God Never Stops Offering Us Opportunities for Growth

Remember when a person retired after decades of work at a factory, a hospital or a school and management threw a retirement party for that person, or gave them a gold watch to commemorate the occasion?

There was no celebration for me, because it happened unexpectedly when I was let go from my last job due to COVID. I was not unhappy about leaving work. I had long planned for my retirement and at that point was less than a year away from leaving. But marking transitions through a ceremony or a rite of passage is important and can help us set our sights on the next horizon with greater anticipation and enthusiasm.

Baptism, confirmation, bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, vision quests, graduation, and weddings are all examples of ceremonies or rites of passage that help us acknowledge and dedicate ourselves to the next phase of life.

For some people, retirement is difficult because there is so little fanfare.

In Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore highlights this fear of the unknown:

“I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity. But I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”

God never stops offering us opportunities for growth and connection and the retirement years, more than any other period of our lives, are deliciously wide open with possibilities.

Rather than the end of things, it can be a time of great blossoming, whether that is finally having time to learn a new skill, devote more time to gardening, volunteer at church or in the community, read more widely, spend more quality time with family and friends, hang out in an art museum, attend more programs at Centering Space, or hike in the woods, the possibilities are endless.

Our challenge is to identify those things that resonate most profoundly with our meaning and purpose and go after them with the passion, intention and joy that we invested in our education, careers, marriages and families in the past.

~Syndie Eardly