Key to a harmonious retirement

 

Three years ago on this day I repatriated, and in a couple of months, I will have been retired for three years which feels an ample time to summarise and share some insights. I believe I can claim with confidence that I have made the most of these three years even given all the external horrors we have been through. So here are some reflections – for those who want to hear it.

1). Embrace it. Getting old is not a given, it’s a privilege not everyone can enjoy. Be grateful for every day you are alive and, hopefully, in good health. Think of friends who sadly did not live long enough to experience the pleasure of retirement.

2) If viable economically, retire as early as you can. There is so much to do after retirement that you need as much time as you can get while you are able to fulfil your dreams.

3) Make retirement definite. Cut off all ties to your professional career. I know it may be hard, but think: you have probably worked in more or less the same area for at least forty years. Can you make any further contribution to your field? If you are an academic, do you really want to produce another book, another article, another conference paper? At this point in your career you probably have scores of former students who can carry on and do it as efficiently as you, if not much better. After all, at least theoretically, every next generation of scholars should be better than the previous one. If you are a teacher you have younger colleagues who will hopefully continue to foster new generations of young people. If you are a writer, artist, performer – make room for new talents. If you are in business, surely some younger companion can make it thrive. If you are in public service… and so on. Be honest with yourself: Will the world go on without you? Let me tell you for sure: it will. And as they say: leave when you are on top.

4) What, then, can you ask, should you do with all your spare time? Think of all things you wanted to try and never had time. Maybe you wanted to be a gardener, but your family insisted that you go to university. Maybe you wanted to be an archaeologist, but you had to support your family and got into business instead. Maybe you have always secretly wanted to build model railways. Maybe you wanted to play an instrument or learn a language. Pursue your dreams. Preferably, start, or at least start looking around, before retirement so that on Day 1 you are already enrolled in a class or have a volunteer job waiting. And remember: this time, you don’t have to compete, you can quit if you get bored and want to try something else, and you will never get orders from anyone. Whatever you do, you do it entirely for your own pleasure. If in the process you contribute to saving the world, that’s a bonus. A way to reason with yourself is: by being happy you increase the overall amount of happiness in the universe, which is a huge deed.

5) join a community. You are probably used to have people around you: colleagues, students, people you meet at lunch, your elders and your peers and your subordinates. Suddenly you are on your own. Even if you have a partner and a family, you will lack a wider circle of like-minded, of people who share your interests beyond your profession. Almost every pastime will have a club, or several, physical or virtual. Search “Star Wars”, “Balcony gardening”, “Disc golf”, “Theorbe music”, “Basque cooking”, and you will find people passionate about the same things as you are. And in an unlikely case that you don’t find any, create your own club. It’s enough to be two to start, and you will be amazed how fast it grows.

6) maintain your connections. Stay in touch with your colleagues, on the understanding that you no longer talk shop – find other common interests: camel riding, UFO spotting, mushroom picking, collecting beer-bottle caps. Get in touch with those friends with whom you have been saying the past five years: “We must meet soon”. Nag them, invite them to something exciting. Perhaps one out of ten will respond, and that’s an achievement. Reconnect with your childhood friends, classmates, distant cousins. You will discover that fifty-year-old memories you share will bring you together even closer than you were once. But don’t be afraid to get new acquaintances. Within your new pastimes you will get to know new people so make sure you meet even outside clubs and events. Don’t be shy with people much younger than you. Think: when you were twenty somebody aged thirty was ancient. When you are 65+, age means significantly less. You can make new friends within a range of twenty years younger and, yes, twenty years older. While your recent students may be the same age as your grandchildren, once you no longer are in a teacher-student imbalance it does not matter.

7) all the above will only make sense if you are in good shape. You will doubtless have various ailments but as long as you are generally fit, physically and mentally, your life has a potential to be highly enjoyable. Of course there are things you cannot secure yourself against, but making your health a priority is essential. It doesn’t mean you have to spend three hours a day of your precious time in a gym (unless you like it). There are plenty of other activities: walking, running, biking, dance; and there are classes and clubs for seniors so that you don’t have to feel embarrassed next to perfectly fit youngsters. (Frankly, some retirees are much better fit than many youngsters). Try something you have never tried before. Maybe climbing or paragliding is your favourite, you just don’t know it yet. Don’t let absence of companions stop you, do it on your own. I am aware that some sports can be expensive, and you should not deny yourself anything as long as you can afford it, but there are plenty of things that are free and that can still make you fit and happy.

