Beyond productivity, there is the poetry of retirement

Avijit Pathak

Sociologist

MY friends, relatives, neighbours and even students seem to be curious to know what I am doing after my retirement from Jawaharlal Nehru University, where I taught for more than three decades. They want to know whether I am getting bored or how I spend the abundance of time when there is nothing ‘concrete’ to do; or, for that matter, whether I am planning to join a private university to overcome this state of ‘boredom’ and keep myself ‘busy’ and ‘academically productive’. Even though I value their love and concern, I must say that in their curiosity I see the reflection of the societal neurosis that characterises the age of industrial capitalism or contemporary hyper-modernity — the obsession with ‘time management’ and ‘productivity’. We are indeed afraid of ‘doing nothing’. As this fear of ‘nothingness’ confronts us, we tend to attach negative connotations to the phenomenon called ‘retirement’ from what the system normalises as a ‘busy’ and ‘productive’ life, or from the cycle of the routinised and officially designated work — Monday to Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm. We fear ‘idleness’.

However, I do not stigmatise the phenomenon called ‘retirement’ because each stage of life has its own significance, beauty and poetry. In fact, there is something more in retirement than just the pain of the financial insecurity and associated anxiety or the inevitability of ageing and carrying the burden of a heavily medicalised body. Do we realise that there is a great possibility in the art of retiring from our busy, career-oriented, unilinear and ambitious existence? Possibly, it is a period of great learning and necessary unlearning. In this context, let me make three points.

First, if we are truly receptive and sensitive, we can realise the depths in the art of ‘letting go’. Quite often, our jobs, our career curves, our official power and status tend to make us excessively attached to our ‘professional’ selves. We begin to think that we are primarily directors, managers, army Generals, police officers, professors, etc. And this sort of ‘self-identity’ makes us incapable of experiencing the lightness of being. But then, if with our retirement, we succeed in freeing ourselves from the heavy weight of our official positions and CVs, we can experience the lightness of being. We do not feel insecure anymore; nor do we suffer from the pathos of identity crisis. Instead, we realise that we have a ‘surplus’; we are more than what we were at the peak of our careers, and hence, it is not impossible to live with joy and creative intensity without any official position. It is, however, sad that many retired people fail to overcome the trap of this attachment; they continue to seek power and position, and remain perpetually tense, jealous, restless, insecure and unhappy. Or, they become pessimistic as they begin to fear that their existence has no meaning anymore. Yes, I have seen this pathology even among many retired professors — their intense urge to occupy some positions and their constant craving for power. They lose the grace that ought to characterise the stage of retirement.

Second, our retirement gives us the joy of freedom — yes, the freedom to be ‘idle’, or the freedom to see, feel, touch and experience what we missed when we were one-dimensional and neurotically preoccupied with jobs, promotions and departmental politics. Think of the possibilities that your retirement provides. This is the freedom to defy the tyranny of the clock; this is the freedom to walk without any utilitarian purpose and allow the warmth of the sun to enchant you in a winter morning; this is the freedom to rediscover your school friend with whom you once played football on a rainy day; and this is the freedom to experience the beauty of reading the likes of Walt Whitman, William Blake and Rabindranath Tagore without the pressure of any ‘deadline’. If we think deeply, it is not difficult to realise that our 9-to-5 hurried existence, our hyper-competitive professional work and our social Darwinism often disempowered us in many ways. We earned money, but we lost our eyes — the eyes that the divine has given us to see the dew drop on a tiny leaf, the rhythm of life and death in sunrise and sunset, or the play of the finite and the infinite in the relationship between the wave and the ocean. In other words, instead of mourning the arrival of the day of ‘retirement’, we can feel it as a day of new birth filled with the possibility of enchantment in an otherwise disenchanted world.

And third, this newly acquired freedom can empower many retired people and enable them to develop a beautiful relationship with the young. It is really sad to see many retired people joining an exclusivist ‘senior citizens’ club, remaining obsessed with medical insurance and hospital bills, and withdrawing themselves from the new generation. I am not saying that you need to think of the miracle of plastic surgery and the anti-ageing cosmetic industry to look like an 18-year-old college student. Instead, your wrinkled face, your experience and your detachment can enable you to be with the young, feel their dreams, hopes and struggles, and enrich them through the tales of the ups and downs you have gone through in your life. It is precisely this organic relationship between the wisdom of the old and the vitality of the young that characterises a sane society. No wonder as a ‘retired’ professor, I find great joy in the dialogic relationship with my young students who have just joined the vocation of teaching.

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