Go ahead...retire...the Man will still be there...

I’ve altered my relationship to work in the last ten years.  I’ve tried hard to stop thinking of it as time when someone else owns me. The Man, say.  Kahlil Gibran, that all purpose guru for those in a hurry for a bit of wisdom, says work is “love made visible.”  He suggests that if you’re going to be peevish about it you might as well sit on the stairs of the temple and collect alms from people who are happy working.  To be honest, my work IS about love.  I work in education.  It is true that I have to be at work at 7:30 when I could be sitting at home with a cup of tea and the paper, but I am never unhappy at work unless some little bastard has pulled the fire alarm.  (Where is the love then? my co-workers ask, as I storm through the school looking for the guilty party, who by this time is out of the rain at the local pizza place, doubled over laughing at the sight of 1800 furious people assembled in the wet grass waiting for the fire department, who also aren’t feeling the love, to ring the all-clear.)

I have tried to spend what I have of the summer imagining that my retirement days will be like this; my time will be my own as my hours are now, during my vacation.  But summer’s charm is its contrast to work.  You can fritter time because you think it is part of some rest and recuperation regime that will bring you refreshed back to the Man.  Retirement will be more frightening because, I have discovered from retired friends, when I can track them down (have you ever tried to make a date with a retired person?  If you ever finally get them on the phone you get a long silence in which only the turning of diary pages can be heard, and then finally  “I think I could give you an hour on the 18^th…no, sorry…make that the 21^st.  5 shall we say? But I’ll have to be away at 7.”  They’re like popular restaurants who will grudgingly let you have a table at 6, but they need it back by 7:30.) .., you yourself become the Man.  One of my ‘leisured’ chums, an artist, told me she has to put structure in her day to make sure she gets some work done.  Work.  That’s what she calls it. 

It’s easy for me to be loving at my job.  I’m a Principal, I have kids who need me, and teachers who want things.  I can be of service.  But will work be love made visible when I am the boss?  No one will need what I write.  No one will necessarily want what I paint.  Will I turn procrastination into a full time job? Will my appliances survive the endless shining they will get when I use cleaning to get out of writing?   Will my poor unsuspecting husband become a project?  Will I savagely throw out that threadbare underwear he clings to so protectively? How often CAN you organize your sweater shelf?  Right now I only do that at the weekends and during the summer holidays, but in retirement I could be getting more and more pissed off at myself and less and less loving.

The only good news about this is that I won’t have to be sitting on the steps of the local Anglican collecting alms; I’ll have a pension.  And, clearly,  I’ll have to learn all over again how to use time.  One of my friends retired 5 years ago and was extremely keen.  He was going to re build his deck at last!  I met him in the spaghetti aisle at the local supermarket after that first year and he looked glum.  How was retirement going? I asked.  He told me he’d built the deck and then when that was over the charm of retirement had worn off,  and he didn't know what to do now.  He wondered out loud if he should have made deck building the whole purpose of his life, though not enough, he added hastily, to wish he was back dealing with fire alarm pullers; he had been a Principal as well.  Happily I’ve met him in the intervening years, in the fruit and veg section most recently, and he tells me he’s gotten over the slump and is now improving his tennis game, and has re found a purpose in building new kitchen shelving. 

In other words, the transition from work to not-work finally sorts itself out.  My husbands underwear might be safe, I might find a new balance, find I don’t have to replicate my relationship with my employer in my own life.

I suppose worrying about something that is a year away is like ruining the summer by exclaiming, as my husband invariably does every year on the first day of summer, “God, the summer’s nearly over.”  Some busy psych graduates somewhere have done a study that tells us that the best part of a vacation turns out to be the excited anticipation of planning and looking forward to it, not the vacation itself.  Perhaps that’s why when summer finally arrives my husband is crestfallen.  Mind you, I’ve not found sitting on a patio in the south of France with a glass of wine all that disappointing. Perhaps retirement will be similar, like France, only easier to understand. When someone asks me how retirement is treating me I'll give an impenetrable Gallic shrug and offer them a glass of wine. My new boss won't mind.

boomer retirement...a drink and some ice cream

I read a lovely article by the woman who wrote Marigold Hotel…she was trying to find volunteers among the retired for something in the village where she lives and couldn’t find a single soul…the retired were all off riding motorcycles across Pakistan and hiking in Wales.  It was really to highlight the way boomers, that’s me, were handling retirement…pretty much the way they handled their lives…and I’m going to say their early lives, because the in between bit, if I’m any example, was filled with responsible (ish) parenting and career building. 

I remember when I went to Europe as a 19 year old.  I had my first giddy taste of real freedom…albeit, on my father’s dime...Wiring him for money when I ran out was actually kind of liberating too, now that I think of it.  The freedom, as I think of it, was experiencing myself within the world without reference to the others who defined me: my parents, my friends, the school I went to, and so on.  Suddenly I was alone and without familiar guideposts, feeling my own edges, pushing them out, finding limits that would only be defined by me and my good sense. My heart was huge and full of sunshine.  No…it wasn’t the drugs…I never could see a percentage in being out of control, so I gave them up right after the first time I did them and found I could see my own words coming out of my mouth like dialogue bubbles.

