Am I really retired? 2

Helen, Heading Out (6)

A series of articles about recreating identity after an all-consuming career

By Helen
University Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Retired August 2012 at age 63

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
~ Walt Whitman

One day, more than two years into my retirement, I was tired and took a rare afternoon nap. It was too late to go back to painting when I discovered that sleep wasn’t coming. “You can do anything you want now,” I told myself. “What would you like to do?” It felt like the first time since retirement that I’d had freedom to ask the question. And yet this was supposed to be the mantra of retirement: “You can do anything you want now.”

I’d learned in a Crabapple Coaching workshop years earlier that retirement can begin with a honeymoon period, possibly a year long, of happy lazing around, before a need for more meaningful engagement kicks in. That initial honeymoon ease hasn’t been my experience.

Linden MacIntyre’s main character in his novel Punishment observes, “In those early days of my retirement I found a disproportionate sense of satisfaction in completing little obligations, even paying taxes. Former colleagues who had retired were always telling me how much they had to do. Never been so busy. Not enough hours in the day. A load of crap, as I’d learned in the first five months I’d been back here. Days spread out in front of me as vast uncultivated plains.” That troubling aimlessness hasn’t been my experience.

A friend from my painting group has leapt into retirement with élan, full of new plans for yoga, guitar lessons, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, larger paintings for her daughter, and travel with her husband. She seems to be recreating herself on a blank canvas. That bare, inviting canvas hasn’t quite been my experience either.

No free time

For the first years of my retirement, I don’t remember deciding to take a weekday just to enjoy the sunshine or the heavy snowfall inviting a longer cross-country ski trek. I’ve postponed haircuts or long showers or saunas, because I had no time for them. My January resolution this year to try one new recipe a week produced, in eight months, one fine new meal. When an interesting former colleague from another faculty initiated a friendship, I didn’t follow up after the first, congenial visit, because I felt my life was already too full. How could I be retired, when I still felt as if I had no free time?

Partly it was retirement that was responsible. Because I was retired, I was able for the first time to accompany my partner extensively on his travels as an author. Partly it was timing. The first two years of my retirement coincided with a startling upsurge in such travel.

Room around the margins

I’d no sooner retired than we were off for two weeks at the Banff Centre, where my partner taught writing, while I hiked the town site and nearby mountain trails. Two months later the fall tour for his non-fiction book took us to eight western Canadian cities, and the following spring and fall to ten more in central and eastern Canada. Then the book garnered a half dozen award nominations, some of which involved multiple trips for readings, interviews, and ceremonies. The following fall, my sweetie’s new novel produced a similar western Canadian tour, plus appearances in Iowa and Minnesota. And Ottawa for another award. I was learning that even with good restaurants, schmoozing with authors at writers’ festivals, and a personal search for good cocktails, the pace of these travels, with as many as five events in one city, is gruelling. Personal interactions with so many old friends, new friends, fans, journalists, and strangers is exhilarating and exhausting. And I wasn’t the one on stage.

I had my own annual activities too. The first year of retirement began for me with participation in local Idle No More protests, and built up from there: three fetal alcohol conference workshops to prepare and deliver, an annual Women’s Week at the Cottage, a pagan weekend retreat, a nephew’s wedding, my father’s wedding anniversary, and an old friend’s funeral. Four Stratford plays, a three-day art course, rituals with my earth-based spirituality group, visits by friends from California, Minnesota, and England, and our annual week in a Wisconsin cottage with our children and grandchildren. Daily painting, when possible, and weekly painting sessions with my art group. Each activity was pleasing in its own right, but the cumulative effect was an overstuffed schedule.

Retirement was teaching me the same lesson as had my work life – the necessity to leave room around the margins for the unanticipated.

In July of 2013, my father was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and given days or weeks to live. Being retired meant that I was able to spend part of almost every day of his last five weeks at his house or, eventually, the hospice. I could host siblings who had returned from vacations or flown in from across the country. Because I also faced a difficult co-executorship of my Dad’s estate after his death, my siblings generously took most of the overnight shifts. My freedom to devote myself to Dad’s last weeks meant that I can recall that sad and rich period without regrets.

About retirement, I had heard the caution not to let others fill your newfound leisure with their tasks and plans. But I hadn’t foreseen my own possibilities ballooning in quite the way they did. So, by second year, I was more deliberate in taking on invitations, turning down more, trying to prioritize.

Clearly retired

When I was working, I used to marvel at others’ accounts of reading the morning paper during leisurely breakfasts before work. I ate standing up at the counter, making lunches and preparing everyone for the day. This after rising at 6:30 to get my morning run in, usually in the dark. If I had a schedule of twice weekly 8:30 morning classes, with course preparation at 7:30, the morning run wasn’t even possible. And those 8:30 a.m. classes tended to be paired with 5:30 p.m. ones, the price for teaching longer classes twice weekly rather than shorter ones thrice weekly.

So, of course, I am clearly retired now and feeling the difference. I get up at 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning. Or later. After running or skiing, while I sit to eat, I have time for my gratitude journal, and other writing. My day has a slow and inefficient start, often with 11:00 rolling in before I get going with the day’s activities. Although I try to paint every weekday, I am free, if I choose, to gallivant at thrift stores with my friend or to shovel the ridge of snow left across the driveway by the snowplow, before it hardens. Many such excuses can be used to postpone painting. I couldn’t postpone teaching, whether I wanted to or not.

In the evenings, I have no obligations. I am free to read e-mails, scroll through Facebook, play online games, talk on the phone, read, and watch television. Although I lament that retirement hasn’t yet provided me with leisure to loaf and invite my soul, in reality, if I took the hours I spend zoned out on the Internet my soul would be mightily refreshed.

Loafing and inviting my soul

I am writing these pages at this year’s Women’s Week at the Cottage, where we arrive frazzled and cranky, and leave restored. For ten days my ideal of retirement leisure mostly prevails. We have a thoughtful discussion arising from a reading after breakfast; most of us have art or textile or other projects; we read and swim and eat and nap; we have a rule about not doing anything we don’t want to do, while somehow sharing the work and the meal prep. We tend to live more mindfully in the present. Even here I expect myself to sketch and paint when sometimes I just want to lie in the sun or shade. I’m still searching out the balance between overcommitment and aimlessness, still inching towards a new, less driven freedom.

I do recall one perfect day last February, after a snowstorm. I skied, painted in my studio, and cooked that one new meal, a Provencal green-bean and pasta dish. And all was right with my world.