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By Susan C. Price
So now I am about one year into my full retirement, still surprised at what a difference I feel from the part-time work schedule I was on for 10 years. When a friend needed my organizational / administrative assistant abilities earlier this year, I cautioned her that it would be temporary help. And I was surprised to find how strongly I adhered to that limit. I have no, no, no desire to work. No desire to be expected to regularly show up at any work or volunteer site/activity.
In the abstract I miss the "you must DO this" and the "they are expecting you to finish this," and the structure. But I enjoy deciding each day and many times each day, "this,...or that...or nothing?" And yet, I still feel the need to be "productive." Wow, it must have really been drilled into me.
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I keep finding new things to do and new people to play with. And the "schedule" keeps changing. I was trying to have lunch with some friend or other every week. Now I spread these out more leisurely. (Um...but yeah...being the control freak I am...I keep a chart to ensure I am not forgetting to connect with anyone.) If the hubster and I have a "big" thing to do one day...we try to keep the rest of the week "quiet."
I started volunteering for studies related to aging and dementia. So far I have participated in four. I am sort of working on using my art on fabric...a slow process probably not going anywhere...but I might have a few blouse made. I am trying to work at my easel more. But there is no expected outcome. No expectation that the gallery membership tentatively mentioned will happen. Or that the economics of that membership will suit me. No one will buy them. They can be burned when I am. I just keep trying to make them. I read. I read Facebook. I watch TV. I watch movies, I bought a Roku...to do more of that...maybe.
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I did buy a fold up treadmill in December. This was an attempt to keep me from sitting so long each evening watching tv or movies and/or reading. It has yet to "catch on." "Naw, I don't want to walk NOW...I just finished eating...need to digest." "I like to read during the commercials...I can’t do that if i walk on it during the commercials." Etc....I will give it one more month...then it may be donated to greener pastures.
But what I really wonder..when I quiet the incessant "...is this ok? Am I supposed to be helping more...doing more, being busier, more energetic...?"...is, Are you listening to anything I say?
Is it the same or different for YOU?
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Copyright © 2014 by Susan C. Price
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I had no problem with retiring. My wife however felt her work defined who she was and it was harder for her to get over retiring. Now we both know each time we plan to do something, it is not carved in stone, it can be changed at any moment and no one cares. I just we had done it sooner.
ReplyDeleteI quit working before I retired, so the transition only lasted a year or two. The feeling that "I should be doing something more" goes away more slowly. After a couple of years of retirement, I found it very easy to play a round of golf and feel as if I had fulfilled my responsibility for being productive. (It was harder to find what I was responsible to.) I was tired after walking 3 to 4 miles and hitting a ball, so I must have been productive... I did some volunteering -- Habitat, soup kitchens, community gardens, tutoring -- all of which seemed to make me feel like a useful person, yet somehow unfulfilled. Still searching...
ReplyDeleteIt took a while. I wasn't happy about the way my career ended, so I started another (part-time, partly pro bono) doing science for the Nature Conservancy. Also let them make me chair of the Mountain Club to see what it was like being a manager.
ReplyDeleteAfter ten years of this I was more than ready to stop being a productive citizen - so I became a Serious musician. I still work compulsively, but only for my own satisfaction. Maybe I should have done that from the beginning!
I'm glad that Susan's column has sparked some thoughtful comment. I felt sparked to examine my own "state of retirement" immediately upon reading it the day she sent it to me, and I wrote back that "maybe I too need to try to write about my own current habits of living." In fact, I'm already into the writing, using the subject to construct my first sestina in several months. It feels a lot like "navel gazing" – maybe of the same sort Susan does – self-examination, motivation-questioning, moral taking-to-task: how I use (and how I "should" be using) my time....I'm deep into contemplating things like my habitually keeping busy and wondering whether this "keeping busy" is a way to avoid just such navel gazing, which doesn't seem to be much fun at all. Could it be that a significant component of my motivation for writing for and managing this blog (approximately 20 hours per week), for watching TV serials and movies (for perhaps as much time), and even for my daily household chores, which I do "religiously, is to avoid thinking about how I might be making "better use" of my time? There is so much suffering in the world. Do I have a duty to devote more time than I do to try to help alleviate it? Which part of the suffering world should I direct my efforts toward? Would it make any difference, really? So far, the result of my trying to write that sestina seems to be that I'm gathering a great sadness around me....
ReplyDeletewelll, great sadness probably does no one any good...what also mystifies me...is i never heard my parents or grands talk about this. i think it was my grandmother who did say, "you look in the mirror and say, "who the heck is that old woman, i am still 18 inside" ahhh yes
ReplyDeleteHaving, like John D. McDonald's Travis McGee, "taken my retirement in installments", usually devoted to creative work, I haven't had much of a problem with finally being able to step away from the job rat race.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, the difference lies in having- ever since High School- regarded what I "had to do" as a distraction from what I considered worth doing.
I recently read a remark that "Artist was one of the few occupations where everything you do is part of the job" so maybe that also skews my perspective...
Having made the fateful (if not fatal) decision at the end of 1966 to begin working for the International Business Machines Corporation, I found myself in a sort of "velvet cage" situation (as some medical doctor or other has described marriage), where I was both confined to working to support the division or office's ends and fairly pleased to be doing interesting and rewarding work. I also had the "professional freedom" to participate in the Society for Technical Communication, which had a journal for which I sometimes wrote and annual conferences at which I frequently presented papers and workshops. And IBM allowed me the freedom to give workshops in-house, in things like creative problem-solving and technical writing. These (and fairly often my IBM) work were my "creative outlet." Plus family life. My wife and I together "created" two fine human individuals, who do us proud.
DeleteNow that I'm a fairly hard self-taskmaster with this blog, it isn't clear that a whole lot has changed, except that I don't get paid for blog work (no one does, I'm sorry to say), and I don't have to drive to an office. (I'm paid by two modest pensions and a modest Social Security allotment.)