Have you ever shuddered at the thought of retirement? Considered it a fearful, even inconceivable proposition? “Retire? Why in the world would you want to do that?

In Gaining Altitude, Rebecca Milliken tells the saga of her odyssey into retirement after turning 60, an odyssey that included changing much more than she had anticipated. She invites the audience to accompany her in this memoir as she recounts the highs and lows of laying the groundwork for retirement, making the leap, and finding her way to what lay beyond.

The journey she describes is one without a playbook: the ambivalence and second-guessing, the leap and the limbo that followed – opening the way for the surprising and even exhilarating experience of free fall and freedom, then a “rewirement” – the discovery of an entirely new avocation – writing.

This memoir invites the reader to think differently about retirement. It beckons those with long careers to imagine what might come next: the cultivation of unimagined possibilities in retirement.