Q: As I prepare for retirement, I look back at my life and wonder if I have been successful. How does one know?
A: Success is not something to be determined by someone else. This is ironic because we spend so much time trying to please other people.
It starts in grade school. That sweet kindergarten teacher, as sensitive as she might have been, was busy measuring the abilities of her little students who were moving on from her classroom to Grade 1. She was looking for success in her classes.
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That search for success kept right on going. It was there in every grade along the way and it continued after school was over. It spilled over into work, searching for success in job after job, until you retired.
The problem is that the praise or otherwise you received from your kindergarten teacher or your work mates did little more than give you a shot of adrenalin every now and then.
You are who you are and success for you could mean a lot more than a pat on the back in grade school or a byline at your retirement party. It probably means recalling moments when you settled a restless baby down for the night, when you pedaled your bicycle for the first time, when you took a walk through a quiet summer rain shower, when you shared a sandwich with a friend and when you decided that your life partner was the one for you.
Of course, you have had disappointments; life is filled with them. But your disappointments did not depreciate your life’s successes. It is rather that you focused on them rather than on your successes.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, success is in the well of your character. Failure is only there if it is allowed to distract from the rest of it.
Some of life’s tragedies are difficult to overcome. How can anyone get over the death of a child or a spouse, a loving parent, a faithful puppy or that special grandparent?
To be successful means that you have to look not at what you have lost, but at the times when those people or things you lost brought significant meaning into your life.
You can look at your pension plan and wonder if you have been successful, or you can look at your pension plan and know that it does not stop there.
Just because you are retiring does not mean that you quit living.
Retiring does not mean that you stop setting goals, that you stop trying to achieve.
Retirement means that you might start walking a different highway. You will know that your life has been successful if you carry on, despite whatever health and aging problems you meet along the way, and you will find rewards not in what you have done, but in what you propose to do.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
