The local newspaper ran my article about retirement today and I want to save it here. Trying to link it requires the intrusive and self-serving process of logging in so, OK. It's not exactly what I wrote, but it's close enough and what I wrote makes me keenly aware of what I didn't say or might have said better. Oh well....
NORTHAMPTON -- At
the easiest and most graspable level, when one-third of your life has
been devoted to work, then one-third of your life is suddenly left
wide-open -- and perhaps frighteningly free -- in retirement.
I distrust news
articles in which the retiring police chief or councilman says he plans
to “travel” or “spend more time with my family” or “devote more energy
to my hobbies.” It may be true in one sense, but in another sense, it is
questionable whether those activities will meet the need for “meaning”
or “satisfaction” — the defined meaning and satisfaction and definition
found in work.
I cannot speak for
anyone else in the matter of retirement. It is a personal matter that
does not take much comfort in the nostrums of others. There is no
one-size-fits-all good news. There is no single all-you-have-to-do-is
... prescription. Everyone just has to gut it out.
When I retired at 69 in
2009 from the newspaper I worked at, I waited a while and then took what
little was left of my 401k after Wall Street got finished looting it
and went to see Bill, a money manager. I was not very good with or
interested in money and needed the help.
And it was in the course
of talking things over that Bill asked me idly, “How long have you been
retired?” I told him it had been about nine months. “Oh well,” he said
with a magical understanding in his voice, “you haven’t gotten your feet
under you yet. That always takes a year or two.”
And I felt an enormous
relief. It was, apparently, as common as dishwater to feel a sense of
uncertainty and loss and floundering — the stuff that seemed to lurk
just beneath the surface of getting up in the morning and not going to
work. It was nice to think others had similar unspoken concerns. It
didn’t solve or erase those concerns, but misery loves company and I was
happy to have some company.
It took a little while
for another recognition to kick in: Not just was I not producing what
the newspaper had asked me to produce, but my own little-acknowledged
assumptions about that work were under siege. Work had been a part of my
definition of myself and without the work ... well, how much of that
definition had been lost and what could I do to restore a sense of
definition?
This turned into a
multi-part question. If one definition (work) relied on something
outside myself and if it could be so easily taken away, then how
reliable were any of my other definitions and touchstones in life? This
is a spooky question, assuming anyone is willing to ask it. Maybe it’s a
spooky question even if anyone is not willing to ask it.
Whatever the approach,
retirement put the question on my plate and caused me to reflect, not
always with pleasure, on the assumptions that had helped bring me this
far ... work, marriage, three kids, an interest in spiritual endeavor, a
love of stories ... and a host of other matters, little and large.
How honestly defining
and important were those definitions? What did my life look like when I
took off the clothes of definition and meaning that were certified by
others? Was there anything left?
There were times when I felt decidedly and uncomfortably “bare nekkid.” Unprotected.
But a little at a time,
the dime began to drop: Everyone is always “bare nekkid” under whatever
clothes they have chosen to wear. This is as true metaphorically as it
is literally. Like a dandelion in an otherwise unblemished backyard
lawn, “bare nekkid” is not good or bad — it’s just a dandelion that
allows itself, without complaint, to be defined by any and all
onlookers. Are those onlookers right or wrong? Either way, the dandelion
is still just a dandelion.
These days, many of the
old definitions have been retired. The suit-and-tie importance I once
gave them strike me as possible but not imperative. The Miracle Glue of
definition that once allowed me to look with presumptuous confidence in
the bathroom mirror has dissolved for the most part.
What’s the matter with a dandelion?
For my money, everyone
is retiring all the time. Whether they notice it or not is up to them.
What was a-moment-ago has retired and what-is-now blooms ... over and
over again.
Being a dandelion is not half bad. Some nitwit is bound to reach for the weed killer, but that’s the way the world goes around.
In the meantime, I figure my job is simply to bloom.
Adam Fisher of Northampton is the author of “Answer Your Love Letters: Footnotes to a Zen Practice” and blogs at http://genkaku-again.blogspot.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment