WHAT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO RETIRE?

WHAT IF YOU DON'T EVER WANT TO RETIRE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007

"Folks who never do any more than they get paid for never get paid for any more than they do.”

Albert Hubbard (1859 - 1915), American author

"We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living."

Dean Charles R. Brown (1862 - 1950), American educator

"Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it."

Henry Giles (1809 - 1882), American clergyman

"Work is love made visible."

Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), poet and philosopher from Lebanon

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When I was in my mid-thirties, after completing an assignment in South Africa, drained beyond what I had ever experienced before, and reasonably well off, I decided to retire. I first thought of moving to Spain and becoming a writer, but my wife vetoed that. My four children were too young to have a vote but were amenable to wherever we wished to go. We decided on Florida where my wife's parents lived in Pinellas County on the West coast of the state.

For more than two years I did little more than read, play tennis, and write, producing one book (Confident Selling 1970), which became a national best seller and was in print for twenty years. It seemed so easy as I wrote the book in six weeks, one draft, and sent it to Prentice-Hall in New York without an agent or protocol. It was accepted within two weeks. The book would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies.

It seemed too easy, but it was not the kind of writing I wanted to do. I wanted to write books on ideas of meaning to me and out of my experience. I wrote one on the Roman Catholic Church titled A Plebian View of the Church in Transition: The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It has never found a publisher. I wrote a novel called Harry: The Triple Foole the title derived from John Donne's poem. It failed to find a publisher. The Catholic book took eighteen months to write, researching and writing every day, and the novel years on and off.

My next attempt was to find an agent contacting a major New York City firm and telling them of my background and that I had retired to write. I still have the letter in response. It was from the senior partner of the agency, and he stated, "I thought I had experienced everything, and then you come along, a person highly successful, traveling the world, and you stop off it to become a writer. I've never known of a more hare brain idea. My advice is to rush to your family doctor and get help."

This advice was more a surprise than discouragement, but now with the perspective of these many decades I can see his point. I couldn't then. I also know it was a blessing these books were never published. They demonstrate a man in search of himself, uneasy with what society suggested were the staples of success but were meaningless to him, and his sense of being betrayed by his culture, society, church and profession. Nearly forty years later these themes are finding their way into his South Africa novel Green Island In A Black Sea.

After more than two years of this retirement sabbatical with my funds dwindling, and my sense of connection fraying, I didn't go back to work; I went back to school.

Presumably my motivation was to attain a Ph.D., but actually it was to find some answers to my dilemma, which was why the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and why duplicity, chicanery, back stabbing, gamesmanship, and endless charades were the constant diet of work at the executive level in the complex organization.

I acquired the Ph.D. after six years of continuous study -- I had to take several under graduate courses because my training was in chemistry not psychology -- and first looked into the possibility of becoming a therapist with a colleague.

But after only short exposure to this, I could see the people that needed help couldn't afford it and those that could afford it were willing to pay to talk to someone who would listen.

I next went into macro-psychology (organizational development) never to consider again micro-psychology (clinical psychology) by having the organization as my client and not the individual.

Remarkably, actually perhaps not, I found the problem was not dissimilar to that initially experienced with individuals in a clinical setting.

Senior management never asked operating personnel, who had the answers, for them. It believed since it possessed the power and the ability to execute at its pleasure it must possess the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi.

So, for six years while pursuing my Ph.D. studies, I consulted on the side being able to make a living working only twenty weeks a year while going to school full-time year around by simply listening to operating personnel and feeding back their answers to senior management, and often receiving bonuses for the effort. Eventually, I would join a client as an OD psychologist, and work for that high tech firm for ten years again retiring for good in my fifties.

That was seventeen years ago. The irony and the reason I share this with you is that I work harder now than I ever did before, reading and writing every day of the week, and often receive no pay at all.

In fact, if I were to calculate my earnings for this 17-year-period, I would be making the equivalent of workers in the Third World, the difference being that I don't work to make a living I live to work, and will do so until I am unable or should die.

I never found retirement in the flush of my youth that enjoyable, but I have found work that I love a reason for living for the future.

We are in a culture that makes such a big deal about retirement treating work as something we have to do, or something we would rather avoid than do if we could.

My grandson, Ryan, told me the other day that he is bored. When I didn't reply, he asked me, "Are you ever bored?"

I thought for a minute and then answered. "I suppose I once was bored when I was forced to do something that I thought idiotic or wasteful."

He interrupted, "But you said you only listen to your own drummer. How do you explain that?"

I pushed him on the shoulder and said, "Let's play some more basketball."

How do you explain to a grandson without seeming arrogant that your bane of life was that you have never stayed long where that was the case?

He will have to find out for himself that boredom is only a case of not being interested in something and having the courage to pursue it come hell or high water. Most people don't, and look for Nirvana in retirement, when most of their life is over.

The great Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) understood this. He, unfortunately, lived such a short live, but left us a treasure trove of classics (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped).

He once said, "If a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him."

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Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Author