Retirement – when trifling moments (and bodies) become momentous

People around me are starting to succumb. One by one disappearing into the silvery abyss of age. “I’m retiring,” they announce with contented smiles. “I’ve done enough, and I’ve had enough. It’s time I enjoyed the fruits of my labour.”

They speak of retirement as if it’s the holiday of a lifetime, a state of grace that has always been life’s purpose – a pay-off for the grind. And now, here it is, the endless vacation, sequential summers in which to languish, keeping the hours and habits of a duchess or labrador, snoozing at will and gobbling strangers’ sandwiches off cafe tables while making the great circumnavigation in the caravan.

You’ll hear retirees say, “Oh, there aren’t enough hours in the day.” These are the armchair snoozers tumbling from one nap to another until they wake to find they’ve made it through all that bothersome sunlight, and it’s dusk at last, and time to winkle a cork from a bottle.

I never had a career I could retire from. Never did anything regular or important enough to justify the word. So the idea doesn’t affect me personally. But I remember my dad was petrified of retirement. He saw it as a banal antechamber to the tomb, a place of cold toast and putting yips, the end of you as serious person. He was a peripatetic man and to him, free time – time without immediate purpose – was a torment. Retirees “pottered about” until “the sun was over the yardarm” and then started to “bend the elbow”. Retirement was a mire of blank days and temptation in which a person could barely remain moral, let alone dignified. Mercifully, he died in the saddle and never had to deal with that.

And never got to know the magical compensation of retirement is that the neighbourhood expands to take on the dimensions of the universe, and trifling moments become momentous. A friend who once employed 2500 people is, in retirement, a happy chaperone of eight chooks. I have heard him talk to those birds as if they were undermanagers, clerks and sometimes as though they were his daughters. Well, something must fill the void left by relevance, and if it is to be chooks, they must be anthropomorphised and adored.

These are the easy heights of self-deception that aid retirees in the dread gloaming. They can be heard lecturing their poinsettias as if they were chemistry students. They can be seen conducting fence sparrows as if they were orchestras. And to watch them making tea is to witness a successful moonshot.

Tasks that were, at best, bothersome, must become crucial and rewarding. Have you seen the grin on a retiree’s face as she retrieves The Saturday Age from the front lawn? As broad as Nelson’s when the smoke cleared at Trafalgar.

In retirement, the shopping becomes a military campaign, the making of a bed becomes the construction of another Hoover Dam. It’s not delusion as much as a psychologically crucial resizing of the world into a place where Clem’s pruning of the roses warrants Edward Gibbon to tell of it. It’s a natural defence against decline. Glamourise the quotidian. See your window box as Eden.

But laying down the tools can be risky. The most profound caution against retirement I’ve witnessed was when Clive, a stockbroker, called last trade, turned off his screen, took his overcoat off the rack, and trained home from the CBD, never to return. In retirement, his standards avalanched like a precarious Swiss village into the valley of dissipation. Without discipline, without structure, and within a year, he had besieged the larder and distended himself twofold. A stumpy-legged man, he nevertheless topped 105 kilograms.

He then decided to become an ocean swimmer to lose weight and went to buy a wetsuit. “What size?′ the saleswoman asked. “Oh ... XL?” Clive ventured. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Maybe ... once ... in illness.” He couldn’t get the XL past his ankles. He couldn’t get the 2XL past his knees. The mirror in the changing room fogged up as he battled black neoprene and blacker reality. “Are these kiddie sizes?” he called over the door. The saleswoman answered, “Sir, honestly ... I don’t think your core temperature will be a problem while swimming.” With this suggestion that he might loll among humpbacks nibbling krill au naturel with no discomfort, Clive stormed from the store.

To keep himself from the larder, now he’s taken to napping as a sport and spends his afternoons entangled in thickets of vainglory.

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