“I would have been happy being a teacher,” says the 78-year-old singer/actor, reflecting back on the year he took a break from the music business and taught math at Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut. “I loved the curriculum; I loved the act of teaching.” After instant fame from the album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, teaching gave him an opportunity to take a...
There are sports coaches. Life coaches. And career coaches. But a travel coach? Formerly a travel writer, Dylan Essertier now works with people seeking travel experiences that go beyond the ordinary vacation. “I searched for a travel advisor who would speak to ‘a woman like me’—someone who didn’t just want to escape through travels but use that time away to help me move toward my long...
Most of us own an item or 500 that we’ll probably never use again. Their primary function? To collect layers of dust for a family member to blow off when we’re gone. Even if something has sentimental value, you can’t, as they say, take it with you. In ancient India, spring cleaning took the form of aparigraha, the Sanskrit term for non-hoarding. Mastering this practice is said...
The great novelist Gabriel García Márquez once said of his wife Mercedes, “I know her so well, she is completely and utterly unknown to me.” After 56 years of marriage, that’s a curious thing to say. The gist is this: Human beings are constantly changing and evolving. Retirement is a great opportunity for couples to become reacquainted, to drop old judgements and perceptions and...
With hits like “The Closer I Get to You,” “Killing Me Softly,” “Where Is the Love,” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Roberta Flack has captured the hearts of hopeless romantics since 1969. But her first success, as she remembers, was not in the recording studio but in the classroom. Born in 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, Roberta...
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!” —Thoreau Over time, many of us have accumulated things we rarely, if ever, use. When we finally wise up, we come to see that all that stuff—along with the house in which it’s been collecting dust—no longer makes sense. Many experts are recommending that retirees sell their homes and rent instead. Typically, this...
One of the perks of grandparenting is an education in how to smile. Babies are the experts. They smile in the womb and continue after they’re born. Smiling is innate, not learned; this we know because even blind babies smile. Children smile as many as 400 times a day. That’s a lot more than the general population, with 30% smiling more than 20 times a day and about 14% smiling...
If retirement is throwing you for a loop, you’re definitely not alone. Coleman Barks, a poet and translator, writes this about his last day of teaching at the University of Georgia: “I missed giving my final final exam. I slept through it. The alarm didn’t sound, or I turned it off in my sleep. I’m buying a new clock. But maybe it’s perfect this way. They wrote me such letters. I’ll...
“Happiness is only real when shared.” —Chris McCandless, from Into the Wild According to the Social Security Administration, nearly 80 million people are retiring at a rate of about 10,000 per day. Meanwhile, since 1990, divorces among the 65+ population have tripled. Coincidence? Probably not. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary...
Tess Simonetti, a retired elementary teacher in Massillon, Ohio, has seen it firsthand. “When I began teaching, there was little to no involvement by grandparents with the students,” she says. “By the end of my career, many more grandparents played a large role.” Grandparents today are more involved in their grandkid’s lives than ever before. And they’re being...
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