Is It Time Yet?

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion . . . You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you . . . The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

They never come at you all at once, more like in fits and starts over extended periods of time, small isolated events that seem to be unrelated either to each other or to anything else. But then, synchronicity being what it is, there comes a time when these so-called isolated happenings cluster together and their import can no longer be ignored, denied, or repressed. This “cluster effect” happened to me recently and I haven’t been able to shake free of its potential consequences ever since.

The first sign came after watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension with my science fiction film students. As we began to unpack the intricacies in the film (and there were some), I had to strain harder than usual to hear what the students were saying. Because I suffer from moderate to severe hearing loss in both ears, I have worn in-canal hearing aids for over five years now, and am totally convinced that I could no longer teach without them. And yet, even with my plastic helpers firmly in place, if I’m teaching in a room with bad acoustics (Is there any other kind?) and/or where some heating or air conditioning vent is belching out “white noise,” I still don’t hear well, and it’s getting worse. As I did before the hearing aids, I once again have to sidle up close to any student to hear what he or she is saying. Obviously, I’ll see if I can get the volume on my current units ratcheted up a bit, but I sense now, perhaps for the first time, that this is a progressive problem, one that, ultimately, technology will not be able to solve.

Less than an hour after that class, I was checking my email and discovered that a good friend had sent me a keynote address she was about to deliver on the qualities of good teaching. Now truth be told, I began watching more as a courtesy than a desire because I already know that I’m a reasonably good teacher and certainly don’t need any additional pointers at this advanced stage in my career. But about halfway through, the focus shifted from teachers to students and that’s when I learned something both unsettling and important. Students in a large lecture hall held up handwritten signs comparing the amount of time they devote to school work with that spent texting, tweeting, twittering, and otherwise keeping in constant electronic contact with all the people all the time. By my rough estimate, they spend approximately 85% of their waking hours in cyberspace, while the remaining 15% is begrudgingly given over to class-related materials. For me it was like The Matrix come to life, but read more reflectively, this frightening imbalance unmistakably pointed to how woefully out of touch this old “literary man” is with the “digital students” of today. And what also hit home was that I have probably been this out of touch for several decades now.

Later that same day, after a wonderful dinner with a close friend and colleague, the talk turned to departmental politics. At one point, my colleague was sharing a very intricate and sophisticated interpretation of the various hidden agendas in an email from another colleague about some interdepartmental matter. I flashed back on my own reaction to this same email several days earlier when I’d hurriedly skimmed through it, agreed with most of it, and slammed back something like, “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” After confessing envy at his seeing things that I had obviously missed, he remarked off-handedly, “Your trouble is that you just don’t read shit carefully anymore.” He didn’t intend the remark maliciously, he’s not that sort of a person, but he got it right; I don’t read shit carefully anymore. And that got me to wondering whether I was even capable of reading shit carefully anymore, not just some innocuous departmental email, but the scholarly research that (still) defines the foundation of my own academic writing and my graduate seminars. I think I can still decode intellectual complexities, but I had to confess that the seeds of doubt had been planted.

And that very night as I lay packed tight in a robe beneath my throw, and the cats were fed and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe, ¹ I had a dream about those same three experiences. I can’t remember much of the dream itself, but I got its point immediately the next morning—namely, the not-so-innocent query, “Is it time to retire?” And so I want to address that “dream question,” to see if there might be some compensatory wisdom from my unconscious in there, and, if there is, what that wisdom might be. The first step, as we all know, is to find out what like-minded others have already had to say about this retirement business because if I knew what they said, well then, perhaps I wouldn’t have anything more to say.

I want to start with Marx (that would be Karl, not Groucho) because nobody much starts with him anymore. Even when he was a Commie sprout, Marx used to worry about what made us human. Here’s how he and Friedrich Engels put it in The German Ideology:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men [sic], the language of real life. . . . Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (Marx & Engels, 1932/2007, p. 409)

Put less cosmically, Marx figured that the essence of our humanity that, “language of real life”, came from our work, from what we did for a living and how free we were to do it (Aune, 1999, p. 541). I’ve been thinking a lot about that of late. Although any attempt to characterize “the essence of humanity” is bound to be partial at best, if Marx got at least a big part of it right, and I now believe that he did, then when we cease to work, whether caused by dismissal, resignation, health issues, or retirement, we lose a large part of our humanity in the bargain. That’s a problem, a very big problem.

