I love fall. It’s my favorite season, it always has been. The crisp days, the first fire, the color, the weather, the semi-relaxed days where we can wind down early because, well, it’s dark outside by 4.
Some days, I just have to lie down in the leaves and absorb the breath of the earth. I need to fill my heart with healing, to let my brain bleed it’s frenetic busyness back into the loam and the mulch that will ultimately accept all of me. Whose with me? Anyone? Anyone? You in the back? Hold my hand, we’ll run as fast as we can, laughing hysterically like children, leap for a fraction of time into the clear, deep blue sky until gravity takes us, crashing into a pile of summer’s bounty, waiting to hold us up, just an inch or so above the sweet smelling ground.
This has been a tough year for so many of us, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse for many people, but I’m trying to stay as happy and helpful as I possibly can. I turn 65 this birthday, and while I do not mind the number as an age, I have found that those digits also mean; welcome to a world of paperwork and forced change. No matter how much you’ve planned for social security and medicare and pensions, you aren’t—prepared, I mean. So, what I have to say, with respect and encouragement is—get your financial shit together as best you can, take a gummy, and learn deep breathing practices, cause you’re gonna’ wanna’ kill somebody.
I mean seriously. I have bought homes, produced movies, dealt with unions, lawyers, contracts, etc, and I was still gobsmacked. I have talked to financial advisors that can’t figure this out. It’s like a video game crossed with chess, mixed in with deliberately misleading clues, a maze that’s always foggy, and multiple appointments with the village idiot who speaks in tongues. I mean, there is a lot of stuff to find out, navigate, and execute, and they have tried really hard to make it all confounding.
I find myself continually saying that things will calm down tomorrow, next week, in a month, maybe after the first of the year, but so far, it’s always something. I have spent more time in social services offices than I would have thought possible for someone who is pretty well set up for retirement. Call for an appointment? translation: stay on hold for three and half hours only to be cut off. Bottom line? They need to streamline this stuff. I mean, come on. The people I have worked with, I must say, have been wonderful, patient, kind, commiserating, and often ready to admit that they have no friggen’ idea what’s going on with your particular case.
And just when I think I’m almost through it, here comes an email from my union pension office saying they can’t accept the marriage certificate that took me 3 months and a hundred and fifty bucks to get because of some detail completely out of my control. Then, when I call, pay more money, and fill out more forms to get something in the now shrinking time-line, I receive— for an additional fee to have it expedited—a delivery—for which I paid an outrageous shipping fee—containing a letter telling me that no such record exists. The same non-existent record that they somehow found and sent to me a couple of months before, but with an unexplained, and unasked for, redaction. Fifty bucks for rush shipping a letter to tell me it doesn’t exist when my email is right on the order. Whew, I’m tired.
Here’s my advice, start early and get to someone face to face, or at least on the phone. You won’t get the same person, and you definitely won’t get the same answer every time, but it’s somewhat helpful.
The most ironic thing is that I really thought I’d have more time to relax these days. And I kinda do. Still, the stress has been intense, so my advice is simple, and the same as always. Get out in nature, when you see colors you cannot resist, take them into your soul and hold them there. Some days, feel the breeze, and some days, the rain. Preserve your sanity and your peace with as much effort as you have to put into unraveling the tangled mass of life and documents that constitutes retiring.
Not that I’m even really retiring. I mean I have a new book coming out soon, it was supposed to be November 11th, but with all this other noise, I have to push it back into December. I love writing, but I don’t so much love the process of promotion and the technology one has to master just to promote your little work of art. Art=good. Promotion=pain in the ass.
So, I’m shooting for December 6th, to release a book, to slow down, to stop desperately calling government agencies, and to shout to the heavens, “I’m finally done!”
And if that date doesn’t work, well, maybe the day after, or the week after, or maybe after the first of the year.
In the meantime, I will jump into leaves.
Lie down on the ground and admire the trees.
Close my eyes when the breeze hits my face.
And get back to filling in forms with a semblance of calm.
However thin that calm may be.
Good luck to us all.
Shari, November 2nd, 2025