Page Turner

The main tension in my pursuit of early retirement is quite simple (and enviable I’ll concede.)

I love my job.

And it’s not just that I like what I do during the day. (I get a kick out of shooting the breeze with my patients and getting to know them and finding out what’s troubling them. I love performing the variety of procedures that I perform to help them. I love working with other healthcare providers towards common and unambiguously worthwhile goals.)

It’s also that my chosen career had such a long period of training. To be precise I studied and trained for 11 years after finishing college to become what I am today.

So I’m not being disingenuous when I say that if I won the lottery today, I would not quit my job tomorrow.

I have written about this paradox before in this post. The main message being that working for the sake of working is a far different (and presumably more enjoyable) thing from working for the sake of money. And so I suspect financial independence would make my work even more meaningful.

But lately I’ve been fast forwarding in my mind 10 or 15 years to the point in time when I’ve already hit my number. And I’m seriously wondering whether or not I may in fact retire early when I reach financial independence.

And the reason for this is not because I expect to enjoy my work any less. It is because I am plagued by this nagging suspicion that there are not enough hours, or days, or weeks, or months left on this earth.

There are so many things that I wish to do.

And right now my life just feels so completely full between my working, and spending time with my family, and blogging, and reading, and playing the occasional round of golf.

I sleep about six or seven hours a night. And my days are always packed tight.

There are always five books that I am waiting to read. (Which is a simple thing for me to do during a week of vacation, but a tough thing for me to do during a month of my working life.)

I am dying to give myself the opportunity to write for 2 to 3 hours every day. For if this blog has taught me nothing else, it is that I love writing. (Which was a complete and utter surprise to me.)

Ever since I read this book I have been wanting to try my hand at running every day.

Plus I’d love to give myself the opportunity to grow some serious vegetables in my front and backyards.

Realistic depiction of me as an early retiree in my portland back yard?

And I find that why play golf more than twice a month, particularly when I play two or three times in the same week, my short game gets pretty dependable and I score better.

And I used to love drawing but I never do that anymore.

So despite my sincere belief in the power of small efforts repeated over time, I am growing impatient.

These are all things that I want to do right now (along with traveling more and sleeping more, and driving less.)

So early retirement begins to become something other than an escape hatch.

It becomes an open door that I just cannot wait to walk through.

I don’t see a life without employment.

I see a life filled with other things, triaged only by their intrinsic value to me.

A selfish time. Like summer vacation as a child.

But I try to take this impatience for freedom as a sign of progress.

For I think this means that I am not viewing my life as a treadmill that I cannot wait to get off of.

I think the best metaphor for my life since I began to pursue early retirement is something like this: my life is a well written novel. It’s a real page turner and I can’t wait to see what happens next.  And it’s so gripping and interesting that I keep on turning the pages each one faster than the next. And when I get to the last few pages I just have this feeling that my main regret will be that it all ended too soon.