The last of life, for which the first was made

Mar 29, 2019 | Dead Water, Retirement

For the first time since 1983 I am not in full-time employment. While the quote from Browning that provides my title for this post may seem dark, I mean it in a positive way, and this is why:

Several people have said the same thing to me, best summed up by my old chum Steve Bell who reckons I should be ‘making the most of what I reckon could be the best years of your life’ and seizing ‘the opportunity to transition to a lifestyle that would suit you down to the ground.’

I agree. We own our house outright, we have no debt, I have two pensions and savings, so, in my sixtieth year, things are set up nicely to grow older disgracefully.

My immediate plans including making headway on my large ‘to be read’ pile of books, walking some coastal paths, reacquainting my fingers with my guitar fretboard, and writing (with associated research). I have no plans to look for a job. That’s not to say I won’t look at work opportunities, just so long as they don’t look like a job. My guiding principle is that I am in no hurry to make any decisions at all; my immediate priority is chilling out.

More generally, I have long held to the view that it is a good thing–a necessary thing–to reinvent yourself every decade or so. I’ve mentioned it one or two times here, for example on 5 March 2011 I wrote:

What is important to me, though, is periodically to lose some baggage and reinvent myself. The last time I did this was in 1999/2000 when I left Registers of Scotland and transfered to the Scottish Executive.

 

I like to have a relationship between what I do and who I think I am. A friend, whom I haven’t seen for quite a while now, used to say at work ‘this is what I do not who I am’ but that isn’t a situation I like to be in. It worked for him but not for me; so if what I do and who I think I am become too far apart then it is time to change.

 

So reinvention means deconstructing and paring away the things that don’t fit for me and putting myself in a situation where I can effectively take what is useful from what has been, and challenge myself to develop in a new situation which is more stimulating, even if it is simultaneously uncomfortable and risky. That’s what keeps it real and interesting.

Thinking about it

• 1980 I switched the focus of my first degree, Bachelor of Divinity at Edinburgh University, from vocational to academic
• 1990 I was studying for an LLB at Edinburgh, and re-evaluating my life in the process
• 2000 I switched from Registers of Scotland to the Scottish Executive
• 2011 I left the Civil Service and started in the private sector.

These were all occupational or directional changes that correlate to changes in self-perception.

And now in 2019 a new challenge beckons, stripping away the old and becoming more who I want to be as my 60th birthday is in sight, setting up whatever changes I want to make in 2029.

I’ll write more about this no doubt.