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 18th…no, sorry…make that the 21st. 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.
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