Walking in the Weeds

This year, I retired from a career in education, primarily workforce training and education, although I did teach high school, consult, design curricula, and educate professionals working in various occupations, including higher education.  Since my retirement I have rarely thought about the intellectual issues of educating the workforce, or the practical tasks involved with ensuring readiness in the workplace, two aspects of a lifelong career in education that had engaged my attention for decades.  In fact, after seven weeks of retirement, I have yet to open--much less unpack--the boxes I brought home from my office.

People have asked me if retirement bores me, if loneliness has overtaken me, and if, by some chance, I might be ready to take on new challenges and even a new job.  My brief answer to all of these questions: No.



Since retirement, I've spent nearly three of those seven weeks recovering from an illness, a fact which utterly surprised me.  Two other weeks were spent traveling, visiting with family. Calculating my leisure time in retirement, then, I've had exactly two weeks when I wasn't preoccupied with health or family, hardly enough time to say that I'm even familiar with the experience of retirement.

If you asked me to catalog what I've been doing during those weeks, however, I will find myself at a loss for words. During the first week, I felt compelled to find productive uses for my time. It seemed impossible that vast, uninterrupted days could be squandered with frivolity, such as television watching, web surfing, and shopping.  I lined up a long, complex, and serious task list, so complex Microsoft Project would have been a better tool for the job.  For practical reasons, my retirement income and financial analysis spreadsheets spent their days open and ready for use.  If I didn't check off several tasks from the list, at the end of the day I felt somewhat defeated.  I asked retired people when the impulse to produce results might wane, and the answer disheartened me. At least six months, they told me, and possibly a year or more.  I'd hoped that retirement would free me from frantic activities and obsessive rumination about work, yet now it appeared that I compelled myself to consider my leisure with the same rigor as my career.

Shortly after my retirement date, we traveled to the East Coast.  I spent time with little ones, a true pleasure, but came down with the scourge of an asthma sufferer's existence: an upper respiratory tract infection laid me low for two solid weeks, and beyond.  As I recovered, neglected chores nagged me.  And then another trip to visit the younger generation in another state brought a short bout with a scourge of aging: arthritis pain.  A desk job didn't involve as much squatting and standing, walking and trotting, as playing with a two-year-old grandson does.

Retirement's been more like taking sick leave, or one's annual vacation, or spending extended time with family to help out, so far.

Yet, I notice that retirement has slowed me. Rather than rising at 6 and racing out the door an hour and a half later, I've discovered the pleasures of rising when I'm rested, savoring a second cup of coffee in my robe, and the joys of accomplishing a short list of tasks punctuated by pleasures I'd delayed until this time, such as reading in-depth journalism or a chapter of a long-awaited book, or listening to energizing music in the morning and dancing around in my nightgown.  Better yet, this blog, which I'd considered establishing more than a year ago, can now be taken up, as a writing practice and a personal journal combined.

Transition time in the landscape of retirement involves a peace and solitude I hadn't realized I needed. Our home maintains quiet, with birds that twitter in the morning and bullfrogs that serenade us late at night.  At the moment, the view of the pond behind our home provides as much stimulation as I require; exotic destinations can wait.

In my down time, I am slowly releasing the hold that decades of career focus had on me, and the picket fencing that contained me--the daily schedule, the press of deadlines, the demands of others, the setbacks and roadblocks to accomplishment, and even the exhaustion I felt at the end of every day in my last months of work--begin to fall away like neglected and weathering posts and rails, opening to a clear, untrammeled meadow.  I'm taking walks in the weeds now.  Perhaps I'm creating a path.