We Keep Growing—Even in Retirement

By Harold Klemp

An ECKist from England wrote me. He was telling me about how years ago when he was a young man, he was planning for his retirement. In those days, he said he still believed in retirement. You’re young, and what do you do? You work your whole life so that someday you can retire. And do what? Wait? Just stop living? As the young man grew up, he found a fallacy in the idea of retirement. Even though you retire from your job, you cannot retire from living.

A lot of people make that mistake when they retire from a job. In a way, they almost retire from living. This is when all their problems start to increase. Because they stop learning how to take care of themselves.

As we get older, our bodies don’t respond the same way they used to. That means the foods and the nutrition that we were used to just aren’t adequate anymore. Survival is a day-by-day lesson. It means you’ve got to keep learning, retired or not. Sometimes when people retire, they forget to keep growing in the areas of survival. They forget to ask, “How do I eat better?” or “What better nutrition do I need now? What isn’t in the soil today that used to be there in 1940 when good food came straight from the land?” Things have changed. You’ve got to keep growing, because that’s part of the spiritual law of survival.

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Excerpted from Our Spiritual Wake-Up Calls, Mahanta Transcripts, Book 15.