Dinna Fash Yersel!

One month has gone by and I’m still at work scooping strawberries and mangos into containers at 6am and weighing chicken into two ounce bags for Thai chicken wraps.

Usually this leads to serving several early morning smoothie aficionados and fans of flatbread breakfasts. I’m out of my Tropical Smoothie two-toned t-shirt around 8am and sometimes 9. It’s a short shift but my goal is to help the owner, and my son, a manager, get off to a good start.

That’s it. I’m not there to make money or to build my work resume or to get a good reference. I am there to be useful. Today I realized what I thought I was going to realize all along: For me, as a retired actor and former creative director, my purpose in retirement is to be useful.

Many people are fine with the time they have, once retired, to enjoy themselves with more leisure activities, to travel more, or to see more of the grandkids, or to start projects that were, for decades, “when I’m retired I’ll get to that” endeavors. That wasn’t my destiny, however. And I’m discovering that many other people 65 or older aren’t satisfied with those activities either.

Perhaps, that’s not accurate. Those are great activities that are justifiably enough, but they don’t settle the angst some of us feel about not being useful in the way we were during our careers. What is settling my misgivings about a post-career life is the accumulation of meaningful responsibilities that ultimately serve a purpose to…serve.

Most days I have a need for a calendar to keep all I have to do straight. I’ll have a meeting with a community project in the morning, a Zoom to discuss a future class with UNI students, a podcast with a friend, a planning committee meeting to help the Eastside Ministerial Alliance fundraiser, and often a voice over or two at Mudd Advertising where I maintain a relationship after my long career there. Lately I’ve been meeting people (and had an interview on KCRG) to talk about retirement issues. The evening could be a rehearsal for a play at the Oster-Regent theater. That’s not an unusual day.

And the day now begins with doing dishes, prepping fruits and taking drive-through orders. Those two or three hours everyday set a tone of work and accomplishment where even menial tasks have value when you see how they fit into the mechanism of a business and how a business generates opportunities far and wide.

The result has been increased energy, heightened optimism, and the karmic embrace of usefulness. Not only to a business, an organization, or a community, but to myself.

I don’t know how long my smoothie days will last, but the lesson, permanently embedded in my brain, is that I can do it. I can do whatever I want, to have whatever experience I crave, in the act of creating purpose. And in a few days my wife and I are off to Scotland for several weeks.

Because now we can.

Dinna fash yersel! That’s Scottish for “Don’t worry (yourself)!”