WHAT ARE YOU RETIRING INTO?

Last week I was at a life celebration of a former co-worker who died recently. I spoke to some people that I had not seen in more than twenty years. It is profound to review lives spanning a long  period and seeing people grow and age and mature. I have been thinking a lot lately about how we simultaneously change while we stay the same. Life is a moving train that keeps moving along but whatever happens along the way, we are still on the same train.

So, in retirement, are we more the same or more different? Which parts of us change and which parts stay the same? 

Do we really find a more natural temporal rhythm once our schedule ceases to be dominated by a version of time that has been structured by a daily work routine? What happens to all that extra time - the eight hours previously spent at work?

It is one thing giving up work, leaving an environment that we no longer want, but, as a Psychiatrist at that memorial asked me, “what are you retiring into?” I feel like I found a healthy sense of purpose in my work; what will happen to that element of fulfillment? It’s one thing to fill time; it is another completely to be fulfilled over time. It is not a simple process to imagine a new structure that will bring wholeness to the hole in time. It would be hyperbolic to think of retiring into myself, an unbridled onrushing into a passionate void, feeding the unharnessed magician waiting to evolve, and thus taking the world by storm.

Nevertheless, I would love to believe that I might able to attain a state of calmness, of equanimity, a distance from worries, and an ability to move into my own natural rhythm. I am trying to visualize something like this while maintaining a sense of excitement, of spontaneity, of adventure and curiosity, a desire to learn and to try new things. My desire is that I will not be moving into an absence but rather into a sense of fullness.