In search of the meaning of life (still) 4

Tales of Retirement

Rose Morley
Elementary School Teacher
Retired June 2013

A former teaching colleague who recently retired emailed me with a brimming litany of what she has been up to, expressing her amazement at – and difficulty understanding – people who feel a sense of loss or worthlessness once they have retired. And then the final salvo, “Sad, really.”

Hmm. And I actually thought I was doing all right. I’d been feeling my way through this new life, not quite sorting it out yet and, yes, still having days wondering what I had accomplished. Now it seems I am a pathetic creature because I am still searching, still experimenting. And what happened to all those pursuits I dreamed about while I tortured myself over whether to give a nine-year-old the benefit of the doubt because it is hard to read the degree delineations on a scuffed and ancient protractor? Why had I not jumped whole-heartedly into retirement and never looked back? Why, eighteen months later, do I find myself taking a stress management course at the local university? What do I have to be stressed about? I’m retired, for God’s sake!

I find myself listening to this tune often, mostly against my will. The earworm of guilt, planted by a perfectly innocent communiqué from someone who just recently joined the ranks of the retired. The burden has been lifted! Hallelujah! A new adventure awaits! So what the hell is wrong with you?

A pursuer of solitary activities

So here I am, a year and a half later, still wondering, questioning, examining, discarding, refining. While the great majority of my retired friends are joiners of choirs, theatre groups, book clubs and exercise classes, I am essentially a pursuer of solitary activities – not just solo acts but ones which happen to require self-discipline and only intermittent social contact. And in spite of wanting (mostly very fervently) to be involved in these activities, I find myself still trying to adjust to a world with no colleagues, nothing to complain about on a Friday afternoon in a pub, and without the signposts that ensure you are a contributing cog in a wheel that carries you through the world, assuring you that you are part of that world.

I confess I was one of those overly earnest children who wept on days when I had to stay home from school, sick. I had an overwhelming sense that the world was continuing without me, that I was being left behind; even the sounds of children shouting to one another as they walked home from school would bring on a fresh bout of tears.

What did I get done today?

Now I have stepped into a world where, if you are not a cog in a wheel, your very existence is questioned, albeit tactfully, at a dinner party, or simply disregarded by those who are so busy they don’t have time to be sick. When I encounter another new retiree, I am immediately regaled with tales of how busy he/she is. It never occurs to him/her to, well, pose that question of accountability: what did I get done today?

I am discovering that retirees, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, are all different. Sound like a bit of a “duh” realization? In reality, when we encounter one another, there are certain accepted beliefs and assumptions about retirement – unfettered freedom, losing track of what day it is, adventure, and fulfilling goals and ambitions which we may never have been even dimly aware of during our working life but which are suddenly clear and urgent. Oh yes, retirement can be/should be all of that.[1]

The weight of being your own boss

But like those students, sometimes you don’t know what else retirement can bring. Just as the employment gremlins (real and/or imagined) have released their grasp on you, you are handed the control yourself and, whoa, what a responsibility it is! If you have been in the habit of operating reasonably well within a set of parameters, you sometimes get very used to working within the box. Suddenly the sides of the box are flattened and it is all up to you. It takes a while to be the boss when you haven’t been for a very long time (at least not since you were a child and believed no one was the boss of you). Both heady and weighty.

Maybe I’m a slow learner. Maybe it’s my personality (as suggested by my cello teacher, rather stymied by my too intense approach to learning a new instrument), or maybe it is just all about the process of figuring it out and never quite doing so.

Exchanging cash for time

I find metaphors somewhat comforting – to describe, live by, endure. When I retired, like anyone else I had to consider the reality of a reduced income. I blithely told myself I was now exchanging cash for time – the new currency now an embarrassment of riches. Wow, look at it all! I could just dip my fingers through it and luxuriate in it, which meant that I could spend hours on the Globe cryptic crossword and not bother washing my face until noon.

But soon enough my need for routine and ritual prevailed, as well as my anal compulsion to cross off tasks listed in a little datebook (yes, I still keep one – vestiges of a career in education). You have to know you have done something with your day and washing your face doesn’t count.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives

I listened and noticed. I continue to rise early in the morning because I love to watch for the moment when enough light has emerged in the sky to call it day; because I savour the quiet of the house when I am the only one awake; because it has become an absolute essential to take advantage of the fleeting opportunity to write when nothing has been allowed to be imprinted on my brain quite yet. Read the paper, put the kettle on, get dressed – I’ll have lost it.

Annie Dillard, who famously said “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” offers up another way to regard the passage of time in retirement, a process that is both too fast and too slow. What I do daily – half-finished, half-formed, just beginning, new or familiar – adds up. When I am absorbed and totally given to whatever I am doing, it is glorious and there is no deeper satisfaction. When I walk a little away from it, I can see how it becomes me, how it is both the character of my life and the character of me.

The abundance of tomorrows

It can be useful to ask on a daily basis, how will I spend this day? There are times at day’s end when I am dismayed because I have knitted a sock twice, only to find some grievous error just before bed or that there was nothing but blather on the page today; yet, for no reason at all, I am given another abundance tomorrow.

Admittedly, I was not much good during my work life at putting faith in the following day, but in retirement you get to realize that it is mostly up to you, both a blessing and a curse, perhaps. After you are fed, watered and warmed, it’s all on you. Learning how to spend your newfound currency (which keeps coming to you, unbidden, at least for a little while) is tricky, but you might finally recognize that an afternoon on a couch with a book, with the brilliant winter sun streaming in, is not like washing your face. It counts.

[1]  And much more, as my intermediate English students used to add when they ran out of details but wished to indicate that they were actually fully cognitive that there were more ideas brewing up there in their heads but proper essay writing style forbids the run-on.