Looking Forward
I am feeling pensive this morning as I wait for a business call with my expert witness partners in an hour from now. I spend way too much time thinking about life these days and am always trying to take away lessons to live by in the process. I am certain that this is about being in and adjusting to retirement. When I was working full-time I used to take time to write, but it was not so challenging to decide what to write about. I look back at those early stories and they were of two types. They were either about looking back at something that had happened that I considered unique and noteworthy or they were about dreaming of a time when I would leave my work routine and build a life being where I wanted to be and doing what I wanted to do. The latter was what got me onto the topic of retirement, and then when I was asked to take over the Retirement Services business of Bankers Trust, at the time a leading provider of retirement services, the study of retirement as a discipline just furthered my interest in the realm.
Last year, the real first year of my retirement, which I define by having moved out to California exactly five days after my 66th birthday, which the Social Security Administration had defined as the official retirement age for Americans (that ratchets up gradually and is capped at 67 years of age, at least for now). With the advent of COVID, I, like everyone else on the planet, spent much of last year adjusting to the Pandemic reality, so I’m not certain I had the opportunity to ease into retirement per se. I eased into a new lifestyle out here, but retirement really only started for me this year and I feel it is now pretty much in full deployment. When I am asked, I do not hesitate to say that I am retired, even though I do hedge myself ever so slightly by saying that I stay engaged teaching and doing expert witness work. I still have a business card (SEDA Experts, where I enjoy the title of Managing Director and can be found prominently on their website), but I have yet to find someone to give that card to since my engagement in the business occurs entirely online via email and calls (Zoom or otherwise).
I have fallen into an interesting weekly pattern and will largely be in that groove through the Spring of next year. That all revolves around my teaching at University of San Diego on Wednesday nights (from 7pm to 9:50pm now and from 7pm to 8:50pm in the spring semester). My week goes like this: I use Monday and Tuesday to prepare to teach and Thursday to recover from teaching before I start my three-day weekend. It works out to be a pretty good pattern and it also helps to define how I spend my non-teaching time. I have planned a vacation (driven from a timing perspective by United Airlines giving me a deadline in choosing to use or lose a ticket I had to cancel in 2020) and I will leave the day after teaching, skip one week’s teaching and then return before the next Wednesday. It means our trip to Italy was bounded by timing constraints, which I find to be a good thing so that I do not just wander around the country that means so much to me until I get bored or tired of being away from home. I have always thought that moderation in travel is a good thing.
I also find that the semester structure, which last fourteen weeks, is a perfectly good timeframe for positioning my interest in the subject matter I am teaching. I always write with a structure (1200-1400 words) and it helps me form a pattern for the narrative arc. I like things that start, have a middle and then end. It feel right to me. I am just past my midpoint in this semester, which I started planning mid-summer. I am now looking forward to the semester ending in early December. That will leave me the holiday period to look forward to. I am going to Florida in January during what is academically called the intercession, and when I return it will be time to start the new semester of teaching, which will last through early May. There is a natural rhythm to that flow and it appeals to me for some reason.
It’s not like I don’t so other things that intervene on the pure teaching semester schedule, but it is a very loose definitional structure to my current life and structure-light seems to work very nicely for me right now. Having to be somewhere and do something does not feel confining for the most part. Instead, it feels like it gives shape to my year in a very loosely defined sense and that suits me for the time being. I do not know that I will be asked to teach again next year, though I expect I will be. I do not know that I will want to teach again next academic year, but I suspect I will want to. Academia generally likes a degree of consistency as much as we as humans do. My bet is that I will retain my 2021/2022 teaching schedule for 2022/2023. I dare not project beyond that because I suspect that my appetite for continuing to teach (certainly the two same subjects I’m scheduled to teach this year) may well wane after a second round.
My expert witness work has no particular flow or seasonality. Some cases are bottle rockets that come and go quickly with gusto, others are a slower burn or ramp up and down. I am currently on pause on the big antitrust gig that occupied August and some of September. My lingering testimony case is now wound down and I am no longer on weekly call. I have a new case that is just ramping up, but has time to develop and should not require a burst of effort, but rather a steady flow for a few months. I also have three others on the hoof that may take shape. I have yet to find a major conflict in my expert witness work that prevents me from taking on a case or making the workflow work, and it all seems to be manageable while giving me some interesting projects to attack and some pocket money to add to the larder. Overall this year I will have done about half as much of that work as I did last year, but next year might be the same or more. I do suspect from the conversations that I have had that as my experience gets more and more dated, my utility does decline. That’s where my academic work helps somewhat with the argument that I am keeping myself more current than my W2s would otherwise imply.
That leaves me with the garden and nature has taken care of the cycling for me on that. I’m not sure I completely understand the seasons out here the way I came to understand the seasons in the northeast, but I generally know when its summer and when its not. That too gives me something to look forward to in my gardening. The good news is that like retirement in general, the flowers bloom all year long around here on one plant or another tend the secret seems to be to keep a good diverse portfolio of plants. That gives me the perfect segue to retirement…keeping a portfolio of activities to constantly keep yourself looking forward.