Confessions of a Retiree

• It is an amazing feeling to look forward to the work week without the slightly anxious or mildly depressing anticipation that would often accompany the thought in the past. You know how it is on a Sunday morning: you slept in because you are not a morning person and you awoke because you simply had enough sleep and not due to the alarm clock, as you do every day of the work week, or, you are having a leisurely breakfast at home, or, you are taking a morning walk about the neighborhood – Sunday afternoon: You are having late Sunday brunch at a new restaurant, or, taking a hike, or just shopping - Sunday evening: watching 60 Minutes and you suddenly realize that your two day weekend is nearing its end and that your workweek is about to begin again? This sudden realization is often accompanied by a slightly anxious or mildly depressing feeling. You tap it down this feeling almost immediately, almost in an act of defiance or actually denial. Well, I don’t have that feeling anymore! • How many people actually look forward to the work week without these feelings? I never did…ever, in spite of the fact that I loved my job. I knew, or felt I should look forward to the work week, recognizing that doing so was the healthiest posture to working, but I never did really. I don’t know if I ever would have acknowledged this while working. I did admit I had a workaholic career but I never would admit to being a workaholic. My job was designed by a workaholic. I used to joke that if you looked up “workaholic” in the dictionary you would find a picture of him. • Did I love my job? Or, was I just grateful for the opportunity to work as I did: 1) with a level of responsibility (I was not just a cog in some wheel; I was a program director and managed a staff and worked with cohorts of students; I loved knowing I was having a positive and critical impact on some of my students); 2) with a level of prestige ( I worked in university higher education and always felt proud to be a representative of the highest of the three educational levels –secondary, community and university, notwithstanding there are three levels of higher education achievement – the bachelors, masters and the doctorate); 3) with a level of community service (I worked specifically with red, black and brown students, which satisfied my need to be of service and give back to the community, as a person of color myself); 4) with a decent salary for which I felt adequately compensated. Knowing this got me through some of the more challenging work times; 5) There was not a day in all my seven years at my last university position that I did not feel grateful at some time of the day for the opportunity to do the work I did. • Still, I NEVER, EVER LOOKED FORWARD TO GETTING UP AND GOING TO WORK! I was very, very grateful for the opportunity to work as I did but I did not bring a workaholic’s commitment to my career. I was not the workaholic required for my job. I was never willing to work insanely hard, meaning, to sacrifice health and nutrition and rest (although I did many times) in order to get the job done. When I did, I did so with begrudging resistance and the constant acknowledgement I was going against the natural order of things. I could never embrace the need to do so and as such was never as successful as I wanted to be because the only way to be successful was to work insanely hard. • What would it have taken for me to look forward to the work week? Looking forward to working with the people I worked, perhaps? More money? I certainly did not look forward to getting up and going to work in the morning. I don’t know what would make me want to get up in the morning overriding how I am conditioned to arise, which is: no alarm clock, no morning schedule (I hate morning schedules), the time to meditate, take a walk outside, exercise, and breakfast leisurely. Nothing is more important. Even on vacations, Cynthia and I sleep late and never venture out until around noon. Those are my natural rhythms and working was always counter to those rhythms. • More about work - I never felt as if I could give any of the tasks for which I was responsible at work the full attention required: the instruction; the staff management and evaluation; student advising and professional development; the industry cultivation; the grant writing. I never felt I had the adequate time or resources to accomplish these tasks. Everything was always rushed; one completed task was immediately replaced with another to be completed. And any need for detail and quality required that I over extend myself and work insanely and unhealthily hard. This over-extension is a standard and expected part of the work environment but does that make it healthy? It never felt healthy to me. • What about work did I enjoy? I enjoyed most the first weeks of the fall quarter, re-connecting with returning students and getting to know the new students. In class, I enjoyed very much the opportunity to present the new world of opportunity which awaited my freshmen students, but only for the first few weeks before the reality of the rigor and the tedium settled in. Each year I would observe the excitement of the new academic environment begin to gradually decline for the new students into a humdrum of the routine to be replaced with the dull recognition that college study is not the same as high school study – not for all of the students but certainly for the