What Dog Training Taught Me About Retirement

Two days after I retired, I slept past 9:00 AM for the first time since I was a teenager. When I emerged into the kitchen, stiff-jointed, groggy and a little headache-y, my husband said, "Look how late you slept! Isn't it great?"

"No," I said. Three weeks later, we got a dog so I’d have a reason to wake up and get moving.

Our new dog, Bella, came from a shelter that was only able to tell us that she’s an adult Labrador Retriever mix, and that she had puppies recently. Dog training classes seemed like the best way to get off to a good start. For the next six weeks, Bella, my husband and I attended Doggie Manners Level 1.

Here’s what I learned: Dogs are, well, dogs. Their nature is to live in a pack with hierarchical order and rules. It can look chaotic, but it makes sense to dogs. Humans bred dogs for specific tasks or qualities, and dogs thrive if they have something to do.

Pretty simple concepts, and once I accepted my humiliation that I did everything wrong the first time we tried it, dog training made a lot of sense. 

For example, walking was the first thing we practiced. As a former planning consultant, I understood how Bella’s learning to walk calmly at our sides systemically impacted other areas of behavior. In addition to getting her energy out, it established hierarchy; humans were going to choose the path and pace. She could respond by being her own dog self, exploring and marking her territory along the way, keeping her urine outside our home. In my strategic planning vocabulary, the outcomes of regular walks checked off several boxes on my priority positive impact list.

We followed our trainer’s advice about when to be consistent, (“Never give her handouts from the table...”), and inconsistent, (“Don’t feed her on a regular timetable; make her guess and wait...”).

The hardest thing for me was the assignment for the last class: Teach the dog a trick that requires shaping. “Shaping,” in dog training, is breaking down a desired behavior into component parts, and rewarding the dog for accomplishing each intermediate step. Having one week to do this supercharged my perfectionist performance anxiety; I perceived Bella as being slower to learn than all the other dogs. All I can say is that in the end, Bella could touch her nose to a Frisbee, and my perfectionist tendencies underwent the biggest change.

At the same time I was shaping Bella’s behavior, I was shaping my attitude about retirement. For months, I worried that I made the wrong decision. I felt untethered, aimless, irritated. Luckily, I found out I wasn’t alone.

Research published this year from the Employee Benefit Research Institute reported progressively increasing dissatisfaction with retirement since 1998. Whether or not you chalk it up to baby boomers’ eternal youth narrative, die-at-our-desks work ethic, or the changing economic landscape, it’s not surprising that we just don’t seem to like moseying off into the senior sunset.

I wonder if those of us who struggle with retirement have a lot in common with dogs. We’re also communal creatures who find comfort and security in a group. Give us a job! Work gives us a chance to use our natural abilities. It keeps us out of trouble. We like hierarchical structure, and if we have been the alpha dogs, it’s hard for the grocery store line to replace the boardroom for accepting our top-notch leadership skills.

I think it’s possible for us old working dogs to learn the trick of retirement if we approach it with some basic principles of dog training:

1. Look for a simple, core practice that will trigger small positive outcomes in other areas. The key is the word, “practice,” and is the dog-training equivalent of walking. This is not about distracting yourself with planning a big project, learning a new skill or traveling. It’s taking something that you already do - physical activity, writing, meditating, cooking – and doing it regularly, with mindfulness and without judgment. Simply pay attention to how your thoughts change over time while you do it.

2. Make a couple of rules for yourself. We working dogs like to know the rules, and retirement has none. Remember how your workplace always had some protocol that seemed ridiculous, and yet there was always someone who took it seriously enough to enforce it? Be that person. Whether your rule is to always have breakfast at the kitchen table instead of in front of your computer, or not reading Facebook posts from former colleagues before 5:00 PM, there is no rule too minuscule for you to institute immediately.

3. If you feel you must achieve a goal, break it down into component steps and reward yourself as you reach each one. This is shaping. Pay particular attention to, and be flexible about, your rewards. You might be surprised that what felt like a reward before retirement isn’t one now.

4. Find a pack of other working dogs to play with now and then. Our dog trainer told me that when a group of dogs are together at a park or kennel, they tend to play with others of similar breed. Retrievers have a different way of playing than lap dogs and simply have more fun together. The same goes for you. You’ll feel better if you continue to connect with other people who share or need your professional gifts. If you decide to volunteer, look for something that utilizes a skill that you mastered. If you were a marketing executive before, stuffing envelopes at your place of worship won’t feel as good as building up their Twitter presence.

Dog training taught me that from a dog’s perspective, there’s only this moment. It’s the trainer who knows there will be another one. When you put the two perspectives together, there are endless possibilities to make each moment a new adventure. 

