TOP-TEN ACTIVITIES TO PURSUE

WHEN YOU ARE RETIRED

Top-Ten Retirement Activities

An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven!
— James Thomson

You can feel whole and alive again at any age provided you have an overriding purpose other than to just exist in comfort.

Here are the top-ten retirement activities that will help you retire happy.

1. Have a major life purpose. 
2. Be open to learning new things. 
3. Accept that money will buy style and comfort, but it won't buy you happiness. 
4. Learn how to enjoy solitude. 
5. Find a retirement job that you can work at temporarily as a fun job. 
6. Maintain old friendships and create new friends. 
7. Indulge in regular strenuous exercise so that you will be physically fit and able to enjoy your retirement activities. 
8. Read The Joy of Not Working and How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free. 
9. Travel a lot.  
10. Find many ways to connect with the world.

Top-Ten Retirement Activities That Are Never Too Late to Pursue Unless You Are Dead

1. Start a Newspaper: Mary Baker Eddy was 87 when she founded the Christian Science Monitor.
2. Obtain a University Degree. Doris Eaton Travis was 88 when she graduated with a degree in history from the University of Oklahoma.
3. Learn How to Read Better: Franklin Tennessee resident David Eugene Ray was ninety-nine when he started to learn how to read.
4. Run a Marathon. Ed Benham was 84 when he ran a marathon in 4 hours, 17 minutes, and 51 seconds.
5. Go to Jail for a Good Cause: Doctor Benjamin Spock was 83 when he was arrested at Cape Canaveral, Florida for demonstrating for world peace.
6. Operate a Ski Club: Lloyd Lambert, at 87, was an active skier and operating a seventy-plus Ski Club that had 3,286 members including a ninety-seven-year-old.
7. Climb the Highest Mountain That You Can Find: Hulda Crooks was 91 when she climbed Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental United States.
8. Continue Working as an Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright, a pioneer in the modern style and considered one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century architecture, was 89 when he designed his last building.
9. Start a Symphony Orchestra: Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra at 80 and recorded twenty albums in his nineties. At the age of 96, Stokowski - an eternal optimist no doubt - signed a six-year recording contract.
10. Write a Book: At the prime age of ninety-eight, Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux sold her first book for a small fortune. The great-great-grandmother, an unschooled and unskilled writer, turned a memoir she wrote in a writing class for senior citizens into a book.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 by Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of The World's Best Retirement Book
All Rights Reserved