5 shockers learned from my Retirement Practice Year (so far)

From a jungle in Central America to the floor of America’s favorite retailer?

Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash

I got laid off again from my job working with the state in September ‘22. It’s like my 3rd layoff in six years. How does anyone lose a government job? Only me. Thinking that temporary would definitely become permanent. Wrong again, grasshopper.

So I decided that this would be a good time to prepare for what I do next in those supposedly golden years called retirement before retirement becomes a permanent thing.

I am taking a pre-retirement year to plan for the inevitable. And I may just trademark “Retirement Practice Year” (RPY) before it becomes a worldwide thing.

So far my RPY is off to a good start.

I finally, finally — got the balls to journey to a new country where I resided in a jungle for almost 30 days. I traveled 7 hours in search like my hero, Thoreau — “Because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Amazingly I did it myself.

Thus my trip teaching English (and caring for wayward dogs) came to being in blistering humid Costa Rica. Yes, I missed the memo that…