Drowning or waving

It has been a long time since I last posted but there is a reason for this, which is, that I have been busy retiring.

It is a funny old business, retirement. You walk out of work at 5 o’clock on a Friday evening and that’s it. It is a bit like being one of those cartoon characters who run off the edge of a cliff, and their legs keep going for a while before they suddenly realise that they are in mid-air and then they drop like a stone. 

 

Of course, you realise just how quickly you become entirely irrelevant to the place where you used to work. This is something that happens whenever you leave a job, whether it is because of retirement or because you are moving on to a new post. An old friend told me long ago, “When you get out of the swimming pool, you don’t leave a hole,” and she was absolutely right.  Depending on how you feel at the time, this can be a consolation or a regret.

When you leave your job to move on to a new one, you take your belongings, and your knowledge and your skills, with you, and you hope to be going to a place where they will continue to be useful and where you will learn new and interesting things. It isn’t quite the same when you retire. You still bundle up all your belongings (amongst them, in my case, all eight pairs of shoes that had been living under my desk, three mugs, and the umbrella which might have come in useful because although it had holes they were only small ones) and take them home. And then you wonder what to do with them. Are you actually going to need them as a stay-at-home retiree? How many pairs of black shoes, with heels, will you need when all you do is potter to the supermarket or in and out of the garden?

And it is the same with your skills and knowledge.  You have brought them home as well, and now you wonder if they are ever going to be used again.  Do they follow the shoes into a corner where they slowly get covered with dust and start to crumble until finally they are thrown away? Is it worth keeping and polishing skills, or shoes, that neither you nor anyone else may want again? Now I have a really really good excuse not to, just how much do I want to engage with RDA and BIBFRAME?

It is interesting to discover how hard it is to lose the habit of work. It feels very odd to have no pressure, no targets. It is shocking to discover how little I actually get done without a deadline. After all, there’s always tomorrow. But all the time it feels as if I ought to be doing something but have forgotten what it is, or that I have put something down and can’t remember where I put it, and that is vaguely and persistently worrying. 

And then there is the difficulty of work life and home life having become intertwined. Although I have walked out of the door for the last time, and with no looking back, what about social media, where the boundaries of private and professional life are blurred, with people tweeting about both their knitting and recondite RDA rules almost simultaneously?  A lot of my contacts – a majority of them – come from work life and to cut them all out would lead to almost complete social isolation. With noone to follow on Twitter, and almost no emails, I would enter a strangely silent world. It would be like not having Radio 4 in the kitchen.

I was lucky in that I had already been asked to undertake some consultancy work, albeit short-term and part-time, and I am also volunteering one day a week. Both of these have acted as parachutes to break my fall into retirement. What will follow, I have no idea but it will be interesting to find out. This year didn’t turn out at all as I expected. Here’s to 2014 – and not drowning but waving!