Comfort Zone Be Damned 1

Tales of Retirement

Rose Morley
Elementary School Teacher
Retired June 2013

I am sitting in a nondescript classroom in a concrete block of a building on the campus of the local university.  It is the weekend and I am thinking of a thousand other things I could be doing: ambling through the Saturday Farmer’s Market, getting lost in a knitting project, reading the weekend papers at my leisure, deliciously losing any sense of time.

More than two years ago I left the classroom, grateful for the opportunity to escape the demands of an impossible curriculum, the expectations I found increasingly difficult to fulfill, the absurdities of decisions made by those who had little idea of what actually goes on in a classroom.  And now, here I am in a classroom, albeit as a student, learning how to be a teacher again.  Do one’s choices know no bounds in irony, punishment and unpredictability?  I will be here for the next three weekends, engaged in a course in Teaching English as a Second Language, which I hope will prepare me for a position teaching English in a country I have never set foot in.

Rituals to set the day right

What was I thinking?  Or has Early Onset weaseled its way into my bewildered brain?

For the past two years I have tried various approaches to retirement.  Knowing that I am not one to wake up in the morning to a blank sheet and decide spontaneously how I should make my mark that day, I began cello lessons, fantasizing that this pursuit would someday (as in a matter of weeks!) inform my life.  I would get up as Pablo Casals did to play the Bach Variations as the sun rose — a ritual to set the day right.  I would watch my hands gain a knowledge and expertise with the wood and metal, producing the deep sounds I fell in love with many years ago.  Ah, but realism bites.  I developed a chronic injury likely brought on by overzealous, incorrect practice.  The cello is silent for now.  For the moment, I can’t bring myself to think of shelving my fantasy forever.

I sat in cafes to write, took writing workshops, read more than I managed to while I was working full-time, tried to vary my exercise regime, took Tai Chi, knitted — all the kinds of things I actually like to do. And, of course, even in retirement there is routine and ritual – not at all a bad thing and something I find myself reaching for, even when traveling.   But after what I consider a long enough period of time in which to figure out this retirement thing, something I can only call restlessness has surfaced.

Restlessness

Was I truly doing what I wanted to do?  Yes, in a manner of speaking.  But is that what retirement is truly for?  A part of me wonders about the other lives I could live (the cellist righting herself in the morning); what is even possible on the spectrum of things I have never really thought about?  Is there a way of remaking yourself or at least seeing what you can rise to, given a different set of circumstances?  Is it about maintaining (oh, those necessary rituals to ward off the pains and decrepitude of aging) or creating?  Despite the comfortable calm and flow of retirement, I cannot live without the prospect of new goals and adventures even as I cling to lifelong intentions.  There is something about wanting to see how I respond to something beyond my control, even if I choose it.

The summer immediately after my retirement from teaching, my brother-in-law told me he was taking a 100 hour TESL course, partly in hopes of escaping the brutal winter in Ottawa.  Mere weeks after he finished the course, he landed work in Arequipa, Peru, teaching at a private language school. His description of life there – nothing earth-shattering but perhaps on the scale of a series of small epiphanies — grew on me.  Something to do with simplifying life, making do, noticing what is around you 24/7, learning and practising another language.  Another way of living, another life.

Stripping down to the essentials

Two years later, I am in that classroom, scribbling notes and attending to the instructor’s words, ever the earnest student.  I am surrounded mostly by young people just graduating from university and looking for an international career – I envy their energy and long-term goal to live somewhere else in the world, far from where they grew up.  Their itchiness is recognizable though mine is firmly rooted in the notion that I will follow my brother-in-law’s route and be away for just a chunk of the year.  It is a parcel of time that I think I can and want to hold; safe enough for someone who grew up mostly doing what she was told, a teacher-pleaser who became a teacher.  And knowing this, I am drawn to the idea of occasionally choosing to do things that take me out of my comfort zone, in the belief that one is stripped down to the essentials when one is Somewhere Else without the reassurance and ease of ritual, familiar surroundings and mindset.

Parcels of possibility

If I end up in Peru, my modus operandi becomes a matter of simple, basic verbs: teach, write, walk, sleep, eat, look, feel, smell, hear, taste.  There is something wonderfully rife with possibility about these words.  Perhaps that is indeed what retirement is – parcels of possibility which become reality with all its attendant glories and messes.