Review: Poised for Retirement: Moving from Anxiety to Zen

Poised for Retirement: Moving from Anxiety to Zen by Louise Nayer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this an enjoyable description of the author’s thoughts and actions prior to retiring, with annual updates for a few years post retirement. I find myself in roughly the same position in my career that the author was in at the beginning of the book. No surprise, I found the author has many of the same questions and worries and aspirations about her upcoming retirement as I have for my future. She provides some of the answers she reached, but also writes about the outcomes of her choices, and of her days in her new routine. I found this comforting. The author is a creative writing instructor, so I got the expected lengthy, poetically descriptive passages. The author also intended this to be a self-help book, so mixed in with her personal narrative are some paragraphs providing suggestions on things to consider or actions to accomplish to help lead to a successful retirement. I found these oddly placed suggestions, usually dropped into a narrative stream, were not very interesting or valuable, similar to many other books and matching common sense. The narrative is the value here. I greatly enjoyed the book. It hit the points I was like talking to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a long while – they meander around the decisions and actions of their lives, sometimes big ,sometimes little, always with reflection.

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