On Being Retired:
I have not studied the subject of retirement and don't have a real clue to how psychologists and sociologist would describe this phase of life. Nevertheless I think I'm beginning to understand that as persons enter this phase of life and as we progress through it there are several distinct "phases" that we pass through. I've experienced at least four of them since I retired in January 2008.
First there is great fear. How will I survive without a steady income that arrives in precise amounts and in regular intervals? Have I saved enough? Have I planned well enough? Will I miss working, will my wife be able to stand having me around all the time? Who will take over my job, will they do better at it than I did? Will I be missed? What will I do with all that extra time? Those questions and fears will sound familiar to those of you who have already retired. For those of you who have not yet reached this milestone I can guarantee you too will have doubts and fears about leaving the workforce.
After the first few months have passed without our having suffered the eminent financial ruin we had feared a new phase will set in. That is a feeling of almost complete freedom, it grows on us slowly. No more deadlines, no more disagreeable co-workers, the clock slowly ceases to rule our lives. Get up late, go to bed late....it really doesn't matter because the time is now ours to do with as we wish. A strange thing begins to happen. That worry about how we would spend all that extra time seems to have been a misplaced worry. There is plenty to do, in fact there is perhaps not enough time to do everything we'd like to do. Because time had always been at a premium before retirement we find ourselves making extravagant use of our new found time. A vacation doesn't have to be a week or two...it can be a month. It could even be all winter. Feel sleepy after lunch....nap....because you can.
The third phase takes some time before it comes to a head, but it will, it always does. Even as we relish our freedom from the clock we fall into a sort of self made routine. Before we know it we find ourselves just sort of drifting along. The excitement we felt as we discovered our freedom from living by someone else's clock begins to fade. It's easy to become rudderless, purposeless. What I realized was that I was missing structure and purpose and that moved me into the next phase.
Finding purpose is perhaps easier than finding structure, at least it was for me. Both came with my career, they came with that hated alarm clock, a calendar, goals, expectations, duty, and providing service to others. So how do I get those things back, especially how to I give myself some structure. For a while I had been drifting along, not that drifting is always bad...it's mostly stress free, but as I've always read, even stress isn't all bad. It motivates if nothing else. So, what's next? What I discovered was that a simple volunteer job could provide the structure I had been missing.
It would have to be something I enjoyed, something that I liked well enough that I'd happily do it without any pay. When I was a boy one of my favorite things to do was to listen to my grandma talk about "the old days". From her I learned to appreciate my family history and to understand how it all fit together and how "history" is really nothing more than a bunch of little stories from a lot of people all mashed together. I've been the family historian in my family for more than 40 years now. Collecting dead people and their stories. The biggest family heirloom I ever collected was the house built by my great great great grandparents. It's where we raised our children through elementary school into high school. My interest in history and family history has not wavered so any volunteer work that involved history would be right up my alley.
I have been making fairly frequent (several times a year) trips to our local genealogical library housed at the Archives of the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. They kept asking if I wouldn't come in and help them with some projects. I finally took them up on their offer last December and have been volunteering three afternoons a week since then (vacations excluded). It's been a great fit. I'm involved with a project that might not be finished in my lifetime but it's one that is important, and it's one that has had the side benefit of uncovering some interesting "facts" involving my own family along the way.
In the mid 1980's Tippecanoe County was running out of office space in the courthouse. To make more office space they decided to turn the attic into offices. That required them to dispose of many of the oldest county records that had been moved into the attic over the years. Covered with coal dust and over a hundred years worth of grime many of the documents had been simply dumped into piles or boxed randomly. Much of the material was given to the Tippecanoe County Historical Association for preservation. Something over 200 file boxes had been filled and brought to TCHA along with dozens of ledger books and other items.
Initially some of the boxes containing what appeared to be the oldest records were sorted out by topic but that process lagged as TCHA ran short of money to pay staff. Things had been more or less rough sorted and shelved in the basement but none of it was of any real use to researchers. First step is to clean the material which had not already been cleaned in 1985. The next step is for me counter intuitive, but the standards of Archival preservation call for the material to be first arranged in the order and manner in which it was created and originally filed . Tippecanoe County officials had originally filed paperwork into numbered boxes. If the county purchased ink and paper the bills were presented and then paid...and that paperwork was filed in a box. The box numbers were written on every item that was filed. Because all the material that was brought from the Courthouse attic had been badly shuffled our file boxes might contain items from several "original" boxes...things from 1830 were mixed with items from 1880.
What I have been working on is sorting the diverse items from the file boxes in which they arrived into their original county box number order. It sounds boring...but I've also found some really interesting items because I'm looking at each item which allows me to determine if it is something special or something very routine. The project will eventually result in an index system that should allow family or historical researchers a way to access items by subject and or by name but at the very least by date. There are around a half dozen volunteers working on this long term project. We all hope that in the end we will have created a useful collection of material. Ah...I've got some purpose and direction again and that feels good.
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