Retirement should be a progressive, not a retrogressive, period. Men and women who have withdrawn from daily toil in their usual occupation, business, or profession may and should look forward to continuing achievement, usefulness, and happiness. The right sense of retirement includes rest without idleness; changed activity, not inactivity; independence, not dependence; continued growth, not stagnation; newness, not staleness of life. This sense of retirement is not attainable through human thinking and planning, but unfolds through the understanding of God and man.
Viewed through the material senses, retirement very frequently presents unpleasant aspects. Sense-influenced thought would classify and catalogue one who has retired with such labels as old, handicapped, incompetent, lonely, dissatisfied, indolent, insecure, worthless, outworn. It pictures this unfortunate person as being subject to so-called laws and forces, all contriving to lessen his health, harmony, and happiness, and ultimately to put an end to life itself. What a discouraging concept! Happily this is not the true view. It is an illusion, which disappears when it is rejected in favor of the spiritual sense of being. We need to make this rejection and to accept the spiritual as the real, "for," wrote the great apostle, "to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Rom. 8:6).
Looking through the lens of Christian Science, we behold in the cessation of customary human activities nothing to alarm us, nothing that is depressing or dismal. The reason is simple enough, for, in Science, man is seen as the spiritual reflection of God. God is Spirit, and so man reflects the power and permanence of Spirit; God is divine Principle, and so man images forth the order and harmonious action of immutable law; God is infinite Mind, and so man everlastingly manifests the intelligence, capacity, and talent of Mind; God is eternal Life, and so man expresses the continuity and vitality of God's being. This is the real man, and he is wholly spiritual, independent of matter and exempt from its supposed laws, for he exists as idea, living, moving, and having his being in God. As Mind's perfect representative, this real man is of inestimable value to God, and consequently to the whole universe.