great majority. • I enjoyed my contact with certain students, only a few frankly, who truly recognized the value of the opportunity which college offers them and how my program benefitted them in the process. College today and yesterday is represented by two icons: the diploma and the beer bottle – graduation and animal house. I grew tired and bored by the attraction of the latter over the former by too many students. I also enjoyed my contact with certain colleagues, who brought humor and lightness to the workplace. If I would do it over again I would cultivate the relationships with these people more than I did. I have only one true friend (we socialize in non-work-related settings with our families) as a result of my work. It is absolutely essential to be able to have social relationships that derive from one’s work if one is to thrive in the work environment. What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement makes clear why this is so important. • I am also more conscious of how stressful the process of working is: the orientation of waking in the morning; toiletry; dressing; breakfast (rarely); commuting; organization and preparation, according to a schedule which required that I attain a level of efficiency without the time to do so on my terms but on some abstract basis that measured at minimum: good, excellent or outstanding performance outcomes. The multi-tasking efficiency engendered by the Internet years ago created a work environment wherein outcomes based on human interaction became trumped by outcomes facilitated by technological means—a work environment whereby human interaction was augmented by sophisticated tools which facilitated quicker outcomes leaving the components of human interaction less important in the process. • I resist characterizing the work environment as negative but I certainly see the stress induced by the work environment as toxic. Nevertheless, I believe strongly that stress is an internally-produced outcome. It’s not the stimulus, it’s the response. Meaning, you make it what it is. • “When I am not working I could be working.” That was motto as Program Director. I am very grateful to be relieved of that responsibility more than I thought I would be. The motto served as a motivator for quite a while, but it crossed the line at some point and became a psychological weight from which retirement has freed me. I am astounded at the depth of my relief of having retired. I feel as if I checked myself out of an insane asylum. I got off the moving train. I resigned from the rat-race. Life has begun anew. • The prospect of retiring never appealed to me as a worker bee. Retiring felt like giving up, being put out to pasture, being washed up. I envisioned that I would work until I was no longer able to, until I would have to give it up, too tired to keep it up. Only then did retirement feel like a circumstance I would sanction. That’s what I projected for myself. Reality turned out quite different. I had this vision of my working in my career until I was 80, with the full expectation my health would continue to be sound at that age. 80 sounded like the right time to let it go and leave it all to the “young’uns.” The reality was, I would have had to work even harder than I was to maintain that work life: retooling regularly to keep pace with the technology, paperwork, emerging trends and a workforce younger than I was. And, I found myself not wanting to work harder and work so much. I didn’t want to be beaten down by working so hard. I didn’t want to be still working and clearly past my prime. I didn’t want to be one of those employees who looked like they were ready for retirement. I wanted to retire when I still had some semblance of youthful vitality. I wanted an active retirement as opposed to passive. • Retirement did not come easy though. In retrospect, the signs were there. I started to get into work later and later although I stayed later and later. I never worked the required 8 hours - I always worked overtime as a matter of course. At some point, however, I started to be conscious of making sure I put in just 8 hours and then I started to leave before I put in my 8 hours. Inevitably, I would put in way more than 8 hours because that’s what was required to get a task done. The pattern was there – I just did not attribute it to burn-out. I did not recognize it was burn-out until I made the decision to retire. • Every day I practically pinch myself in the joy and acknowledgement of my newfound freedom. I no longer have to work for a living. I’m in the process of grasping what that means from day to day – I don’t have to work to make a living anymore. • Also, I don’t have to report to anyone anymore. I don’t have anyone to report to. I don’t have to inform my staff, my secretary, my dean, or his secretary of how I plan to spend my time or how I spent my time. I don’t have to complete time sheets declaring how much time I worked when in reality I always worked overtime without compensation, drove my car for work without reimbursement; worked at home in the evening; worked on weekends; worked on holidays; worked on vacations; LIVED AND BREATHED WORK. I don’t have to do that anymore. I only have my wife to account to and that is by choice. I am free of the unwritten rules that said my work was more important than my personal life. • A friend asked me recently, “What are you going to do now?” My reply was, I’m going to be a “human