Between work, email, coding projects, writing, photo editing, the time sink that is social media . . . I spent most of my waking daylight hours in front of a computer screen the past few years. And even when I was away from a keyboard, I was often thinking about what I needed to do at work.
That didn’t leave a whole lot of time for other things.
I haven’t exactly stopped using my computer, iPad, and smartphone in retirement. But removing the “earning a living” part of my life has freed up a remarkable amount of daylight hours to do –and pay attention to – other things. One of them has been experiencing the changing of seasons in a different way, as New England moved from late summer into autumn.
There are a whole bunch of cliches about my current stage of life and “autumn”, but that’s not where I’m going here. Instead, it’s more that I’ve felt a stronger connection to the natural rhythms of seasons. Sure, I always noticed the leaves changing colors, and I’ve long been sensitive to days growing shorter every fall. But my typical autumn weeks while working rarely included contemplative walks to truly experience these things. I went for walks almost daily, but those were mostly exercise walks. I rarely had time to both exercise and stroll, and also do the many other things I wanted to squeeze into my life around work.
Now I have time to do my exercise walks and also stroll. And get my daily stretch routines in. And meditate most mornings, even if for just a few minutes. I can take walks or bike rides to get my heart rate up and, when the weather was nice, meander on local paths to watch leaves flutter off the trees or sit for a bit and watch the river go by. I’m guessing some others managed to figure out how to do these things by not being so tethered to their keyboards off work hours. But for me, this is a radical change – even moreso than no longer having a professional identity. And it’s one I wasn’t expecting.
It would have been nice to have more of this in my life before I retired. But honestly, I don’t know how that would have worked – unless I’d been born into a different culture with a different personality. There’s little I could imagine current me telling 25-year-old me that would have helped her figure out a better work-life balance and a career she’d be proud of.
I spent much of the first, daily newspaper part of my career in the Reagan era. It wasn’t exactly a time with a lot of structural support to make any sort of requests related to mental health. I had one paid vacation day (along with some federal holidays) my entire first year on the job. My schedule then was often working until 4 am one day and being back on the job at noon the next.
I cared a lot about doing good work, creating useful things, helping my readers and colleagues, being respected, getting ahead. And I learned a lot. I don’t regret too much of it. Erasing that part of my life would have changed who I ultimately became.
But also, I don’t miss it anymore.
Some of the theories of aging I’m reading about talk of late adulthood as a time to look back and integrate the different phases of our pasts. The idea is to create a personal narrative that helps us understand who we’ve been and make sense of who we are.
“Here we integrate our life history, waving together stories, finding threads of connections, and discovering the meaning and purpose of our life in the whole,” Rabbi Rachel Cowan & Dr. Linda Thal write in explaining Erik Erikson’s theory of psychological development. “The work of integrating the pieces of our life story can help us begin one of our most important tasks: the rediscovery and reclamation of that authentic self.” That is, the “real us” right now, not the professional version from our past who may have developed to complement a career.
This can be tough to do when you’re working 40+ hours a week and thinking about your job in many of your “off” hours. It needs time and space. That may be where I’m moving to now.
But it’s not just looking back. They talk, too, of the excitement of learning new things, about ourselves and the world. This is also “a good time for conscious effort to make new friends and renew valued friendships. . . . Exploring the richness in this stage of our lives will take us to new places.”
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