"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.”