Hear the talk:
When I retired I swore I would never utter the trite phrase I heard retired people utter so often: “I am so busy now I don’t know how I ever had time for a regular job.”
I was sure the phrase was true -- so many retirees uttered it -- but it explained nothing. In what way are you so busy? What do you mean by “I am so busy?” Is it just your imagination that thinks you are busy? Is it perhaps that you’ve just grown lazy?
I need specifics. Large generalizations do nothing for me. The large generalization that for long infuriated me was the slogan: Just say no. My reaction? Just say no? What the heck I’ll just say yes. If you can’t explain, you won‘t convince me.
So here is part of what us old fogeys mean by, “I‘m so busy, I don‘t know how I ever had time for a regular job.
When you have a full time job, your obligations are clear -- job & family, family & job. You know the path -- though it may be, at every step, a learning experience. But you know what you must do. Raise a family, be with your wife and children. Earn a living.
Retirement is baffling: no job, no family. If you want to stay sane & productive, you must construct a life -- and the operative words here are construct a life.
Constructing a life takes time, especially since there is a strange disconnect in all the activities one is involved in in retirement.
I am deeply involved in dance activities -- but the dance I am calling this Saturday night really has nothing to do with the video of contra dancing that I am editing. And the preceding two have nothing to do with the dance tours my wife and are planning, which has nothing to do with our various visits at various times of the year to far flung parts of our extended family.
Or, to make the point again, our activities have no set structure -- we must decide what to do when. When we had full time jobs, the over all structure of our lives was set -- job & family, family & job. Now who knows what we should do when? It is all choice.
I always flash back to the story of the workman who was given wood to chop. This huge man performed an hour long task in half an hour -- he was dazzlingly efficient. His boss then gave him a sack of potatoes to peel, but with the instruction to check each potato & to discard the rotten potatoes. An hour later his boss returned and the man had not peeled a single potato. “What is your problem, the employer screamed.” The workman said -- I can’t decide if the potato is rotten or not.
Choosing, deciding, is an arduous task -- and in retirement choice is the whole of life -- and disconnected choices: should I sit and write radio talks? No I really should work on mastering the art of calling English country dances. Actually, I should do neither: we should go on vacation. No, we should not. It has been a year since we visited my wife’s mother & stepfather….
How did we retirees ever have time for a job? Currently our time is consumed by the choice all civilized human beings should be able to make: what should we do with our lives. There is much to choose from, but you must choose between disconnected tasks, and that takes lots & lots of time. So long…
Copyright © 2007 Henry Morgenstein