Okay, I Hear You!

Having read the “oh, no’s” many of you expressed, I will not suspend the Newsletters while I am reorganizing the practice in November and December. So relax, your Sunday morning “fix” will not be withdrawn.

With closing the office, and with Mary Ellen’s partial shift to other interests as well as my own reassessment of what to do now, we am open to suggestions as to ways we can continue to help that differ, at least in delivery, from the model we developed and implemented 15 years ago.

In the meantime, we still have a few open weeks this month and in October for those of you who don’t want to miss out on a last chance to work with the two of us to solve your problem effectively, discretely, affordably, and individually (unless you wish to work with us as a couple). And to be sure there are no misunderstandings, you will receive the full 12 weeks of follow-up with either Mary Ellen or myself as you prefer, even if that runs into January.

All of that said, I will admit that it’s hard to envision semi-retirement and the changes that will entail both personally and professionally.

Which leads me to this Newsletter’s second point.

“I realized I was just putting in time waiting to die.”

A client, who happens to be the same age I am, said that a few years ago as we worked through his excessive drinking.

Physicians frequently die within a couple of years of retiring with alcohol being the preferred “vehicle.”

So do professional athletes.

So do many whose identity is wrapped up in what they do, and who are unable to wade through to who they are separate from what they are.

You start out at 2 or 3 or 11 knowing you want to be a gymnast, doctor, baseball player, lawyer, mother, or, in my case, an Alaskan (that right, I wanted to live in Alaska at least since I was 2 and was discovered panning for gold with my mother’s skillet in a drainage ditch on my grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania).

Many of us achieved our goals – I did – but then, goal achieved or abandoned, time runs on. The teenage girl gymnast “ages out” at 17; the athlete at 20 or even 40; the mother at 50; the physician and attorney at 65; the pilot at 60; and for me, at 32, I’d done everything I ever wanted to do..

If we’re “old enough” and have done well enough we can either re-invent ourselves or we can pass the time waiting to die.

It turns out that a lot us get stuck. We have too much life left in front of us to just sit down and die. But we’re also used to having our chosen “roles” structure us, define us, and propel us. Now we’re stuck having to pay attention to managing our lives, time, activities, rewards, social needs, and physical considerations for ourselves.

Bummer.

We have, over the years, likened many of our clients to Corvettes sitting up on blocks in a crumbling garage with the engine running but going nowhere as the carbon monoxide fill the space.

But you, like the Corvette, were not designed to sit on blocks going nowhere. It’s time to make conscious and informed decisions about what you are going to do with the next X number of years. And that can easily be enough years to do any number of things. Remember, if you are in your 50’s or 60’s you could easily have 30 or more years to create unexpected lives and enjoy long postponed interests and pleasures.

So why not let us help you kick the blocks out from under the wheels and get headed down all those roads you never took, but now can?

We’ll be doing it – want to come along?