Step by Step

It’s going on a year and a half since I retired, and I can hardly recapture the frame of mind that I lived with for so many years, rising five days a week to go to work and organizing the rest of my life around those committed hours. Fortunately, I managed through most of my life to work at jobs that excited and motivated me, so that whatever resistance there was to the constraints on my time was balanced by an eagerness and commitment to the work itself.

Quite a few of my jobs were project or contract related, or were new or cyclical in some sense, providing me with a sense of creating, developing or building on something that either had a finite end, or that would reach a natural, periodic conclusion. Working through a school year was like that, or counselling a group of youth transitioning from incarceration back into their communities, or putting together a life skills program for a new group home. This enabled me to work at specific jobs for one to three years, and then to move on at a natural end or completion point. Which in turn enabled me to feel just fine about my frequent changes of employment.

My very last job, however, was quite different. I remained in it for over ten years, which proved to be much too long. And while it was work that brought me onboard with a new and growing enterprise, and so had those elements of newness and development, this aspect was essentially done after the first three or four years, after which I found myself in increasingly stagnant and repetitive environments and routines. I should have moved on from there but failed to make that happen, and had become a burnout case by the time I coasted numbly into retirement.

Looking back, I’m struck by the levels of depression I experienced in that last job, and by the depressed energy and suppressed frustration and resentment in those around me. It wasn’t an atmosphere I had much prior experience with. In the past, I’d always felt well able to flee such environments long before the souring had set in. But this time around – having failed to succeed with a number of applications for other jobs, I felt stuck, resigned and hopeless. So I accepted what I’d always considered a ridiculous and unthinkable proposition: remaining in a role where I largely went through the motions, unhappy with the quality of my own work, and finding little or no fulfillment in it.

Retirement has become a kind of drawn out adventure. I feel that I’m engaged in an ongoing process of reinvention and rediscovery, but it progresses slowly. The pressures I’m under are set principally by myself. Goals and projects are my own, self-defined and willingly embraced, but not promptly executed. When I don’t accomplish what I’d planned to in the course of a day, there is no external consequence, and that’s an aspect with two faces.

On one hand, I’m thrilled at how completely free I feel. What didn’t get done today, I can easily put off to tomorrow; there’s no one to care or even to know. The absence of the mounting pressure I’ve associated with procrastination all my life is really beautiful. Whenever I do get to whatever it might be, I feel motivated by my own concerns and wants, instead of by a desire to avoid criticism or disappointment from someone else.

But the other side of the coin is that I let many things slide for longer than my own standards can tolerate. And the feeling of disappointing my own expectations cuts deeper than those complaints I occasionally got from others. And they are a lot harder to dismiss.

Maybe the best side of this process of developing a self-generated work process and rhythm is the fact that it’s so personal, and has involved me getting a deeper understanding of how I tick. For example, I’ve confirmed that the most productive work times for me are late morning – shortly after getting up from bed, and late at night – early morning, really – when the day is over and the next hasn’t yet started. That latter time is like a space in between, and it feels that way, almost as though it floats between those two days, untethered from regular clock time. My late morning and my early morning sessions have totally different feels, and I’ve also found that the second is always best if I’ve already made an investment in the first.

There are a few other things I’m learning about myself and how I work best that are carrying me toward the goal of writing and publishing regularly. I’m sometimes amazed that I’m seeing a piece of the puzzle of myself so late in life. And I’m also seeing that some lessons are so particular to my current stage of life that I couldn’t have learned them any earlier than I have, just as I’ll never do the writing I failed to do at earlier stages, because I’m no longer the person who held those seeds of stories inside himself.

All of this together seems to be opening up a present tense in my living that, while it’s always available, can only be entered into by conscious choice. And I only seem capable of making that choice when I’ve freed myself of distractions and fears, while at the same time accepting whatever structures and demands the moment brings for what they are. And often, as weird as it may seem, that means being willing to act without explanation or understanding. It’s like giving voice to another dimension of my own awareness and intelligence, and trusting that it won’t let me down, because it can’t.