The retirement week in review

It's been 9 days since I left work and it feels like a month. Tonight I turned on the TV to look for a weeknight show I thought was on and only then realized it was Sunday. A part of the time uncertainty comes from being in the altered reality that is the real estate market in Silicon Valley. We listed our house officially on the Monday of my last week at Google. By this past Tuesday after 8 days we had accepted an offer and were in escrow. It took me longer to sell some of my old furniture on the internal MTV for-sale group at work. Despite the fast pace of the execution, psychologically it felt like the whole thing was happening in slow motion. Also the loss of awareness of the passage of time is in part because I have allowed myself the luxury of leaving large swaths of my day unscheduled and picking up activities as I feel the urge. This is quite a bit different from other time off I've taken, including extended leaves of absence from work that I typically had intentionally well structured. My comfort level with this apparently lackadaisical state of affairs is something of interest to me, but neither because of regret about lowered productivity nor concerns about laziness. It just feels quite natural to me now to react to a given moment organically. So I might go from doing some packing for our move to reading the newspaper to taking a walk with the dogs to working on our new financial plan to...taking a nap. I expect this to change some as we reinvent our lives and get plugged into a whole new set of pursuits. But right now we can't really pursue all the things we have slated for investigation to fill our time. So this is how I'm reacting to the welcome problem of having spare time.