When Work is Done
Does everyone know the joke about the sex survey that ends with the question, “How many people have sex only once a year?” And the little guy in the back is excitedly waving his arms and when asked why that makes him so happy he says, “Because tonight’s the night!” It’s a classic, right up there among the best because its all about wrong-footing the audience and then surprising them. I try to incorporate that same philosophy in my writing, always trying to find ways to surprise the readers. Usually its about tying things back to the original theme, which should be highlighted in the title in some way either directly or obscurely. Well, this story is NOT going to be about retirement so let’s get that out of the way to start. I write a lot about retirement, not just because I am getting myself accustomed to that state of being, but because going back over thirty plus years I have found it a fascinating topic for discussion both financially and psychologically. The financial fascination is all about the powerful force in nature, which is that of compounding. The exponential accumulation of money over a retirement lifespan, which is best characterized as our working lives is a very powerful financial force that trumps almost any investment per say in its accumulative capabilities. The old story of the chess board the emperor and the grains of rice tell the tale very vividly in that if you double a grain of rice for every square on a chess board, by the time you get to the end of the 64 squares, you are at a sum total that exceeds the number of grains of rice in the universe. It’s a neat trick worth using to amaze people and perhaps educate them as you go.
I occasionally find myself wishing I had tucked away a few hidden caches of coin fifty years ago and could go dig them up and see how they have grown. Some people wish they could know the future so they could buy Bitcoin at $100 and such, but I find myself more realistically wishing that I had internalized the lesson of the power of compounding when I was young. Life would be so much easier if we were as wise in our youth as we are in older age. I suppose it would be easier still if we were as strong and vital in old age as we were in our youth. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t see fit to make either of those possible.
I have lived my life without regrets. I make it a point to never regret anything for the same reason that you are not supposed to change anything when you travel back in time. Change one thing and everything else about the world changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. They call it the butterfly effect and it is a foundational aspect of chaos theory that says that that everything depends on the most minute chacteristics of the initial conditions. Everything flows from those initial conditions and any change to them changes everything. So, no regrets for me. It is also a matter of the importance of avoiding guilt feelings. Life is too short to worry about spilt milk. The serenity poem tells us to focus on the things we can change and to ignore those things we cannot change. In the Spielberg/Hanks movie Bridge of Spies, the Russian spy played by Mark Rylance, every time he is asked why he isn’t more upset about this or that, he just says, “Would it help?” That pretty much summarizes my view about regrets.
I have now spent the last four or five days cleansing my Ithaca home of all the personal effects I have accumulated. I will send that all in boxes or place them in the car when we return to be further sorted out in California. I am trying to triage as much as possible and shed as much as possible, but experience tells me that this is all a process and that one good purge deserves another and that the process will eventually winnow things down to the stuff I really care about. I am finding that we care about things less and less over time. I watched my mother go through this as she aged and sent me the occasional box of junk that she had stopped caring about but thought I might want to care about for a while longer. I will eventually go through the same process with my kids. They are already getting some of that from me as I entice them to take this or that from the Ithaca house. I’m not talking about utilitarian stuff like furniture, which they are taking in bits and pieces as their needs may exist. I am talking about memorabilia that mostly serves to remind us of people, places and things gone by. One of the strange things is to see how everyone has their own memories and their own memorabilia that holds meaning to them. My son wants my old leather chair and my daughter wants an upholstery-stuffed teddy bear from the sofa. They each mean something that eluded my recollection. I suspect that things I bought are simply objects to me, but they contextualize them more to people or place more than I do.
The time I have spent working the problem has now come to a natural pausing point by design. I have put everything I haven’t already mailed in boxes in the garage. The only things not in boxes are pictures and despite my best efforts to triage, I still have a dozen or more that I will have to wrap and send in some manner or another. I have no idea where these will go, but that is a decision for another day. I will set down my packing tape, bubble wrap and U-Haul boxes for the duration of the long weekend in deference to making new memories with my family rather than waste my time making the mistake that sorting out old memories is more important than making new ones. There must come a time when work is done or at least declared as such so that life can proceed. I am very much in that mindset these days as I find the calls of a business or even investment nature to be an annoyance that interrupts my preference to be living what’s left of my life doing anything but work. To some, business and investments are pleasure, but to someone like me that spent a lifetime dealing with them, they are only examples of work to me. Don’t get me wrong, I have been working hard to triage the Ithaca house, but that is still not work in the context of work versus life. That is life in that it involves my memories and the ordering of my priorities.
For me, work is done. Anything I choose to do I do as pleasure at this point. The only exception to that is that anything that seriously impacts my ability to enjoy the life that remains for me and Kim is a new category of necessary work. But that is silly, necessary work has always been the definition of just plain old work. What distinguishes it now is that for years I didn’t allow myself the luxury to question it, but now I do and in so doing try hard to minimize it. I don’t even like haggling for the best price.
I have always wondered about the hypocrisy of something like an orthodox Shabbat, where people won’t push an elevator button or turn on a light for concern that it might be interpreted as being work. I understand that better now in the context of my retirement. When work is done, it should be done. I worry less about giving my time to God than about giving my time to myself and my family, but to me that is as godly as it comes.