At a recent neighborhood Christmas party, a guy from down the street joked that he worries about me if I am not sitting at my living room window each morning when he heads off for work. Apparently I have become a local fixture, and something’s not quite right if I am not in my spot by 7am.
It occurred to me that if I sat in a chair every morning with nothing in front of me and did nothing more than stare out the window, my neighbors would think that I was a lonely old man. Because I sit at the window with a pen, a notepad, and a laptop computer, they assume I am mentally engaged and that gazing out the window is part of the writing process.
I am far from lonely in my retirement, but I have somewhat withdrawn from the outside world. The surprising part is not the dysfunction that I see at the national and global level, but rather how little all of that dysfunction affects my day-to-day life. When I look out upon my cul-de-sac, I see only pleasantness. Dog walkers wave to me as they pass by, the birds behave as if I’m not there, and the squirrels actually climb up on the window sill to show me their walnuts before they take them to wherever they take them when the ground is frozen.
When I sit in my writing nook I sometimes make the mistake of checking out the morning news on my laptop. When I do, two annoying thoughts sometimes take me out of my calm. The first is that the major events of the day, while seldom affecting me personally, have or will have an impact on the lives of my daughter and her fellow twenty-somethings. My own adolescence and early adulthood included Vietnam, race riots, Watergate, and the assassinations of our best leaders, but there was always the sense that “this too will pass.” Today’s problems, maybe because they have been sneaking up on us for decades (e.g., climate change, income disparity, xenophobia), feel more engrained and more permanent.
The second disruption to my peace of mind is the sense that the mess we’re in is partially the result of people like me having stayed out of it. I spent my entire life teaching at various universities. The image of eggheads in an ivory tower is a false one, but that does not mean that college campuses don’t reside in a bit of a bubble. That bubble is one of the reasons I became a professor in the first place. For decades, I told myself that I was fulfilling my obligation to society by helping students define their environmental ethic. It was good work, but none of it ever required personal sacrifice. Taoist writings state that people cannot divorce themselves from the problems of the world. At best, they can hope that their direct involvement won’t be needed. I have gone through life telling myself that I was not needed.
I like retirement very much. Overall I haven’t felt this carefree since graduate school. Still, one of the few things that does bother me at times is the suspicion that, in addition to raising an intelligent and caring daughter, there might be something else I was meant to do or am still supposed to do. Mark Twain said that one of the great days of life is the one where we figure out why we are here. I’m still working on that.
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