Another birthday passed. Last year I used a reference to “I Can’t Drive 65!” by Sammy Hagar. This year I am saying that I’m starting out getting my kicks on Route 66. I believe this will exhaust the birthday highway messages (unless I usher in next year’s day with “Life is a Highway”).
On a slightly different topic, I wanted to write a commentary on something I’m experiencing around my retirement. When I announced it—and this happens to a lot of people, especially in academia—I was asked, “But what will you do? How will you spend your time?” As if teaching and the job are all that there is, and that I have no other interests beyond that.
Now, in retirement, as I put together a playwrighting class for the local community college continuing ed program and work towards creating a new theatre and performance group, people are asking, “But I thought you retired?” As if once the retirement date is reached, everything stops except the slowly creeping onset of death.
My response to them has been (and probably will continue to be), “I’m retired, but I’m not dead and gone!” I’m still active and creative and it would be a waste of my energy and experience to sit and count the minutes awaiting my demise, whether there’s travel involved or not.
Retirement can create an odd feeling. I worked all those years, experienced many things, and gained a great deal of knowledge and (I hope) wisdom—not to mention a boatload of song lyrics as found in paragraph 1, above. Now here I am, at the moment, with this huge collective assemblage of stuff in my mind, and a continuing need to utilize it and not waste it. It would be like Jung’s collective unconscious without humans, just floating and gathering celestial dust, desperate for someone to tap into it.
Pass the prospector’s hammer. Tap, tap.
Thoughts and reactions? Leave me a comment, and please like and follow (either of which would be a lovely birthday gift).
MUSOFYR 