The art of retirement

You typically study till about the age of 21, and work till about 60. That gives you a working career of close to 40 years. Which means that the preparation time for work is about 50 percent of your working career. Ever think of that? Your retirement will last till you die - say at about 85 years. So how much preparation time do you get for the 25 years of retirement? Zero.

In some ways life is like a 400 meter race. You start with your back to the finish line, run a difficult first 100 meters (20 years) with loads of change as you grow up, go to school, go to college. You then spend the next 100 meters (20 years) galloping straight as fast as you can go, starting and building your career, starting and building your marriage, a family, your savings. You are still running in the opposite direction to the finish line and can’t see it. You then get to another difficult stretch, the third 100 meters, on a curve like the first 100, from age 40 to 60, when you have to deal with career issues (the pyramid narrows), the demands of marriage versus the increasing demands of one or both careers, adjustment to the children leaving home, and finally retirement. Which brings you to the last, or home stretch. Another straight stretch, the last stretch. You can finally see the finish line for the first time. There is nothing beyond it; it is terminal, ends in death. Within the first six months of retirement I lost two old friends both of who had retired during the year. Death is actually a key player in this last phase of life as it claims friends, family, maybe your partner, and finally, you. I am not being trying to be morbid, this is just factual. Anyway, the question is, having run this race without the end in sight, what will you be able to make of retirement, will it be reward/enjoyment or punishment/suffering. Will it be just the absence of work?

The responses I got from friends and colleagues when I announced in 2006 that I would retire in 2007 were very revealing. I was working in New York at the time. All my non-Indian friends and colleagues sent messages saying "Congratulations! Wish I could afford to retire now...you're going to have a blast! Lucky you", or words to that effect. Almost all my Indian friends and colleagues said "Retire? So what are you going to do?" And now that I am retired and in India the most common question I get asked is "Oh, you're retired. So what do you do?" If I could charge a rupee for every time I am asked that question I won’t have to worry about market crashes. As a friend of mine who retired a few months before me said to me quite crossly "Why do people keep asking what I am doing? I'm retired. Why should I have to do anything?”

The British have a lovely expression for retirement; they call it "going plural". Retirement is a time for pursuing multiple interests, now that work is behind you. Work which robbed you of the best hours of each day, the best years of your life. Because work takes such a handsome chunk of your life, it makes sense to learn to enjoy it, otherwise your working life will be a living misery, a terrible waste. The problem comes when it takes over your life, and all you learn to enjoy is work – live to work rather than work to live. You are then the Marcusian ‘One Dimensional Man’. AJ Cronin said: "Men's hands are too coarsened by hard work to able to appreciate the finer things of life." That is true of all of us to some degree. Work partly deadens our ‘hands’, unless we constantly flex them, constantly seek to keep our leisure interests alive.

"Quality is time well spent". I have loved this definition since I came across it, but never found a truly fitting application. Till now. It applies perfectly to retirement. When you are working, your time is not your own, it is always compressed, in short supply. You spend no more than 7 minutes on the morning paper, and that too while gobbling down your breakfast. You never get enough time for the family, for sports and other leisure activities. In retirement these activities expand, taking up more of your time. A certain amount of expansion is needed. You can gainfully spend an hour or even more on the papers, including online. You can sit at the dining table and have lunch - lunch is a lovely leisurely mid-day meal, not 10 minutes to shut your door, wolf down a sandwich and open the door again for more of the grind. Beyond a certain level though the expansion is Parkinsonian - activity expanding to fill the time available. I saw a great cartoon in the New Yorker, two women standing in the doorway, looking into a room at a man at a desk with an envelope in his hand; one (clearly the wife) says to the other "retirement suits him; he can make half an hour of mail last him the entire morning". I sometimes feel that fits me to a tee. I have spent the entire morning or afternoon in my study, and what did I really do? If you do not have ways of spending your time well, you will kill it. In the words of Lawrence Durrell:

"Time amputated so will bleed no more
But flow like refuse now in clocks....
Not made to spend but kill and nothing more"

I have been retired two years, and feel that these two were a lifetime. You first go through an immense feeling of euphoria - the feeling of an endless vacation. You don’t have to set an alarm, you don’t have to shave if you don’t want to, you don’t have a jackass boss who's stupidity you have to either fight or put up with, you don’t have to travel, deal with the aggravations of airports, missed connections, cancelled flights, immigration, customs, jetlag. No daily commute. It takes a while to decompress, and when that happens you realise with horror how much subterranean stress you had even though you enjoyed your work, and know you can never go back to work again. Then, when the euphoria wears off and you realise an endless vacation needs some structure, you have to start ordering your day, your week, your year.

