Taking the Fork in the Road

 

               When you come to a fork….                    Courtesy fallforward.wordpress.com

If you had been a fly on the wall, listening to our discussion, you might have come away with this conclusion:

Finding a new path after leaving a longtime career is a bit like hiking in a forest with few trail markers -- and no GPS.

You know that any trail will take you through interesting scenery, but which one to choose? Walking through the forest with some buddies lends support to your decision. Also helpful is not worrying about the destination.

As they say, “It’s about the journey.”

Or as Yogi Berra said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Thirteen of us recently chewed over this transition issue, each sharing insights and experience.  Judy, a U.S. bankruptcy judge is retiring in five months and just getting over the “terror” of that prospect; Margit, an entrepreneur who loves running a small company is contemplating a different challenge; Sharon and Cece, who had full time jobs when our Project Renewment group first met, worked up the courage to drop to part-time; Essie, a hearing specialist, Tobi, a scientist; Jean, a business school instructor, and Barbara, who carries huge responsibility in a large non-profit, still love their work, but want a glimpse of what’s around the bend.

Three others (Carol, Carole and Shellie) left their careers years ago and have considerable experience if not expertise in what’s on the other side.

As for me, now two years out, I’m plunging ahead on many fronts – and feeling a bit lost in the woods.

On the pull of work, aka "I don't clean, cook, shop…."

Margit, for one, has never spent time at home and doesn’t relish the idea of doing so. “My whole life, I got up in the morning and went to work. I took a month off when I had my kids,” she said. “I do nothing around the house. I don’t clean, cook, shop, nothing. I never have. I get no enjoyment out of that. I don’t know what the next phase will look like…I need to figure out what will even appeal to me. I don’t know what I want.”

For Essie, Thanksgiving with 30 people reinforced her determination to keep working pretty much full time. “I was so glad to go back to work on Monday and it wasn’t because I was tired.” The holidays, she said, “were  a long time at home.” On the other hand, work offers  “a place to go. I have an excuse to be out of the house, to have a routine, to have this definition of time where I’m supposed to be somewhere and I don’t have to be home looking at all this sh--. That I don’t like to do. And I get paid for it. I like to get paid for what I do. What’s wrong with that?”

Yes, concurred Cece, “There’s security about being able to get up and go to the office.” At work, “you’re focused.”  

The prospect of losing that focus – and identity --  is what brought Judy, a bankruptcy judge who has “loved every minute of it” for 28 years, to our meeting.

“I am retiring May 16. Gulp. The terror I feel about getting up in the morning without getting dressed up and walking out the door,  I’ve sort of gotten over that, I think. I’m excited about prospects and certainly that’s why I’m here.” Still, she said, it’s about “your identity.”

“You’ve had a working life all these years and you’re intertwined with that.”

Why the fear of leaving work? 

 “We grew up thinking we had to push, we had to achieve,” said Marlyn, a  psychologist. What effect does that early conditioning have in terms of how we face the rest of our lives? The fear of not doing something. The fear of finding something that you think is really meaningful. I think you’re dealing with some really ingrained issues.”

Taking baby steps into the thicket

Said Sharon, a speech pathologist: “What really helped me the most was that I began thinking about the process.” Sharon decided she wanted to retire from the hospital where she worked, “but I didn’t want to retire from working. I loved what I did and felt that I had reached a certain level of experience and expertise and I wanted to keep doing it.” Through planning, she was able to piece together two days a week of work – one teaching and the other seeing patients. “I still feel that I’m contributing and doing something that I love, but I’m no longer rushing.”

Margit, the entrepreneur: “I think we’re talking about doing the kind of work that we find meaningful. A number of people here work in therapy type situations. They work one on one with individuals and their satisfaction is from helping a given individual. Others of us are helping a system or a community.” Either way, she said, satisfaction comes from being “in a

dynamic situation that’s alive and where you can play an important role.”

Still, the trick is to find the venue for that satisfaction. “It’s almost as if we want people to ‘show me THE road,’ but there isn’t one road.”

To quote my neighbor, Ellen, a later-age artist enjoying increasing success and too busy to come to the meeting: “Retiring is like job hunting. You have to go out and research it,” she said. “You network, you meet with people, you figure it out.  If anybody is sitting around feeling like there’s nothing to do, they’re not trying.”

Is there a roadmap? Or just blind turns? 

“Change is the new norm,” said Jean, a business school instructor. “So we can assume that we will not go forward on a straight trajectory, but we’re changing according to what our situation is at the time and maybe that won’t stop.”

