The longer I am retired, the more I realize how unhappy my job made me. I know a guy that spent five years in prison. He said there were milestones while he was in, one year, two years, and he could count the days he had left before he was eligible for parole.
But the day-to-day grind wore him down. Each day was identical to the last, and nothing ever changed. He stayed away from trouble, never spoke to anyone but his cellmate, and worked hard to be invisible. He rarely left his cell and when he came up for parole, sitting in a room that wasn’t a cell in front of people who were not prisoners was more than a little frightening.
After all, it had been five years since he had seen daylight for more than a few minutes at a time, and it had been five years since he was able to do anything at all without walls around him.
Released into a halfway house, he got a job, worked hard, then returned to the halfway house and hung around with his fellow ex-convicts. When he was finally released from this part of the journey, he moved in with his parents, moved into his old room he had when he was a kid, and started life over again.
That’s what being retired is like. You’re accustomed to living your life a certain way, and then one day it’s gone. Of course, it feels like a vacation at first, but you start to drift away from that life you lived, and you lose track of people you knew at work. It’s coming up on six years for me now. Suddenly, it seems, six years.
My friend who did time, it’s been five years for him. He says it’s like he wasn’t there at all now. None of the people who knew him before talk about it, and no one in his new job knows, or at least they pretend they don’t.
Odd thing, the one thing we share is we both went through a lot of physical health problems right after. Both were digestive issues. Both of us found freedom, but at the same time, the fact we both were in a very restrictive relationship with our time, having time suddenly was overwhelming.
Physically and emotionally, any sort of dramatic change in lifestyle takes a toll, even if that change is positive. For twenty-seven years I rose and went to bed guided mostly by the idea I had to, had to, go to work. It’s what I had been trained to do by my parents, by school, by the bills that needed to be paid, and by the fact everyone else was doing it, too.
Work devoured my life and became a prison. I put off family functions, girlfriend’s lives, my own life, and countless other events and occasions because of work. Work became a mental illness of sorts, a vast blanket under which I hid from living.
And suddenly, I am alive.
Take Care,
Mike
