No One Retires

Retirement is an amusing delusion that can be both dangerous and rewarding.  

After all, what can we really retire from?  Certainly not anything that’s essential, anything we cannot live without. 

Like bringing all the love we can to here and now.  Like managing fear.  Like allowing our experience to teach us.  Like aligning commitments with action.  Like choosing where we place our attention moment by moment.  Like striving to create beauty with every breath.  Like living in the spirit of the Divine, whatever that means to us.  Like defining our world (as I’m doing here), the choice that creates the reality in which we live. 

There’s no retiring from stuff like that –– things so vital to happiness that some of us aspire to be doing them with our last breath.  

When we retire in the traditional sense, then, what is it we are giving up?  Nothing indispensable, though it often doesn’t seem so. 

Being a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief.  Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.  Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy.  They’re not who we are.  They’re roles we play.  And while all roles are sacred –– even being a crook (The plot can’t thicken without troublemakers, Ramakrishna tells us) –– none is special.  They all serve the exact same purpose: showing us ourselves.

No matter how any role of ours nurtures or harms society, sooner or later (over lifetimes, some say) it helps us discover, and hone, those practices that are key to a timeless definition of health: growing the ability to respond in a life-affirming manner to whatever comes our way.  

Retiring, then, is just changing one role for another.  The role of farmer or mother or monk for the role of something else.  Perhaps someday to include being a member of an old folks community.  The curriculum embedded in every role remains unchanged––discovering our answer to life’s number one question: Who am I?

No wonder retirement can be dangerous.  

Imagine believing we are the role we play.  Easy to do given how much energy we invest in it, and how good we feel when it goes well.  Imagine the despair when that role expires.  

While older adults make up 12% of the US population, they account for 18% of all suicide deaths.  It’s fair to assume that the loss of identity associated with so-called “retirement” contributes to that statistic.  

But the pain of that loss can be a gift, if we heed its encouragement to feel the price we pay for hanging our identity on the nail of any role.  

The actor Jim Carrey learned from his own experience to think of the word “depressed” as “deep rest.”  He means the rest our body and mind need to recover from the roles we’ve been trying to play despite the reality that none of them is really us.  

Perhaps one of the chief blessings of retirement is the opportunity to learn that we’re not who we think we are.  No one is.  Our potential for self-discovery is immeasurable.  

There’s no retirement from that adventure.  Even running from it helps us wake up.