“Time waits for no man.”
Of all the memorable lines in the classic Coen brothers’ film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” the one that makes me pause is delivered by an old man on a hand-driven railcar somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. He lays that truth on George Clooney’s character and his hapless comrades when he confronts the folly of their youth.
I am turning 71 as I write this and am embarking on a retirement journey that presently seems more puzzling than liberating. I have good friends who planned their retirements for years to spend their winters in Florida. I have other friends who, like me, have created something they love and must reconcile turning it over to the next generation.
As a typical boomer, I’m not retiring because I dislike working. I’m retiring because I think it’s best. I’ve watched more than one fellow boomer work beyond his best years, and it’s not pretty. My companies have been my obsession for 35 years, and now I’ve decided to take the off-ramp to find some new obsessions. That sounds unhealthy, I know, but the idea of trying to become well-rounded now seems like a lot of work.
Because of my wife’s career, we moved to Bardstown, Kentucky, years ago. Bardstown is more than an hour’s drive from my office in Lexington. My friends cannot fathom that kind of commute for even one year, much less 30, but I’ve cherished it. There’s something comforting about that hour of solitude at the end of each working day.
I frequently get a surge of optimism by driving into a rising sun. My commute has been northeast in the mornings and southwest in the afternoons. In the best conditions, bright skies have allowed me to start the day watching the sun rise and end that day watching it set. It’s no wonder that my personal prayer time has been during that drive to work.
I’ll still be involved in some work activities, including most of the media aspects of the Select Traveler Conference. Charlie Presley and I created this conference in 1996, three years after we created the magazine that preceded it. We’ve weathered economic downturns, the horrific attacks of 9/11, the creation of the internet, the COVID-19 pandemic and now the arrival of AI. But all in all, it’s been a blast.
George Clooney’s character in “Oh, Brother” was obliviously optimistic. The old man on the railcar was an unsentimental sage. I’m shooting for both in my retirement.
