Definitions of retirement cite a withdrawal from public life, working career, or profession. It casually adds, mostly due to old age. My parents’ generation feared retirement. They had grown up thinking that it meant poverty and death. I have now retired three times. Each one was bittersweet. It is akin to having multiple lives. Perhaps that’s the remnants of my parental beliefs, or a natural nostalgia.
Speaking with others, I have learned that some count the days, months and years in advance of their retirement, and then move to a different part of the country to live a different life. Some are consumed at their amassed pensions and want to build it higher than they thought possible with the delusion that they will have all the time in the world to spend their earned fortunes. Some find that not having a job is so disturbing that they take part-time work to fill the time. Some travel leisurely. Some scrimp to eke out an existence with the help of others.
Janis Ian wrote about beauty queens who married young and then retired. In that case, because it was not brought about by old age, it is considered a negative. It’s an aimless, purposeless drifting connotated by the concept of retirement, coupled with a young age. It stands to reason that retirement is only recommended for the old.
Some believe that retirement is a disastrous decision, one of the most notable architypes being that of King Lear. When one is used to power, it is a natural delusion to believe it exists after it has moved on to another suitor, like fire consuming an object that still appears after it is no longer there. Your word was law and now is not.
Retirement comes with seeing yourself as the elder in stories. These tales often end with the death of the old person, and you learn that these lessons speak to you now. Inspiration becomes both easier to sense and harder to realize. You aren’t as you once were.
I’m not sure that you can retire from love. Love is like energy, difficult to destroy but very malleable. Fires of youth may later glow with embers but there is much warmth. And warmth is the product of energy.
Retiring from love comes at a cost to your heart. I stopped teaching in order to have more power and earn more money. Not teaching chewed at my soul until the joys of the classroom seemed to be something that happened in a previous life. I told myself that I had just retired.
I told myself that I was using the power to create a good environment for teaching and learning, but it wasn’t the same. I learned that you really cannot teach someone to teach the way that you do by supervision. And so, I moved on from what I had loved so deeply, that it had seen me through decades of my life. I guess it wasn’t a retirement at all. I’m still in love with teaching.
I began to write in earnest after I retired from supervision. The novels that I had been living in my head poured out. Essays and short stories were rewritten and became public. I rediscovered poems and fragments that I had been scribbling throughout most all of my lives.
Retirement is a step into the unknown. Its timetable is a mystery. It’s freedom with everything that’s left to lose.
I found myself with a post-retirement career as a disc jockey. For the next six years, I investigated blues and jazz and pop and rock, both from memory and research. Now it’s time to see what happens next.