Retiree Explores New Phase of Life

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A friend once told Dorothy “Dot” Wiley to think of retirement as “purposeful living.”

“I think sometimes people retire ‘from’ something,” she says. “But really it’s retiring ‘to’ something. It’s kind of like your next phase of life.”

Certainly, Wiley has embraced this new phase during the eight years since retiring.

She has ridden a camel in Egypt, traveled by riverboat on the Nile and explored Italy’s vineyards. Nearer to home, she has fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a master gardener and has begun playing more tennis, joining a team for the first time in her life.

“I think you kind of grow into your retirement,” Wiley says. “It just sort of evolves.”

When she first retired, after working 20 years in a New Hampshire school department, following years at home raising her children, her primary focus was spending more time with her five grandchildren, her grown children and her husband.

Next up on her bucket list, becoming a master gardener. Having grown up on a farm in a small Midwestern town, gardening has been a lifelong love. She took courses at the University of New Hampshire and put in the volunteer work to achieve the master gardener status.

“I admit, I thought I’d have a lot more free time in retirement,” Wiley says. “I thought I’d get all those projects done that I’d been thinking about all those years.”

Though she has finished some, Wiley realized it’s best to keep your eyes, and mind, open to new opportunities - like travel.

Since her husband isn’t much of a traveler, she reconnected with her college roommate, and her sister, to travel on group tours in Italy, Ireland, Greece and Egypt.

The opportunities afforded by tour companies have been priceless. Traveling along the Nile, children on homemade paddleboards sang rounds in English to earn money to support their families. While on the same trip, they visited a mall in Cairo 11 stories high. The dichotomy didn’t go unnoticed by the group.

“I come from a very small community so the world has always been a fascinating place for me,” she says. “I just like to see how the rest of the world lives.”

Essentially Wiley has found that the mindful practicing of retirement, or pre-retirement, can pave the way for a successful new phase of life.

“Hopefully you’re in a financial position, for the first time in your life, that allows you to do the things you wouldn’t have had the time, or financial support, to do before,” Wiley says. “And now that your kids are grown up you also have fewer responsibilities.”

As she sees it, “It’s just how busy you want to be and what you want to do to be busy. And being open to new things. That’s a key characteristic to making the most of this phase of life.”

Photos taken by Dorothy Wiley on tour in Egypt.