60 Days In

Whelp, I think I finally found my calling: Retirement.

That extra 5 lbs that may or may not have been the result of stress-eating?

Gone.

Housework?

Done.

(Pro tip: no longer having to change from “school clothes” into “play clothes” on a daily basis is a laundry game-changer.)

All those articles that I keep leaving out on my desk for the elves to finish?

Well, I’ve accepted that said elves are clearly unreliable, so I’m cheerfully finishing them myself.

David Bowie once said that “aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”

So 60 days in, I would argue that retirement is actually the perfect complement to Bowie’s description of the aging process.

Over the past couple of weeks, I came across two interesting posts on LinkedIn.

The first one was a recent opinion essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Because the essay is behind a paywall, I won’t link to it (leave a comment if you’re a subscriber to the Chronicle and you’d like the link), but I’ll briefly summarize it here.

It argued that colleges and universities should better leverage (I think the word “exploit” might actually be more appropriate, but maybe that’s me) their emeritus/a faculty.

The author observed that retired faculty have a wealth of knowledge and experience and many might very well like to continue to voluntarily contribute to the life of their former workplace.

In essence, they’d be doing elements of what they were previously paid to do… for free.

The author suggested that institutions of higher learning could find other ways to compensate retired faculty.

Hm.

Behind the author’s suggestion was his concern that higher education has been getting a bad rap, as many see the work that college faculty do as a waste of $$.

So this would be a way to show faculty commitment to the work itself, perhaps, sans pay?

I’ve heard this argument before, actually. Years ago, faculty at my former institution agreed to take a furlough and some argued that “we would probably come in to work anyway!”

The union’s reaction was, “Please don’t: you won’t be covered under workman’s comp if you have an accident.”

My reaction was, “Yeah, it’s a job, so I need to be paid. No pay, no me.”

So the suggestion that retirees might be coaxed back to work for their former institution for either no pay, or something other than pay, landed pretty similarly with me.

Personally, I don’t need office space, and I have access to other free libraries.

As far as crediting the institution with any writing successes I might subsequently experience… well, all my MS Word docs became “read only” weeks before I’d even received my first retirement check. I can now only use Microsoft Office Suite if I log in through the institution.

This is probably due to contracts between the institution and Microsoft, which is fine— I began using my own personal copy of Scrivener for my writing projects years ago, so I simply returned to it.

This brings me to the second essay I encountered, which talked about a concept called “institutional betrayal.”

Early in my career as an academic, I had to hire an attorney & threaten to take legal action against an employer.

It’s not something I talk about, not because it doesn’t still stick in my craw a bit that I had to do it, but because I decided years ago not to be the kind of bitter little person who holds a grudge for years on end.

That said, I may forgive, but I sure ain’t forgettin’—do me wrong, and we aren’t going to hang out the way we used to… End of story.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons as a result of that unfortunate experience, and I think many of them were described in the essay about “institutional betrayal.”

In a nutshell, the author argues that, in cases of “institutional betrayal,” “the job you were promised isn’t the job you got.”

I was intrigued by this essay, in part because it landed when I’d been trying to make sense of a very odd dream that I had several nights earlier.

In it, I found myself back in my old job.

I’d had a leg amputated, was fitted with a prosthetic, and then given my teaching schedule.

Throughout the dream, I kept asking, “But … wait… What happened to my leg?”

Because in the logic of dreamland, the amputation had happened offstage, and apparently without my knowledge, and although I was managing fine with the prosthetic, I found the whole situation a bit… unsettling.

So I kept looking for an answer.

But in my dream, the response was, “Well, you have a prosthetic, so you’re fine. It’s not a big deal.”

When I replied, “Well, yes, I know, I’m okay, but losing my leg is kind of big deal to me, so I just want to know: what happened to my leg? Why did I lose it?”

Repeatedly, the response was, “I don’t think it makes sense to dwell on that—you have your teaching schedule. We’ll see you at the meeting this week.”

The dream continued in much the same vein: I kept asking how I’d lost my leg, and repeatedly being told it wasn’t something I should be concerned with, that I needed to focus on doing my job and everything would be—as it already was— “fine.”

When I woke up, I had a sense that my brain had been trying to process something left over from my work-life in academia.

Reading the two essays in the aftermath of this dream helped me to parse it: I think from the beginning, I had a sense that a part of myself had been “amputated” and to succeed, I was going to have to simply proceed without it and behave as if everything was simply “fine.”

I think this is why I’m now enjoying retirement so much: no figurative prosthesis.

And more importantly, I no longer have to wonder why I ever needed one in the first place, and try to be “fine” without an answer.

It feels good to live life with both feet on the ground.