Sixteen months ago I stopped working and this has been long enough for people to ask how I am enjoying retirement.  I interpret this as really asking “What on earth do you do with your time?” I feel better if I can reply with a list of activities. My response must be plausible, at least some of the time, as friends have taken to saying “I know how busy you are” and then I feel a fraud. 

Retirement is an unattractive word.  Fusty and aging.  And while it is undoubtedly a privilege, it can feel like a privilege forced upon one by circumstance. The cumulative effects of work – stress, fatigue and, sometimes, physical damage – are often the reason we have to stop. For me, additional circumstances pushed me towards retiring as a necessity: something had to ‘give’ and work was the most straightforward to extricate myself from. While it was undoubtedly my decision, and I was lucky to have the choice, yet the options felt limited. My appreciation of my privilege is soured.  Have I in fact retired like a beaten army?  Unable to stay in the field? Yes, perhaps.

A little.

But it is not only that. Not merely retiring to lick my wounds.

There is also a sense of release.

Work was a commitment, framed, at least to me, within a powerful sense of obligation to my colleagues and to the broader purpose we were all engaged in. Most of my adult life was spent feeling responsible for others: as well as work, the children needed getting up, out to school, feeding, keeping safe. It’s not just that my life was kept busy by these things. I was raised in a family where such responsibilities were taken very seriously. Perhaps I absorbed them too strongly: my sense of obligation can be excessive.  Now, if I miss a choir practice or fail to attend an event, my absence is pretty inconsequential to anyone but myself.  I feel it as quite a startling change. Retirement confers a great freedom. 

So what on earth do I do with my time? The challenge is that retiring can also feel like being untethered. Without the demands of the daily routine, there is less momentum to bowl one along and every moment presents choice. There is also an unfamiliar isolation: whatever I choose, what difference does it make to anyone else, if no-one depends on me? Am I retired or redundant?

What come to the mind most often are the naïve questions: what do I want to spend my time doing?  How do I choose? If my answer is a vague and qualitative “I want to live well,” how do I define that?  These aren’t new questions by any means. There is a brief time as adolescents and young adults when they come to the fore and feel urgent, when all our actions feel significant and life-determining. Then, at least in my lived experience, they get pushed behind everything else – we make enough decisions to create a framework and simply sustaining that seems to take all our energies. We have, as it were, now made our bed and must lie in it. But movement is constant, and all things change, such that I emerge now, blinking, with a past behind me and the questions before me once again. 

Yesterday, I was sorting through some old family photographs of my mum’s. That’s the sort of activity that retirement grants time to do. Amongst them I have some of my grandparents.  One taken in 1917, just before they were married, my grandfather in uniform.  Another taken in the back garden, on Sunday 16^th July 1944. My mum – then aged 20 and serving in the WAAF, for it is wartime again – was back home with her parents for the weekend. My grandfather died unexpectedly two days later.

I look at these photographs and identify with their worries about uncertain, frightening world events which intruded into their attempts to have a quiet life.  It comforts me that my fears and confusions are certainly not original and we share them across the generations. I wonder whether this couple, unmet by bound to me, feel they lived well.  What did they feel about the choices they made?  How did they cope with the changes forced upon them by the disastrous world they found themselves living in? And I share with them the unknowingness of mortality. How much time do I have left?

How do I live well?  The question is more urgent as time becomes more limited. What should I do next? As always, I am tempted to blame the circumstances which surround me, and my demon voices tell me to use these as an excuse for further prevarication. In the past, I was too young, too inexperienced. I am now too old, too war-weary. My body is less robust. I am too scared to try. I am too daunted by the disastrous world I see around me. I can’t decide now. I am no closer to an answer. And now I have double vision, both past and future:  what did I spend my time doing, how did I choose, have I lived well? Can I even yet define what I am seeking? 

I do not seek happiness, although I welcome it when it calls.  I think I seek contentment. A word which dwells for me in a linguistic field with other profoundly stirring words: satisfied and enough.  I enjoy the double meaning. A life well-lived is, perhaps, one full of content.

So, how am I enjoying retirement? What on earth do I do with my time?