There are three common building blocks of retirement. One, you can head back to work in some shape or form - consultancy, boards, helping a friend run his little business, a position on the building/neighbourhood association or club committee. Two, leisure time activities - golf, travel, reading, writing, photography, gardening, philanthropy, music, drinking, gastronomy, partying, movies/theatre/concerts/talks - you name it. And Three, you can earnestly set about killing time - flop around the house watching TV, surfing the internet. That is the biggest danger, the blatant unabashed murder of time, and god knows I've done plenty of it, without even realizing it. ‘Time well spent’ vs. “not made to spend but kill and nothing more”. Actually, you need to strike a balance between activity and inactivity (inactivity as contemplation or repose). In activity move from work to leisure related activities. In leisure activities balance physical and intellectual pursuits. In other words a minimum regression back to the comfort zone of One, maximum immersion in a judicious blend of activities in Two while pushing the door hard against Three which is sluicing in like a tsunami. Two has all the good and fun stuff.

Which takes us back to our 400 meter race. Your growth as an individual is highest in the first 100 meters. Though you do grow in the next 200 meters, the pace of growth is slower. Nothing quite matches what happens in childhood and adolescence. The challenge in the last 100 meters is: what is the source of growth? Will your growth slow down or stop? The surprising little secret of retirement is that the pace of growth in retirement can actually be far greater than during working years. Pent up growth, along paths you pursued but didn’t have time for, and also growth along entirely new directions. I don’t want to sound 'new agey' or preachy, nor do I claim to have mastered this at all. I am only sharing a glimmer of truth I have seen at the end of two years of getting to terms with retirement. You can open up entirely new dimensions to your life. You can evolve through phases. While we all need the comfort of some degree of routine, the extent, nature and duration of routine now is at your command. It isn’t possible to live every day as though it’s your last, no matter what those cute forwarded e mails say. That would be too exhausting. You don’t die every day. What you can try and do is avoid the “dreary desert sands of dead habits” over larger frames of time. As a young trainee in Bombay I recall sitting out one evening drinking tea and watching birds fly about joyfully in the pre-monsoon breeze, hawks catch wind currents and float. I thought to myself that being able to move freely in three dimensions must be such an exhilarating sense of freedom, if only we humans could break out of our two dimensional prison. Well, we can metaphorically in retirement.

The new dimensions can be in existing activities. I am enjoying reading of a kind I never had time for, which is nourishing a mind starved for it. The Upanishads are an excellent example of something that opened up my mind, and I realise I could never have truly appreciated them while working. The same I have found applies to music, meditation and yoga. I have started listening to music I hadn’t heard before, and getting more from Indian classical and jazz than ever before – also rock music I had missed out on. I have re-learnt yoga and can do asanas and pranayam well that I used to murder before or could never do at all – even at half my present age! I actually try and meditate (though that’s still a little dodgy). You need time and a certain sense of repose for all these - consonant with the wisdom of the Vedas, which recommend that contemplation be held for the last phase of life, our last 100 meters. I have also realised the possibility of using the sense of repose to enjoy relationships more - both new and old, based off an updated sense of who I now am (defences start to melt away) and who each friend or family member now is, clichéd though that may sound. Quite appropriately, there is much greater possibility of getting to “time well spent” in retirement than in working life, because there are greater degrees of freedom, and you don’t have to rush anything.

Finally, if you ever felt the slightest sense of a calling to spirituality, that signal could well have been overwhelmed by the tumult of a work based life. In the repose of retirement you will receive it clearly, and can follow it without obstruction. That has happened to me, and there is no greater joy, no bigger dimension that you can hope for. And that prepares you for this final phase of life, to be the kind of person who can face the future calmly, recognise that death lies ahead, and be at peace with the thought of it, not terrified or unfulfilled "seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come". I mean this in the existential and the vedantic sense of living with the knowledge of your own death, not an obsession. Face it calmly because you realize that death is actually not an end at all, any more than the end of your working life is an end. Both can lead to better things, depending on how you live your life.

The true art of retirement, I believe, lies in growth built on a foundation of enjoyment - ‘joy’ being central. Not easy, it’s a bit like saying the true goal of life is to be happy...a perfect goal but how do you get there? Truth is, you have to work at it to get somewhere. That is what I am dedicating the rest of my life to, all the way to the finish line, and maybe beyond.