Following retirement, am I finally a gentleman of leisure?
I think not!
Rather, I have the opportunity to become a gentleman of pleasure; to indulge my hobbies and pastimes to maximum potential.
My current challenge is that, despite the day job getting in the way previously, I still find that there are not enough hours in a day. I need careful planning to achieve many of my lifelong ambitions. Web development continues high on the list, but I will need to focus more on wider readership and, sadly, allow personal site to gracefully fade away when the domain expires.
With other activities waiting in the wings, including volunteer tutoring and creative-non fiction writing, I remain on a massive learning curve and hope so to remain until I croak.
You can retire from the ‘day job’, but you must never retire from life. Life is a journey which provides lifelong learning opportunities. Internet technology hands out much of the quasi-academia on line for free! Embrace it and learn as you grow older. My lifemanship experience has taught me how to distinguish between fact and fiction; reality and fantasy; truth and falsehood; good and evil; right and wrong, and it has given me a certain wisdom.
The Internet used with wisdom is arguably the greatest informational and educational tool in history. Without wisdom, its value can be dubious, in the extreme it can be self-destructive and, at worst, it may be simply trivial or banal. Normally it serves as an extension of the entertainment industry.
The Internet condenses the world into a Global Village with social networking and e-mail technology. Love it or hate it, social networks are here to stay. Blogging, tweeting, posting on Facebook and other sites will remain.
Surprisingly, perhaps, I like to use my mobile phone to make phone calls. I don’t particularly like how mobile phones have effectively become fashion accessories and mobile entertainment centres. Nevertheless, I was compelled to buy a ‘smart’ phone, because I cant stand younger people being more technically aware than me! I know that’s conceit and I’ll probably grow out of it.
So onward and upward as I venture forth to embrace this new beginning by doing things that I want to do and, henceforth, I entrust the brave new world to the future leaders of industry, commerce, government and banking!?!?