Before you write that retirement book, live it

After a long career, authorship can seem the ideal next act: purposeful, dignified and faintly immortal. Yet, the most important work of later life may not be what we produce, but who we become. At some point after retirement – usually after the farewell lunch, the framed photograph and the first few suspiciously empty Tuesdays – a thought arrives with alarming seriousness: Perhaps I should write a book.