People of a Certain Age, if you are retired, perhaps you have been party to something like the following exchange:
Acquaintance. Dan! How’re you doing? How are you liking retirement?
Dan: I’m loving it.
Acquaintance: Keeping busy?
Dan: (Lists a litany of activities that make his calendar so full.)
Acquaintance: Wow! Certainly an active retirement!
Dan: Seems like I am just as busy as when I was working. The difference is that I can choose what I do.
Why do I and countless others who have retired from active and successful careers feel obliged to be seen as doing?
I once described this as Newly Retired Syndrome. Said I hoped I would outgrow it.
It is going on three years now since I retired. That stretches the definition of new. There must be something else at work.
I asked Mom about this one time. She said that, at her age, she sometimes asks herself to “justify taking up space on earth.” I suspect you don’t need to be 95 to ask that question of yourself. There are books about purpose-driven lives written by people a lot younger than Mom.
Pico Iyer, the famed travel writer, gave a TED talk in 2014 called “The Art of Stillness.” He has made a good living going places and doing things, then writing about the goings and the doings in an artful fashion. He says, though, that his life has required stillness from time to time, not going, not doing, not writing. He spoke of “sitting still, turning sights into insights.”
Being still can serve a purpose. Can it be a form of doing?
“How’s it going, Mr. Spaeckle?” asks the little fellow in the comic strip, “Frazz,” drawn by Jeff Mallett. “More things to do than hours in the day,” replies Spaeckle. In the next frame, Frazz says, “For some reason, grown ups don’t think that’s a good thing.”
I mis-read Frazz the first time. I thought he said, “For some reason, grown-ups think that is a good thing.” That fit neatly into my mindset about the urge to be seen as busy, even when retired.
The correct reading of Frazz’s comment gets at Mom’s point. Having a reason or purpose to get up in the morning, as Judy puts it, makes getting up in the morning easier. Maybe the trick is to define purpose differently.
Many of us were raised to see as heroic those people who accomplished great things while harried and drawn in multiple directions at once. Yes, sister, you can have it all. Yes, brother, you can run the company, serve on three boards (two voluntary, one paid), play well in club tournaments, not miss any school event involving your offspring to which parents are invited, etc.
A work-life-career like that is bound to create patterns of living that influence life beyond the last day of a paycheck. The habits of a lifetime don’t disappear overnight.
“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” wrote Shakespeare in “Hamlet.”
Retirement gives us time: to think, to see, to hear, to turn sights into insights. If I need to come up with a purpose, could I come to see being, thinking, seeing, hearing as important ways of doing? If Shakespeare was right, I’m in control on that challenge.
The actress, Sally Field, stars in the movie “Hello, My Name is Doris.” Field says about her reason for doing the film the following: Doris is a “wonderful person to look at on entering one’s 70s. As human beings, I think our challenge is, will we be open to what is waiting for us to find out about ourselves?”
If we take the time to think, to turn sights into insights, we will find out about ourselves. I suspect that many of us who have lived the harried life, pulled in multiple directions, were quite comfortable putting off finding out about ourselves.
What we People of a Certain Age might discover is a purpose only we can serve, valued, perhaps, more than we had ever thought; the sharing of our experience.
In the March 25, 2016 edition of The Week, gerontologist Karl Pillemer advises readers about a way for them to ease their anxieties: “ask an older person.” Writing about the urge to find a purpose in life, Pillemer reports that older folks say “relax.” “They say that you are likely to have a number of purposes, which will shift as you progress through life,” he writes.
Pillemer recommends that younger people consider asking the advice of older people as they move through life for the simple reason that the older people have lived through more parts of life.
Have you imagined sharing your insights based on your experiences as an important purpose for you in later life? NPR’s “Story Corps” featured a man in hospice who was disappointed each morning he woke up until, as happened each day, someone sought out his counsel, even about small stuff. Who is waiting for your wise counsel?
Being still. Relaxing about this purpose-driven life stuff and simply sharing your experience with others, urging them to relax. There is a theme emerging here.
Daniel E. White
April 4, 2016