Two years of retirement already.
Even though the time has zoomed by, I can certainly say my time has proven to be my own.
I can say no in a way I didn't used to be able to. And there may be some truth to the observation that once free from work (mostly), people become more themselves, more who they really are. And if I learned nothing else working in open-door community colleges for most of my adult life, I learned that people have an incredible capacity to bloom at different times in different ways. If we're lucky, we do contain multitudes.
Two years ago I really WAS a recovering employee: I used to sleep until eight just because I didn't have to get up at six to get to work. But these days: hey! I'm retired! So some days I get up when the birds are singing (which I assume is because the sun is shining, a comparatively rare event where I live), and other days I sleep in. Some days I have to remind myself what day it is.
I am still grateful for all the opportunities my places of work afforded me even as those days are receding in the rear view mirror. More than that, I am grateful that I made it this far. When I had lunch with a former colleague who had retired voluntarily six years ago and when I think about those who recently were "realigned" (management speak for their positions being abolished), I am certain that I retired at the right time.
What's changed?
I am aware, or more aware, that I need to get exercise, as much for my brain as for my body. And I do. I get enough exercise to know I feel better when I do, but I also know I have no aspirations to be An Athlete. I also listen to Slow French on my iPad (intermediate level, and most of which I do understand). I read. I write.
My time is my own--and it is mine to fritter away if I like. My routine is good until it is not, until it gets interrupted by, say, a phone call or the new episodes of Orange Is The New Black.
Now that I am home and refocused, the seasons seem to matter more than they used to. Or at least I am more aware of them than I used to be. I no longer have to drive on unplowed streets to get to work. I can stay in. I can go out. Where I go is up to me. I actually notice when the weather is nice in part because I am not in an office eight hours a day. I am no longer exhausted at certain times of the academic year (say at the end of the first week of classes or at graduation).
I no longer have to suffer fools the way I had to in the past. And, to be fair, perhaps a few of the fools are not grieving that they have found themselves Sandy-free for a couple years.
I am no longer offended by being given the senior discount, most often at Dunkin Donuts. Not that I have ever asked for it. I have other things to think about. And when I am home, and, for example, the power goes out, I am the person in the neighborhood likely to know when it is going to go back on. I have been known on occasion to watch what goes on in the neighborhood, but I don't see myself ever saying, "Get off my lawn". Yet.
Because my time is pretty much mine, my using it wisely is more important than it used to be. I left full-time work two years ago, and since then, others have left as well, either to the Great Beyond or to other locations--this last so much that there are very few people left to swing by and say hello to except, maybe, my annual Girl Scout cookie supplier. Otherwise there is little reason for me to visit quickly because I am in the neighborhood and taking a book out of the library on the floor below. So maybe there is some truth to the where-we-are-is-who-we-are idea. Or who we are determines where we go once we retire and realize time has passed for everybody else, too.
More than that, maybe in a recent synchronicity-type occurrence the Universe reminded me to continue to pay attention to what matters--or maybe it just was a random event: I read a telling obituary the last time I was in New Hampshire. I happened to be sitting in a coffee shop and I came across an obituary in the Manchester Union-Leader (which was far less right wing and vitriolic than I remembered it). I didn't write down her name and I haven't been able to find the obit online, but the 90-plus year old woman had died after a life that included a husband, several children and grandchildren, and a successful business that sounded like she had made wrapped-submarine-sandwiches-for-supermarkets. Though she had grown up in a local orphanage and the obit made reference to "her orphan sisters", it also gave the name of her birth mother, and said about the deceased: "She always wanted to be a nurse."
Which she had never done, apparently.
How much of our lives do we make and how much is a matter of luck and circumstance? She must really have wanted to be a nurse for her family to mention that fact. (Unless, of course, she wrote the obit herself. No matter if she did.) Maybe we contain multitudes, and, well, maybe we don't. I don't know for sure. I just kind of toodle along with whatever purpose and interests I have.
Even though my left knee pops more than it used to, I am fairly content in my SandyNiche as I define it for now. Few things are as calming (not that I need calming) as a snoozing cat. I still think that you can never have too much flannel and and that it is wise to never underestimate the power of Vietnamese coffee, cafe sua da, iced espresso with sweetened condensed milk as a power drink.
I have never encountered anybody who was unhappily retired although perhaps they exist. All I know is the locus of control has made a tectonic shift to moi. I have a certain social (and personal) security that I never had in the full-time workplace. When I think about it all, it seems like I have done a lot along the way, including in retirement. But I don't want to be a nurse, and I don't want to find myself thinking that way in a few years.
Still, complacency is not good, for as someone told me long ago, if you are complacent, then you are in a rut, and if you are in a rut, you are close to being in a grave. That may overstate things a bit, but still.
I have a loose and expanding list of things I want to do and that will happen: paint the deck and the wicker love seat; get the car inspected and the trees trimmed; decide what to do with oldish cameras and organize thousands of photos. Pick up an el cheapo chair for the beach. Buy the tickets to see John Cleese. Other occasions and ideas will appear, evolve--maybe will bloom--and I will do what I can to move things along. So good, so far.
And if all these things seem small and ephemeral and whatever else--well, hey, what I did at work (and not at work) all those years was equally and cosmically small and ephemeral even as it all looked Very Important at the time. So things go.
And so, as the T-shirt says:
I don't want to
I don't have to
You can't make me
I'M RETIRED
Copyright Sandra A. Engel
May 2017
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