Sometimes the harder you go at a thing, the more it recedes 4

Tales of Retirement

Hazel Lyder
‘Poet’
Retired 2012

I am 55 and I have, sort of, configured my life – the nuts and bolts of earning a living and setting up housekeeping – on a super simple scale so I have serious time for writing.

I have been writing for close to two decades now, even though for much of that time I just fit writing into the nooks and crannies outside of work and family life. Then, through misfortune rather than by design, life got reconfigured for me: the end of both my 26-year marriage and the closing of our family business (a fabulous little bookstore). There I was, just four years ago now, no job, no partner, and not much of a plan. However, when I really started to look at my situation, I saw that both my needs and my aspirations were very modest. I sold my house, took a seasonal live-in job, and said ”Okay, from now on, from October to May I will just do as I please. I will be a Writer.”

Preparing the creative juices

Autumn arrived and I booked a plane ticket and a cabina in a remote village in northwest Costa Rica. Before heading out, to get in the spirit of things, I enrolled in a memoir-writing workshop to get the creative juices flowing. With all the upheaval in my life, I had actually been doing very little writing for a quite a long time. Mostly I just fantasized about it a lot.

At this four-day workshop with Alison Wearing, she worked the conceit that writing is like running a marathon. To be honest, it seemed self-evident to me. “‘Okay, yeah, I get that, that makes sense. Sure, I know that.”’

How strange I must appear

It’s December 29^th and I head to the airport with growing anxiety. Suddenly (I’ve read somewhere that only hacks use the word ‘suddenly’) I am filled with questions like: what kind of a person travels alone?  And now I feel painfully self-conscious: how strange I must appear in this airport lounge full of couples, and lovers, and families, and flocks of youth.

Travelling alone had worked so well in my early 20s for meeting scores and scores of folks; but now, in my 50s, it became clear that some other dynamic prevailed.  People don’t engage with you, nor you them; there is something more fixed about us all.  What I remembered as having been attractive and bohemian (vaguely) in my youth, in my middle ages smacked of just pure loneliness.

But that’s okay, right? Because you really need to be alone to write. Right?

Panic

Day two in Costa Rica: out come the blank notebooks and pens (I’d bought five of my favourite kind, in an array of colours) and what should happen, but I have a blinding epiphany.  ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to write any more.’

I had suspected for a while that this might be lurking in me, might be the truth of me. I’d given it fifteen years, time to move on. But the epiphany was quickly followed by terror. How would I fill the void?  Would I take up painting?  Get out my Suzy Sew And Go and become a seamstress of funky, alternative frocks?  But, more pressingly, what would I do now?  There I was in Costa Rica in a cabina near a very fetching beach with a few books and a few pens and, well, LOTS of time (nine weeks to be specific). If I’m not going to write, what the (expletive) am I going to do???!!

Despair

There followed a long day of panic and despair. I went online looking for volunteer opportunities, tried and failed to contact West Jet online to change my return ticket to an earlier date, contacted a friend to contact West Jet on my behalf. I had to force myself to go to the beach and once there found living proof that I was indeed the only solitary person on the entire planet. NO ONE else travels alone. No one. Trust me on this.

This day of despair mixed with high anxiety I will just add was preceded by a night of little sleep. (That’s an air conditioning story that I won’t go into.)

When finally I crawled into bed exhausted after a day of much anxiety and self-pity – a day that had actually made me consider online dating when I got back to Canada (truthfully, I vowed to try online dating) – I was a most miserable Robinson Crusoe.

My own tiny little university of one

A night of profound sleep ensued and I woke in the morning and thought, “‘So what? Big deal, so I don’t want to be a writer any more.”  I have my Full Catastrophe Living book with me (meditation), I had what promised to be five fabulous novels, there was a yoga place a 20-minute walk away with classes (by donation) seven days a week at 7 a.m., and my darling daughter had set me up months earlier on Duo Lingo to learn Spanish (which I had foolishly ignored prior to this moment), plus I’d packed The Idiot’s Guide to Learning Spanish.

I decided there was, right on my Costa Rican coffee table, my own tiny little university of one.  Add “Introduction to Costa Rica” in there and I had a very full course load. Like the sign at the yoga centre said “Smile, You’re in Paradise”.

There followed a couple of days of beach walking, swimming, yoga, meditation, cooking, Spanish lessons, meeting the nice American couple next door (after forming an intention that morning in yoga to ‘connect with someone’). Gee, was two months going to be long enough?

Writer in training

Then I woke one morning with the writing workshop leader’s voice in ear, “Hazel, my girl, remember you don’t run a marathon without some pretty serious f’*@ing training first” (okay, so I may be paraphrasing a bit).

Okay, now I get it! I hadn’t written in three years … not really … I mean I’d jogged to the A&P a couple times (metaphorically speaking) but that had been pretty much it.  What made me think I could come to the sun, sit in a deck chair and start pumping out excellent short stories? That very same day my daughter sent me an academic essay about the value to the historic narrative of poetry written by ordinary folks. I thought of my friend, the wonderful poet Liz Zetlin, and her ‘poem a day’ practice, and thought I can do that.  A poem a day. So, yep, I started writing. A poem a day. Then along came an essay. And after a bit I started to poke away at a novel I’d started some long time before. Before I knew it, I was struggling to find time to fit in the meditation and Spanish classes.

Maybe it is the status of a thing that gets in the way. The constant internal battle between:  I am writing versus I am a Writer.

My little trick

My little trick since my ‘poem a day’ initiative (I got one poem worth keeping, by the way) is that now when people ask, “Are you a writer?” I say, “No, I’m a poet” and it’s a capital response because it stops them asking the next (worldly) question, “So what have you published” (they don’t care); and the follow-up, “Do you make a living at that?” (they already know the answer); it also answers the question implied in “Do you make a living at that?” (i.e., “Are you any good?”). They don’t care about that one either.

Turns out, three years later there is still not much of a plan, but I’m learning to live with that. Last winter on the west coast, I wrote only personal stuff and so far I haven’t been able to look at it to see if there is anything there worth hanging on to.  However, I’d like to think that in the process of remembering and being thoughtful, maybe I’ve come to know and understand myself a bit better as I continue on this new, mostly solitary, path. No, I didn’t try online dating, but have huge gratitude for my many wonderful friends.