I think we can cut the problem down a bit if we differentiate more carefully within work. In this regard, I want to suggest that our work can be viewed as either a job or a calling. Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton (1985) say that a job “is a way of making money and making a living. It supports a self defined by economic success, security, and all that money can buy” (p. 66). By contrast, having a calling “constitutes a practical ideal of activity and character that makes a person’s work morally inseparable from his or her life” (p. 66). Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) enriches this distinction with his contrast between the “internal” and “external” goods that are related to practices, practices being various forms of cooperative human activities that surely subsume work, but include a wide variety of social and leisure activities as well (p. 175). Exhibiting different temporal frames, external goods are rewards garnered after the work is completed, while internal goods are those that are only obtainable through the actual process of doing the work itself (p. 176).

As MacIntyre (1981) originally envisioned these two goods, the internal kind were linked to improving the quality of the practice itself, while their external correlates were related more to the satisfaction of the person engaged in the practice (p. 176). I’m tweaking his original distinction here because I think, along with Bellah et al. (1985), that the internal goods of a calling also affect the person doing the practice by enhancing his or her character and self-worth. To take the work that I’m doing right now as a case in point, if I am telling this retirement story to get another entry on my curriculum vitae, to enhance my reputation of a scholar, or to add another $4.75 to my base pay, then I would see this work as a job whose value would be linked to any external goods I might acquire after having completed it. By contrast, if I am writing to learn something about myself in relation to my eventual retirement, then I see this work more as a calling where the internal goods inherent in the writing process itself might enhance my self-understanding.

So let’s think of a calling as work undertaken primarily for internal goods and a job as work done mainly for external goods. Because most professions are uneven blends of a calling and a job, most professions will also entail both internal and external goods. As such, I am neither trying to create a mutually exclusive dichotomy here nor trying to smuggle in some value judgment of the sort that says callings/internal goods are “good” while jobs/external goods are “bad.” I see callings and jobs and their attendant goods on a continuum rather than as an opposition. And people can be as wildly passionate about the external goods they take from their jobs as they can about the internal goods inherent in their callings. Intense emotional commitment to either type of work is both common and really not the issue here. What is the issue here is that retirement may mean something quite different for a person who sees his or her work as primarily a calling as opposed to someone who sees it first and foremost as a job.

I guess it’s time to confess that I have always seen my own work as a college professor as a calling. And because of that, I’ve had a hard time relating to most of the postretirement suggestions in the popular literature. That literature fractures off into two rather distinct trends—one that addresses how to recover external goods and the other geared more to finding some internal goods—although neither trend uses the terms or distinctions that I’m using here.

The external goods trend, typified by self-help type manuals located in the “Business” section of my local Barnes & Noble, says, “Rejoice at the end of work” and “Rejoice at the beginning of fun.” For example, Richard Wendel (2008) is pretty down on the work part. “Retirement is an opportune time in life to let go of unfulfilled dreams and emotional conflict. At the end of the day, retirement makes unmet, lofty career aspirations moot; why not accept reality, and purge them from your narratives?” (p. xviii). So what should we do, once we have “accepted reality” and purged it from our narratives? Wendel says we should (a) explore computers and the Internet, (b) do some traveling, and (c) volunteer at service organizations. Ernie Zelinski (2010) is a bit more circumspect on work but equally upbeat about retirement opportunities:

Regardless of how talented you are and how successful you are in the workplace, there is some danger that you will not be as happy and satisfied as you hope in retirement. . . . Put another way, you will want to keep growing as an individual instead of remaining stagnant. (p. 2)

And just how might we “keep growing” outside of the workplace? To discover how, there are a gaggle of chapters with breezy titles like, “So Many Worlds, So Much to Do!” “Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More!” and so on.

