Michele Crowl, executive director of Discovery Space and The Rivet, playing around at her day job.

I go on walks regularly with an 82-year-old. Retired for more than 15 years, he hasn’t slowed down a bit. He has served on several boards and committees, taken classes on local history, computer programming, wildflowers, and wetlands, and even helped scan ballots for local elections.

Talking with him has given me a real perspective about how someone in a specialty engineering field can have such a robust retirement that is interesting to him despite a complete shift from his previous career and field of expertise.

Much of his engagement in town has been with non-profits. Centre County is rich with non-profits. If you have an interest or a passion, we probably have a related non-profit. It says a lot about the awesome humans who live here and it speaks to the fact that there are well-paying jobs here and people from well-paid careers who work remote or relocate here.

And there are so many jobs working for those nonprofits. I’m the executive director of Discovery Space and The Rivet, and I’ve helped to grow both from an idea into a reality. I don’t know many other jobs where you can spend the morning listening to preschoolers’ ideas about the moon as you look at real images and try to draw what you see on black paper with white chalk, spend lunch talking with a cohort of folks around the state about supporting arts-based entrepreneurs, head to an afterschool program where you launch 110 Alka-Seltzer-powered rockets with kids in grades K-5 in hopes of breaking the record for most rockets (of that type) simultaneously launched in a school gymnasium, and then stop back into your office to grab your work boots and safety glasses just in time to experience the prototype of a new CNC router class. I get to think a lot about learning across a lifespan and I’ve never been to a community that is richer in opportunities than this one!

If I were ever to write a non-profit poem (or rap song) it might go something like:

Wanna learn to decoupage,
explore budding blooms?
We have a nonprofit for that.

3D print or make costumes,
We have a nonprofit for that.

A cup of coffee to warm your heart,
Dance till dawn, give a new business a kickstart,
We have a nonprofit for that.

Food for the hungry, care for teeth,
Help for children in struggle beneath,
We have a nonprofit for that.

Turn wooden pens with a craftsman’s delight,
Build model railroads through day and night,
Clear hiking paths, history in sight,
We have a nonprofit for that.

I have the pleasure of working with many volunteers in my role, many of whom are retired and just as busy as I am—by choice! When I was younger, I imagined that by now we would be living in space or at least driving flying cars like the Jetsons. As the years pass and we remain a single-planet civilization, I’ve had to rethink what my own retirement could look like.

It’s not that I dislike my job, in fact, I love it. But I think about retirement because there’s so much in our community that I want to explore.

Can I bring it back to science for a moment? Everything we know about the brain suggests that using it and staying active is better than the alternative. Activities like learning a hobby or a new language, hiking, and biking all contribute to brain health. All of the science points to this: staying active physically and mentally keeps you spry and healthy longer. And guess where you can do that?

Living in Centre County is not only great—it’s good for your brain, too.