8) declutter. Whether you downsize or not, there is an enormous sense of freedom in getting rid of worldly possessions, and there are many gurus to guide you, but you can just use your common sense. Did you need dozens of smart outfits during your employment? Will you need them again? Keep two favourites, sell or give away the rest and free space in your wardrobe for nice leisure clothes. Do you really need five sets of dinner plates, seven teapots, ten table cloths and three dozen wine glasses? Will you ever use that cheese fondue pot that someone gave you for Christmas twenty years ago and that you only tried once? Some things will have a sentimental value, but at this stage in your life there is no point in keeping anything that “might come handy one day”. Those days will never happen. Keep only things you know you will use everyday or at least regularly. Ask your children, if you have children, whether they want anything – usually they don’t even when they are just about to start a household of their own. For many of us, the most difficult thing to get rid of will be books. Yet you are beyond the argument: “I might need it for work” or even “I will read it when I have time”. If you bought a book twenty years ago and still haven’t read it you probably won’t. And if you give it away and then suddenly feel an urge to read it, there are libraries. Think: how many books a year can you reasonably read? How many years have you theoretically left? Bookshelves lining every square inch of your walls were once a token of prestige and learning, even if you knew, and your guests knew, that you have only actually read a fraction of them. This attitude goes back all the way to 16^th century or even earlier, when books were rare and expensive. Not any more. So keep only books that you know you will re-read and books that are dear to you, for whatever reason (signed by the author, gifted by a dear friend, books your granny read to you when you were five). Once upon a time first editions could fetch you a fortune, but today it has to be something really exceptional so I wouldn’t bother.

9) adjust your inner clock. My most unexpected and most welcome discovery has been that time flows at a different pace when you don’t have work to go to every day (even if you work from home and just go to your desk). Everything you do you do slower, and everything takes longer – and it’s not simply fine, it’s the whole point! It doesn’t matter if you haven’t finished something you planned in the morning because you have all the time in the world. Maybe you got distracted and did something else, just as exciting, instead. Or maybe you were enjoying whatever you were doing so much that you didn’t want it to end. Or maybe you just needed to wind down and look around and have a quiet cup of tea – a luxury you couldn’t allow yourself before. You can even emphasise this slow pace: walk deliberately slowly paying attention to the environment, move slowly around your dwelling. Don’t multitask. We think that by multitasking we save time, but in fact we waste time because we are never fully engaged with whatever we are doing. Pay attention, live here and now. Have you noticed this funny sculpture by your local bus station that you have passed hundreds of times? Have you observed how the rose bush under your window has grown since last year? Have you considered the pattern on your plates and the exact shade of green on your curtains? Suddenly your life is so much richer in experience than before. Rather than saying, “Where has this week gone?” you say, “This has been such a full and exciting week!”

10) Keep rules and routines you enjoy and ditch those you don’t. If you have always hated that alarm clock ringing at six, throw it away and sleep as long as you wish in the morning. Have breakfast in your dressing gown – or in full makeup if you prefer. Make the bed, cook meals, wash up – if it mattered to you before. But if it didn’t, maybe you will discover that it does now because you will spend more time at home and want it to be neat. Absence of schedule may feel frustrating so make a schedule for yourself, based on your pastimes: yoga on Monday morning, baking club on Tuesday afternoon, and so on. Shop for groceries on the same day of the week. Water your plants at the same hour. It will bring structure into your life, without creating pressure. Because you are completely free to break your own rules.

11) Once again – and I know it is pathetically trivial – wake up every morning grateful that you are alive and in anticipation of wonderful things that the day has in store. If by the end of the day nothing spectacular has happened, you should still be grateful and hopeful about the day to come.

