Investments

Many folks seem to spend a lot of time actively preparing for their retirement. IRAs, stocks, bonds, investments. Regular meetings with personal account and money managers. Endless hours on the internet tracking and charting, researching and deciding. Blood pressure rising and falling along with the Dow Jones or NASDAQ averages. You can see it on the faces of many the day after the stock market mis-steps or takes a dive, for they wear a certain level of pallid shock like a mask.

Yet to me retirement somehow feels like something that only other people have to deal with. This is an issue that I am pretty disconnected with for the most part and cannot find within me to take all that seriously. Some folks that I have talked to that are struggling to pay their bills or purposefully cutting back on their leisure or travel budgets still work to put as much of their paycheck as possible into their retirement accounts. While, intellectually, I do appreciate the idea of proper planning for tomorrow, doesn't it seem that folks are so busy focusing on their tomorrows that they are missing out on their todays?

I remember being at special celebration times with my daughter when she was young. Often I would be handed the video camera to record the event. I always hated this responsibility. You cannot be present in the moment and enjoy it to its fullest if you have one eye closed and the other is staring intently into a viewer. The investment made in embracing today with both eyes open can often have a much bigger payoff than that of some distant tomorrow that is anything but guaranteed.