On Retirement

~by David Aiken~

Retirement feels funny. Or perhaps it just really depends on how retirement gets handed to you as you get closer to that age range. In my case, retirement was publicly announced to me by the powers that be at my university… the administration foisted it on me. Their reasons are their own, of course, and have nothing to do with any decline in the quality of my teaching or research accomplishments. Rather, it was something about getting rid of senior philosophers so they can be replaced by junior (read: cheaper) academics; and it was accompanied by a troglodyte mentality from the Proverbial Age that gave rise to adages such as ‘the old dog has earned his reward’, or, ‘it is time to put that horse out to pasture’.  Whatever.

That said, and administrative rhetoric aside, despite everything my mind is thinking in its trained and reasoned way, this retirement still feels like I am being ‘thrown away’: ‘Thanks for the service; now, f*&k off and die’. ‘Make way for the younger and cheaper…’

I guess that the way this retirement ‘thing’ came about would matter to me more if I had some modicum of respect for the powers that be in this case. But I absolutely do not. And does not Epictetus teach us that this is the correct philosophical attitude, in a rephrased sort of way? That MY attitude toward retirement is all the difference between others choosing to put me out to pasture, and me deciding that I am, metaphorically speaking to be sure, being put out to stud?

All of this quibbling and hither and yon-ing, however, changes nothing in my new social reality; and I am fully aware that I am presently perched upon the horns of a phenomenological dilemma. Because my mind is giving me correct interpretations about this retirement event: that I have given excellent and professional service throughout my teaching life… that many, and perhaps even most of my students have valued what I have had to offer them through my way of teaching philosophy… that I have created goodness, and perhaps even greatness, in and through the classroom. But my feelings are still feeling that I have become, in terms of my place in the greater society, a cast-out and surplus ‘thing’ on the edge of society… am become burdensome… that my productivity is no longer of interest to the larger intellectual world that I have lived in. What a weird, fully Cartesian moment—feeling deep inside me that the mind and the body are not in agreement about this retirement event.

And then there is the fixed, and very modest, retirement pension income. ‘Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas has gone Bye-Bye".

So, when there is little else left to do about a thing, it seems entirely reasonable to simply give a gift.

Here, then, is my retirement gift to all my students, to those who have found any value in what I teach or how I teach. I first received as a 19-year student from one of my favorite teachers this very short visual lesson about Life and Living from Anton Chekov. The text is exquisitely relevant to all who wonder about their value in and to their world. But unfortunately, the visual copy is much the worse for wear and tear.

For those moments when we must inevitably come face-to-face with our own true endings—our changes-of-life and transitions: As we go through the process of remembering back, as does Chekov’s existential hero, let us each one hope to be still moved by whatever greatness or nobility or truthfulness has inspired us in our performance of Life, so that we can also say near the end of our road: “That will do.”

YouTube links (2 parts):

·      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ftBT5etyho

·      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGw26ldtgmM

The very best of luck to you all.