When my retirement was announced at the hospital I worked at, I received a number of notes from younger people, typically women, who said, ‘Oh good, you can rest now.’

I cringed a bit at these well-intentioned remarks. It worried me that all they could imagine me doing was resting (no doubt a precious commodity to younger folks with kids at home). But I have always expected to live into my 90s, so the thought that went through my mind when I saw these emails was me sleeping for thirty years. Is that retirement? Would I become Rip Van Winkle?

Now that I have passed my second year mark, I can testify that I am indeed getting more rest. Even so, I am not sleeping all the time and, much to my husband’s frustration, I keep pretty busy.  But one thing has become clear — I am still in the process of working through what I think of as a ‘long-unraveling.’

The structure of a career and work life

Imagine that you are a captain of a tiny toy boat. And all your life, the little boy who owns the boat decides how to rig your sails, what landmarks you sail towards, and even whether you sailed at all that day. You and he argue a bit. But he is way bigger and stronger than you so you don’t often win. Sometimes you do, but not often.

This boy is your career and work life. You have opinions, make choices, but are really not free of all the demands of your owner.  The little boy who owns you during your work life may also be your job or employer, but for me it was simply my career, which I mostly enjoyed but that shaped a huge array of decisions, both at work and in my personal life.

Then one day, the boy sets you down in a wide pond, just you and your boat. And for the first time, you get to sail on your own. Truly on your own.

Will you take the helm and go off to new horizons? Or will you quickly make your way back to the boy and find another past time that provides the same structure as your work life? This is the first dilemma of retirement.

Taking the helm

No one tells the caterpillar as it wraps itself into its cocoon that it already has special cells that are waiting for the next stage of its life to begin. The cells are evocatively called ‘imaginal’ cells. They have been waiting all along for the right environment to multiply and be expressed. The cocoon is the right environment and so the imaginal cells begin to grow and be expressed. Wings develop, a new body shape forms, and hundreds of legs are traded for six.

Perhaps retirement is a time when our own imaginal cells begin to multiply, when untapped interests and potentials can be explored.  Some of these interests and potentials won’t surprise us, but others may. We may see interests and potentials for the first time. Some old ones may shift in unexpected ways. 

In her discussion of saucha (one of the niyamas of yoga, often translated as purity; I prefer ‘clearness’) in the Yamas and Niyamas, Deborah Adele points out that the clarification/purification rituals of traditional yogis are acts of subtraction. The core idea is to subtract the confusing and overly complex, the putting on pretenses and false identities, so that our true selves can be here right now in the present moment. Clearness is achieved through careful wading through of what serves the body and mind.

Consider that perhaps each person is born with a very full and chaotic garage, and the point of the various yoga practices is to clear out all unnecessary things and to organize what is left.  The goal of clearness is being at ease in your own skin and in the world.

I find this useful. As my imaginal cells organize and multiply in retirement, my job seems to be one of subtraction, of giving them space to take over, of not presupposing I know where I am going, of giving up parts of the knowledge I relied on when I was being carried around by my career, and of discerning which of all the skills I picked up over the past decades to build on, and which to let go of. 

Thus, as I set sail across this wide pond with no map, I do so while I am still confused and still in an active state of discerning, subtracting, and letting go — of becoming clear. Getting comfortable with this confusion seems to be my first job, so that whatever is lying in wait inside of me can find its way to the helm.