Posts Tagged ‘Memoir’

Secret #3 of a Successful retirement

Monday, April 22nd, 2013

Take Time To Get To Know Yourself

At 61, I decided I need a better understand of “Why am I the person that I am?”  It was not an effort to better myself or to settle any depression or haunting problems but instead it was an exploration that led me far into my memory.Tall_Grass_Cover_estore[1]

The Swedish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life can only be understood backwards.”

I had just retired and I had realized that in my life and career I had repeated my same victories and had as well repeated my same failings.  As hard as I tried I could not change, the pattern of my life seemed to have been predetermined.  I wanted to know how that pattern had been set and “Why I was who I was?”

Two other factors entered into my decision to write my memoir or what I call a Life Review.  First I didn’t know how much more time I had and I wanted to make the most of the rest of my life; that is I wanted to live it to the fullest and I wanted to concentrate on my strengths and avoid my weaknesses.  Second, I wanted to leave something behind.  I know more about

George Washington and Abe Lincoln then I know about either of my grandfathers and I didn’t want to die at my death.

I’ve been asked “Who would want to read about your life?”  I’ve learned not my children and not many of my relatives, its mostly been people that I don’t know.  My hope is the most interested will be my grand children and those that follow them.  I also hope that they can gain some courage from what I’ve done and strive to find their creative side.

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Ten Steps to a Happy Retirement

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

Thus far retirement for me has been a joy and the deeper I get into it the better I’m getting at it.  The reason this has happened is because I’ve seen retirement as a new beginning not a journey to the end.  I seek new adventures, new challenges and new friends.  Here’s a list of the 10 things that I’ve put into my

life that has made my retirement a joy.

  1. Love my wife. I’ve promised to love my wife as much as I love myself and work to make sure she knows it.
  2. Stay physically active.  This first required me to lose some weight and get physically fit.  I joined a gym and started going five days a week.  I bought a good bike, a $2500 bike.  I’m committed to ride it three days a week when the weather permits and it’s in the back seat when ever we travel by car.
  3. Form a Guy Group. Found a small group of guys that can go on a “Guy Trip” once a year or more.Lee, Ron, Phil, Kerry at Lewis Mt. Cabins
  4.  Build a business.  I’m building a retirement business that produces an ongoing stream of income.  To do this I must keep learning and challenging my mind.
  5.  Travel.  We’re seeing the world and experience how other people live.  Our trips to Asia and Central America and Europe and Russia has opened my eyes to the rest of the world and has made me appreciate other peoples ways of life as well as the quality of my life.From Russia with Love
  6. Be competitive.  I like to measure myself so I qualified to run the 100 meter and 200 meter dashes in the 2011 Senior Olympics, I’ll be cycling in the 2013 Senior Olympics and I’ll do my first Triathlon in May.  I’ve run four mini marathons 15 5k races,

    I think it’s important to have goals that you are working towards.2009 Indy Mini Marathon

  7. Build Family Traditions.  I want our family to do things after I’m gone because that’s what our family dose and that’s how our family stays together.
  8. Write a memoir.  I don’t know much about my grandfathers, I know nothing of my great-grandfathers.  That’s not going to happen to me, I wrote Tall Grass and have had it published.  I’m leaving something of myself behind.
  9. Stay involved with my children.  I believe that it’s part of my responsibility as a parent to help my children to have a better life then I’ve had, thus they need to learn from me and I need to continue to help them.holidaygroup
  10. Gather memories.  I’ve been alive now for 25,003 days, at any given time I can only remember 50 to 75 of them.  I need to have more memorable days.

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My Life Review and What if?

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

I wrote Tall Grass for me, to gain a better understanding of who I am and why I am, for my family, most of whom don’t care to read it now but I suspect will read it when I’m gone and that’s OK, and for others in hopes that other people will write about their early life to better understand themselves.  I’ve found that most of the visitors to my blog are coming through Search and they are in some form using the keyword “Life Review”, so I feel that I have achieved all of my primary goals for Tall Grass.

The other day at lunch a close friend, who had read Tall Grass, asked me questions about my childhood and some of the things that he had read.  Many of the questions I couldn’t answer because they were things that I might have known at one time but apparently weren’t important to me at the time and now I don’t remember.  This caused me to  realize that who I am is a result of what happened to me in my early years but it’s also as a result of what I deemed to be important at the time, and I think that was controlled by my emotional state at the time.  So if my emotional state had been different the results would have been different.

I mention this because I am in the early stages of developing a new website, BestofUs.com, built around the phrase “It Takes the Best of Us to Raise a Child”.  It will be a closed circle social networking website built around the young children in our life’s, the children that we want to have an influence on even though they may live hundreds of miles from us, our grandchildren, or our nieces or nephews, or the children of close friends.  If as a close knit community, I call it a village, we can add some stability, some emotional strength achieved by knowing that they belong, maybe the children in our life’s can become the best that they can be.

I just wonder

how my brothers and my life’s would have turned out different if there had been a tight circle that could have supported us after our mother died.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress with BestofUs.

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<span>About</span> KERRY J. GRINKMEYER

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Kerry is new contemporary author and the web publisher of BestofUS.com and SmartestofUS.com. Kerry is a retired financial advisor having built and sold one of the largest American Express Financial Advisors franchises in the United States.

Shortly after retirement in 2005 he started a self-examination process that took four years to complete.  The result of the self-examination is Tall Grass, a memoir of a young boy, Kobie, growing up in the Midwest and having his beliefs in God, family, and love tested, destroyed and reshaped.  Grasshopper, his sequel to Tall Grass, which will follow Kobie through his high school and college years in Indiana, will be published in 2012.

Kerry lives with his wife Nita in Birmingham, Alabama.  They have two children and three grandchildren.  Kerry has recently qualified to represent the state of Alabama in the 2011 Senior Olympics in the 100 and 200 meter dashes, he is a repeat participant in the Indy Mini Marathon, and a world traveler having spent extended time in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Europe, and Russia.  He and Nita plan to visit Africa in 2011.  Their travels are chronicled at

http://bestofustravelers.blogspot.com/

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