retirement the conversation

We basically have an understanding that neither of us drives anywhere alone anymore; not that it takes two half-wits to make one wit (which would still be two half-wits), but that being two people in our late eighties, two brains, four eyes, and four ears makes for a marginally safer driving unit for avoiding causing an accident.

And when we're grocery shopping, one of us goes off one way and one another way, IDK where she goes, but me usually first in the direction of the sushi counter, so I try to remember to wear my bright yellow hat so Linda can spot me across the store. The hat is new this year, bought first as better than a baseball hat for keeping the sun off my neck and ears, and second for the color so I can be spotted/identified from afar.

All leading to this morning's unusual snack with my mug of hot & black: four little Captain's Wafers, each smeared with a touch of butter. They were introduced to the market years ago, I remember when, they were a feature with the tossed salad with blue cheese dressing at Tower House restaurant on the square downtown Gainesville my years at U Florida. They made a new and tasty addition to the Ritz Cracker and Saltine tradition, kind of rich and buttery.

Sticking pretty much with Saltine Crackers, the new whole wheat kind, I'd never buy Captain's Wafers because when I do crackers I do them as the platform for what I actually want to taste, like cheese, butter, peanut butter, oysters; but one day when I was in one part of the grocery store and Linda another, an elderly woman befriended me and led me to the cookie and cracker shelves, where she picked up this box of Captain's Wafers, told me they were delicious, her favorite, and she always had some at home, and I should try then; so I took the box from her and put them in my shopping cart. Later I was thinking to put them back on the shelf, but the woman passed me again, so I kept them because to do otherwise would have been unkind. Agape is so easy when you think of it.

Anyway, the crackers are nice. That was weeks ago, and Linda just opened the box and put a sleeve of the crackers out for me; thus this morning's snack with coffee.

Below (scroll down) an essay from The Conversation that caught my eye because it's really personal. Who or What am I? I'm a human being, male, white, ... . Unless I continue a lot further down with categories and subcategories, I'm not an Episcopal priest or a Navy commander even though that may be how I think of myself. That "I am what I do" is a way of thinking that isn't helpful when you get to the point in life of doing nothing.

Who or What am I? I'm an aged and aging creature who sits here looking out the window trying to remember.

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Saturday: not much point in going next door to the Farmers' Market this morning, nobody will show because of the ongoing light rain. The fact that I'm blogging on Saturday morning is supporting witness to that I'm pretty well finished with prep for tomorrow morning's second session of the adult Sunday school class on Revelation. I try to make each session somewhat different so it doesn't go off boring, nomesane?

Tomorrow for starters, we're going to understand about 666 and each calculate our own personal number of beastliness, using Revelation John's technique. If I spell out Tom Weller, for example, and transliterate my English into Hebrew as Revelation John seems to have done his Greek into Hebrew, sans vowels, I come out as TMVLLR = 315. But you can't back 315 into Tom Weller with absolute certainty, just as you cannot with absolute certainty back 666 into Caesar Nero, so Revelation John's subtle encryption works safely enough.

Revelation is a fascinating book, and I don't agree with Luther and others who say it should never have made it into our canon of scripture. It tells us a great deal about life at the end of the first century A.D., and it stirs the imagination.

On the horizon: STELLINA 570 x 56 arriving to unload general cargo.

RSF&PTL

31588&c

online recently from The Conversation

Most discussions of retirement focus on the financial aspects of leaving the workforce: “How to save enough for retirement” or “How do you know if you have enough money for retirement?”

But this might not be the biggest problem that potential retirees face. The deeper issues of meaning, relevance and identity that retirement can bring to the fore are more significant to some workers.

Work has become central to the modern American identity, as journalist Derek Thompson bemoans in The Atlantic. And some theorists have argued that work shapes what we are. For most people, as business ethicist Al Gini argues, one’s work – which is usually also one’s job – means more than a paycheck. Work can structure our friendships, our understandings of ourselves and others, our ideas about free time, our forms of entertainment – indeed our lives.

I teach a philosophy course about the self, and I find that most of my students think of the problems of identity without thinking about how a job will make them into a particular kind of person. They think mostly about the prestige and pay that come with certain jobs, or about where jobs are located. But when we get to existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I often urge them to think about what it means to say, as the existentialists do, that “you are what you do.”

How you spend 40 years of your life, I tell them, for at least 40 hours each week – the time many people spend at their jobs – is not just a financial decision. And I have come to see that retirement isn’t just a financial decision, either, as I consider that next phase of my life.

Usefulness, tools and freedom

For Greek and Roman philosophers, leisure was more noble than work. The life of the craftsperson, artisan – or even that of the university professor or the lawyer – was to be avoided if wealth made that possible.

The good life was a life not driven by the necessity of producing goods or making money. Work, Aristotle thought, was an obstacle to the achievement of the particular forms of excellence characteristic of human life, like thought, contemplation and study – activities that express the particular character of human beings and are done for their own sake.

And so, one might surmise, retirement would be something that would allow people the kind of leisure that is essential to human excellence. But contemporary retirement does not seem to encourage leisure devoted to developing human excellence, partly because it follows a long period of making oneself into an object – something that is not free.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between the value of objects and of subjects by the idea of “use.” Objects are not free: They are meant to be used, like tools – their value is tied to their usefulness. But rational beings like humans, who are subjects, are more than their use value – they are valuable in their own right, unlike tools.

And yet, much of contemporary work culture encourages workers to think of themselves and their value in terms of their use value, a change that would have made both Kant and the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers wonder why people didn’t retire as soon as they could.

‘What we do is what we are’

But as one of my colleagues said when I asked him about retirement: “If I’m not a college professor, then what am I?” Another friend, who retired at 59, told me that she does not like to describe herself as retired, even though she is. “Retired implies useless,” she said.

So retiring is not just giving up a way of making money; it is a deeply existential issue, one that challenges one’s idea of oneself, one’s place in the world, and one’s usefulness.

One might want to say, with Kant and the ancients, that those of us who have tangled up our identities with our jobs have made ourselves into tools, and we should throw off our shackles by retiring as soon as possible. And perhaps from the outside perspective, that’s true.

But from the participant perspective, it’s harder to resist the ways in which what we have done has made us what we are. Rather than worry about our finances, we should worry, as we think about retirement, more about what the good life for creatures like us – those who are now free from our jobs – should be.