A time to every purpose

I have been writing this post mentally for quite a while, long before the current situation, but it feels more relevant now than ever. I have been reluctant to share my reflections because I might sound self-righteous, and I am also aware that I am exceptionally privileged, since in my retirement I have no obligations, I have stable economy, good health and other benefits many people are denied. And yet I am disturbed by what I hear and read these days about frustration and boredom; all kinds of highly contradictory statements. Some people say time has stopped, some that it has expanded beyond reason; some don't know what to do with their time; some feel the “before” was centuries ago, some look in horror at just a few weeks back; some see no future, some cannot wait for future to arrive.

I have written a book about time in children's literature. After twenty years, I still think it is the best book I have written, unjustly not having received as much attention as it should have. In this book, I explore the use of circular, mythic time in classic children's books and the ways this archaic time – kairos – occasionally opens into linearity, chronos. But kairos is not simply here and now; it's vast, it includes all past down to the beginning of time and it stretches into the future to the end of time and beyond. It is recurrent in changes of seasons, in death and rebirth. It includes all parallel worlds, beliefs and imaginings. Australian Aborigines' concept of Dreamtime is one of the closest ways of grasping it, although it is hard for us, Westerners, to understand, because we are conditioned to value linear, measurable, goal-oriented time; we are told that the so-called carefree time of childhood is something to leave behind and grow up and start living according to clocks, calendars, schedules, timetables, and achievements. This is what children's literature endeavours to prepare us for. Yes, the little boy and his teddy bear will always be playing in the Hundred-Acre Wood, and yet we know that the boy is going away to boarding school, where he will be introduced to spelling, multiplication tables and citizenship. This is inevitable, but all great children's books remind us of kairos, of the “very long time ago, maybe last Friday”. Of the time of always, usually, habitually, every Sunday, every summer. Some languages have tenses and modalities to express this iterativity.

What no literature, children's or other, has prepared me for, is return to kairos in old age. I am not sure whether the rapidly expanding academic area of age studies has paid attention to this phenomenon. And I don't remember any work of fiction that describes it. There are of course numerous stories about old people, but usually with negative connotations, focusing on illness, loneliness, disappointment, fear of death. I cannot think of any story that highlights the pleasures of getting old. Maybe because halcyon old age doesn't constitute a good plot. It isn't as exciting as opening up childhood idyll into constant linear advancement, nor promising the vague, even if encouraging happily-ever-after. But as people of my age know, there is more after happily-ever-after. Once our linear progression slows down and eventually stops, we don't die yet. Instead, at least some of us are blessed with returning into Dreamtime, to the all-encompassing Grand Time we lost when we decided or were forced to grow up.

They say that senescence is the second childhood, but it is not true. As Clémentine Beauvais demonstrates in her research, a child is mighty because of their vast resources of time-left, time-yet-to-spend. An old person, returning to kairos after a life of stressful, competitive linearity, has limited time-left. I don't know exactly how much time I have left, but statistically it is significantly less than I had when I was a child. Yet this is only true if we think in linear, goal-oriented terms. If kairos has no beginning or end, if it has no structure, then it makes no sense to measure it the way we measure linear time. I don't have any deadlines or goals. I may still want to walk a thousand kilometers by the end of 2020 or climb to the height of Everest adding up my daily climbs; I may want to build another dollhouse or harvest tomatoes on my balcony. Yet these are desires, not goals. I have left all anxieties of my adult life behind (and yes, once again, I am aware of being exceptionally privileged). Like a very young (privileged) child, I don't have to worry where my next meal comes from. I am my own master, and unless I want them, I have no societal constraints, no rules to play by. I have got rid of as many possessions as I could; when you don't owe much you don't worry about losing it. Like in childhood, procreation is not an issue. I have no fear of death, because, although I hope to live a few more years, death will not rob me of my life, long and on the whole quite satisfactory. While a young child is not yet aware of their own mortality, I have come to terms with it and thus become immortal. My present life is a life of total harmony. A life in Arcadia. A life in kairos.

