Hi, Boomers,
It is with somewhat regret that I am signing off my blog from this bloodspot website and will now be blogging from my website: www.joanfrancesmoran.com This site is a dedicated to a new direction in my professional journey: the journey of a public speaker.
It is with great joy that I am in the throws of changing directions in my life. Why not at 67 years old? There is no better time than now to rejuvenate my life and give it a different direction, still with passion and still with desire. I will not, however, be giving up teaching yoga. Yoga is my passion and my life. They are one for me and I cannot live without yoga to nourish my soul and bring peace into my life. Yoga has given me so many unbelievable gifts. I am blessed daily and I have deep and profound gratitude for these gifts. In time, I will simply scale down my version of teaching yoga.
I don’t believe in retirement. Retirement is just waiting to die so that isn’t an option. I believe in living life to the fullest always. When I wrote my memoir, Sixty, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer, I thought it was a totally fun moment in my life. The writing and publishing brought me joy and honor. But it was just a book and a book has a shelf-life if it isn’t a classic or a bests seller. But a life has no such thing as a shelf-life. Life is lived on a continuum with curves and variables and losses and struggles and joys and successes. Life is incredibly interesting because it has so many nuances and levels and loves and desires and dreams and passions. What a rides this life!!
I don’t know when it was that I decided to be a public speaker. Maybe it was always in me and it took writing my book to bring it out. After all, my memoir was a window to my soul. My beautiful close friends have told me that reading my book was like having a conversation with me in a private room. How splendid! A very long time ago, I was a public speaker in high school and won all the major speech contests in the state of California. Maybe that young girl of 16 is still in me and maybe that girl wanted to come out again and speak.
Seventy-six million baby boomers will are retiring or about to retire. This moment in our social and cultural and economic history will transform society. I don’t know in exactly what ways, but they will undoubtedly be transformative. I wanted to take a little corner of this phenomenon and talk about what it means to retire for our generation. The clearest response to this idea is that we will not retire like our parents. Boomers will lead the way to a new paradigm of how we will grow older. Leaving the work force does not mean that we will give up on life; leaving the work force is the begging our our Act 3, the best and most exciting time our our life.
And that is exactly the reason I am altering the dynamics of the last eight years of my life. There are other passions to explore and other dreams to pursue. This is my journey. I hope your journey is as awesome.
See you on www.joanfrancesmoran.com
Namaste
Joan