Retirement, Panic, and Peace

     When I retired last February, I felt eager. My job had long been stale, and the last two years were the worst of all. I had weeks, sometimes months, of being stuck at the desk with nothing to do.

     I pleaded with my boss, “I have a cell phone. Just let me go walk around Lake Los Carneros while I wait. You can call me the moment something comes up, and I’ll be back within fifteen minutes.”

     My boss was sympathetic, but the company rules were clear: the minute I left the company campus, I was off the clock and using precious vacation time.

     I walked the halls every week, talking to anyone who might have work for me. I nearly always returned empty-handed. In times past, I would use those periods of down-time to study, to hone my engineering skills, to “sharpen the axe before cutting down the tree,” as one manager used to put it. Our new department manager didn’t see the value in that, however, and actually told me not to do it. (I often did anyway, because not doing it seemed stupid.)

     We weren’t supposed to surf the Internet on company time, and it was considered bad form to be seen reading a non-work-related book or playing on your smart phone. We had a small field at one corner of the campus where we could walk. I wore grooves in that path, but how many times a day can you walk around and around in the same circle? I thought about all of the things I’d rather be doing, and I counted the months, weeks, days, and hours until I could finally be free.

     It was a shock, then, when the panic set in.

     The first morning of my retirement, I woke up, looked at the clock, and smiled. It was Friday. “I don’t have to go to work today,” I thought. “Wow!” And then….

     “Holy shit! I don’t have a job! What the hell have I done??!”

     Except for when college was in session, and one 6-week period when I got laid off, I had been employed since graduating from high school, 36 years earlier. To be suddenly and voluntarily jobless – what had I done, indeed?

     I’d had panic attacks before. Many years ago, my wife had a brush with cancer. She survived, thank goodness, and is doing well today, but we went through a hellish year when it happened. I was her primary caretaker, while holding down a full-time job, managing doctors' appointments, and wrestling with insurance companies. The experience drained us both. Then, when she began to be well again and things grew quiet, my own panic attacks started. 

     I hated and feared cancer, and something deep in my subconscious was convinced that I would be its next victim. Every ache, every odd lump, bump, sore, or asymmetry because a cause for worry. Each time, worry would grow into obsession, and obsession into panic. Adding to the worry were strange physical manifestations: a rash that nobody could explain, and which would not go away; a lump on a testicle; an odd sore in the mouth.

     Time, therapy, meditation, Buddhist lectures and mantras, anti-anxiety medication and, most of all, a steady succession of medical tests proving that nothing I had was malignant, finally brought calm. I thought I had made peace with my mortality, even if I still didn’t like the idea of dying.

     Retirement taught me that accepting my mortality and finding peace with it was not a one-time thing. The sudden, open expanse of time in my life put me, again, face-to-face with my demons. This time, however, I knew them, and I had the tools to tame them. 

       The other thing that I need to tell you about my experience of retirement (knowing that yours will probably be different) is that the days pass with blinding speed. It feels like the slide of time has been greased and tilted downward by another ten degrees.

     There are no more long days of sitting in front of the computer, wishing or imagining that I could be doing something else. When I sit at the computer now, it’s because I am doing something there: writing, processing photographs, communicating with friends. And when I want to do something else, I simply do it. 

     Long days are no longer balanced precariously upon wobbly, week-high stacks of too-short nights. Now, I wake up when I’ve slept enough. The days fill with whatever each one of them wants to contain, and then suddenly it is evening again, and time to snuggle in with my wife and our pets.

     Am I doing what I thought I would? Yes, and no. I am not, sad to say, writing much fiction, which is what I thought for years that I’d be doing if I ever slipped the corporate yoke. I’ve had to make peace with that, too. I’ve tried forcing the fiction to come, and it always sounds exactly that way: forced, stiff, and contrived. Better, then, to let it go, and to let the writing simply be what it is. I won’t stop doing it.

     Writing is how I process life. Others have already said, “I don’t know how I feel about that, I haven’t written about it yet.” For me, that is a deep truth.

     I am doing a lot of photography, however, and I am happy with that. I am calmer, too. Without the external time pressures and constraints of work days and weekends, I can relax and breathe more deeply. I see others rushing, trying to get to work on time, squeezing in a quick stop at the grocery store on the way home to whatever personal chaos they have in their lives, and I can feel empathy for them without being caught up in their stress. I am glad not to be living at that pace any more.

     Speaking of pace, it is time for my morning walk. Live deeply, for we never know if we will live long.