ASCENSION
SUPPORT TEAM.
DAVID AND YVONNE BRITTAIN.
.
To gracefully retire.
This
article is written for the benefit of anyone who has or is about to retire from
work, and who may feel daunted and haunted by the empty years that lie ahead.
Please don’t feel daunted and don’t feel haunted. You may find it difficult to
believe but to be ‘written off’, as ‘passed it’ is one of the greatest joys of
retirement. Suddenly all of the pressure of competition has gone. Just like us
you definitely may not have been in the ‘golden handshake’ league but at least
you now have time to think and to observe and to comment. Meanwhile the greater
wisdom of your brain cells allows younger people to provide the muscle power
when required. This is the whole point of the ageing process. Gracefully wisdom
replaces the need to appear ‘Macho’ or irresistibly gorgeous.
The first
thing that you may observe is that those people who wrote you off are still
feverishly and frenziedly competing with each other. They will continue to
compete until they also are written off. So for you the time to feel daunted
and haunted has now passed. You are now as free as you will allow yourself to
be!
Does that
sound odd? As free as you will allow yourself to be! Think about it for a
moment. After decades in the role of either employee or employer no one retires
without the scars of conditioned thinking. This means that your first task is
to de-condition the way that you think of and regard YOU. You will have to do
it because no one would or could do it for you. As employees one of the biggest
traps we all fall into is to be persuaded by employers that we are either
indispensable, or easily replaceable. As a result, eagerly or apprehensively we
have filled almost every waking thought with our indispensable or easily
replaceable roles.
Maybe after
many decades we have come to regard ourselves only as those roles. Anything
else is sort of shamefacedly and irrelevantly tacked on. Thus the enthusiastic,
talented amateur artist or poet who must fix cars or telephones for a
livelihood thinks of self as a motor mechanic or telephone engineer who (rather
quaintly) paints or writes poetry as a hobby.
When you
retire you want to be free not to be needed. In a similar way a wife who is the
mother of now adult and married children, may regard her freedom from family
responsibilities in two ways, either, negatively as surplus to her family’s
needs, or positively and gratefully for her hard-earned freedom after a job
well done. After all, who wants to walk the same path yet again?
This newly
found freedom may make you feel fear in the form of self-doubt, and this is
quite natural. From the moment you were born to the moment you retire you have
conformed and molded yourself to the demands, needs and wishes of others, first
to your parents’ preferred image of you, then to your schoolteachers’ and then
to your employers’. Then as a husband and father or wife and mother, again you
remolded yourself to fit yet more required images. But now you are free to
create your own preferred image of self. So now you must look closely at
yourself to decide what must be changed. This isn’t a matter of your financial
circumstances it is all to do with your attitude of mind.
Obviously
generous dollops of available money would relieve anxiety, but conversely the richest
person in the world might also be the unhappiest. That rich person could scour
the pleasure resorts of the world for ever-new sensations that would pall
faster and faster even as they were experienced.
But what is
this rich person actually doing? He or she is using the crystallized energy
that money represents to continuously drain vital energy from other people. He
or she attempts to fill his or her internal vacuum with energy provided by
other people. But why does this vacuum exist in this person? The vacuum exists
simply because he or she has never found his or her inner source of energy.
Always it has been easier to write a cheque and then use the energy of other
people. This is like the child who complains, “I’m bored, I’ve got nothing to
do.”
Until we
retire from a long life of work most of us have never been allowed to have
‘Nothing to do’. Often this means that we may retire haunted by the feeling
that we are duty-bound to fill our new freedom with usefulness to others to
justify our future existence as a retired person. This is part of the thought
conditioning that you have to unload. It is not made easier by the thoughtless
astonishment of younger working people when you politely reject their offer to
fill your spare time with their odd jobs. The answer of course is to ask them
if they would exchange their next twenty or thirty years to be in your retired
position of freedom?
The
important thing is to make a clean break with your past employment. There is
something sad about the retired man who tries to cling to and still be part of
the camaraderie shared by the currently employed workforce at his ex place of
work. It is sad because when he clings to the past this man fails to live in
the ‘now’. But all anyone has is ‘now’, the past has gone and the future only
holds one certainty for any of us.
Often in a
jocular manner the talk is that we have entered our second childhood, but in a
way when we retire this is true. With retirement each of us faces a brand new
future that has no connection with our past. No one still trapped in his or her
competitive ‘now’ could help us to enjoy the freedom of our future years. In
fact a large part of the enjoyment begins only after we unload the heavy mental
shields and tools that in the past we needed to successfully compete.
Early in
our first childhood we all learnt that to win any race we have to learn the
basic ground-rules. Those basic rules ruthlessly demand that the runners ignore
the hopes and dreams of success, of each other. In our second childhood we have
to unlearn a great quantity of such accumulated obsolete garbage. Only then can
we learn how to fill our lives and freedom with quality. An ongoing competition
with its shabby, basic rules hasn’t and could never offer mankind a high quality
of life, and yet we all are born into the competition until we retire from it.
Only then have we time to take stock of what the competition did to us instead
of did for us.
Retirement
means that you are now the boss of you. It also means that you are once again a
student of life, but also you become your own teacher. But what will you the
student study and what will you the teacher teach? You will learn how to enjoy
this moment called now. You will learn how to enjoy being “YOU”. You the
teacher will continually remind you the student that there is only one “YOU” in
the entire Creation! This makes you yes 'you'
unique.
