I am invited to speak to a class on “Aging In America” at the university today. They are focusing on the “living environments” of us geezers. I am to speak on the living environment of retirement. The invitation of course prompted some thoughts.
What is retirement? Seems as if I should know what that is if I am going to talk about it. The more prosaic meaning is that one leaves the work arena. In this society, work means the making of money for oneself and others. One does this by selling one’s time-space and attentional energy to others. Retirement means that one is no longer doing this.
If one would devote one’s time-space and attentional energy to the contracted services anyway, as one’s outflow of being, one is not working. One is being paid for who one is. Retirement is a term of no consequence. One is oneself. Sometimes money comes. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Of course one can always sell oneself into slavery and perform duties not at the core of one’s being for money. Prostitution however exacts its price.
My two major “jobs” in my life have been (and are): (1) the absorbing of information, putting it into simpler terms, and passing on the info to others, and (2) listening deeply to people caught in confusion and assisting them in becoming unconfused. This is what I do. This is who I am. Sometimes I have received money for it. Sometimes I have not. No retirement here. One cannot retire from the essence of one’s being.
What will I say to the class today? I do not know. I do not speak from notes. What I might say is that retirement means that one’s time-space and attentional energy are no longer within the structural frame of someone else’s devising. One can then do things like sit in the afternoon sun and watch a wasp stretch and flex itself, wash and groom its little face and its antenna, and then fly away.
But heck, I have always done that anyway. I suppose I have always been retired. What is that old joke? "Retired? I was never tired in the first place!"
