Retirement Blues

You know you are on retirement if you wake up in the morning and wonder how you will spend the day. You rise up, open the computer to either Gmail or Yahoo, and you wonder why there's no email for you. Weeks before, you had quite a lot of them, each one screaming for an urgent response. So you crawl back to bed ten minutes after you wake up, which should be around 4 something, and lay in the dark waiting for the sun to shine. You endure those hours in the privacy of your own thoughts. You are retired and the biggest problem is how to make yourself useful again. You wonder why you were not ask to volunteer by the organization which last claimed the best of what you could offer as an employee with 32 years of professional work behind you.

Fortunately, it took me just three days to bounce back from this state often referred to when we were young as a period of "suspended animation." A confused state; a time when you seem not to be able to decide firmly on anything at all. You just want to stay in your room, often in bed, trying to decide whether to continue reading a book you started to read a week before, click the TV for CNN or BBC, or just stare blankly at the ceiling, thinking of nothing in particular.

Most of the time, you are left on your own. Everybody's just plain busy minding his or her own business. And this is the most difficult of all, when you are on forced retirement: to find nobody home to talk with. You listen to the birds, the barking of dogs at night, some voices of children at play, but you find no motivation nor energy to be an active participant in the scene unfolding around you. You want to talk about it, but you hold back because you feel you are an intrusion in other people's lives.

So after three days, I have decided to plunge into frenzied work again, go back to work with the NGO I helped set up years before and meddled with everything there on sight. It's a blessing that the organization is in a mess, and I can play hero by trying to gather together the ramparts of a shipwreck. Wow, what a glorious opportunity to prove you are not that old, that you can play the role of paramount chief again, he who goes back to his tribe and lead the fight.

I found myself in the familiar round of staff and committee meetings, field work, observation and monitoring. Suddenly I have found my voice again. The other day, I was in a meeting and again, I found myself being open with my reflections. After the meeting, I wondered whether they appreciated my being too open with my views. For a while, I doubted the wisdom of joining a meeting in which everybody called me Sir because all the others in the room were half my age.

If you have this doubt, this nagging feeling that people may not appreciate what you say or do, then truly you will know you are getting the familiar retirement blues!