“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.”
So says Merlin, the magician, to the future King Arthur in T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King.”
A close friend sent that passage to me, no doubt aware of my recent epiphanies about aging and retirement. I came to that same conclusion only recently at the ripe young age of 67; the portal leading to fulfillment after a lifetime of career fulfillments, is to become a student again. Not necessarily as an academic, also not excluding, but a student of life; as we were when careers were unformed and every childhood hobby held potential to become our epitaphs.
“She loved medicine her whole life, joined Mercy One in 1982 and became chief surgeon in 1989, a position she held for 35 years.”
“Bob’s lifelong passion for flowers became ‘Bob’s Floral and Interior Design’ on Maple St for 42 years.”
I don’t want to belabor the point I’ve already belabored on this blog, I want to share the kinetic reality of what has become a life changing perspective on changing life; the joy of learning without a cause.
When new information becomes an experience for the sake of itself, rather than to forward an agenda, such as what is dictated by a career, it transforms into the joy of knowledge.
For some reason people like to credit Benjamin Franklin with this, but it was the Chinese Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang, who said, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
Maybe Ben Franklin arrived at the same conclusion or maybe the thought precedes them both because it is a universal truth; the human mind hard wires its connective tissue from immersion. New circuits are created between neurons which remap the brain. When new information is stored we are awarded new confidence and from that an experience of purpose with a wee dram of joy.
That is witnessed in children as they laugh at new sights and sounds; a baby bursting into laughter at a balloon passing by, an excited 4 year old mastering their bike without training wheels or a 13 year old smiling as he proudly recites all the presidents, in order, from George Washington.
The last one was me. Why is it that I remember a seemingly useless skill 54 years later? I had no reason to know them except for my love of history, bestowed upon me by my father who had no reason himself except for his own joy of learning. I didn’t become a history professor and neither did he, but innocent passions are the truest reflections of who we are, more than what we become.
Today, I am with my wife, Shannon, in the rolling hills of Scotland, nestled in a cottage by a crackling fire, on a misty day, typical of a maritime, temperate climate. It is precisely the kind of day we hoped for in Scotland when I put on a kilt with piper socks (and matching sporran) to feel the air and light the same way a Highlander might have felt readying for an 18th century Jacobite skirmish against the English.
I put our 2024 rental car parked conveniently in front and my comfy Aran sweater out of mind and pretend that I’m as hardy, strong and committed as if I’d lived in a different time with so much more at stake.
It’s play, just like a child. And as real as the passion a child has for something they’ll never be but find joy in the experience of learning without a cause.
Welcome to Happy Retirement 101.
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