crunchy texture in exchange for wrinkles shooting across its skin.

Automatically, I reach for it. Training from long ago. We were not allowed to eat the fresh, new fruit. No, we were to eat the older, mushy fruit or vegetable first. That way, nothing went to waste. Waste, of course, was an epic transgression of the laws of nature. I know, I know, but you didn’t know my parents and how close they had lived to starvation for years.

The result? We never ate anything fresh. We constantly foraged for the spotted, the almost inedible, and saved it from the trash by eating it.

I hesitated, my hand over the older pepper. I knew it would not be crunchy, and the bright red taste had faded to a tougher skin and limp texture. And then it struck me: there are omelets, soups, garnishes, juices that could benefit from the older pepper. But the firm one, the one glowing in the corner is meant to be eaten now. Not broken down by cooking, but celebrated for its perfection of temperature, color, and happiness.

So, with my Mother tsk-tsking in my memory, I pulled out the fresh pepper and enjoyed every fresh, juicy, refreshing bite. Life. Enjoy it while it’s fresh.

––Quinn McDonald sees big lessons in small places.

 

It’s Time to Say “No”

Next week is Thanksgiving, and the season of weird requests begins.

“I’m bringing my friend along to Thanksgiving dinner. She doesn’t eat meat, milk, eggs, wheat, vegetables that begin with a “b,” or anything red or brown. You won’t mind, will you–cooking her a special meal?”

“You are going to his parents this year? We have a tradition that you always come here for Thanksgiving, but go ahead. We can eat alone.”

This is the time of year when you brush off your spine and develop the ability to say, “No.” Even better is saying “No” and meaning it.

Of course you want to be compassionate, friendly and helpful. But right at the edge of those characteristics is a boundary. And the boundary marker is “No.”

If you have trouble saying it, you can add, “I’d love to help, but . . .No.” You do not owe explanations past that one word. It takes strength and courage to say it, and I’ve failed many times. And each time I didn’t honor my boundary, I paid a price. Sometimes I overextend what I can do and regret it. Sometimes I cave and say Yes and then do a bad job, which is worse than saying No.

You do not have to say, “I need to spend a whole morning in bed, so I can’t bake six pies for you,” because the other person will not accept that as a good reason. So don’t give a reason. Simply stick to “I’m so sorry, but No.” The holidays will run a lot smoother. And you will feel a lot healthier.

—-Quinn McDonald knows the power of paying attention to your limits.