The Simple Life
My friend Gary is always telling me that I live a more active life than he could stand. Kim has often wondered why I do all that I do. While that may have been true at one point, I’m not so sure that’s the case any more. I still work at things and I still write a lot, but I really am a man of leisure these days and I am getting very used to it. I remember over the course of my life I always imagined what it would be like to just go off somewhere and spend my time just following a simple life plan that did not aspire to anything beyond enjoying the moment. I would have a simple house with particular daily challenges to confront. I would get my pleasures doing simple tasks and just spending most of my day relaxing. Then I would snap out of my daydream and think to myself that it would be a very uninteresting life to live like that and that I would be very unhappy doing so. I could have stepped back and stayed in Rockville Centre and kept to myself, but I would have been surrounded by daily commuters and that always struck me as problematic to the tranquility to which I aspired. Then there was the option in 1990 to move to Quiogue and just live the simple life in a complicated place like the Hamptons. The problem with that was that half the year the place is crazy busy with New Yorkers and the other half it is dead as a doornail with nothing but local handymen sitting in the bars dreading the reboot of the next season that gave them their livelihoods. In 1999 when we sold Bankers Trust to Deutsche Bank, I had the coin to make it work out in Park City, where I had pre-positioned myself with the big house and lots of fancy ideas, but then I saw how many guys tried to retire to Park City and were running away after only a year or so. Ithaca was a real possibility in 2007. I even bought the Jeep and seriously considered what it would be like, but Kim was far less keen and I was at best ambivalent.
By the time 2019 came and I was 65 years old, I forced my own hand by cutting an eight month one-time only lease renewal that put a stake in the ground with the intention of us moving out here in early 2020. I had been planning this for some time, having bought this hilltop in early 2012 and gradually readying it for our arrival into the bosom of full-time residence. I had retired from my position as a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell. I had sold my condo in 2015 and had moved to the rental format in New York. When 2020 came we had no choice (by design) so we packed our belongings and became California residents. The timing was impeccable with COVID blossoming in our rear view mirror and most everyone who could moving out to the country somewhere from NYC. But rather than getting caught COVID flat-footed, we had planned this and were settled in when the Pandemic bomb went off. I had signed up with an expert witness team and begun a dialogue with University of San Diego. I dragged my CEO job out here with me but knew that would end soon (actually, it lasted nine months longer than I expected. I had repaired myself for my retreat even though COVID complicated everything in terms of really coming to grips with the whole retirement thing.
Over the course of 2021 I have geared up the expert witness gig, geared up the USD teaching gig, found gardening, and dropped the CEO gig. I am now sitting here in the midst of what is becoming a post-COVID environment. I am vaccinated and boosted. I am thirty pounds lighter and feeling good. I have learned my way around town, so to speak. But the most important thing I have succeeded in doing is learning how to relax and enjoy my retirement for its freedom and leisurely pace. A big day now is an errand in town and perhaps an hour or two of work. I still plan trips for us, but they are fewer and further between, which suits us just fine. We have a few friends and family to dine out with, but no one would accuse us of living the high life, nor do we want to.
When I sit back and think about it, I have learned the pleasures of living the simple life. I stay informed on world events. I write as much as I choose to. I work a bit here and there on things I enjoy. I have an outlet for creativity in the projects I formulate for the property. I get my exercise by doing my gardening chores and walking up and down that back hillside. I ride one of my motorcycles up into the hills and feel the wind on my face and the oldie tunes in my ears. Yesterday on my streaming station I head John Denver sing Thank God I’m a Country Boy. Denver may have felt that way at one time in his youth when he wrote the song, but his life path was anything but simple. As we all know, he died in a plane crash in a homemade plane he was piloting. While he lived most of his adult life in the not-so-simple town of Aspen, he traveled all over and was clearly not living the life of a “Country Boy” when he nosedived into Monterrey Bay in 1997.
This morning Kim and I planned out and went on several errands. We drove to two local nurseries and bought a plant (ponytail palm), a fe miscellaneous other plants and pots, some mulch and three replacement pumpkins to fill in for the three sun-baked ones Kim and to throw out. When we returned I payed down a few bags of mulch, moved a giant new ceramic pot next to the new Pal Verde tree, filled the pot with a mixture of soil and vermiculite and planted the ponytail palm. After watering it and presoaking the Palo Verde, I was done for the day. As I was driving around with the window and skylight open to the 70 degree breeze, it occurred to me that I was enjoying the simple life of retirement. Kim and I ask each other each night what we have to do the next day. Usually it is trivial or nothing and that seems fine to us. My week builds to my class on Wednesday night and then slides int the weekend. All very simple.
I’m betting that some people who read this will not agree with my definition of the simple life. Some might also think that I’m kidding myself to think that I will be happy to slide into this form of simplicity. They undoubtedly think I will re-engage at the next opportunity and leave this life of retirement behind. I have learned enough to know that nothing is impossible and that could surely happen if all the stars aligned just right, but generally, I believe I am finally happy in my simplicity. I do what I want, when I want to do it. I try to keep my mind and my body active, not so much to ward off anything that might come at me as I age, but just because it makes more sense to me in getting through the day to have things to do. I don’t think any of that makes me strange. In fact, I think this is what’s supposed to happen at this stage of life. When two different friends asked me to help them write books this year, I agreed. And yet, despite writing millions of words on y own, I am not so inclined to write a book. I know I can do it. I have technically written seven books, three for friends and four for myself. I may choose to write another book at some point, but it will be because the spirit moves me and not because I am driven to achieve something. I think that may be the best definition of attaining the simple life. When you do things because you want to rather than have to, you have reached a level of personal freedom that at its core is pure simplicity.