Most of us weren’t born where we work. For the most part, there were many years in which growing and learning is what we did, along with loving our family if we were lucky. I suppose education was a kind of productivity, but if so, the product was us, not some external commodity. Some of these years were idyllic. Unless we had some kind of nightmare of a childhood, most of us can remember moments of paradise in which we chased after fireflies or tumbled down a hill in a big box, or simply ran through a field in delight. We can remember long summer days when there was nothing we needed to do and yet each day seemed so important. Deep in most of us is a nostalgia for these divinely innocent moments that we seek to recover in religion, art, sex, athletics, or any number of spiritual disciplines. Sometimes, when I talk to people about their retirement, they transform before my eyes into a twelve-year-olds talking about their plans for the best summer ever. Their particular plans vary depending on the particular joys of their childhoods, but retirement often seems like a grand desire to return home, to find the place of safety and joy and freedom after years of living by others’ goals and schedules in the occupation we call employment.My childhood was filled with leisure and unprogrammed time. When I wasn’t playing in the darkening grass with the dozen or so co-conspirators of my neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois, I was spending a summer doing not much at all with my mom in a trailer in the most perfect place ever in western Michigan. It had a perfect shallow stream and a beach and watchtowers and a lighthouse and dunes for miles and miles and you could walk for hours and no one would worry about you or even notice and that was just ok. My three siblings were older, so it was often just me wandering contentedly over the sands. Although my life is now made up of many meetings and public presentations, there is a part of me that is joyfully alone on a beach someplace. It’s beyond the dualism of introvert/extravert, it’s the remarkably different neural pathways that make up ‘me’ all at once. And as shallow and embarrassingly nostalgic it is, there is a part of me that wants to go home to that primordial pleasant place. Of course, that particular place in Michigan isn’t there anymore the way I want it to be, so it has that sad nostalgia for me that is a dark brew and only lukewarm.
This desire for homecoming is why farmers talk so differently about retirement. They were often born on the job. Their idyllic moments were a part of their contract with the land that fed them. I have met many farmers who talk about wanting to farm until they die. They live their nostalgia and so feel no need to return to some other place.
Not everyone found the rewards of leisure as a youth. For some of us, the joys of productivity and pleasing our parents by cutting the grass were strong elements of ego development and instrumentality. For these folks, good retirement has strong components of keeping busy and being productive. When these things are thwarted for reasons of health or economics, these folks may fall into depression, unable to satisfy the primordial imperative.
So how can this idea inform our decisions about retirement? Well, we can understand the 'going home' component so that we don’t try to recreate a scenario that is founded on a world that doesn’t and perhaps shouldn’t exist anymore. We can discern and distill the settings that created and nurtured us in the best ways and translate them into a new milieu.
For better and worse, we cannot change who we were. We can, however, like God does, pluck the divine sparks from the air of our life and use them to build a warming fire for the evening coolness.