Echoing the notion of change,  Margit said,
“I think we look at retirement as a time when we’re going to do The Thing, but maybe I’ll do something for two years and then I’ll lose interest in that and find something that excites me more. I like the idea of approaching it  like looking for a job. But reinventing yourself multiple times.”

Now, the conversation turned my previous blog about Wisty Rorabacher, a woman who transplanted herself from the Ozarks to Greenfield, Mass. Her walk in the woods – a fast-paced jog, actually -- was particularly exciting. Without a roadmap, she just put one foot in front of the other, quickly connecting with others, discovering needs and drawing on her skills and interests to serve her new community. “She didn’t have a roadmap,” I told the group. “It just evolved.”

“It’s scary not knowing what the road is,” said Sharon. “But if you’re kind of there and open to it, then other things come about that touch you and connect with you. You get into it.”

A slow walk or triathlon?

Pace is my particular challenge. ”You want to feel like retirement is the time when you have the time to do the things you really want to do, but then you don’t have the time to do them,” I said.

Quipped Carol K, reminiscing about her dream list. “I haven’t gotten to many of them. I thought I was going to be fluent in French.” Then, she noted that people are who they are. ”People who are over committed are constantly driven. It doesn’t matter if you’re employed or not.

Shellie loves the rushing. “I’m very happy being retired. Don’t ask me what I do, but I’m busy all the time. And I’m still rushing. Maybe it’s because I do too much, and that’s ok, too.”

On friending

The meeting ended in a kind of kumbaya – talking about the importance of  having each other, of having community at this stage of life.

For Shellie, that community is the Y, where she goes every day. “My volunteering is volunteering to be there for my friends and helping them through all the things they’re going through. Of course, they help me with the things I’m going through, too.”

Margit noted the loss of communities as we move on. “A lot of us have communities from our work and a lot of our friends are from our work, so whether or not we’re moving geographically, [when we leave work] we’re suddenly in another city. It’s called the City of Retired. And we have to figure it out.”

And for Barb, who works with many older people in her non-profit, the value of women’s friendship is “clearer and clearer” as she grows older.

“So many people come to the center where they create new groups. Much to their shock and surprise, they find they’re able to make meaningful relationships at any age.”

What are your concerns? What have you learned along your path that you can share with others.

(For previous posts on our Project Renewment meetings, google "Project Renewment" and "UnRetiring")

Unexpected Pleasures: The Surprising Perspective of Wendy Lustbader

Wendy Lustbader

Wendy Lustbader delights in upending stereotypes, especially when it comes to aging. She does so in a big way in her book,

Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older.

“What could those pleasures possibly be?” I asked Wendy, a professor of social work at the University of Washington and Huffington Post contributor who has devoted her career to understanding and explaining the inner feelings of older adults.

“I tackled the book because it seems like the opposite message is in our media, in all our conversations,” Wendy said, as we chatted on the porch of her island home near Seattle. “People are always apologizing for getting older and making fun of it.”

Instead, she said, “I challenged myself to write a book where I explored the ways, literally, that life got better. I spoke to so many people who said they’d never want to be in  their 20s again. As one woman said, ‘I’d take the body but I wouldn’t want the life.’”

Wendy determined to tackle the topic head on. “I didn’t do the bubble-gummy stuff. There’s a chapter on loss because there are so many losses you deal with as you get older. Friends die, which is really difficult. But loss itself awakens us to the preciousness of time. Many people have told me that they’ve become more alive… taking time that they wouldn’t have before…and wasting less time.”

Relationships -- whether among siblings or old friends or between couples -- often get better; quarrels are shorter and fewer. “The common thread is that as time passes, you gain a history together, and gaining a history together is such a precious possession.” 

Aging also means that “our self-knowledge grows … and if you’re self aware, you’re a better partner, you’re a better sibling, you’re a better friend. Because you know your own foibles and hopefully can stop a fight or a conflict and take responsibility and say, ‘Well, I actually did that thing again that you find so hurtful and I’m sorry.’ Oops. What happened to the fight? It’s gone. That’s a very serious way that life gets better and you’re very lucky if you’re in a longstanding relationship. If you have a partner who’s truly a life partner because that gets sweeter and sweeter as you sort of burn off the superfluous with each other. That’s a huge privilege.”