being” instead of a “human doing” for a while, if not forever. My primary orientation during the employment phase of my life was as a “human doing”. I was introduced to the concept of “human doing vs human being” in the early 90’s when I was listening to a tape by John Bradshaw. The concept just stunned me for a moment. I was immediately put in touch with the reality that my values had been doing-oriented instead of being-oriented, for I knew innately that my true values are being-oriented or should be being-oriented. But I was a being-oriented man in a doing-oriented society, a doing-oriented world, with a doing-oriented career. Nevertheless, I was able to adopt a new affirmation for myself – “I’m a human being not a human doing.” Having retired I can naturally embrace my being-ness as my primary way of operating. It was the exact opposite when I had to work for a living. • After 6 months - Relieved. That’s how I feel when I awake every morning - relieved. Relieved of all that duty and responsibility that had become a burden to me. I was enjoying it less and less as much as I was still continuing to enjoy certain aspects of it. I have not yet gotten over the relief. It still feels fresh and palpable and I am still basking in my new found freedom. • In retrospect, what I needed was a year-long sabbatical with no work responsibilities, but that kind of work agreement does not exist so retirement was my only choice. I say this to many of my acquaintances: when you have worked for 20 or 30 years (10 years even) you need a year off to effectively recharge. No simple vacation is going to do that adequately. Unfortunately, the work environment does not provide that kind of opportunity and people simply burn out until retirement is the final solution. I’m having the time of my life deciding what I want to do the rest of my life! • Once it was certain I was going to go through with retiring, my wife gave me a book to read, What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement – John E. Nelson and Richard N. Bolles. I wish I had read this book ten years ago or twenty years ago even (although it was copyrighted 2007. My wife had purchased it but not read it). Knowing what I know now I would have even required my staff to read it and complete the exercises it provides. There are chapters I would have given as an assignment to my students. The book is not just about retirement, it is about how you align and integrate your present life: work, relationships and finances so that they serve you functionally for the inevitability of retirement. • It is fascinating how nature abhors a vacuum, isn’t it? How the time we spent working almost immediately gets taken up by other matters, whether chosen or un-chosen. We do not retire – we just move on to occupy ourselves differently than how we did previously. I refuse to say I am busy. That sounds as if I am working, but I am occupied more than I would like to be. I'd love to have "too much time on my hands" but that is just not the case. • Retirement is a process. And I suspect it is a different process for each of us. Some of us look forward to the unstructured-around-a-job-or-career time and some of us cannot imagine what we would do with all that unstructured-around-a-job-or-career time. Me, I’m all about the former. Each day I am learning just a bit more how to be retired, learning anew what I want to do, accomplish, envision, and just be. How many of us were asked early in our lives, “what do you enjoy, what are you good at, what is most meaningful for you?” and assisted and nurtured in developing towards that purpose. I never was…so I asking it now. • I can listen to music now again fully as I did when I was younger. I guess I don’t have the distractions or preoccupations I had in my working life that didn’t enable me to do so as I can now. When I was younger listening to music was a foreground experience for me. When I would listen to music I would listen to the complete performance: the contrasting instrumentation, vocal quality, quality of the recording, quality of the performance. During my working life I rarely spent time listening to music as I did when I was younger. It retreated more to the background and I missed the immersion in the experience of listening to music I once had. Now when I’m listening to music it is in the foreground. • This past weekend, after almost seven months of retirement, I felt none of Sunday’s transition to the work week. Finally, it all felt the same, just days of the week. • I am still learning my own true rhythms regarding what truly engages me. Divested of the rhythm of working and the need to make a living (it’s a way of life; a way of being; a way of thinking; a way of living; an all-consuming orientation that takes time to peel off) I get to discover anew what are the energies that motivate me and engage me on my own terms without the rhythm of the working life as an influence. • I doubt there is anything which can engage me enough to want to get up early in the morning again. I would love to be engaged enough to want to get up early in the morning but nothing in my life has motivated me enough to want to do so. • I put aside my organizer notebook when I retired. After 7 months of retirement I am now compelled to bring it out again in order to organize myself in my retired life. I’m finding I want to organize myself in my retired life. I had to when I was working but I brought a degree of