“So this must be what retirement is like,” Deirdre declared yesterday. An epiphany moment. Is this the Nirvana to which our lives have been trending, retirement as envisaged by our parents and grandparents? That is literally retired from responsibility and commitments, free to do what we want within certain practical constraints. For our parents those constraints would have been to do with opportunity and material resources, and their locus of activity may not have been much wider than ours at present. Though of course the local shops and social events would have been available to them – a weekly outing to a garden centre and a coffee in the case of my parents.
Lockdown has privileged our 70+ generation with the opportunity, maybe it’s even unavoidable, to assess is this the retirement we want? If so will we be able to sustain it? If not will we be able to change it? Do we want a passive or dynamic retirement or can we balance it? Can we achieve healthy equilibrium between that which enriches us and that which drains us? It’s one of those existential dilemmas that I once imagined we would be free of in retirement, but which in fact are coming increasingly thick and fast. And there will be plenty more to come: changing diet, walking with a stick, moving to a bungalow, going into a care home, giving up driving, whether to revive us, burial or cremation?
We baby boomers were the first generation to be offered a lot of things - higher education, the chance not to follow in our parents’ employment patterns, to move away, to enter the professions – ultimately to make choices. We could afford to retire earlier than our parents, and incidentally than our children, and with our professional experience entered into the full gamut of trusteeships, governorships, committees, organising community events, taking multiple holidays, becoming councillors. Some extend their professional life by taking on consultancy or free- lance work until they become used to having more time and decide they want to maximise it, or until changing technology and procedures make them obsolete. I know one gentleman who devoted much of his retirement to collecting litter. Some find themselves in a caring role for elderly family members, some find themselves full-time unpaid child-minders. Some just clear off on round the world cruises and whatsapp pictures of Caribbean beaches to their fraught offspring. Our daughters graciously never expected regular child-care of us, one reason being because we were too unreliable and never around. Lockdown means we have to reconsider all these things and try and remember what our expectations of retirement were.
I’m trying to remember how retirement was for “old people” when I was child. It seemed to be at worst a brief hiatus between work and death or at best being dusted down and wheeled out for Christmas. As I recall most of the community activities I was involved in as a youth, such as rugby, drama, folk music and church, were run by people who still worked. Mind you in those days I don’t think I really distinguished working folk from the retired anyway. I think the assumption was that retirement equalled being clapped out.
Talk about not living in the present, I spent most of my working life planning my retirement. Then in my late 50s I was found to have a heart condition despite not fitting the profile at all. My consultant actually used the phrase ‘Sod’s Law’, which preoccupied me in my blog yesterday. I overheard him discussing ways of “increasing my life expectancy”. This was all rather alarming in the light of my plans. The parable from Luke 16 kept going through my head:
And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself”.
Thus with amazing support from my Principal and Vice Principal, I dropped out of management responsibilities and went part-time for my last year. I remember on my first day in this state a member of staff, with the usual stressed look, came rushing over to me in the staffroom, paused, muttered, “Oh, it’s no use talking to you now,” and rushed away to bother someone else. It was marvellous to be dispensable. Another advantage of part-time status was that no one quite knew which days I was in so didn’t know whether to expect me to attend some of the unpalatable meetings that were held, so I didn’t.
I was therefore very fortunate in entering the retired state with a foretaste of freedom. Then going away travelling for three months put a time buffer between me and work and so on return I was in a position to choose what activities I wanted to take up. Then came the moment of wanting to retire again, when all the meetings and expectations cluttered my fantasies of ‘just being.’ To continue that search for the ideal ‘retirement’ in the second phase.
So here am I, and perhaps you too, considering this relatively passive state that has been imposed upon us, when we are service users not providers for the first time in our lives, and wondering is this what I want from now on? Do I want to change the way I live? Could I, even if I wanted to? Would it turn out as I wanted anyway? Could I sustain it? Can I wrest control of my retirement from competing pressures? Do I know the answer to any of these questions? Are the answers the same from day to day? Does it matter? Answer – I have no idea!
We’ve always had our role models of older people whom we aspired to emulate or who impressed us with the way they lived. Many are in this village and are still role models and still a decade older than we are. One such person, not here, the gentleman who picked up litter, had a picture on his wall taken from the ground looking up some tall pine trees. I once suggested the picture was upside down. After much debate we all went out into the woods that surrounded his cottage and lay on our backs, looked upwards at the trees and contemplated the issue. That was in 1996, at the height of our working lives when we were graced with a perfect time and a place for that perfect moment of suspension. One sadly which can never be sustained. Which way the pine trees grew was a conundrum worth considering especially as we never arrived at a conclusion. Those are the best sorts of conundrums.
LINGERING – A ROUND
We've lingered a long time here,
You and I.
We’ve seen the sun shining
And watched the frost melt
From spider webs.
We've gazed into the fire
And you were the fire
Who flickered warmth
And flickered thought.
And we lay on our backs
And named the stars
And wondered which way the pine trees grew.
So this is as good a place as any
To linger a long time,
You and I.........
..........................(Repeat)
(Clay Island, Lake George, NY 1996)