This is where the current situation comes in, and this is where I am running a risk of sounding sanctimonious. I feel leaving chronos behind is a relief. I still need to keep track of days to know when my groceries delivery is coming, and I need to know when the live-streamed concert starts, but apart from that days are determined by sunrise and sunset, meal time is when I am hungry and bedtime is when I am tired. In between there are so many exciting things to fill my days, and every day is Sunday, and it is always summer. Unlike childhood, there is nothing I must learn because it will be useful later in life. I can gather totally useless knowledge and acquire totally useless skills. I can “waste time” because I have unlimited supply of it. I have the peace of mind to feel joy about everything I do, everything I see, hear, touch, smell. I do not look back with nostalgia or regrets at my past. I do not look with hope into the future. I do not feel anxious about the future either. I am not longing for anything, least of all any return to my previous lifestyle. I enjoy being away from civilisation and close to nature. And of course remoteness and isolation are the very tokens of kairos.

All this happened to me before everyone's lives changed so dramatically. Therefore I believe I am so much better prepared for the current situation. I don't want to preach, just to share my experience. Even if you still have your commitments, stop and reflect. This is the opportunity to capture a few moments of kairos, if only to realise that it is there for you when you feel you have completed your linear, measurable, goal-oriented existence. Don't misunderstand me: I used to live that hectic life myself. We are trained to in our society. Returning to kairos involved a lot of effort and determination, but it was worth the trouble. Your voluntary or involuntary isolation is a valuable, albeit temporary escape from linearity, but not a nostalgic escape to prelapsarian childhood – you still have your adult responsibilities, and you can never shed your adult knowledge and experience; neither a blind-folded sideways escape to idyllic fantasy from which you return no wiser. It is a glimpse of the reward to come – if you let it come, if you don't lament the “waste of time”, the days and weeks and months stolen from you, but see them as days, weeks and months gifted to you as a password to kairos when your are ready. To everything there is a time and a season. A time to rush, and a time to pause.

 Ill. Kate Greenaway 

ABC blog: T

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T is for time. You know, “parsley, sage, rosemary and time”. A time to be born and a time to die. The time garden. A wrinkle in time. A stitch in time. Time cat. A traveller in time. The tale of time city. Bedtime for Frances. Time to get out of the bath, Shirley. I have written about them all. And some more that do not have the word “time” in the title.

I had a chapter on time displacement in my thesis, but I don't think I did anything revolutionary, just categorised time-related fantasemes. 

I wrote a book the initial title of which was “Time and archaic thought in children's literature”, but the marketing people said it wouldn't sell so it was changed to From mythic to linear: Time in children's literature. It is my favourite book, and I am a bit upset that it hasn't been noticed more because I am doing something that hasn't been done elsewhere. I look at the way time is presented in children's books, old and new, realistic and fantastic. I look at two kinds of time: chronos, the measurable time, and kairos, the mythical, sacred time, and how children's literature systematically utilises the latter to portray the condition of childhood. The idea of kairos and chronos comes from the myth and religion scholar Mircea Eliade, and it complements in a fascinating way Bakhtin's carnival, since the suspended carnivalesque time is of course kairos, but you cannot stay there forever. 

 

ABC blog: I

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I is for iterative. It is a narrative structure, a temporal frequency that implies telling once about something that happens over and over again. The normal frequency is singulative: one event told once. In repetitive frequency, the same event is told several times, occasionally from different perspectives (known as Rashomon technique) or with additional details. The tokens of iterative are words and phrases such as “sometimes”, “ usually”, “every Friday”; but it can be much more subtle than that. Gerard Genette, the second most inspirational scholar for me, after Bakhtin, claims that Proust is the great master of iterative and unique with this device. Now, if Genette had read some children's literature he would notice that iterative is the most common narrative mode: “Every Christmas we...”. This is just one example of how features pointed out as unique in the mainstream are abundant in children's books.

I usually – this is iterative – discuss iterative when I talk about the circularity of children's fiction; how time seems to go on for ever, and it is always summer and nobody grows up. This is not quite true; in fact, it is true about William or Nancy Drew, but not many other books. Even when the boy and his bear are always playing in the Hundred Acre Wood, in fact they aren't, and we know it. And yet books such as The Secret Garden first take the child out of circularity and then bring them back and freeze them in time, forever.

