What IS Pretirement?

Such a clever word . . . When Rachel first described our forthcoming trip this way it appealed to me immediately even though I wasn’t really sure what it would come to mean. I don’t even think Rachel knew. To break the word down is quite easy: The prefix, “pre” obviously means “before” and the root “tire” … ummm well that’s a bit more difficult. For us, it would obviously mean that we would not be working, but how would our lives really change? Today I had a bit of an epiphany and I will share with you what “pretirement” means to me.

Our first month of pretirement was mostly spent in the west camping, hiking, and exploring parts new to us. Our first two weeks of Spanish classes in Mendoza included a biking trip to wine vineyards and a trek up a 3600 m 'hill' but a list of these activities isn't really what pretirement is about.

How ironic that I learned what it is to pretire today. The morning’s situation was stressful: we had to move out of our shared apartment at 10am without a place for our things until we moved into our new apartment at 3pm. Our plan was to hang out in the Plaza de Indepencia and just pass the time. Little did we know there would be a music festival complete with children singing, playing local instruments, and dancing in costume on stilts to entertain us for quite some time. Eventually the gorgeous garden/plaza of the restaurant we passed en route to the plaza finally called our names so we decided to treat ourselves given the difficulty of our situation.

I think I will let the pictures of the restaurant do most of the talking, but let me say that in a perfect outdoor setting, complete with palm trees and fountain, we had the best meal of our trip. It was this meal and our predicament that shed the light on “pretirement” for me. We dined for about two hours, conversing only in Spanish with our server, over three delightful tapas all paired with a bottle of delicious red, where were only to outdone by our perfect steak. Rachel had the wherewithal to sit back from her wine and declare, “This is pretirement.”

That declaration was a reminder that it’s important to realize my position at the moment. I was reminded that I am pretired: that I can take life slowly, satisfy my curiosities, learn new cultures, and just enjoy every minute of this new life. And I’m lucky enough to pretire with someone I love.