Introduction to
How to Plan a Great Second Life
An absurd
idea...
When I was ten, a book like this would have
seemed absurd. That was 1948 and mostly I remember two things—a
loud neighborhood party when the war ended (that was World War II, and we were
supposedly sound asleep several doors away) and my mother crying when Franklin
Delano Roosevelt died.
During my earlier years, say 20 to 40, I was
too busy just surviving and doing what everybody else did to give it much
thought. My only sense of mortality was one night, at 38, realizing that I
would no longer get that desperate call from the Cubs to put on the gear, get
behind the plate, and bring them a pennant. Old age and death seemed a million
years away.
The crack in my immortality came when I was
50, the year my 27-year marriage hit the shoals while our girls were in
Blame the “Boomers”!
That it does exist
you can blame on the “boomers”—if you’re into blaming. It took their
reaching 50 to provide much public focus on a sensible, rewarding older age.
What put my pen in this pasture was a chance
remark on the radio, something about our current life expectancy being about 80
and the 50-80 later-life vacuum being just as long as the maturing bubble for
those 20-50.
Then just about everything I heard or read
for the next two weeks seemed to be about retirement and nobody being prepared—like me. Was that true? I love research, I’m a writer, and the line was drawn.
This book has answers
What I found is on these pages.
I was sixty when I started this book. I’m 65 now and the first printing has
sold out. In the past five years I also offered scores of speeches and
workshops about second life planning and design. To my delight, I found that my
book was on track and its contents were both helpful and need-meeting. So in
this second edition I am mildly updating the first,
somewhat simplifying the process, making the examples easier to relate to, and
releasing it in a smaller paperback form. It even has a new website section
accessible at no charge to those who wish to download and print out clean,
unused charts and fill-in forms.
I also discovered that hardly a sexagenarian
had heard much about or seriously planned for his or her own “second
life.” But they—we—weren’t
alone. Those noisy, puffing boomers, bless
them, hadn’t either. As for anyone younger than
them thinking about their later years, I might as well be writing about corset
hooks or one-horse shays. (Their day will come...)
A last thought. I could have moaned for
several hundred pages about our collective lack of preparation, or just listed
700 or 7,000 ways to get ready. But who wants to read that? What I really want
to know (and share with you) is summed up in two questions:
(1) How can you and I lead more joyous and productive years by
creating our own “Great
Second Life”?
(2) And, specifically, what can we do now to prepare ourselves
to live each of the days we have left to its fullest?
The answers are found in Parts One and Two.
This book is a reference guide, a blueprint,
and a map all in one. Please take its words and its process and from them
create your own wildly exciting, unique, envious Great Second Life.
Enough babbling. Neither of us is getting any younger. Let me find my
specs and let’s get going...
|
Gordon Burgett |
(800) 563-1454 |