Once upon a time – that's singulative – I gave a paper on iterative at a conference that was totally devoted to one single novel, Alan Garner's Strandloper. It is one of very few papers that hasn't been published nor incorporated into a larger piece of work. I am not even sure I have got it still. It my have dissolved into the mists of time.

I is also for identification, which I have recently written a lot about, especially immersive identification, a highly immature reading strategy when you love a character who is “just-like-you”. I claim that it is immature because the reason we read books is to learn something about other people, who are not just like you. Immersive identification is the opposite of empathy.

To everything there is a time and a season

When I took my daily walk in the park yesterday (still keeeping to New Year resolutions) I reflected on some day walking clockwise and another day counterclockwise, just for a change. It struck me that the words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" must feel very strange for today's children because they don't know how to read the old-fashioned, non-digital clocks. Once upon a time, a mother would ask another mother: "Can your child read the clock yet?" Reading the clock was part of pre-school development tests. There were dozens of educational books, boring and exiting, involving clocks. But the other day our middle son told everybody on Facebook that his four-year-old boy woke him up saying: "It's 8.23, time to get up". I am proud of this clever grandchild, but I am a bit melancholy too. I have always disliked digital clocks, because you can clearly see time disappearing forever. In an analogue clock it comes back every twelve hours (yes, yes, I know...)

My favourite of my own books is From Mythic to Linear which is about the development of children's literature from archaic concept of time as recurrent, reversible, eternal - kairos, as in "a time and a season", the time of the Returning God; toward the linear, one-directional, irreversible time, chronos, leading to growing up, ageing and dying. Although I know that time is irreversible, classic clocks provide a sense of security. It is ten o'clock right now, and it will be ten o'clock tomorrow morning again.

I will not think about belonging to the last generation of non-digitnal clocks. I'll go and take a walk in the park. Counterclockwise.

Chronalgia

Somebody has said that nostalgia is a wrong notion, we don't long back to a place, but to a time. Chronalgia.

The post-conference trip goes to Kennedy Space Center. I am not sure I want to go, but I have a whole day to kill before my flight, and there is nothing else to do on the Magic Mountain. How wrong I was to think I wasn't interested! It is a nostalgic trip - or rather chronalgic, a trip back in time, to the past that once was a future. I am so old that I remember the sputnik, and the first man in space. (I guess for my children it feels as if I remembered the French Revolution). I remember it from my childhood perspective: we were the first in space! Here at the Kennedy Center it's "They were the first". But "We were the first on the moon". I remember it too. By that time I was grownup enough to think "We are on the moon". I wept of joy.

When I was a child I knew I would be an astronaut. Space exploration expanded so quickly that it seemed absolutely plausible that within my lifespan humankind would fly to the moon, to Mars and beyond. I told everyone who would listen that I particularly planned to visit Saturn because of its gorgeous rings. In the Kennedy Center, they show a video of "the last man on the moon". It all stopped so unexpectedly. I feel sad.

The strongest impression is the International Space Station building. That's where they assemble units to go up. It is not a museum, it's a working place like any other. There are some capsules that have been up and down a few times; others are yet to go. The exhibit of "Early Space Exploration" is a graveyard of hopes. Mummies and pyramids.

The area is huge, and they take us from spot to spot in buses. It feels like a Tarkovsky movie. On the way, we see alligators, herons and eagles. The visitors seem to be more fascinated by these than by rockets and space shuttles.

Friday again

People usually say that time goes too fast. Days and weeks and months and years just pass by and disappear. For me it has always been the other way round. Time is stretched; it is still only Wednesday, it is still only February. I think it has to do with what you do with your time. If you fill hours and days and months with interesting and important things time goes slowly. Yet it is Friday again, and we have been to the Green Dragon. On the other hand, so many things have happened since Monday, I've done so much, I've been to London, I've seen fireworks, I've run a successful (I hope) seminar, I've met my students, I've answered zillions of emails of which at least a dozen were exciting. So yes, Friday again, looking forward to a quiet weekend but looking back at a long and gratifying week.