Abraham Lincoln

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

You can never go wrong with Lincoln, and what can be more meaningful than that? This quote means a bit more today as I approach my first full year in retirement.

Nobody gets this perfectly right, and we certainly do not think this way in our day-to-day lives, but when you look back over your years, it really shows how important it is to have meaning, make a difference in some way, and add value.

As I come to the end of my first year in retirement, I realize that when I was younger, I had plenty of time ahead of me but far too much going on. Now I finally have the freedom to do almost anything, but the clock itself feels more visible because life and aging make time feel finite in a way it never did before.

You never want to reach the exit and look back thinking you should have done things differently or focused on the wrong things. I look back at the years I spent at work, the great people I worked with, how they treated me, and the relationships we built. That became a great life experience in itself.

There will always be things we cannot do for various reasons, but the goal is to do as much as you can, when you can, for yourself and others. Life is always happening while we are busy planning for retirement, waiting for things to slow down, or hoping life becomes calmer. Maybe we spend too much time waiting for the perfect conditions instead of simply living while life is already happening around us.

I think this was Lincoln’s message when he guided the nation through one of its most difficult periods while carrying enormous personal burdens himself. He understood better than most that simply surviving life is not the same as truly living it.

Is it better to live ninety years cautiously doing very little, or eighty years fully engaged in life, experiences, and memories? That is the message.

A good memory lasts forever. The fancy car eventually becomes scrap metal, and the big house eventually belongs to someone else. But the memories stay with you until the very end. That is living. Accumulate the memories, not the stuff.

He definitely had life in his years.

If you look at Lincoln’s life, he speaks with authority on the subject. He lost children, guided a nation through a civil war, dealt with impossible personalities and enormous national division, yet still left behind one of the most remarkable legacies in American history.

Maybe the real goal is not simply reaching old age, but reaching it without feeling like you missed your own life along the way.

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