Retirement can do that, too.

The Cheap and Lazy Maximalist Gardener

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal grabbed my attention because it was a piece about gardening. 

Showing us the home of Katie Ridder, an interior designer with a "more is more" signature style, we see her loose, but deliberate, approach to her landscape as being the same wild, colorful abundance associated with English cottage gardens. Describing herself as a "maximalist" designer, she ignored practical advice about choosing a manageable number of plants, and plunged in with an initial purchase of 1,000 items of 65 different species. 

Is there such a thing as a maximalist gardener? The term "maximalist" was initially coined in the early 20th Century to describe all-or-nothing Russian revolutionaries. Now, in its broader use, it describes an uncompromising approach of "redundant overkill" for maximum impact, or an all-in plan of attack towards a goal. 

I find it a perfectly fitting term for gardeners like Ms. Ridder and me. We are maximalist gardeners. Except I'm a cheap and lazy one.

I inherited a 40X40' kitchen garden, divided into four quadrants, with a fountain at the center of flagstone pathways. In addition to a cherry tree and a few blueberry bushes, the space was full of day lilies, black-eyed susans, hedge roses, purple lobelia, wild geraniums, ferns, trumpet vine - and weeds. 

My vision for the garden was that it would be a cross between a kitchen garden and an English cottage garden - a maximal explosion of color and function. But because it's expensive and back-breaking to start from scratch, I did the opposite of Ridder's maximalist approach of buying a thousand new plants. I left everything in place and simply added more. 

I smothered the weeds and trumpet vine in one quadrant with cardboard and mulched leaves, erected an herb spiral, (constructed from limb leftovers of a tree that we cut down), and added plants. It became my herb and medicinal garden, with thyme, basil, chamomile, feverfew, arnica, chives, dill, mustard greens, and mint. 

A word about mint: Seasoned gardeners will shake their heads and say, "Mint is invasive and takes over the whole plot!" This is true, and is exactly why invasive herbs are a lazy maximalist gardener's dream. 

Basil mint from a 3-inch pot, taking up 6X6' of space within a year.

Anything that I like to eat is welcome to stretch out in my garden until it bumps into a neighbor that I also want. That's when I assume a traffic cop role, yanking out chunks of the exuberant plant to give the right of way to the other favorite. 

Being cheap, my new plants came from seeds that I collected from the previous year or the leftover plants I picked up at big box store garden centers. I have a weekly ritual of buying up the withering remains of perennials that can't be sold by those stores. Left on a clearance table to die, they're perfect for me to scoop up in bulk and put into a hospital corner of my garden. Then I simply wait for them to come back the next year.

My lazy compost-making means that I spread it prematurely, and there are always seeds that will provide volunteer vegetables somewhere in the garden. I let them grow. Grape tomatoes pop up everywhere, so you can pluck a few to eat as you walk by to check out the roses. My columbine and snapdragons this year were bullied by a few acorn squash vines that blew into their space, but I got dozens of squash blossoms to stuff and bake, and about 20 mature squashes to roast and pickle.

Is my maximalist garden pretty? Well, that depends on whether or not you're a maximalist viewer. If you prefer neatly tended spaces, with flowering plants framed by burnt sienna mulch, and vegetables lined up together without intrusive weeds, my garden might remind you of the median strip on a major highway. 

But if you love the idea of walking on that median strip, curious to see what's growing among the wildflowers, and excited by the surprise of edibles that you can take home for your salad, then follow me. My cheap, lazy maximalist garden is for you.

Lilies growing among rudbeckia.

How to Win the Renovation Game Show

What can retired couples do when they finally have the time for whatever they want?

Some downsize towards a simpler life and more freedom. Some travel and explore the world they never had time to see before. Others volunteer or take a class together. 

Kathy and Bob, the Upsized Boomers, renovate.

To be honest, retirement has not brought this out in us. We always bought ugly duckling homes at rock bottom prices, when the word "flipped" referred to pancakes, not houses. This house will be our sixth renovation in 33 years. It was Bob's retirement project to buy it and make the major repairs that are inevitable with a 110-year old house. It's our joint project to bring the kitchen and master bath into the 21st Century.

If you watch any of the fixer-upper shows on HGTV, or have renovated your house in the past, you'll know what I mean when I say that it can feel like being on a perverse game show where you not only get to play, you also end up paying out the jackpot. With our current project, we passed quickly through the initial Your Bottom Line Budget is Delusionally Low audition, worked well together during the Cut $20,000 More challenge, and blew through the Bad News About Structural Defects That Will Add Back That $20,000 scoring. In this moment, we're negotiating the It's Going to Take An Extra Three Weeks bonus round.

