It Takes Two

 I worked a few years longer than most of my friends and I had several of them tell me that it took them two years to adjust to retirement. Of course, I laughed at this, thinking: "how hard could it be to get used to not setting an alarm clock?" 

To be honest, my retirement decision was a bit haphazard. I wasn't sure that I could afford to retire economically due to a wildly misspent youth that continued up into my mid 50s, and so I was prepared to work until I was 70 or 71, maybe even 72, if necessary to assure a secure retirement. 

A couple of things happened.

My wife, who is a few years younger than me, was working as a registered nurse. She had spent most of her nursing career on the floor of hospitals, an emotionally and physically taxing job. Her last several years of work were from home as an advice nurse, which was a break, physically, but which, in the end, may have been even more demanding. Without coworkers for support, or at least a cohort of people to gripe to, working from home left her isolated and at the mercy of a series of micromanaging and capricious supervisors. One day she'd decided she'd had enough and announced that she was going to retire in six months. I couldn’t say I blamed her, of course. She had put in the years and earned a pension and she was old enough to start collecting Social Security so we agreed that it would be a good idea for her to go ahead take her retirement.

I was left with the prospect of, if I continued on course with my original plan, to work another year and a half or two while she was retired. The prospect didn't please me, to be honest. I liked my job well enough, and I liked my coworkers, had great respect for them, and enjoyed their company. But I had gotten to the point where I had had enough, and had to admit to myself that my heart really wasn't in it anymore. I don't doubt that I could have simply sucked it up and soldiered on for another year and a half and done an acceptable job. I was undecided but thought that I should give my supervisor at least a heads up that I was considering retiring within the next six months. During this time there were a few positive financial developments in my life and I was more confident that I could afford to retire. Knowing this, and having given my boss a heads up that I was thinking about it, all of a sudden the prospect of another year and a half or two years of work seemed interminable. I quickly came to the decision that I should pick a date, tell my employer, and get on with it.

So I did that. I gave notice that I would be leaving at the end of May, 2020. This was in about January or February 2020. I wanted to give my employer the opportunity to hire a replacement and maybe even train whoever was going to replace me for a while, hence the long notice. About two weeks later the first rumblings of the seriousness of the Covid 19 epidemic were starting to be felt. I'd been watching the news, and I consider myself pretty well informed, and the Covid epidemic was certainly something that we had our eyes on, especially since my work involved spending a lot of time in a hospital. But, still, it seemed like an abstraction to me. Oddly the event that caught my attention, and I don't think I'm alone in this, was when the National Basketball Association — the NBA — canceled their season.

Due to the nature of my job we'd always had the ability to work from home from time to time. A lot of my coworkers took advantage of that and worked most of their hours from home, but I liked the separation between home and work, and so I usually only worked at home during periods of severely inclement weather when travel would be unsafe. But when the NBA canceled their season I pretty much decided on the spot that I would be working from home from that point on, for as long as I could get away with it. 

That decision turned out to be redundant on my part, as the organization I worked for, within a week or two, had decided that all employees should work at home. So the upshot of that was that my last six months of work was spent sitting at a desk at home. I don't have a great exercise routine, but during my work life I did have occasion to walk a lot. I would take the stairs instead of the elevators when I had the chance, I would be sure to park a fair distance from meeting locations so that I'd have time to walk and think before getting to a meeting. So I wasn't totally sedentary. My new routine, however, was. 

The fact that I was winding down from work and, to be honest, that I was also emotionally done with work at that point, didn't make things any easier. My retirement was pretty much an extended fizzle of winding down from looking at my computer monitor for meetings and documents to looking at my computer monitor for Netflix and YouTube. At that time, my wife and I were pretty much under lockdown, the vaccine wasn't on the horizon, and we were trying to be conscientious and not risk exposing our children or grandchildren to Covid. Parks were closed, recreation opportunities were limited, so we stayed home. To be honest, it was easy to just slip into waiting for the vaccine, which didn't really arrive, for us anyway, until March of the following year.

Now, I won't deny that I have a natural inclination toward sloth, and that I pretty much loathe yardwork, and I've been through two fixer-upper houses already, and home maintenance isn't really one of my major joys in life. I do what I have to do, but that stuff isn’t what gets me up in the morning. And the shocking fact, to me, was that once I was no longer working I didn't really have anything to get me up in the morning.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't bored or depressed, there were lots of intellectual interests, reading, going for walks in the woods, stuff like that. But the things that I really wanted to do that I thought I would do when I retired - writing, art, photography, backpacking, all seem to be things that I really just couldn't summon the energy to do. And so I entered what I would think of as a period of lethargy. It wasn't a period of recovery, it wasn't a period of healing, it wasn't anything that I think of as particularly positive. It was just being directionless. It was actively avoiding making commitments. Which brings me back to my opening paragraph. I now understand, a year and a half into retirement, why my friends would say it takes two years to adjust to being retired.