resistance to doing so. Now I can embrace being organized without the resistance. • I am more conscious now than I have ever been. This consciousness I possess is nevertheless informed by all of the experience and knowledge I have gained up until now. I will have a broader consciousness ten years, twenty years, and thirty years from now. I can look forward to that. I wish I had this kind of consciousness when I was much younger, although as Dag Hammarskjold mused, “But for all the time the journey has already taken, how you have needed every second of it in order to learn what the road passes by.” • I don't dislike yard work maintenance. I just never felt I had the time for it when I worked and now that I'm not working I still don't give it the time I would like. I could spend all my time on my yard turning it into a garden. I spent 3 hours washing and waxing my car I few weeks ago. I'll never do that again. I don't want to be one of those guys who spend all their time on their car but I know I'm capable of that sort of perfectionistic indulgence. A teacher/guru taught me that perfectionism is about control and control is about not allowing, therefore I work against my perfectionist tendencies quite often. I'm still determining my priorities in the midst of my first year of retirement. • Settling in to retirement…it’s on ongoing process. I would not be surprised if I am saying the same thing 2 years from now…settling into retirement, still putting the pace of the work-life behind me. I also have to recognize it is sometimes anxiety producing to have all the time in the world you have desired and to recognize you still can’t do it all, particularly if you don’t want to operate at the work-life pace. Up in the morning, commuting, organizing, thinking about being organized all the time, having to be organized, having to be responsible to others, having to be responsible for others…Yuck! • After nine months I feel I’m still on vacation. And when you’re on vacation you don’t work. This vacation feeling might and must come to an end at some time in the near future but right now I’m enjoying it to the maximum. • For the past few days I have felt a decrease in my attachment and identification with my work persona. Almost 10 months into my retirement I still think about work. Thoughts about my students, my staff, the administration, the faculty, the campus would occur randomly throughout my days since retirement. I still have dreams about work – new projects and old projects revisited often populate my dream space. Two days ago I awoke with a different sense of my relationship to my past career. It was simply less of a felt presence in my thoughts than it had been since I retired – a new stage of my retirement psychic space. • What would make me want to get up early and address the day the way I did when I was working? Hmmm…Perhaps, the opportunity to move our finances into the black. Is there any activity I would volunteer my time and energy at that level? It has yet to reveal itself. • I retired feeling totally unfinished about the work I did and as a result I oftentimes feel frustrated or angry even thinking about my ex-campus and work. Nevertheless, I am relieved I don’t have to pursue that route anymore. • After 10 months I find myself wanting to do less than more. As I embrace being over doing I find so much of our lives are so consumed with doing, we have no idea what it is like to be at a being level. To take things as they come. To not be in control. To not be in charge. To let things happen. After being so doing-oriented, to actually incorporate a being attitude, spirit and nature takes time. When I retired in September I had a lot of energy for the things I want to do in retirement. Now, I am just content wait for the time and place for those things to emerge. • Retirement is a major developmental milestone, according to my psychologist wife. It is a new stage of existence on the planet. I feel as if I joined another species of human being. Interacting with people who are still working and involved in their careers while I am still shedding and molting my work and career habits has given me a new perspective on life. I am now suspect of people who are working for a living. As a consumer, I am sensitive to whether people are interacting with me only because they are paid to do so. I am now just like one of my students, who intimated that we were paid to care about them. I want more than someone who is just paid to work. I want somebody who cares and I bristle when I sense they are just doing their jobs. • After 11 months I am still feeling more and more the relief of having retired. I feel less like I’ve retired and more like I let that job and responsibility go. Whew! • September 6, 2013, my last day at work. It has been a complete year. Today is my one year anniversary. I feel as if I have only scratched the surface of my retirement. It still feels new and special - an absolute treat! I still cannot get over the fact that I don’t’ have to get up and go to work anymore or carry within me that ongoing responsibility my job/my career entailed. • I feel as if I am STILL settling in to being retired. The pleasure of not having to work for a living still feels new and fresh. I feel as if I needed an extended vacation from formal working, a sabbatical as it is termed. But people on sabbatical still work on something related to their careers. I am working on becoming a human