Having learned the rules through years of trial and error, here's my advice for anyone who thinks that now's the time to play your own Renovation Game Show:

1. Retirement does not convey skills or knowledge that you never had before.  If your previous attempts at this game failed because you thought you could do it yourself, and one or both of you 1) hated manual labor, 2) didn't know the difference between a plumber and a plumb line, and/or 3) lost patience with making 1,000 decisions that all seemed to do with something called "finishes", be honest with yourself. Your new life of retirement can only possibly change problem #2, because you'll have time to watch fixer-upper shows, expand your reno vocabulary, and throw around words like shiplap.

2. The rules of the game remain the same if you downsize. Congratulations on selling your big house and moving to your new town home! You might be thinking that the renovation game will be easier with a smaller space. That's like thinking that house training a small dog will certainly be less complicated than house training a big one. The reality is that each project has its unique opportunities and limits that only emerge as you go through the process. Please refer back to my previous paragraph - substituting the words, "A smaller project" for "Retirement" - if you didn't like the game in the past.

3. The Renovation Game is won with teamwork. Renovation upends your entire life. It's costly, dusty, tedious, and anxiety-producing. It can feel like a marathon with an imaginary finish line and a course that keeps changing direction. Whether you're doing the work yourself or hired a company to handle the project, a team approach will get you through it. 

4. The Renovation Game really isn't a game at all. It's creation. It's art. Go into it with the shared goal of feeling joy every day in your space. Keep that in mind when you have to make hundreds of decisions and navigate the compromises that are inevitable. 

Here's the payoff: If you take a dream trip around the world, you go home with memories. If the home you create is your dream, you get to live in your dream every day.

Garden Yoga

"Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow." 

- Abraham Lincoln

Thistle is a scourge. An uncontrollable parasitic pandemic. A gardening nightmare. I hate thistle.

And yet, every year, like a great 19th Century American president, I try to put aside my awareness that the network of thistle roots underneath the ground is exponentially larger than the hundreds of thorny green shoots popping up around every plant in my garden. With my trowel and clippers, I snip and hack at every piece of thistle I can find, in the hope that I'll tire it out and win a longer war of attrition.

During my first four-hour thistle busting session this spring, the bending and kneeling was easier if I thought of it as exercise rather than a battle. Yoga was a much more pleasant image.

See for yourself. There's the "Downward: Facing Thistle" pose.

The next day, I applied the yoga re-frame to more garden chores. The posture for pruning:

And planting snap peas:

In my exuberance for planting last week, I also sowed sunflower seeds when the temperature was 80 degrees. Tonight, as it dips into the '20's, I'm going to hope that I won't be witnessing my plants doing their own yoga: the corpse pose.

Worms and French Fries: How Many Kinds Can You Name?

My friend brought her almost-four-year old granddaughter, who is curious about seeds and plants, over to see my greenhouse. Since my sons are grown, and I have only imaginary grandchildren at the moment, this was a chance to indulge in one of my joys: sharing what's in a garden with a child. 

We started by looking at sunflower seeds, then tomatoes and peas, how they sprout, and what they look like as they grow. I gave her seeds of her own to plant and take home. Working our way through what's coming up in the greenhouse, we tasted the pea shoots and micro-greens. At one point, as we looked at garlic that was overwintering in a bed, I mentioned that the worms were staying warm in there, too. 

"What's a worm?" my little friend asked. 

We marched over to the compost pile, where it was easy to pitchfork up a pile of wriggling worms of all sizes. Like most kids, she was curious and not afraid of them, asking me to uncover more. Although I could explain the importance of worms in a way that a four-year old would understand, ("They eat dead leaves and plants, and their poop is good for the soil..."), I couldn't answer any of her questions about what kinds of worms we were looking at. "Night crawlers" and "red wigglers" were all the biology I ever learned from the other kids when we tried to fish in the creek and bring our own bait. Her grandma promised to take her to the library for a book about worms. 

Before she left, we made "seed bombs" together that she can throw randomly into bare areas of grandma's, (or her neighbors') yard - because no one's ever too young to start a life of guerrilla gardening.

Her visit reminded me of my own childhood, spent trailing around after my Aunt Helen in her garden, or taking walks down the country road past our house with my mother, learning the names of wildflowers and trees. They passed on to me the ability to move through the world and recognize details of my environment. A green front lawn isn't just grass or weeds: it's often crab grass and dandelions, purslane and plantain. Three of those four things can be put right into your lunch salad. 