Another positive: Many “elders” (as she calls them) don’t care about doing what’s expected or “normal” anymore. “They just care about what’s meaningful to themselves and to the people in their communities. I think that’s really interesting… that privately people say their lives are better but publicly we have very little serious discourse on the internal ways that life gets better. So I’m trying to start that discourse.”

Her focus is internal growth – “sage-ing,” (a term she attributes to  Rabbi Zalman Schachter)  -- rather than   “positive aging,” a term she dislikes.  “Almost all the books are about people who ski in their 90s and do huge bike rides when they’re 75. It’s too much emphasis on the physical. “I’m thinking about internals when I say life gets better as you get older, and the positive aging movement isn’t focusing internally.”

Sage-ing  refers to “people who know how to live and the people whom younger people should turn to for guidance, and yes, wisdom. It’s the idea that we become more and more substantial as we get older on a spiritual level, broadly defined, and that we ought to be able to use what we know about life on behalf of others.”

“Unretiring,” is a concept Wendy also likes -- “the movement where people are sort of reinventing themselves.”

So how do you move from a life of busy career to a life of meaning? I asked her. How does that happen? Is there a refocus? Is there a stepping back? What have you watched as people try to do this?

“It’s a good question,” Wendy said, “because it’s not without struggle and sometimes some suffering because our former identity could have propped us up for a long time.” That identity was rooted in the nonstop working, the accolades we may have gotten and the status received “based on how much you earn.”

Leaving a career, she said, “could be seen as a plummeting.” If you’re not in a society where becoming an elder is venerated, even celebrated, what a plummet to find yourself a so-called nobody in the eyes of your very own society and even your community. So there can be suffering.”

She told me one of her favorite stories, about a man who left a top government job and was “feeling so much like a nobody that he became powerfully depressed.”
Then a friend suggested that he volunteer as a crossing guard at a nearby school. “ ‘Since you’re not doing anything, it will get you out of bed,’ the friend said. And the man made himself do it, even though in his former life he used to actually drive by there and kind of laugh derisively at the ‘old guy’ crossing the street with the little kids and their orange vests. But there was a little kid who was scorned by the other kids, overweight and lonely looking. He made that kid his deputy crossing guard and he couldn’t wait after awhile to get there every morning in order to make this kid smile and make this kid feel like somebody. Eventually he fell more in love with that work and the children and helping them cross the street than anything he had ever done. He had never influenced anyone’s life…

“I’ve met many elders who after a period of emptiness, sadness kind of reach down into themselves and try something else that they’ve never done before. So I think that’s the way life gets better, to try to live a dream that you have, try something you’ve never done. Just that search for meaning itself is a beautiful thing, though it could be hard.”

Follow this blog on the transition from fulltime work to the next great thing  at www.unretiring.blogspot.com

For Judge Flora Wolf, a Liberation -- and Love

Flora Wolf, former Common Pleas Judge

In trying to find “purpose” and “meaning” in later life, some folks act as if they’re cramming for the test of their lives: if they don’t study really hard to figure it out, they’ll be failures in retirement. True has-beens.

Such is the pressure.

Former Common Pleas Court Judge Flora Wolf, though, sees this next stage of her life as “reinvention,” and one that comes with a sprinkle of luck, love and poetry.

Of reinvention, she told about 50 people at Philadelphia’s Cosmopolitan Club the other night,  “I’ve done it more than once.”

“When I was 33, my husband died, leaving me with two small kids, a dog and several cats. The dog had puppies -- eleven!

“It became apparent to me that I needed to work but I didn’t want to go back to school. So I got involved in a political effort, a ‘Recall Rizzo’ campaign,” she said, referring to the city’s cop-mayor of the 1970s. “It was a wonderful experience for independence, self-confidence, political connections and general friendship -- and out of that came law school.”

After a decade practicing law, Flora morphed again. She ran for election as a judge, building, she said, “another level of confidence.” For 20 years, it was “the best job I ever had.”  In her late 60s, she contemplated running for a third term, but it didn’t seem worth it.

“You go senior at 70 and somebody else gets appointed to take your place. So I said no. I had almost a year and a half to think about the next reinvention.”

In reading, The Third Chapter by Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Flora was struck by her discussion of the “liberation” of this time of life, of “not having the same urgency, not having the same financial pressures, of not having the same ego, and I thought that was very appealing.”

While Flora was determined to work part time on a meaningful project, “my goal for the first day of retirement was to stay in bed all day. My goal for the second day was to go to [the restaurant] Parc and sit in one of the windows and drink cappuccino and be entertained by all the passersby.” 

