For those of you a year or so from retirement

I know it seems weird to write an article on LinkedIn about the end of a career. But there are too many retirees who don't think about what they hope retirement will actually look like, until the day they're actually retired. I've been retired for about a year, successfully I think, but I thought about that question for a number of months before I decided it was time. The financial readiness is an important matter, yes, and you will have to be confident about that. But that's hardly the most important thing, and I just wanted to give you a few tips in how you might want to ask yourself about emotional, social, spiritual, personal readiness.

Bottom line, retirement isn't so much about stopping as it is about choosing a new direction. What retirement does is open up choices. The world is genuinely your oyster when a salary is no longer a key concern. Nor does it mean that you have to do only those things you've always dreamed of, or those things you know you love to do.

I knew long before I retired that I would not do well with too much leisure. Even when working, three-day weekends left me out of sorts. And so for me, I was fairly confident I'd be looking for a part-time job pretty quickly, or some volunteer work, or a mix of both. The key thing about anything I took on is that it has to be learning something new and meeting new people. There are a zillion part-time jobs that are fascinating, where you can start knowing nothing. Bake pies at a diner, be a city tour guide, be the person that hangs art at new hotels, give samples at liquor stores, build sets for a local theater company, work the tools section at a hardware store. The important thing is to keep the job while it is fun and new and interesting, and when it no longer feeds you, you can move onto something else. What do you think might be interesting, exactly because you've never done it before.

Decide with your partner how you want to do travel. Some couples have stifled their travel bug while working, and are now just busting at the seams to spend a month in Thailand. If that's you, go for it. But also talk with your partner who may be more of a homebody or is now committed to a volunteer activity that would suffer if they were gone for that long. One tip I could offer is the beauty of the day trip. Draw a radius of 200 miles (a 4 hour drive) around where you live. How many of the places in that circle have you never seen? How many have the World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil or the best cheeseburgers in the state? How many national or state parks are in that range. If you leave at 8am, you'll be there by lunch at the latest, and then at the end of the stop, you can decide to go home, or spend the night before going home, or spend the night before going 200 miles in a different direction.

Be sure you give yourself more time for fresh air, especially now that you can do it at 10am on Tuesdays, rather than at dusk after work or on the weekend. I'm told that walking 3-5 miles a day is the best way to stay out of a nursing home.

This kind of thing is what I actually decided on before retiring. I knew I wanted some exercise and nature. I have a half dozen volunteer things that mean a lot to me (which is why I do them). I do have home hobbies like guitar playing and cooking, and I have a lot of books. The decision about a part-time job was really just picking which one I wanted to try first. And I've been blessed with six short domestic trips in the first year of retirement, and for me that feels right. But mostly, I know that the mix will change with time, and the variety and the choice are the breath of life for my own retirement.

My advice to you is to think about what you're retiring to more than what you're retiring from. Your choices will almost certainly be different than mine. If you have a feel for your choices before you actually tell your company you're ready to do that, your entry into retirement will still give you purpose, intellectual stimulation, pleasurable company, and a sense of opportunity.