being instead of a human doing. My wife will join me Jan 1. • If I ever am not able to take care of myself, if someone else has to take care of me, I will not want to be here anymore. • I am everything I see. Everything I see is me. I want to connect with that more and more. • This is really extended vacation time. And what does one do on vacation? Relax and enjoy and not get too consumed in many commitments. To take time off. To get off the clock. To take things as they come. Being-ness over doing-ness. To be is to do. • I slept in today, as usual. Since retirement I usually sleep in unless I have a specific task or appointment which requires I set the alarm and arise early. But today, sleeping in was without the mild, low-level guilt which has usually accompanied my sleeping in. My only scheduled task for the day is to take out the garbage, nothing else; it felt like heaven to awake leisurely, at my own speed knowing there was nothing I was scheduled to do today but the garbage. And since garbage pick-up is in the afternoon I did not even have to think about it until later. I did not awake with even that task in mind. It is interesting to take in that I have carried this mild, low-level guilt with me since I retired. There is so much to do all the time. I can admit now I have not felt comfortable with allowing all there is to do to get done in its own place and time. I guess, I have felt guilty for not being more task-oriented in my retirement. But for now, being task-oriented is not where and who I want to be and I am finally comfortable with that position for the first time since I retired. It really was the goal, or vision, really, of retirement I had for myself when I was working, to not be task-oriented. Finally, after 14 months and 6 days I have come to that place in body and mind. I am at peace with who I am, how I am, and life itself. • Yes, allowing and not resisting – that’s the ticket – that’s what I am learning in my retirement. • Relinquish. That's the word now. I am relinquishing, letting go, moving on to a better place. Relief, relieved was how I felt initially- relieved of the responsibility of working for a living, of the pressures working for a living entailed. Now I am relinquishing my attachment to that responsibility slowly but surely. Developing a new skin - molting. Becoming a new person, a different kind of person – a non-working person whose identity is not linked to my career or job or the working life. As I keep reiterating, I am becoming more being-oriented than doing-oriented. That does not mean I do not do, but it does mean I do to be, not be to do. It keeps getting better and better. My all-time graffiti favorite: To do is to be – Nietzsche; to be is to do – Sartre; do-be-do-be-do – Sinatra. • Gratitude. I awake today with gratitude in my heart and mind. Gratitude to just be here and now. • I am still astounded when I reflect upon the amount of psychological pressure and stress I carried with me with that job and with that career. It is only in its absence that I can take the full measure of it. After almost a year and a half I still exhale every day with the sigh and relief of its relinquishment. • “You don’t know where you are…until much later.” –The film director, Lee Daniels, talking to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, 2012. • To take stock of my work life while I was working would have required a therapist. I now have a perspective on my work life now that I did not have when I was working. I don’t know if I could have viewed it then as I am now viewing it. I was so involved, engrossed, and enmeshed in my career and I never had the benefit of a true mentor or advisor or even a team of colleagues to reflect with in an honest, open, authentic way. While working, you sort of have blinders on, in a way, unless you have a refined degree of self-awareness or an effective support team, or the willingness and means to ask for honest feedback. There was a prove-it component to my work – the need to grow it and raise money, which placed a different kind of pressure upon me. Given that pressure, I don’t know how open I was to criticism or just objective analysis about what I did and how I could do it better. I always felt I was too busy to conduct the internal assessment necessary. • I am a different animal now – a different species – a different kind of human being. I’m a person who does not have to work for a living, having worked for a living all of my adult life. I’m a person who is no longer part of the working class. Not being a member of the working class any longer I am conscious of the profound difference in an employment-life orientation and a non-employment orientation. It is not that I have joined the out-of-work class even. Retirement, by choice, affords one with a cachet, a status, a stature, which is higher than being out-of-work. Still, I am now off the beaten track of the work-life/employment-life orientation and system. We don’t think the same anymore, you workers and me. I have different regard for you and you regard me differently. I watch you; I observe you; I try not to feel sorry for you. I try to discern which of those amongst you truly are happy doing what you do, or is it just putting on a good face or is it abject denial. It is too stressful what you do. It is not healthy what you do. I know. I did it myself for so long. To do is to be – Nietzsche To be is to do – Sartre Do-be-do-be-do – Sinatra