Now, when I travel alone, as I did one summer to Bulgaria when I was in my late 40s, I sometimes feel that same sense of heady re-discovery of finding out who I am outside my relationships.  In real life, by necessity one pulls in, accommodates, makes room for the others…the balance of happiness seems to be in accommodating just enough to allow the other person some room on the bed, without ending up clinging to the edge.  Even now I am far more likely to ask, “what do you want for supper?” than to think about what I might want.  When I travel on my own I have to really think about what I want.  Soft ice cream followed by a stiff drink at the hotel bar?  Why not?

So how is this related to retirement?  I have been deeply defined by my job.  Though I have won two major awards as a Principal, one national and one local, I can scarcely recognize that person as the essential, soft ice cream eating me.  I never did anything to excel, I just went along, and was startled every time I ended up with an opinion about something.  Others called that ‘leadership’.   Without work, without awards, what will I be?  Will I be able to even lead myself?

I’m hoping it will be like being a teenager again, a reprise on self discovery of my essential self.  Will I tell my husband to piss off, we’re having a cocktail and crackers with Nutella, and if he wants something else he can pop round to the pizza place?  In a way, I hope so.  With any luck I’ll be too busy re building a 1932 roadster like Nancy Drew’s to cook for him anyway.  I’d like to drive it on small, little-used asphalt highways through the Midwest and South.  He can come if he wants.  There will be room in the rumble seat for one extra small bag, but we’re not camping, and I’m eating whatever I want.

A new, more sinister response: you need to keep busy, or else!

It’s been a few days now that I have not blogged…interesting…that is how Catholics start their confessions, ‘It has been two years since my last confession’…or in my case, 20 years.  I’ll tell you straight up; my greatest sin is worry.  Why else would I have a blog, but to worry out loud, yet in complete obscurity?   So, In the last week I have been on vacation, learning again how to move within time, pushing out its borders to suit my activities and mood, constricting it only when I have to, like when I needed to get the grandchildren home because I had to come back, make dinner and get to my band practice.  All of this rather than being driven by time, or being its servant as I am during my working year.

This reflection on time is important in this blog about my impending retirement, because my relationship to time will be different; I won’t continuously have to be places at certain times.  And to be honest, I’m not minding my vacation right now.  I don’t stay in my pyjamas all day, and I feel one or two tasks are enough to tackle.  For example, making breakfast and then moving my deck chair in or out of the sun, as the mood strikes.  Or cycle with the children to the local university farm, lie around (with intermittent cries of ‘stop throughing clumps of dirt!” and then cycling home.  Perhaps it is a model for the days of my retirement?  But of course, it is a vacation, which by its nature gets its pleasures through its contrast to work, and here in the northern clime where I live, it is summer; the days are long.  And then there is the question of purposefulness.  Pressed though I am by time like icing through a nozzle during the working year, my life at work is purposeful; and it is a type of purposefulness that I like.  I feel that I am important in the little realm in which I operate, and that what I do is important.

When I imagine retirement, I think on the one hand of the type of life I am living while I’m on vacation, and on the other hand I think of the short winter days, and the potential purposelessness of what I do with the time encompassed in those days.  In other words, a vacation is pleasurable by virtue of its contrast from work, but what will retirement contrast?

At first when I told people I would be retiring in a year people expressed happiness for me.  “You’ll love it!” “ You’ll be busier than you can ever imagine!” “Someone like you will never be bored!”  Now, I’m hearing a different chorus.  The 95 year old lady downstairs said to me, “Oh.  Well.  You’ll need to keep busy.  You’d better get out and volunteer.  If you don’t keep busy and find things to do you won’t live long.”  Ominously she’s been busy for as long as I’ve known her with a series of grim-seeming health problems.  And a chum on my band, who is an architect and therefore effectively self-employed, said, “Hmm.  You’re going through with it then?  You know, for every year you work past so-called retirement age, you extend your dementia free years by a factor of…oh, I don’t know…five.”  And then she looked at me with a slightly smug expression that said, ‘you won’t catch me retiring!’

And finally I read my friend Max’s blog.  He retired two years ago and has been in Rwanda with CUSO, with the avowed goal of one day running the whole Africa branch.  Examples like his keep me awake at night wracked with guilt.  I want to write books and maybe do a little contract work as a Principal mentor. In other words two highly risky enterprises in terms of whether anyone will want either one of these products of my retirement activity.  Whereas if I were to volunteer my time, I would be as purposeful as all get out, and people would have to accept me and bear it no matter what a pain in the ass I might turn out to be. 

Oh…it’s breakfast time.  I have to get dressed and do one of my activities.  I will mull over what the second activity will be over my poached egg.

