"Be counselled and retire"

This year a couple of my older colleagues will retire. Older colleagues have retired before, but I have reached the age now that younger colleagues inquire about my own retirement. Until recently I have not given much thought to it, or rather, I have not given too much thought to specifics about when and how. I have been “saving for retirement,” of course, as  conventionally recommended, and, assuming no meltdown to civilization as we’ve known it, no serious compromises to one’s health, no financial mishap among loved ones, the prospect of retirement seems bright enough to perceive at least dimly. 

I have long been imagining retirement as a sort of true leisure. Not to golf or fish or otherwise “be active,” for these are mere pastimes for most of us, and not the objects of true leisure. If these were the true arts of one’s life, they would be truly leisure activities. I could imagine golf, and once did, as a true leisure activity, as it was portrayed in Golf in the Kingdom, a way of looking at the world, a disciplined practice around which real life, good life, can center. But I am not a golfer at heart, only a hacker, and nothing of a fisher. My art, writing, will be my new next job. HDT dismissed the notion of retirement in later life; not the leisure it represents, but rather the deferring of it to our later years, decrying, as he did, the “spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” For me, though, I never found what are often considered  “the best days of our lives” to have been all that superlative, however agreeable. I find HA a bit more forgiving and instructive, “A lifetime is not so long a time to learn to express one’s ideas.”

Senectute Corporis

This body is not what it once was. It was once, my body, I almost entire, almost indistinguishable from me in those years when I lived most fully and almost exclusively in it and through it. It has acquired now an existence of its own, an independent, sometimes mischievous physicality over which I exercise less and less control. For a former athlete, still actively living the motto mens sana in corpore sano, these losses, this decapacitation strangely does not diminish me. It may yet, but for now, I feel myself more me than ever. I have no particular desire to return to the day or the body in which I could run a sub-5 minute mile, play ten sets of tennis in the summer heat, get two finger joints over the rim, read without glasses, pee quickly. Even if one could return these faculties merely by wishing, I’d defer, settle for the restoration of my eyes and prostate, in that order. A body for games less becomes an old man. He should spend his time otherwise.