For Consideration

Everytime I read or hear in the news about some guy barricading himself in his house or apartment or the apartment of his wife or girlfriend who has left him or threatened to leave him and holding her and sometimes the kids hostage or killing her and sometimes the kids and shooting it out with the police after killing her and sometimes the kids, either dying in a barrage of bullets or turning the gun on himself, tears come to my eyes.

I cry just a little bit because I know his pain; I know his desperation; I know his absolute terror given the abandonment of his wife or girlfriend and his choice to kill her and the kids rather than face the emptiness of life alone. And I am reminded of my own past pain, desperation and absolute terror confronted with being abandoned by a loved one to face the emptiness of life.

His sense of himself had become so enmeshed with his wife and family that even if he was an emotionally-distant, controlling, physically and emotionally abusive son of a bitch of a husband or boyfriend, life was no longer worth living if she and the kids were going to leave him. The blinding rage of learning that she was choosing to live her life without him, the overpowering jealousy, the terrifying recognition of his inadequacy as a husband or boyfriend or father or lover expressed in her desire or request or demand for independence or independent action was just too much for him to bear. He’d rather see himself dead, and by extension, her and even the kids.

This is such a common scenario. You read or hear about this kind of tragedy so often, too often. I lost my dear cousin, Jackie, to such a tragedy years ago. It was inexplicable. Her boyfriend shot her at her apartment and then shot it out with the police and was killed. Nobody ever really knew the details. They died with her and him and the torment of whatever drove their relationship to that tragic ending. I remember reading somewhat recently about three police officers even, two male and one female, killing each in the fevered frenzy of their dysfunctional relationship. OJ Simpson, even. I remember one tabloid picture of Nicole: incredibly sexy and seductive and attractive, and my thinking and understanding how that look must have so enraptured Simpson that the notion of the loss of that experience forever drove him crazy. The Dorothy Stratton tragedy, its just goes on and on…

It was only until I felt my own rage, and terror and inadequacy as a result of my separation from my first wife, Jacqui, that I began to have this level of understanding and empathy for these tragedies. And I feel so sorry for these sad and frightened sonofabitches who did not have the blessing of a counselor or a therapist as I did to give them insight into their own psyches. I am so grateful for the circumstances of my being able to make constructive choices when I was confronted with my own abandonment issues and maybe even averting a similar fate for myself.

I remember so well walking along a main thoroughfare in Oakland late one night unable to sleep due to my recent separation from Jacqui. Across the street there was this loud commotion of a liquor or drug-fueled argument between a man and a woman. All of sudden I heard, “smack!” the sound of his hitting her reverberating into the dark night. Uncontrollably, I yelled out loud, “Yeah!” Silently, in my own thoughts I followed up with, “Hit that bitch again!” And I was serious.

“Oh, shit,” I thought. “I’ve got issues with women.”

I never thought I had issues with women. From my perspective, women were the salvation of this man-dominated, out-of-control world and society. I called myself a feminist. I subscribed to MS. Magazine. I loved women; I respected women; I was non-threatening to women. Women were comfortable with me and I preferred their emotive company to the non-emotive company of men. Men were sexist, mysogynistic, homosexually-panicked, violent and saw women only as sex objects. I was not that kind of a guy and I was proud of it.

What I was expressed that night was just not like me. And yet, there it was, me wanting to call a woman a bitch. Where did that come from? What was that about? I had never spoken that word before. I hadn’t even thought it, until then…… when a woman was rejecting me.
Bob Earle, a Twelve Step speaker whom I consider to be a teacher and a guru, on one of his tapes said, “You cannot be rejected!”.....