My husband and I laugh about the differences in our abilities to discern details around us. Walk through a parking lot, and he can tell you the model and year of every car he passes, while I can only say the color. Walk down the street, and I can name every tree and flower, with or without leaves. He sees a stretch of green or a patch of brown. 

Recent research points to the possibility that humans, as a group, didn't "see" the color blue until they named it. Noting that ancient languages didn't include the word, (except Egyptian, a culture that had blue dye), and based on contemporary research with a tribe that has no word for blue, the conclusion is that what we're able to see is what we're able to name. 

I believe that walking the garden with children is more than a fun way to teach about how nature works. I can develop a classroom lesson about conservation and saving bees, for example, by starting with a french fry. Who doesn't love french fries? They come from potatoes. Potato plants are pollinated by bees. Bees are dying all over the world. Save the bees, save the french fries!

But what if a child can walk to school, drive to the mall, or go on vacation and become aware of connections to, well, everything? 

Here's what she might see: 

• Milk weed on the side of the road nourishes monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico for the winter. Without the milk weed in Canada and the U.S., there are no monarchs in Mexico. Without Mexico, there are no monarch butterflies in the U.S. and Canada.

• All those fir trees along the Atlantic City Expressway and Garden State Parkway in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, or the giant sequoias in California, have more going on underground than above, in a network of roots that work like a circulatory system. Introduce a virus in one area, and it can be passed through the underground system to them all.

• There are tens of thousands of species of mosses. They provide habitat for all kinds of insects, and their condition can be a red flag for water or air pollution.

Naming things in the garden is a powerful way to develop children's ability to differentiate - and, hopefully, appreciate - the interconnectedness of life in the world around them. It's not a text book exercise. As more of the "green" on the planet disappears every day, along with whole species of insects and animals, how children see their responsibility to the world they'll inherit - as global citizens - may depend on how many things we can teach them to name in their back yards today. 

The Three Stages of Right-Sized Retirement

Three months ago, if you and I ran into each other on the street, or, more likely, found ourselves commenting on Facebook about the election or cat videos, you might have wondered how I'm doing. If you'd asked, here's how I would have probably answered: 

"I'm great! I just retired from my full-time position."

Pay close attention to my cautious turn of phrase. I used the word, "retired," but only to describe my relationship with full-time work and/or my previous employer. I left open the possibility that I had something else lined up and ready to go, maybe something part-time, (Consulting pays more..), or in a new field, (Gonna try my hand at astrophysics!). I could never say, "I retired," because that would mean I stopped working. I didn't believe that for a minute.

I have been on my own since I was 17. I put myself through college, worked two jobs at a time in my early '20's, and even when I "stayed home" with my young children, I volunteered in the community, chaired committees, raised money for their schools, and picked up part-time teaching or writing gigs. My hobbies - gardening and sewing - require physical labor and produce measurable outcomes. What do I do? I work. Even for fun.

I started this blog in 2014 after my husband, Bob, retired and jumped into renovating a big, old Victorian house. At that point, I held a management position that allowed me to put in long hours from home, in between business trips. Each day, like a groundhog searching for food, I emerged from my third floor office for only about an hour at dusk, and then usually headed back upstairs for an evening conference call or to get ready for the next day. I considered myself a passenger on Bob's upsized Victorian house renovation ride. I spent a lot of time pondering the backyard from the window behind my desk, and imagining the garden I'd create IF I ever went outside. 

That time came in November 2015. In hindsight, I can trace three distinct stages before settling into how I'm doing now, which I'm calling, "Right-Sized Retirement." Here's what happened during each stage:

Stage 1: "Don't say the word!"

It was others who began to call it retirement. I didn't. When anyone at work said I was retiring, I told myself it made them feel better than thinking, "Kathy doesn't want to play with us anymore." My husband said it, too, all the time, so we had to have a chat about what the word "retirement" means. His definition, "I pay myself to do what I want..." didn't cut it for me. 

Here's why: Every time I heard the word, retirement, I thought of my father. During World War II, he marched from Africa to Italy with the infantry - until a sniper finally stopped his progress. Back home after the war, he spent 35 years walking a route as a US Postal Service mail carrier. At the age of 62, he turned in his retirement papers, sat in his recliner, lit up his pipe, put up his feet, and pretty much stayed there for the next 27 years. 

Sitting was not in my retirement plan. Neither was abandoning the skills it took me 40 years to build. 

This painful phase lasted from the moment I announced I would leave my job until I came up with the term, "Right-Sized Retirement," about an hour ago.

