Tales of Retirement
By Brad Morley
High School English Teacher
Retired 2012
I recently discovered a free website called Duolingo which specializes in teaching languages, thirteen of them in fact, including Esperanto. So we’re presently working on Spanish, my wife and I, and I can now say with confidence “Yo como luna manzana” (I eat an apple), and even “El mono no bebe leche” (The monkey does not drink milk). And these are only two of the many and various sentences the website asks me to translate into print or to speak out loud.
You may well wonder why I would ever need, or even want, to know that the monkey does not drink milk, nor eat cheese, nor sleep amongst the horses—all phrases presented by Duolingo for me to memorize, recognize, translate, and speak.
Now in my eighth year of retirement, I find myself once again hankering after some part-time employment of the type that involves two of the things I love: teaching and travel. I’ve already done two years of teaching at an international school in Saudi Arabia since I officially retired, and I had about a year of several very enjoyable hours a week at a local bookstore two years into my post-career life, but I’ve been fully and delightfully unemployed since June of 2012.
Who could ask for more?
I have not lacked for very rewarding things to do at any time since I packed in my 30 years of teaching high school English back in February of 2008. Life has been full. I exercise more (and more wisely), I relax more, we’re eating better, we share a rewarding and active social life, and money isn’t a concern. So why get fussed about feeling a need to work part-time?
It has partly to do with winter coming on. The last two have been brutally cold far more frequently than I care for, and in a mere three months winter will be here again. Why not learn a bit of Spanish so as to facilitate teaching English as a second language in the delightfully temperate climes of southern Peru? Thus the newfound knowledge of what monkeys do and do not do.
Is work good for us?
It was an interesting coincidence to me that part of my daily ritual of reading The Guardian online recently brought me to a new German study on part-time work, retirement, and health. Actually, there was little of surprise in the study, as far as I can see. The subheading said it all: “Retirees take more exercise, sleep longer and need to see their doctor less often than before they left work”. In other words, as the title indicates, “Retirement is good for you”. As I have said, hardly a revelation.
But the article goes on to make an interesting point about a key conclusion in the study: “Part-time work…. might prove effective in maintaining the health of older workers.” Could I use this study to persuade myself that I should work part-time because doing so will ‘maintain my health’? Might part-time teaching in the afternoon of my life’s journey be as sublimely restorative as a nap in the afternoon of a wearisome day? Having spoken at length with my brother, who taught English as a Second Language in Peru over two winters now, I know that if I followed suit I would only be making about five bucks an hour, so it isn’t the money that is behind my hankering to work. I do wonder, though, besides the rewards that travel brings, besides the idea of being in a pleasant climate rather than caught in a deep-freeze, whether I’m itching to work simply because there is something about work that is good for me.
Asking for more
Winter is downtime for me, to some physical extent at least. Two of my main passions – running and gardening – are much harder to satisfy in the winter. In a song about what life would be like for him at age 64, Paul McCartney observed “Doing the garden, digging the weeds; who could ask for more?” Well, it turns out that, in the winter, I am asking for more. The German study seems to back me up on that, too. Doing a bit less of some things but a bit more of others is probably good for me, both mentally and physically, and the trick is finding the right balance, the arrangement that works best.
So I will continue my Spanish studies, and though I may never learn why the monkey doesn’t prefer to sleep amongst the horses, I can nap well in the knowledge that my efforts to learn a new language and to teach again will be part-time activities with full-time benefits.