Stuck Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

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While grading final papers this evening I encountered, far from the first time, one of a group of aphorisms I think of as “sophomore certainties.” They aren’t actually restricted to second year college students. In reality they can occur at many, or at any, time in a life. But college students, actively seeking “truth” of one kind or another, seem uncommonly prone to embrace them. This one goes something like this: “Do what you love for a living, and you’ll never work a day in your life!” I haven’t actually seen it on a T-shirt or a coffee mug yet, but I have no doubt they are out there somewhere. So in providing a comment on the paper I did my standard “Let’s unpack this a bit” response. That is where I try to draw a distinction between a beloved avocation that shelters us from those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and the reality of turning that shelter into an occupation. The devil, I opine, is in the details. One may love teaching, but hate lesson plans and faculty meetings. Love singing, but hate life on the road. Love painting, but hate marketing. Very few of us are Enya who loves making music, and confronts her paralyzing stage fright by self-producing and marketing her music from the safety of her home studio while keeping her audience at more than arm’s length. For most of us the devil is in those mundane “but” details, details that have a nasty habit of turning that activity we love into something called “work.”

So here at about 2:00 AM, I am toying with the idea that I am facing a similar, but inverted, version of the “beloved avocation versus work” paradigm.  When I talk with friends and family about the inevitable anxiety of retiring after having spent literally my entire adult life on one side or the other of a desk in a college classroom, they often respond along the lines of “But think of all the time you will have for drawing and writing!” Well, let’s unpack that a bit.

It is not as if I want to go on teaching. We are currently binge watching Boston Legal, and while I am enjoying it, I must admit to occasional moments of uncomfortable identification with Shatner’s character, Denny Crane, who is grappling with what he chooses to call “Mad Cow Disease.” In reality it appears to be more the very common “Where Did I Put My Keys?” or the “What’s That Student’s Name?” disease.  Anyhow, in one of the episodes we watched tonight Denny says to his buddy Alan Shore, “l wish I had never been great.” The notion, at least the one I heard, was if he had never been great, he wouldn’t have to confront the possibility that he was great no longer. I’m not sure how my “teacher-now” stacks up against the “teacher-used-to-be” who won a sack full of teaching awards, but I do know that “teacher-now” has to work harder at it, and frankly doesn’t carry the same passion into the classroom. So it is time to move on. The sticking point is move on to what?

Yes, I am looking forward to exploring my beloved artistic and literary avocations. But will that turn them into work? Will the devil be in those details? I find no guidance in the ads I see aimed at “people my age” that show tanned seniors playing golf and tennis, hiking the Appalachian trail, climbing Kilimanjaro, sketching the Parthenon, surfing and sipping cocktails at the club. They strike me as saccharine, verging on nauseating. I also find my colleagues who hang around the edges of the university into their 80s a bit creepy - sort of like the elders still allowed around the edges of the campfire, but being gradually nudged further and further from the meaningful flames. I guess I feel a bit like I am trapped in that old Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?”

The trouble is I don’t know what else I want there to be. A dear friend who preceded me in leaving the academic life gave me a bit of advice which, at the time, I found strange. He said “For six months after you retire, do nothing.” It doesn’t seem so strange to me anymore. Doing nothing seems a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

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