When I first began reading this sugarcoated fluff, I thought I had wandered into the literary equivalent of some “Up With People” concert. But I was wrong. I now see that this material could be very helpful to those who see their work principally as a job that provides them with at least a modicum of external goods. For such folks, retiring from a job would automatically eliminate the external goods that would be a dominant source of their identity, as well as their livelihood, and so it would be extremely important, I would think, to discover alternative ways in which at least some of those external goods might be replaced or recovered during retirement. And because the external goods provided by jobs are not directly connected to the actual work involved in doing the job, such goods would be replaceable through a wide variety of other activities, some recreational, some not, the doing of which would be, like the job before them, unrelated to the external goods that would be available from having done them. So it might make really good sense to study, say, online investments, if, by so doing, a person might increase his or her financial holdings, thereby recovering one important type of external good previous provided by that person’s job.

But since I’ve never really worked for the external goods involved, I’m not particularly moved by those who tell me how I can continue acquiring those sorts of goods during my retirement. ² At first glance, the second trend in the retirement lore, the one that speaks more of a calling, seemed more promising. Although like the first trend, the split between work and retirement is still firmly in place, the focus is now on finding some calling in retirement and/or on developing the psychological mind set to go along with it, with the suggestions themselves being more subtle, reflexive, and nuanced than they were in the previous trend. Two entries in this literature should provide a sufficient feel for what’s at stake in this vision of retirement.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2009) calls the ages between 50 and 75 (I just made the cut) “The Third Chapter,” a time for “new learning” as this generation moves from jobs to other, often altruistic, more socially conscious types of activities. She retells the stories of how 40 men and women she interviewed (all, by her own admission, very privileged and well heeled) left the comfort and security of their well-paying jobs, some quitting, others retiring, for uncertain and risky adventures in other areas. Many of the tales are truly inspiring. She tells of a 57-year-old welder who, after being laid off, turned his welding skills into creating huge sculptures of prehistoric animals, or of a 72-year-old realtor who, when his business tanked because of the crisis in the housing market, packed it in and joined the Peace Corps in Senegal, or of a 70-year-old gynecologist/obstetrician who burned out, retired, took up classes in her childhood love of the theater, and is now performing on cruise liners (p. x). “When men and women talked about ‘becoming a different person’ in their Third Chapters,” Lawrence-Lightfoot writes, “they described a ‘reinvention of the self,’ a reorientation of their ‘core values,’ and a ‘discovery of ‘soul’” (p. 210). Sounds like they found a calling.

Whereas Lawrence-Lightfoot tells how people can find a calling in later life, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald Miller’s (1995) From Age-ing to Sage-ing concentrates more on the interior, psychological correlates of that calling, proclaiming, “that extended longevity calls for extended consciousness” (p. 50). Calling this extended consciousness “spiritual eldering,” Schachter-Shalomi and Miller put forth an informal set of eldering disciplines by integrating insights from Jewish mysticism, Eastern spiritual teachings, ³ transpersonal psychology, depth psychology, and numerous well-respected books on death and dying with the personal testimonies of people who have taken one or more of their eldering workshops. The disciplines are intended to offset and overcome the lack of psychological preparation that most bring to retirement and aging, mainly because of the depressing and horrific images of aging perpetuated by our culture.

For example, they tell the plight of one vice-president of a multinational electronics firm who slipped blithely into a retirement he was totally unprepared to meet.

Despite my best attempts to fill my days with what they euphemistically call “meaningful activities,” I feel that life is on an inevitable downhill trajectory. . . . I’m depressed a lot and can’t sleep at night. Often during the early morning hours I find myself pacing around the house, wondering what all of this hard work was for. (pp. 18-19)

By contrast, Schachter-Shalomi and Miller relate the experiences of a 50-year-old retired city planner who, after completing one of their spiritual eldering workshops, went into psychological and spiritual counseling and after that learned how to meditate on a daily basis. Having prepared her inner life for aging, she has a quite different view of later life than that of the electronics firm executive.

