Countdown to 50 - My New Favorite Stringed Instrument: the AARP

Daily random ramblings as I approach my 50th birthday next Monday.

Proof that I am about to change age ranges has arrived in our family mail box three times over the last couple of weeks in the form of marketing mailings from the good folks at AARP. While the realities of population demographics, generational turnover, and government financing have in recent years increased the official retirement age, AARP has apparently seen fit to recast its eligibility definition downward to include my (soon) age or older. Consequently, I have received at least three flyers, folders, envelopes, or whatever from them.

Not that I opened them, mind you! Perhaps as a form of civil disobedience against their expansive definition of aging. Perhaps in demonstration of some secreted denial that I am in fact getting on in years. Perhaps simply as another example of my refusal to enable mass marketing campaigns (a.k.a., junk mail). I don’t know why I didn’t open any of the letters, but I know I didn’t.

Which is kind of odd, actually, because in the last year I have thought about retirement more consistently, more afffirmingly than I ever imagined. The numbers from my annual denominational pension report race through my mind at least a couple times a year. I have a spreadsheet on which I track the predicted result of that fund’s increase in value. I have calculated how much we will need, how much we may have, and where we might obtain the millions that will be needed if I am to achieve my dream of retiring in the well-wired guest house on the estate of Bill and Malinda Gates.

So I’m thinking about retirement. Is that a sign of aging? A sign of professional burnout or frustration? Or is it simply a sign that I need something to occupy my free time? If you’re a baby boomer, what are you thinking about these days?

I also think about life after life more than ever. As intimated in a recent essay on this blog, I think about reunions with my mom and grandparents. I think about reconnecting, in whatever way God sees fit, with the people who over the years have so influenced my journey. And I think about eternal chat room conversations with people like Beethoven, Einstein, and the author(s) of the Bible’s “Job.”

Is that a sign of aging? Or of roiling faith? Or spiritual curiosity?

I am in an unusual season of my life. Still creative. Still childlike. Still interested. Yet also attracted to new and possibly telling issues and subjects. . . . just not to AARP mailings.

I wonder what the countdown to 60 will read like?

Leave a comment about your experience, if you feel like it. Don’t worry about making sense; it should be obvious to you that I don’t.


Pray with me:
What a time this is, God. Creative, but uncomfortable. Energized, yet attracted to slower paced life. Hopeful, yet never fully confident. Part of it’s the world we live in. Part of it’s that we’re all changing, time and age wait for no one. So stay close. May your promises never get old as we continue the walk toward your light in the name of Jesus, Amen.