Off the Path: Retirement Five Years Later

Yesterday at the Biltmore Estate, I climbed a hill off the path along the Bass Pond, and laid my ever-present mat down on last year’s leaves. I stretched out in the spring sunshine, ah, intending to listen to a Story Waters broadcast I had downloaded to my iPod. The bright light made it hard to see the screen, and somehow, the iPod kept shuffling my music content on its own!

Okay, I thought, I am to hear something else— let’s see what it will be. Instead of the broadcast, I listened to an MP3 of “All We Need,” a stunning art song composed by my honey Annelinde Metzner. Ah, but then, I got shuffled over to Pema Chodron in a podcast on “Shenpa,” with a funny Buddhist joke about three fish circling a hook and saying, It’s all about non-attachment. Finally the universe, via my iPod, tuned me in to a recording of a workshop I myself gave in New Mexico, called “How to Love the World, According to Mary Oliver.” Well! The experience was a successful microcosm of what I consider to be my only job in retirement: receiving what comes, flowing with each day, trusting reality to reflect what I need.

It’s nearly five years since I quit working for someone else. I do work I love, not “for a living,” but for the life-giving pleasure of using my gifts. Five years seems like time for what my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls looking deeply into things. How’s it going, this new time in my life, what I call my Third Trimester? Yesterday’s experience tells me I have learned to listen for and lean into what’s next. I have become more spontaneous, more curious. As time opens out, so does my sense of wonder. My explorer nature has been freed! I enjoy the hell out of synchronicities and the multi-layeredness of my days.

My iPod shuffled from my partner’s song (“All we need is what we have”) to a spiritual teaching done with humor, to my own self via Mary Oliver reminding me to love the astonishing world (“I am a bridegroom married to amazement.”) I laugh with gratitude for the perfect balance of those three, and for the retirement phase of my “one wild and precious life.” At the five-year marker, I bow in recognition of retirement’s gift. Bring it on!