Stage 2: Adrenalin withdrawal

My brother, a director in the medical world who retired at 64, warned me first about this. He explained that work pumps us with adrenalin, so much so that we depend on it more than caffeine to keep us awake, alert and motivated. It's what helps us go to those dreaded afternoon meetings, push through the inevitable resistance to our brilliant ideas, and keeps us from falling asleep at night - so that the next day we need caffeine and adrenalin to start our engines again. 

I remember the first moments at the end of my final official work day. I walked out onto my front porch, blinking in the daylight like a newly released Prisoner of Zenda, foggily thinking, "Why are the birds so loud? When did that rose bush get in my yard? Do we still have a cat?" I thought I'd feel calm relief. Instead, I felt numb and a little panicked. What was I supposed to think about if I didn't think about work?

Here's my Facebook post three days later:

Many thanks to my dear family and friends who checked in on me in the first 72 hours of my new world of semi-retirement, knowing that I have an eeeeeensy-tiny bit of trouble sitting still. Here's what I have been doing so far: Spent Shabbat with friends who cheer for life changes; started learning in an online Open Permaculture course; made lunch dates with several friends and a couple of appointments to talk about volunteer work; looked through the profiles of 300 adoptable dogs; tried to befriend a feral cat who has taken up residence on our front porch chair at the shore; planned a trip to South Dakota with Jeff to visit Kazzie and Greg; researched Thanksgiving recipes that my nephews, Jim and Tom will love, (can't wait till you get here, dearies!); started watching Ash vs. The Evil Dead so I'll have something to talk to my sons about (not recommended for novices at cartoon gore); took my dress for my son's wedding to a tailor; visited my new greenhouse 4 times today to check the angle of the sun; made salad from my garden for Bob as a thank you for building me a greenhouse; went food shopping and made vegetarian chorizo split pea soup for myself tonight. I'm doing quite well, I think!

Every afternoon at exactly 1:00 PM, I needed a nap, no matter how much sleep I got the night before. I loved not having to set my alarm in the morning, but hated waking up past 8:00 AM. Within a month, we adopted a dog from the SPCA, so I would have a reason to get out of bed and walk. Unable to do anything unless it had a purpose, I made a goal for her to be a therapy dog. Bella, Bob and I passed Level 1 doggie obedience within six weeks.

My brother was right. I could viscerally feel the plunge in adrenalin. For the first few weeks, it tasted like exhaustion flavored by a dollop of depression. Putting some structure in place helped. Eventually, with more adjustments to my schedule, like going to the grocery store or into the garden after lunch, it disappeared. 

I'm still going to try to get the therapy dog certification, though. Turns out that Bella is a pretty mellow canine, and the  thought of visiting a hospital or senior citizen center with a dog who loves to be petted makes me happy. And happiness is part of the final stage of right-sized retirement.

Stage 3: Noticing Life 

The first pleasant surprise happened in the car. All those years of driving to work, or to the train station or airport to get somewhere for work, I never saw anything but the inside of my own head. Finally, even the short drive to the grocery store gave me a chance to look around. We had neighbors! There's a township recreation center a mile away! I had lived in this house for over a year, and easily got lost if I wandered off my street. The first gift of retirement was grounding myself geographically. 

The more I looked around, the more I noticed details. The beautiful, tree-lined driveway down the road. The hundred-year old stone wall on the property across from ours. Neighbors walking their dogs, the local high school track team running by, and the rhythm of traffic each day.  

As my adrenalin dropped, and time seemed to stretch out interminably, I found that when I stopped fighting it, and embraced time, it felt delicious. After all, what was it that I told myself when I was working? That someday, when I had the time, I would.....(fill in the blank). So I sat quietly during those low adrenalin moments to notice what was happening around me, from the ticking of the clock in the kitchen to what was going on in my children's lives. (Wow - I have three sons!?! And a daughter-in-law!) Over the next few months, the gift of time became the gift of presence. 

So what is "right-sized retirement" for me? It's settling into the balance of structure and freedom that gives me both energy and peace. And recognizing that they can happen simultaneously or will emerge over time.

For a shot of adrenalin now and then, I am volunteering for several organizations on projects that use the skills I mastered in my professional life. This gives me structure, connection to the outside world, and reminds me how much I like my adrenalin cup one-tenth full, instead of running over. For deep immersion in presence and mindfulness, I created that garden I dreamt about from my third floor window, and started seeds in the greenhouse my supportive husband built for me as a retirement gift.

My friends ask if I will ever go back to paid work. Maybe. Maybe not. A right-sized retirement begins with financial stability. If we needed the money, I wouldn't have left my job without something else lined up. At this moment, right-sized retirement means that having the time to notice life is paying me more than any job ever could.