| "Retired!"
What a frightening word it
was. We
retired
at Christmas, 2009. It's a weird thing to get used
to. There's a disorienting light-headedness to it. We keep
busy,
and as a friend noted, we haven't retired from life;
but there is a
release from
pressures, and a lightness of being...it's like being a teenager again,
but without the angst; and with less energy. Whatever you don't
feel like doing today,
you can put off. I spotted a t-shirt that suddenly amused
me: "Laziness pays off now..." On the other hand, there's also a strange grief at being severed from your workplace and professional identity, and all the meaning-of-life actions and interactions that happened there. It causes a kind of malaise that needs to be fought. Part of the cause of the malaise might be illustrated by this old metaphor: "Put your finger in this pail of water...now pull it out, as fast as you can! See how quickly the water fills in the hole?" Travel is an antidote - perhaps that's why so many people begin retirement by going away on a trip; and some just keep travelling. I travelled a lot as a young man, and always had butterflies as I started out on a journey, a feeling akin to falling in love; it's easier to avoid being weighed down by thoughts of a past job when you feel like that. A friend who retired said that she was surprised at how much "Catholic guilt" she felt for not going in to work. We considered doing supply teaching, and paid the price to renew our College of Teachers cards; but when we reflected on how desperately the large crop of new graduate teachers needed those jobs, we backed away. It's hard to face the possibility that you might now just be all that you're ever going to be, and that you've done all that you're ever going to do except for travel, perhaps. Anthony Quinn, playing Zorba the Greek, said, "No man is happy without a mortgage"...a grand pursuit, an achievement to reach for, an accomplishment to dream about. Some dreams are stymied by our craving to travel, both in summer and winter. I've seen and done so much when I was younger that my "bucket list" is fairly short, so this is a time of searching. A writing career - songs? poems? short stories? maybe travel writing - might turn out to be my new grand pursuit. It's what I was quite convinced that I would do with my life when I was in grade three. |
| How
we
fill our
days in retirement: I play duffer tennis for fitness; Deborah has a walking regime. We spend a lot of time maintaining our garden or just inspecting it and watching it grow. We maintain the house, two vehicles and two sailboats, stay current with family and a small circle of friends, and go to occasional concerts. I read fiction occasionally, and play my piano and my trumpet, and now my recently acquired guitar. I get out at least once a week to play "amateur night" music with other people, and I'm developing a repertoire of solo "Open Mic" songs to have ready to perform as well, whether in a bar or around a campfire. We volunteer quite a bit, mostly related to sailing: we were Liaison Officers for two of the tall ships that visited Toronto over the Canada Day weekend, the Unicorn and the Playfair. I serve as the Communications Director on the Committee of Management of my yacht club, attending monthly meetings, creating the periodic printed newsletter, the Halyard, and contributing to our club website. I manage the investment portfolio for the Angola Memorial Scholarship Fund, building a sum of money that can generate annual disbursements for students and grass-roots educational projects in Angola. From September 20th to 25th we will also build houses for a solid week with Habitat for Humanity at a fresh "Build" about twenty minutes away from our home. Deborah has resumed learning to play the piano, she reads, and she has become a Sudoku addict. She bought "hers'n'his" ukuleles, but I didn't make any progress with mine so she gave it away to my Dad; I recently bought a guitar instead, and have added guitar practice to my piano and trumpet practice time each day. She has been reading Bridge for Dummies lately, and she wants me to read it too, so she can count on her partner to bid properly...she also spends more time cooking, which she has always loved. After dark, when I'm not playing music or tennis, visiting friends, going to concerts or playing darts and euchre at the yacht club, we transform our living room into our own private cinema, watching our favourite sitcoms and the latest movies on a 10' diagonal screen, with big stereo sound, in rocking-chair recliners. Early every morning and at points throughout the day, I manage the investment portfolio that allowed me to retire early and will pay for our travel and indulgences in retirement - that's a part-time job in itself that takes up about ten hours a week, so in essence, I'm still working quarter-time; but it's a mental exercise over coffee that I enjoy. An enormous - and difficult - project for both of us is downsizing - putting our house on a diet, purging years of collected flotsam, "chatchkis" and treasures, with all the angst-filled choices that process requires - so that we can feel less clogged up with "stuff", and be prepared to sell our house should we decide to become completely nomadic for a decade, or to move south or west. It will take more than a single year. The house project includes holding garage sales on sunny weekends, selling larger or more valuable items online, and painting the interior room by room. We might get to the painting in 2011... At the same time, I can't quite escape the feeling that we're now on some endless vacation, living in a strange sort of amazing resort: we reside in a low-maintenance cottage a short distance from a lake where we have a sailboat and a club full of friends; we have tennis courts; we have a garden that is fun and feeds us tasty daily produce all summer, with minimal effort, and we make our own wine; we have easy access to wonderful shopping and recreational facilities, great friends, and friendly neighbours right on our street - all we have to do is walk out our front door and strike up a conversation; we have musical hobbies, concerts, and groups to play with; great medical and dental care within three blocks of our house; and we can take excursions anywhere we want in the world for any part of the winter or summer. We can sleep as late as we like, stay up until we feel like going to bed, and do whatever we want, day in and day out. It's really difficult to find fault with any of this scenario. We must be some of the luckiest people in the world. We'll continue to sail on Lake Ontario, travel west in the summer and south in the winter. We spent six weeks this summer driving all the way to Salt Spring Island and back, and spent precious time with my parents, siblings and nieces and nephews in Alberta. I've enjoyed expanding and updating this web site since the earliest days of creating web pages with basic html code; this past winter I also kept a "travel blog", with photos. |