Highway to Freedom at 55
” —’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Are you old enough to fill in the missing word of this plaintive ’60’s tune? The counterpoint is, “everything to gain,” but that wouldn’t have fit the mood of the song.
Not long ago, when the alarm jangled in the morning, I reached over to slap it off, grumbling, ‘Morning already?’ Just like everyone else. Then due to a set of fortuitous circumstances, including the fact that I had been born fifty-five years earlier, I was liberated from the Monday through Friday gig. Freedom!
My company had begun moving many of its operations to another state, including the department in which I worked. My husband was even closer than I to retirement, he wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want a long distance marriage, so I declined the opportunity to relocate. My twenty years service with the company, together with my age, equaled the magic number of points for early retirement. And, since my entire department was moving, taking my job, I would also receive severance pay.
No matter that my retirement pension was a mere fraction of what it would have been at sixty-five. With a year’s severance pay and my bit of retirement, I could stay home and write and have long visits with my grandson in the summer. Freed from the daily grind, scheduling the remaining classes required for my college degree would be easier. There would be time to get more involved in my community, even to clean windows if the mood should strike me.
There’s an old saying, ‘youth is wasted on the young’. I would rewrite it, ‘freedom is wasted on the young’. With a few years under your belt, you know a little about what you’d like to do, and (maybe) have the courage to try it.
Freedom, to me, is having the time to examine all of your options, and choose. The time may come when I will want to see just how much clout, if any, that degree gives me in the work arena. But, for now, that highway to freedom I took at fifty-five still looks good.
