Credits: Paula Kesselring - Photograph. Lynne Marie - Photogenic. Rachel Jefferies - Mixed Media Artistry M3 Sept 2018. Etc by Danyale - Clarity.
And for those who want to read the journaling...
Find my purpose - Almost anti-climactic for me. Here I am at the ripe young age of 65, just retired from my position as an analyst at the hospital, my employer for the last 45 years, and now I have to find my purpose??? Oh man! Where do I even begin? It isn’t that I’ve been actively looking for my purpose, growing up I was always into the detail of things. I remember being a kid, no more than 8 years old, falling in love with rocks. Picking them up, bringing them home, washing them with soap and water and a toothbrush, mounting them on cardboard and classifying and cataloguing them. Now what normal 8 year old does that? I moved on from rocks, to postcard collecting. Alphabetizing them by state, by country, learning about their location by pouring through the old-fashioned Encyclopaedia Britannica my parents had bought for us kids. It seems that everything I chose to do was detail-oriented. I was not the visionary, I got bogged down in the details. But give me a path, give me an idea and I would find the way to get there. It worked well for me in being an analyst. My job was drowning in details with me making sense of it all, discovering that path to normalcy where all of the staff could follow. My boss was the idea man, he wouldn’t care if it could happen, because he believed that if he shared his end goal with me, I’d make it happen. My purpose? Perhaps. And now that I’ve been retired for not quite four weeks, it is a bit too premature for me to delve into my psyche and find my purpose. I hope it has already found me. Gone are the years of creating logic, writing processes for staff, testing software and the burn-out that resulted from too much stress. Now I hope to find time to play, even if it is cataloging my thimbles, my collection of 3000+ thimbles, where I just ran out of time several years ago to document them. Maybe my purpose will be to learn to love housecleaning? Heaven forbid, after 45 years of neglect, maybe I can revel in a squeaky clean house. Maybe my purpose will be to keep in touch with friends, send them a note, remind them that I still care about them and value their friendship. I don’t have to save the world, my purpose can be extremely selfish, catering to my needs, to my wants, to my desires. I have noticed that John and I are having more fun together these past few weeks. Maybe my purpose is to perpetuate that fun, experience the newness of a relationship that has rediscovered itself. Whatever my purpose is, I’m doing it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
