What, Me Retire? As If
A year ago, I woke to a fiddler playing 'When I'm 64"...a poignant and funny start to that birthday orchestrated by my funny and poignant wife.
Tomorrow, that song becomes past tense for me.
There's long been an expectation among my generation that 65 means retirement. Unless you can do it sooner or, if you put your trust in RRSPs that tanked and built up a nice wall of debt during the recent decade of nearly free money (how ominous does that sound?), if you can do it at all.
I tried retirement. It just didn't work for me.
After spending most of the '90s embracing the commercialization of the Internet, dumb luck let me cash out before the dot-com bust.
After six months of barely any activity, the threat of boredom drove me back to work. But not back to the workaholic level. It's more balanced now. At the same time, it would take ropes and chains to drag me away from the team of smart, interesting, creative people who share my working life now.
I love being productive, helping to find better and more interesting ways to do things worth doing, sharing with friends in the here and in the virtual, learning, thinking, wandering the globe in large and small chunks, and generally being upright and sentient.
It's been an amazing 65 years. Yes, there are regrets and great stupidities that would be grand to undo. There are tragedies unfolding before my eyes.
The hardest part is losing people.
But like it or not, life marches on. We can only make the best - or the worst - of it.
-g
