In my career as CEO, CAO or other executive level positions, I was active in many different meetings, projects and committees effortlessly flipping from one to another, always keeping a very full schedule. Full steam ahead on as many projects as possible and if work didn’t provide enough challenge, why not volunteer or better yet get a part-time job or hobby to fill in the odd free weekend. And why did I think I would be any different in retirement or even with the complications brought on by my diagnosis of Parkinson’s?
Aye yes, retirement! Sleeping in late, afternoon naps, out for coffee with friends or spending the day in the garden or shop puttering on a small project. What happened to those dreamy ideas of my golden years? Wait a minute, the volunteer work with Community Care was just to help out my friend Mike with his project, then came the opportunity to be a Brokered Helper and pick up a little extra cash. That won’t be a conflict with my PCKC board position and my volunteer role at the Mount and doing fund raising for Parkinson’s. But how does it all start to pile up with home obligation to two big golden retrievers that need daily walking, my boxing classes and Nordic walking for my own fitness?
And things got more complicated. My role at the Mount expanded to being the Volunteer Food Center Manager assuming a lot of the cooking duties for catering events. The mentoring of new food entrepreneurs and helping with volume food product became a regular thing. A food diversion program was my idea and got me committed to Saturday noon and Monday afternoons in the kitchen. This was now a 30 hour per week obligation. The PCKC position turned into being the treasurer with a year-end coming up and budgeting for next year. The brokered helper role was soon 5 mornings a week in gardens all over town with fall clean up on us.
Our Parkinson’s Chapter was also in need of help as we were trying to transitions from the original leaders of the organization to fresh energy to let the “retire” from their demanding roles and spread the workload out to the members. I took on the transition coordinator role, collecting job descriptions, designing organization charts and building consensus. The plan needed to be done to provide us with a new structure for the next year.
And why not start to gear up my “buy & sell” hobby which took a lot of screen time attending local auctions online and in person. It is always easier to sell than buy and there definitely was a need to sell more to fund further purchases. More time was spent online to negotiate prices, arrange pickups and list more products.
The final straw was the opportunity to expand the foodservice at the Mount to three more locations in the city. With two options pushed to the back burner, the third was agreed upon and off we were on another time consuming project. And me, I was about to collapse, the cold winter was complicating my Parkinson’s symptoms and my ability to rebound from a string of hard shifts was not there anymore.
What is a guy to do? I needed a change in activity level to get some balance back to my life and I told the board at the Mount we needed a mini-me to help with the new café project. I knew that this was my breaking point and action was imperative.