We can spend our time in elderhood comparing notes with friends about bodily breakdown and disappointments about how life has turned out. . . . But if we refuse to give way to useless complaining and if we avoid spending our time in amusements that distract us from contemplative work, we can choose to face the challenges of aging head on. It’s not easy, but it has brought me the peace I could only dream about in my youth. (pp. 19-20)

In this important book, Schachter-Shalomi and Miller make a convincing case for, as C. G. Jung once put it, turning inward in the second half of life.

Important as they are, neither book in this second trend of retirement literature spoke to me as much as I had hoped it would. I think a large part of the problem is that I already have a calling in my academic work and so have no need to find a new one in retirement. And I am firmly convinced that having a calling, at any chapter in life, presupposes an active inner life, for how could anyone value and be nourished from the internal goods of a calling if they never paid any attention to their psyche, that part of themselves most centrally affected by those sorts of goods? Because I already have a calling and, as such, have been very attentive to my inner life ever since I eased past 35, much of the very wise counsel in this second trend was, well, sort of “old news” to me. In saying this, I am not trying to sound arrogant or posture myself as self-satisfied and/or psychologically individuated but rather to stress that the postretirement suggestions offered in these two books are advice I have already been taking for years (although I never could quite get the hang of meditation).

So what should I, and others like me, do after we retire but before we die (that being, we shall hope, the actual order of things)? Right now, the answer that is emerging seems altogether obvious, although it has apparently taken me a good part of this story to stumble across—perhaps a premature sign of my impending dotage. After I retire, it says, I should keep on doing what I am already doing. But there’s more to it than just that. For me, to “keep on keeping on” means to allow new knowledge to evolve from the old where the new emerges only through continued psychological growth. For example, my own writing style continues to spin off in too opposing directions. My theoretical and critical work is still written in the traditionally impersonal voice in which most of academics were trained, while my more recent autoethnographic efforts are more personal and are storied in a more conversational tone. So one thing I want to do when I retire, even before, is find ways to integrate these two seemingly incommensurable writing styles. In a rather exploratory way, I suppose that’s what I’ve been trying to do here by combining some personal vignettes with a few theoretically inspired distinctions into a coherent retirement story. ⁴

I also think I know one way extend my teaching skills in retirement, but I want to introduce that idea with the story that inspired it. When I first joined the faculty here in 1985, I heard about a class on C. G. Jung that was being offered Monday evenings at the local Episcopal Church. The class was led by Ed McClain, a retired psychology professor from a small liberal arts college in the East. Because I was into Jung at the time, I figured that this class might be a better option than, say, Monday Night Football. I was right. When I met Ed that first night, he struck me as a curious cross between Ichabod Crain and Abraham Lincoln; tall, rail-thin, gaunt, with a prominent, hawk-like nose, scraggly beard, a shock of fierce white hair, and bushy, unruly eyebrows that seemed to have a life of their own. Although he must have been in his late 70s by then, when Ed talked about Jung, whether he was retelling some of Jung’s early family experiences, patiently setting forth Jung’s theory of the psyche, or carefully leading us through Jung’s almost unintelligible forays into alchemy, he came alive with an almost child-like joy. Sometimes he’d get so caught up in Jung’s world that I’d jump in and ask, with one of my best student whines, “Is this going to be on the test?” And he’d always stop, blink several times, rejoin planet earth, and then say to me with mock disdain, “Absolutely!” Before he died several years ago, Ed offered his class on Jung every year, beginning in September and running through May. I was there for five years running—and I never got tired of it. Each version was fresh, new, and inspiringly different.

Just after I wrote the above paragraph, I heard some commotion upstairs and headed up to see what my cats might be in the process of destroying this time. As I walked across the balcony toward my bedroom, I happened to glance down at Jung’s recently published and long suppressed The Red Book that graces my coffee table up there (Jung, 2009). I thought, “I should really get back into that this summer, maybe even write something about it if I can think of anything reasonably intelligent to say.” Almost immediately, I flashed back on the previous paragraph and heard a voice inside me say, “When you retire, why don’t you fire up that long-defunct Jung group, put the word out that you have this very rare book, and offer to teach it to any and all who might be interested?” If I were to do that, and I now think that I will, somewhere in the pleroma, ⁵ Ed McClain would be very happy.

