Friday, June 6, 2008

Lifelong…then retirement or into retirement

Life-long: what are the benchmarks? Is it duration or duration in relationship to the length of one's life. When must a lifelong relationship, idea, pursuit, regret begin to qualify? Is meaningfulness implied? What are the shades of meaning: continuous until a person's death, continuing through all or much of one's life? This out-of-place meandering began while at a retirement event of a co-worker.

When something is more than 50% of your life and the majority of your daylight it probably qualifies. Family relations most often do. A person’s work can qualify and sometimes that work is at one place of business. This is a phenomenon that is changing. It is one I never expected to be part of but one for which I can now claim a duration maker of more than half of my life.

For my co-worker the years are 36. The retirement is about to start with a summer vacation at the camp of his making with his best friend who is intended to be the rest of lifelong. He practiced retirement for a week before deciding that he was ready. Ready and able are not mutually exclusive but the able part usually comes far later than readiness for most (maybe I am projecting here). If employment is more than making a livable wage then one may never be ready. There are very few positions on 60 Minutes, or tenured professorships in the perfect climate, or artists that can sell enough to sustain daily bread or piano men or living poets with solid indirect income sources.

As I tried to kindle connections I found rhyming words: The batches of rhymes seem to speak to me about passionless day jobs: along phrases are scrape, rush, shove, stretch, play, pull, tag, or come along.

Lifelong is now a learning buzzword. It is something we are all expected to make claim to. I invested in this claim six years ago when I processed through a second graduate program. Sometimes I think it was only proof that I could type ever more poorly with more sleep deprivation. The brain exercise was sometimes fun and challenging enough to make me feel that I was evolving. However, I am not sure that the benchmarks for lifelong learning sited herein.(p.2) were achieved in my personal journey. I am often reminded of the three word marketing rule, as it is often deployed, and the challenges of good tauts. Grad school is where I learned I too could make hyper Connections like one of my most favorite books and made 4 television adventures by James Burke. (And I too have a box and scribble that may become bones or blog entries or remain for future ruminations.)

And then I get totally distracted in the world of connectivity and find bliss.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I THINK I am flattered to be linked to your blog via 'hyper' aka 'why writers write' @ canadada.wordpress.com.

You zig, you zag, you muddle along ... you survive. Good on you.

But careful you don't do much of the 'using' thiny. People don't like it, few abide it. In the interim, wish you well.

By the by, is your spelling 'creative with purpose' or just sloppy?

Canadada

AdeleHouston said...

spelling is a factor of many things: a left looking eye, typing as a communist threat to make us all alike (a.k.a. a young girl's excuse to compensate for a general lack of hand-eye coordination), poetic license, bone drafts released too early into the world, the time of day/nite I give 2 me.

Please be flattered that I visited your words and I was touched enough to hyper. It means I stayed, grazed and thought it worthy for others to graze too. It is a choice to hyper that is I do not lightly make.

I will honor any unlink request.

N. Clark Judd said...

Belatedly, I was pleased, and surprised, to see that you linked to me in this post.

You're a bit hard to parse, but that puts you in good company. And it forces the reader to sit and actually think through what you're trying to say.