By some amazing coincidence, my planning is towards age 60 and there are exactly 60 months in between! That presents an opportunity for some freakin’ awesome symmetry and ritual around the number 60. I have a laundry list of to-do items, old bucket list items to reconsider, and even a list from my sister for her 60 items at turning 60. Plus, my original 50×50 list can inspire me.

So let’s kick off the shenanigans for 60 things to do before I turn 60 (60×60).

[Editor’s note: I flipped the order of #1 and 2 in my tracker, so planning my life now comes before planning my death! hehehe]

1. Plan my life. I mentioned in a previous post that my current personal development model no longer works for me. I’m using it as my featured image for this post, but things have shifted around within the different colour energies for me. I should update that. A new framework, if you will. That isn’t just about the framework; it’s about ensuring I have the right mental platform to get the most out of my next 25 years.

2. Plan my death. Wait, what? No, that’s not a typo. If I had to guess, I’d say my life expectancy is around 80 years. So another 25 to go. And as I see others experiencing a decline in their final years, I find certain things unacceptable. Things that I don’t consider worth living through. Mental decline is at the top of the list. So I want to figure out what circumstances would add up to not only a DNR note on my medical file, but also likely something resembling MAID. While my faculties are still with me. It’s still theoretical, but not as theoretical as it once was. So, sometime in the next five years, I’m going to figure that out.

3. Plan my retirement. In a little over 1500 days, I’m going to retire from the public service. I won’t retire from the field, at least not in terms of my writing, as there is a bunch of stuff I still want to write about. But I want to not only have good plans to get me to that date with what I want to accomplish still in my career, but I also want detailed plans for post-retirement. In my previous post (5 more trips around the sun – part 2: An inventory, not a pity party), I mentioned the balance for friendships between casual friends, friends, close friends, besties and family. From some of my early reading about retirement, I know that many people dramatically miss the casual and regular friends that disappear when they leave a proximity-based social network. In short, you lose all the human interaction you had on a daily basis when you depart from work. Just as you might have felt loss from elementary school in the summer, or when graduating high school, college, university, previous jobs, etc. Your daily supply of “Hey, how’s it going? Okay. You? Staying out of trouble. You?” didn’t seem like it would matter, but you noticed its absence. Part of my planning for new activities in the next five years will be ensuring a network exists when the old work-based one disappears.

4. Read 300 books. That one is going to be a bit tough, but 5×60 seems like a good goal. First on the list? Crime and Punishment. Well, maybe second, since I just finished Mike Brown’s book about killing Pluto. Andrea and Jacob got me an updated Kindle for my birthday, although I’m not sure how old my first one is. According to Amazon, I registered it on January 13, 2011, but I’m not sure if that is the date I registered it with Amazon writ large, or just registered with Amazon Canada. It served me well for 12 years, but I really wanted backlighting and touchscreen options. Not enough to buy one and override the existing one, which was still functional, but I guess I talked about it enough that Andrea and Jacob wanted to shut me up. Anyway, the new reading goal is set. Let’s see how I do. There will be a LOT of series in there. I think I’m going to throw a wrinkle in, though — 20% or 60 of them have to be non-fiction. Gulp. I am looking forward to reading NF on a touchscreen, though, as it is WAY easier to take notes with highlighting, etc.

5. Write 5 books. I know, I know. Holy crap. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of me, I’m not sure what will. I know three of the titles, have basic outlines for them, and I have some ideas for about another 8 that will need to be prioritized. And for the wrinkle? One of them has to be fiction. Yep, that should get the juices flowing.

That’s a pretty impressive set of goals. Some were obvious, some not so much. But they resonate with me pretty strongly. So, let’s get this party started. And that’s only the first 5.