I sent an earlier draft of this story to my sister-in-law, Joyce Hocker, and to Carolyn Ellis. Big mistake! After doing what they both do so well—namely, telling me how wonderful the story was, how it inspired them on so many levels, how it’s almost certain to become an instant classic in the ethnographic retirement literature, and how someone would surely nominate it for a Pulitzer (okay, so maybe I’m embellishing here just a bit), they got to the important stuff, their “revise and resubmit” type suggestions. Both wanted some deeper personal reflections about what I learned from telling this story (actually, right about here).

And then Carolyn, about as innocently as a fox in a henhouse, suggested that just perhaps my preretirement issues might be related to my spouse Janice’s untimely death. I thought about that for quite some time, but it didn’t feel right. I know that many things in my life, probably still unbeknownst to me, are related to Janice’s death, but this story just didn’t feel like one of them. But then I thought about that possibility from a slightly different angle and began to backtrack until I now do think that Janice’s death is related to this story, but only tangentially, and only as a precursor to my own death, because retirement, however else we may gloss its meaning, is, first and foremost, a symbolic form of death. So I want to start with Janice’s death, but then connect her passing to the fear of my own demise.

I’ve shared the depth of my love for and commitment to Janice elsewhere and don’t feel the need to revisit that again here (Frentz, 2008). What I do want to say concerns one very small part of our relationship, one that I’m not particularly anxious to share, but one that seems related to Janice’s passing and to this story. For as long as I can remember, I have been a creature of habit, living most happily by making lists to organize my life and by following a fairly rigid set of daily routines. Because I lost both parents and all of my close relatives (many of them to cancer) by the time I was in my mid-thirties, and because I have survived (at least so far) my own battle with cancer, I now see that those lists and routines were my own attempts to control and lock down all facets of my life and, by so doing, to keep my own mortality at bay.

As you might well imagine, whatever my hidden motivations for this way of living might have been, that life style drove Janice absolutely crazy, because when I lived totally by routines, always making and following lists, never wanting to try anything new, doing the same things over and over again, I became soul-numbingly boring. Eventually, I began to feel terribly guilty for living like that and even more fearful that I would lose Janice if I didn’t change. And so, for as long as we were together, I tried very hard, and with at least some success, to curb my habit-driven life style, to limit my “repetition compulsions,” to stifle my grousing whenever Janice would suggest that we try something new, and to be at least somewhat adventurous on my own without self-destructing professionally (I had the professional self-destruct thing down pat).

But in a very self-protective way, I now think that I replaced my habits with Janice in so far as she became my relational protection against dying. Because I was so connected to her, I was fully alive and in the world. As such, I was always loath to share any part of her with others; I did not want to expose myself to the specter of death by being separated from her for even a short period of time. But when Janice died, my protection against death died with her. I was again left vulnerable, exposed, and without any shield against my own mortality. And so I began to rebuild my old routine-driven life style, for if Janice could no longer protect me, then perhaps my long-lost routinized existence could. And because my habits would now be my last line of defense against dying, I rebuilt them with a vengeance. I clutched at everything left in my life as barriers against aging and death. I turned away potential intimate relationships because I had learned, all too well, that a soul mate as precious as Janice could die, not being able to protect even herself, let alone me, from that final last chapter. I’m embarrassed and more than a little ashamed just writing this because it so reminds me, if reminding is even needed, of how totally foolish, futile, and self-centered my attempts to outflank death have been, but, as I suspect you already know, knowing that in my head and feeling that in my heart are two very different things.

All that having been said, what, if anything, have I learned about retirement from telling this tale? For starters, I’ve learned that retirement, being a symbolic form of death, triggers, at least in me, all the fears of my actual demise that my habits and later my marriage had kept hidden and repressed for so long. I’ve also learned that I can forestall this symbolic death of retirement by continuing my academic calling through more experimental forms of writing and different varieties of nonacademic teaching and that those seem like valuable things to do.

