Then again, I never meant for it to. My daughter was just finishing middle school and I was, shall we say, far from the standard retirement age. After ten months of trying to forge writing paths (with some success) and teaching a variety of community education classes, I got an email inviting me to apply for a job as a psychology instructor.
The rest is (personal) history. One class turned into two, then three, with classes added and subtracted until I reached a point where three classes a semester was the norm. It was a second career that I grew to love as much as my first and real retirement seemed far, far away.
Now, though, I'm beginning to envision what real retirement might look like. Friends are retiring and carving out new lives and I'm finding that the thing that seemed far down the road might be a few exits closer than I imagined.
Let me be clear. This is not an announcement. I am not retiring.
Yet.
But lately, in this space and with friends and colleagues, I've been lamenting how hard it's been to write. I've been viewing it as a planning and productivity issue. If I were more disciplined. If I took better advantage of small bits of time. If I stopped procrastinating.
Then, Easter weekend, I took a vacation. My non-teaching Thursday and Tuesday formed a lovely parentheses around our spring break, extending it from a long weekend to the better part of a week. I spent time puttering, preparing for Easter, doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. My husband was home during all of those days, my daughter was home over the weekend and more family came for Easter. I had a long phone call with a friend from college. I sorted through piles of magazines and catalogs, purged a bunch, and took time to read. I did a little school work here and there so I wouldn't feel as though I'd been hit by an avalanche when I returned to class. My schedule was (mostly) my own and my to-do list included many things I enjoy.
On Monday, I wrote. Voraciously, if one can say that about writing. The well had been replenished and my enthusiasm had returned.
The next day, as I sat in the sunroom with my husband (who was home sick, unfortunately for him), I imagined this is retirement how retirement might look -- both of us sitting in the sunroom, doing the things we enjoy on a timetable of our own creation. And, for the first time, it didn't sound boring.
It sounded wonderful.
I reiterate: this isn't an announcement. I am not retiring.
Yet.
I still enjoy my students. I love standing up in the front of a classroom talking about psychology and initiating conversations where any question is fair game, even if that means we sometimes have to look up the answer together. I love coming up with new and different ways to teach and immersing myself in new material.
But the well is only so deep. And while these things add water to it, other tasks that are part and parcel of teaching take it out by the bucketful. After a while, when all of my energy has been spent in other pursuits, my writing muse fails to show up, preferring to curl up in a comfy chair and take a nice, long nap.
For now, my teaching feeds my writing, at least some of the time. And while I once couldn't imagine not going to school every day, my year of retirement practice ten years ago proved to me that I can be productive outside the classroom and that, when the conditions are right, my muse shows up on a pretty regular basis.
At the moment, retirement is still a dream, somewhere down the road. But lately, that dream, once fuzzy, has been coming into clearer focus, especially on days when the sunroom is filled with light and peace and time feels like something to revel in, not wrangle.
Until my daydream becomes a reality, I have my summers -- a test drive, of sorts, for days to come. For now, that's enough.
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