Mar 30, 2019 | Dead Water, Retirement, Writing
Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life for which the first was made
I first encountered Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra as a young teenager at the opening of Isaac Asimov’s Pebble In The Sky, a novel I still pick up from time to time. It was his first novel, and isn’t one of his better-known ones, but it resonates still with assorted forms of nationalism on the rise. I’ve always found the opening lines of Browning’s poem to be the most resonant, and they were the obvious choice for yesterday’s post.
I find the notion of ‘growing old’ odd; In my head I’m about 34 with all the time in the world. Now, in a different sense, I do have all the time in the world to organise my life wholly for myself and my family. This is liberating and therefore daunting. There are things I want to do and I have no more excuses for not organising myself to do them. The most prominent of these things is writing.
A month ago, reflecting on my years at work, I realised that my happiest period in my whole employment history was researching and writing Automated Registration of Title to Land in the late 90s; I never again found the same mix of structure and freedom, though my time studying for my second degree and the early years of eProcurement Scotland came close. Outside of work, I found writing my short story collection, That I May Swim, and drafting my first novel, A Dream of Magic, fulfilling and rewarding. Neither are published, maybe they never will be, but that’s not the point: the pleasure and fulfillment is in the process of creating, of channeling and shaping.
A Dream of Magic now needs to be revised into second draft. I also have the spores of a new novel creeping through a notebook, with one or two rough fragments already written in early draft. The working title, at least for now, is The Magpie Rhyme, and it is set in an alternate Scotland in 1648. This means research. I’m already working on the historical material available to me at home or Edinburgh Central Library, but I also have an unused reader’s ticket for the Historical Search Room at the National Records of Scotland. I got it when I finished the course on Scottish Handwriting I mentioned earlier this month. I need a bit of a refresher period to get my eye back in, but it means I can go to primary records for the period and get a real feel for what was going on, even though the story is set in an alternate history.
With no excuses left, therein lies the daunting aspect: organising myself to do it.
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.
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