But there has been a more disquieting lesson as well, one that spins back once more on how Janice’s passing jeopardized my denial of death. But before I can share that lesson, I need to describe the context in which it occurred. Ever since joining the faculty here, I’ve never taught in the summer. That three-month hiatus from students, administration, and teaching gave me (and Janice when she was alive) extended flow time to pursue my academic work. But for the past several summers, I have also looked upon that time as a “mini-retirement” where I could check in on what I did, monitor how I did it, and decide whether what I was doing nourished my identity and self-worth.

For a while, summers were restorative, happy, and productive, and I was more than content with how they unfolded. But this one has been different. For the first time, I feel almost—what?—well—“manic” is the word that comes to mind—about writing and revising classes. I no sooner finish a version of some project (like this one) or complete reworking a lecture for some class than I instantly lock onto another project or another class and begin working on that. The routine has become rigidified now; from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. I am revising a class, and from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. I’m writing or reading on a project—seven days a week, no exceptions.

I seem to be converting my calling into just another routine, another set of “things” to check off some master list, and I think that I am doing this because of an intensified fear of dying brought about by my thoughts of retirement. I feel as if I don’t have much time left—either in my calling, in my life, or even with my body and mind still in reasonably good shape—and that I can’t afford to rest for even one second or some form of death will overtake me. Three things are coming together here. One, because Janice is no longer here to love, comfort, and protect me, my fear of death, either in retirement or in actuality, is alive and well. Two, those three events that led off this story have only intensified that fear. Three, as a result of that heightened fear factor, my half-crazed activity this summer is yet another last-gasp attempt to put off the inevitable.

If that’s right, it’s something that really needs the attention of that “active inner life” that I’ve bragged about above, because this frantic pace is not something that I can sustain for very long, and all of the reading, writing, and revising in the world is not ultimately going to save me from dying. And so maybe, just maybe, I’m uncovering the real reasons behind my life-long pursuit of a self-controlled life style and am beginning to realize how impotent (try not to read “impotent” as “important”; I almost did twice now) that way of living is in relation to death. And maybe, just maybe, I’m learning that if I continue to transform my academic calling into just one more item to check off my list of life, I will lose what I treasure most, those internal goods that only come through the intimate fusing of my soul with my work. In an almost alchemical reversal of King Midas’ problem, I am risking turning the gold of my soul into the lead of my routines. I’m also learning that retirement, or even before retirement, is a time to rethink my almost reclusive introversion and to reach out a bit more to those friends and colleagues whose social invitations I have so cavalierly blown off in the past, not as new substitute protectors against death, but rather as fellow travelers on the same path. And finally, I am learning that I have not yet dealt with the larger mortality issues raised by Janice’s passing. So, no, I don’t have retirement all figured out. I have more work to do before the work that I now do is finished.

I prefaced this story with a life cycle allegory by “the word man” Kenneth Burke. His allegory ends in either retirement and/or death with his protagonist “departing the parlor.” Because I now see retirement as a form of death, I now want to amend Burke’s vision by saying that for those of you who, like me, take being an college professor as a calling, it seems much better to “depart the parlor” and die to the job part of work, but to stay alive in the conversation for the calling part. To be sure, there are a few losses in “departing the parlor” through retirement, losing constant contact with (good) students and (valued) colleagues being only the most obvious, and there are some concomitant downers for “staying in the conversation” as well. For me, those would include my own diminishing intellectual capacities, more limited energy, physical ailments that seem to multiply exponentially with age, and an already intensifying set of Luddite prejudices. ⁶ And if I dodge death long enough, I will undoubtedly spoil to the point where most of my physical and mental faculties will fall by the wayside, but, as Scarlett O’Hara once put it in Gone With the Wind, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow” (Selznick & Fleming, 1939). Even so, and even given the current anxieties and old memories that telling this tale seems to have unearthed, if to stay in the conversation means to stay human, then I think that’s an important place to stay.