Her plan had been to help social workers deal with “dependency” cases in the courts, involving children and families, but with bureaucratic changes, that idea went out the window.

Instead, serendipity flew in. And Flora was ready to embrace it. Or rather, him.

“I didn’t know that I would find a new relationship, and that we would travel together. It’s been an enormous pleasure. We went to India last year,” she said.

A year and a half into her transition, she’s still finding her way.

Yes, she’s on too many boards and committees – something she says she’ll “have to sort out.”

And no, she isn’t spending time at her desk. “I really need to spend an hour or two every morning doing the computer stuff, doing the reading, doing the paperwork I avoided for the last 50 years. And perhaps I will.”

And yes, there are things about her job she misses.

“I miss the work. I miss the responsibility -- occasionally.

“I miss my friends, but I still have lunch with them -- occasionally.

“It’s a good thing that we get two years in which to figure this out because I’ve now used up a year and a half of my transition time. I have to say it’s been one of the happiest times in my life so far...We’re getting ready to go to France. We’re going to study French. And when I come back I’ll find that project and save some small part of the world.”

Flora closed her remarks by reading from the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred Tennyson:

Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off…To sail beyond the sunset... 

Though much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Click here to read a blog on another Cosmopolitan Club speaker, Dr. Anna Meadows.

If you're reading this on a phone and wish to comment, please go to unretiring.blogspot.com

For Mad Men Fans, a Pitch that Changed America

The scene is dark. A man with thinning hair is lying awake, unable to sleep. He checks the time. It's 3:30 a.m.  The voiceover says:
So this is retirement. No place to go. Nothing to do. This is what it means to be put out to pasture. There must be something else.

And of course, in 1960 there was something else. Something new. An idea that Americans would glom onto for decades afterward.  The previous quote is from a video made  to promote the nation's first retirement community. That would be Sun City, AZ, a brainstorm of pioneering developer Del Webb, who is also credited with coming up with the phrase, "The Golden Years."

You've got to see this video to believe it. Mad Men fans, you'll love this!

If the play button on the photo below doesn't work, copy this in your browser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxZH_WTRVNU

 or Google search:
"Youtube Sun City Promotional"

If you don't want to spend 12 minutes on it, start it at 7:40 for the winter of that generation's  discontent.

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Happy Fernandez--Her Latest Mission

Photo by Steven M. Falk, Phila. Inquirer

Just 10 days ago,  on the eve of lung surgery,  Happy Craven Fernandez sent an email to friends and colleagues, closing with,  “Please do not send flowers or gifts etc. Non-profits in this region can always put dollars and cents to good use.”

Happy, who retired last spring from her post as president of Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and Design, was like that. Whether running for  mayor of Philadelphia (1999), serving on City Council (1991), or teaching at Temple University and launching child advocacy programs, she poured her energy into benefitting her community.

 Last summer, while reveling in the freedom, at last, of a rare vacation in New England, she had also spent it strategizing her next step.

With fulltime work behind her, Happy was plotting out her ‘encore career.’ She had decided that she wanted to mentor women engaged in non-profit and public service work so that they could both fulfill themselves and better fulfill the missions of their organizations. But she wanted to do this in the biggest and best way possible.  So she brought together 22 of the city’s most prominent women – leaders who, like herself, had long and successful careers in the non-profit world. The group included a law school dean, a TV executive, as well as board members and leaders of some of the city’s most prominent 501(3C)s.

And, lucky for me, because of my focus on “unretiring,” she swept me into her fold.

I felt fortunate to be able to watch the process as these talented, influential women debated the best use to which their expertise and energy could be put. Should they focus on younger women just launching careers? Or people in mid-career reaching for leadership positions? Maybe their mission should be nurturing non-profit boards, some of which struggle to be effective and some of which are simply dysfunctional. Or should the group focus on advocacy – looking to foster change in organizations in which women are under-represented?

After several meetings (the last, with Happy at the helm, was just two days before her surgery), the group was beginning to coalesce, to harness their skills to a higher purpose.

With Happy’s leadership, they were (to quote Marc Freedman, the guru of the Encore Career movement) blending “clear-eyed pragmatism and the determination to make a better world, the idealism of a generation tempered by years of experience at making things work.”

Will this continue without Happy, who died today following a massive stroke three days after her surgery? What’s the most effective way to harness the collective power of women with non-profit expertise? And to what end?

Send along your ideas and I’ll share them with the group Happy launched. Perhaps this will be yet another legacy she would be proud of.