At my age I’ve known many people who decided to retire.  Some have embraced their new life, finding pleasure in the new opportunities all this free time gives them – some to spend more time with family and friends, others to volunteer for organizations and causes they believe in, still others to follow individual pursuits that their working life didn’t allow for – reading, taking classes, gardening, travelling, improving their golf game.  The list goes on.  A year or two after their retirement, you ask, “How’s retirement?” and these people give you the stock answer of how they don’t know how they ever had enough time to work.

Others, though, are at loose ends.  They visit old friends at the office and go out for lunch, only to come home dejected with the realization they are no longer part of the working force which have the office (or another kind of job) to return to.  Eventually, most of these people find worthwhile activities (as in the list above) or they find another job – full-time or part-time, something to fill the empty hours and augment the bank account. The lucky ones would be hired as consultants, drawing both a pension and a paycheck; the others would be offered a part-time job at minimum wage or told to look elsewhere.

And then there's Brett Favre – choosing to retire at the end of one season, choosing to make a comeback at the beginning of the next.  

The word decide comes from the Latin decidere, meaning “to cut off.” In other words, once we decide to take one course of action, we're cutting off other options, since most of us can't do two things at once.  (My apologies to you multi-taskers who claim you can.) 

I'm reminded of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken."  Looking back at his life, the poet recalls a time when "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/ and sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveller. . . ." (It was that both/and. . . either/or dilemma.) The poet chose the road "less travelled by"  and later wonders how his life would have turned out had he chosen the other.  Of course, he’ll never know.

It must be hard to be Brett Favre – wanting, on the one hand, to retire and wanting, on the other hand, to do what he loves best – play football.  Seeing his wife, Deanna, follow him out of the airplane on the newscast last night, reminded me of all those wives who have followed their husbands into the midst of waiting photographers.  They’re smiling on the outside but what are they really thinking?  With Deanna, for example, is she thinking,  “That’s my man, Brett, whatever he wants is fine with me”  . . .or perhaps, “I wish this husband of mine could make up his mind!” 

I’m not a great sports fan but I do wish both Brett Favre and the Packers well this season.  If Brett helps bring the Packers to victory, all those fans clamoring for his return will say, “I told you so,” but if things don’t work out so well, the others will say, “I told you so.” 

One thing is certain though: the next time Favre retires, there won’t be nearly so much hoopla as we saw this past year.