I’m still trying to get this retirement thing down. We had two of my wife’s relatives over for breakfast this weekend. The husband is in his early 80s and has been retired for many years. The wife is in her mid to late 70s. They travel a lot, go to the gym, go to church, and maintain regular contact with their children and grandchildren. Basically they do what we have been doing. So I wonder is this retirement? I don’t know if I am ready to say that yet.
I still get excited about new ideas and I still get urges to be a therapist. It comes and it goes, but my patient load right now is often concentrated on my own family and that is NOT a good thing. Some of the guys I know can talk about their old jobs and the way they were treated by their bosses, or how their companies were taken over by larger corporations. They still have interest in the business of what they did. My job was people, so it’s not quite the same thing.
The winter may be also contributing to this. It is grey and cold and snow covered. Good day to stay inside and read. Sometimes that is OK and sometimes not so much. I recently heard that an old friend began stocking at Target “just to keep busy”. Another colleague of mine told me she didn’t retire, she just resigned from one job and is now in a very limited practice near her home. She has four grandchildren and is very involved in a number of other activities. She still gets bored and often works until she almost collapses. This chapter of my life-the working full time, being on call etc, is over, but the book is not done. I am still trying to write the next section. I remember I once had the husband of a patient tell me that you don’t retire from something, you retire to something. I do think that is good advice, but it is a difficult question to answer. Is just keeping busy enough ?
I want more than that, but not so much as to work full time or again begin to assume responsibility for a caseload. I guess I just have to keep searching.
I was touched by David Carr’s death. He seemed like a good guy. He was an excellent writer and he had been in recovery for many years. His book “Night of the Gun” details his first recovery. He relapsed after 14 years, drank for couple of years, and then got back into sobriety. An interesting man who was very passionate about his profession. I think the idea of passion is what I am missing. Victor Frankl used to ask his patients “What stops you from Suicide?” as an opening to his interviews. For me it’s not that so much as “What else is there?”
When I was working I would see a real difference between Women’s Therapy Groups and Men’s Therapy groups. No matter what they were there for, women would always talk about their relationships (or lack there of) as contributing to their problems. Men would talk about their jobs in the same way. Now I know that is a generalization and may be related to the demographic I was working with. Yet something of that still rings with me. Maybe I need to therapize myself, or maybe I just need spring. I guess I will see what April brings