Officially, I don’t retire until September 1, but since I don’t work over the summer, I’ve already begun to consider myself retired. I’ve been looking forward to this moment for some time. I am relieved to be delivered of the daily stresses of a full-time career, even though I really enjoyed my work. But perhaps my first realization as I came to retire was that I am now on the outside, looking in. It is a curious position to be in.
Retirement means separation. In my institution, the term used is that specific: I will be “separated from service” on September 1. I already feel that sense of separation. My mind seems to understand intellectually that I have no more responsibilities to my former job, but my body has not yet adapted. It still gets that internal sense of anxiety, trying to remind me that there is something I need to do (there isn’t) or that tomorrow is Monday and I have to get ready to go to work (I don’t). It doesn’t understand that, at the moment at least, every day is Sunday, and there are no more Mondays. Adjustments have to be made.
But there is a larger sense of separation I am feeling, and that is separation from society, from culture. All of a sudden, free from the responsibilities of the workplace, I have the time to look at the world around me more closely. Frankly, I don’t care for much of what I see. It is, of course, one of the driving forces of retirement; no matter how much you may have liked your work, there comes a time when what you see happening around you no longer matches your own personal conceptions and priorities. I didn’t care for much of what I saw beginning to happen in higher education and in theatre (my two career focuses), and so I made the active decision to retire — to separate — rather than hang on.