When you
drive your automobile you will teach yourself to regard a red traffic light as
a welcome break instead of as a barrier between you and your destination. In a
similar way to irritably drive your car nose to tail at high speeds places far
more wear on your brakes, clutch, and nerves than it does on the driver’s of
the car in front. We have mentioned these bad habits of drivers because they
are symptomatic of our conditioned, competitive lifestyle. That lifestyle
requires that our thoughts be always focused in the future, never in the now.
In this way the journey becomes a barrier because our thoughts are already
ahead of us at our intended destination. When we reach that destination our
thoughts are already focused on future destinations. Unfortunately for most of
us we have had to fit into what is generally accepted as the norm. But it would
be pointless to try to merge that accepted norm with your newly found freedom.
At the bus
stop retired you has time ‘Now’ to enjoy a beautiful sunset, that is, if you
can only de-condition your thoughts that have always been entirely focused on
the future arrival of the bus.
Enjoy now
wherever you are. To enjoy now doesn’t cost you a penny. Take time to enjoy all
of the things that busy, busy you never had time to notice in the past. To
compete, you had to de-sensitize yourself to be able to focus only on what was
currently relevant. So now you have the time to become more sensitive and more
aware. Many people retire with a fixed almost rigid picture of self in
retirement. After many years of hard work to have a successful career, when
they retire they want to relax and to enjoy the fruits of their success. It is
natural to want time and freedom to enjoy those hard-earned rewards so long as
the pictured enjoyment stays flexible. Inflexibility = “I’m too set in my ways
to change after all these years.”
In a way we
could suggest that far from being ‘written off’ retirement means that you have
moved up a grade in the
We may
grieve for them and feel a great sense of loss now that they have gone. But if
we are wise our thinking will be flexible enough to allow us to be very curious
to know where our loved ones have gone and what are they doing now? If we are
inflexible we will call such curiosity, morbidity. Then like everyone else that
we know, we will avoid the subject that we fear might mar our picture of our
future few years of enjoyment.
Astonishingly
the teachers of established religions always encourage avoidance of detailed
discussion about this taboo subject. As a result even as a regular churchgoer
you still may not have a clue about not how but why you exist or about your
ultimate destination after your body is just a memory. You avoid thoughts of
your own death and think the worst when others die.
But suppose
that you knew for certain that one day you would move to another country, or
even to another planet? Obviously you would try to learn as much as you could
beforehand about what you would have to face whenever and after that time
arrives. The same surely must apply to that one certainty that we all
eventually face physical death. The knowledge is readily available from many
different sources; as is the method for you to personally check that knowledge.
From a positive point of view this gained and tested knowledge may well enhance
rather than mar your mind picture of your future enjoyed years of retirement.
At the very least you would be self-equipped with tested knowledge rather than
with the bland and blurred reassurances of others.
Retirement
is a time for constructive individual reflection. It is precious time to be
treasured and never wasted. So many received hurts and disappointments that
maybe spoilt your past must not be allowed by you to spoil your future. Maybe
you received those hurts from others or those others received hurts from you.
No matter which it is now time to forgive others or yourself and to forget. It
is time now for you to unload all useless, corrosive baggage.
Only then
will you be free of the past and free to live fully in your, ‘now’. Each of us
has had to cope with life from moment to moment at our then current level of
understanding during those moments. To gain maturity of thought and of values
requires long years of hard-earned experience, of wrong choices and mistakes
made and regretted, but hopefully also learnt from. This means that at the time
of those mistakes and wrong choices you hadn’t gained the level of mature
understanding that you enjoy now. If you had gained today’s level then probably
those mistakes would not have been made. In truth you are now a different
person. If you are honest with yourself you will admit that what applies to you
must also in fairness apply to all of those hurt or hurtful people in your
past.
For this
reason regret and guilt, or bitterness and resentment, about those in your past
are emotions that were only valid at your ‘then’ level of understanding. Those
obsolete and inappropriate emotions will continue to corrode your ‘now’ and
your future until you consciously acknowledge that what you felt then you have
no right, no wish, and no intention to feel now. This is the real meaning of
second childhood. You start afresh with honesty and compassion. The world is
crammed full of the ‘walking wounded’. Yet we all have the means to heal our
emotional scar tissue. Only you can forgive self. Only you can forgive others.
Forgiveness is not a transaction, “You forgive me and I will forgive you.” That
would be all too easy. No, genuine forgiveness of self and of others is dumped
squarely into your lap regardless of those others.
You were
born as an individual who probably like us all got merged into a crowd scene to
be led by the nose by yet more individuals. Retirement means that at last you
have escaped from the crowd scene and can revert to what you were born to be, a
courageous and clear thinker who now has time to seek the true meaning and
purpose of your own existence.
Please
believe a couple of retired pensioners who also are seekers named David and
Yvonne Brittain. Far from boring, academic, or morbid, the results of your
search you will find will be a
“mind-blowing enhancement to your graceful retirement”
Love and
Laughter from David and Yvonne Brittain.
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AS USUAL WE OFFER OUR POSTAL
SERVICES FOR TRAPPED SOULS RESCUE/RELEASE WORK, CLAIRVOYANT
Note: David and Yvonne
continuously drew down and anchored the light in
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