The dog's life...fear of pyjamas continued

I told my sister in law Susan that I was worried about retirement because I feared I wouldn’t get out of my pyjamas for three months and she just chortled (well, it was a a chortley email) “I know you love that job more than life itself, but when you retire you’ll be busier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs” she told me.   I’m not sure, in the end, how comforted I am by that.  That kind of busy sounds frenetic and with no purpose than to avoid the pain of having my tail squashed.  I want to be busy, but purposefully…and combine that with a kind of instinctive lack of purpose. 

When I’m not disciplinedly writing, or painting, or tatting, …or whatever I decide to take up, and when I’ve finished my run and my meditation, I want to move from activity to activity, or indeed, activity to inactivity, like a dog.  I’m a great admirer of dogs.  They don’t think “What shall I do now?  I lay on that bolster yesterday, maybe I should try the couch.  No wait, I got in trouble for that...before” (they don’t have a strong sense of time). They just lie down where they want when they feel like lying down, or appear, wagging, at their dish suddenly and hopefully when they get that gnawing feeling.  Or watch the door intently when they want to walk, as they will have trained someone to respond to this adorable trait, who will open the door and take them out.  Once out, they experience nature intensely and fully…too fully some might say, but my point is, they are authentic, they are present.  And after an infinitely long pleasant day, it gets dark, and it is time to lie down wherever they can get away with.   They are the personification of mindfulness.  They are motivated by some inner doggy eternal search for comfort. 

So that’s it in a nutshell.  When I’m not being intentional, I want to be instinctual when I retire.  I want to be a disciplined writer ( painter, tatter) and then down tools and experience my world again with the innocence of a five year old for the rest of the day till it’s time to check the fridge, utter a curse, and set off in a temper to the supermarket for something to prepare for dinner.  Like a part time dog, I want to partially have no sense of time.    I want to walk only a few feet away from a focus on accomplishing things, and only for part of the day.  Ha.  It becomes painfully obvious that a person can either be a person, or a dog, but not both.  Once one has left paradise, innocence about clocks is gone forever.   I guess I could spend the first, say, three months when I retire being a dog, just to see if I can break the time habit.  But then, how is that different from being in my pyjamas for three months?

fear of watches...day 363 on the countdown

I'm at day 363 before I retire.  I won't lie.  I'm a little worried about the change. I've worked for 44 years.  And before that there was all that schooling.  That kept me hopping for a few years.  What do I miss about not working?  The last time I really wasn't doing much with my days I was five years old.  One thing I remember about those days was that the days were really long and shapeless.  They were like summer days.  Well, they were actually summer days, since I lived in Mexico 9 months of the year.  My mother (I had a father of course, but, though sweet, was not equipped with much more skill with children than keeping me alive and preventing me from falling into a well) was a writer and a bit of a bohemian, I believe is her generation's term for hippy, so she never knew where I was, and didn't insist on bedtimes.

I'm rather hoping that days will become long and shapeless again; that this much vaunted idea among my contemporaries that time speeds up as we get older is just because of the way we are always rushing to get places on time.  What did I do with the endless hours as a five year old?  I spent most of my time outside moving instinctively, the way a dog does.  Here some time lying looking at the tops of trees, there some time climbing trees, or in Mexico, walls.  When I was hungry I would hang about looking gaunt till my mother noticed me and assembled a sandwich and some Koolaid.  I never once thought, "Oh, God, it's nearly three, I'd better..."  Then when I was tired and it was too dark to play outside, I came home and went to bed.   (When I became a mother, I was surprised to learn from other mothers that their children went to bed at 8 every night, and even more surprised when my son began at about the age of 5 to ask if he couldn't PLEASE go to bed now, promptly at 8)

I notice now that weekend days are, in fact, much longer than work days.  I get up early every day, but on the weekend days I can hang about in a bathrobe reading the paper, which is an excellent start, but then I begin to worry about time.   I'm constantly aware of the clock in the kitchen and wondering what it's doing, and if it says 3 o'clock I'm dismayed because the day's more than half gone.  We went away for a year in 2000 and did nothing much,( only we did it in Europe and Mexico, which is quite interesting), and I took off my watch that year and never put it back on.  I still don't wear it, even at work. (Mind you, I work as a Principal, so there's brain-scraping buzzer every 70 minutes all day long, so it's hard to get away with pretending you're above watches).

So, in conclusion, as my students invariably say, in spite of my exhortations not to, one difference between me as a 5 year old and me now is 60 years of clock watching.  I check the time when I wake up in the middle of the night, I check the time when I get up, I rush to be at work on time, though lately I've been very daring and started not caring what time I arrive, within a margin of 15 minutes, and I go to bed at 10 every night no matter what, because I'm worried about being tired at work and getting out of my routine.  It would appear that I'll have to put tea-cosies over all the clocks if I want my retirement to be anything like my childhood.