She painted such a delightful picture of her future grandparenting that I had to question my present parenting efforts and insist she write me a list of her fun ideas. Then she mentioned that “we just don’t know how much time we have” and that she wanted to make the most of it.
Jane Fonda says a “life review” helped her achieve a peace and self-awareness she’d never previously experienced. AP
These thoughts sent a shiver down my spine. Are we really at that age where retirement has swung into view? Many of us still have children at school and goals to achieve at work, where professional achievements have perhaps been interrupted (willingly) to spend time with children. The consequence of interrupted careers is that this part of our lives feels full of promise still to be realised.
Many people are confronted by the idea of retirement, so they push it away. It sounds like a quietening down, a retreat from the battles of life that shape us and make us grow, a loss of purpose and relevance. Sure, many live busy lives in retirement – connecting with friends, volunteering services and helping others – but it is not quite the same as being in the thick of battle and striving within a profession.
Then again, we want to avoid missing an opportunity to fill the mind with new sights and sounds, to travel to places only read about in books, to base ourselves in a foreign village and learn a language like a native speaker through immersion in another culture, and to do these things while we are still healthy and fit.
Yet again, some of us had a taste of what retirement might be like while on maternity leave and that sense that no one needs you outside the home is not necessarily positive; our identity is still embedded, at least in part, in our professions, and there are only so many coffees one can consume with friends in a day before one craves a deeper sense of purpose. The thought that others are working when one is not can be an isolating one.
These are some of the tensions that exist in the prospect of retirement.
As to being a grandmother, I know I would like to be one – one day. But with children still at school, it is a shimmering image, not fully formed in my mind, whereas for my friend with children in their 20s and one son about to be married, the prospect is more immediate.
The question of what time we have left is one we like to avoid, yet it is a useful motivator for getting things done. Why are we hoarding things we don’t need? Why do we fail to get our houses in order? The thought of time as finite should make the sorting of clutter easier, but it still fails to shed light on how the mess assembles in the first place, and why a tennis ball, a retractable measuring tape and some superglue sit in cheeky harmony with the wedding photo on the cabinet beneath the television.
said that when she turned 60, she realised that the tragedy of her mortality would not be her death itself but the failure of the creativity within her to find expression. She said that she woke up at age 60 and thought, if not now, when, and if not her, who?
Buddha is reported to have taught that the greatest mistake in life is that we think we have time, yet tracts of time can go by before we tackle those big projects personal to us.
My friend who shocked me so much by her language married relatively young (26) and was one of the first of our friends to have children. What she is contemplating is sometimes called the third act of life.
Media executive and author Josh Sapan’s bestselling book Third Act: Reinventing your Next Chapter, published in 2022, profiles the extraordinary achievements of 60 individuals after the age generally considered to be of retirement.
Jane Fonda too about how the increase in longevity creates in effect a second adult lifetime but that our culture still sees age as an arch, peaking at middle age and then declining. The better view, she says, may be that the third act, the last three decades of life, is a developmental stage with its own significance, in which the human spirit has ascendancy, fear subsides and one makes more sense of life than in the first two acts, giving us an opportunity to change our relationship with the past.
I favour going at full throttle for as long as possible. As American author and journalist Hunter S Thompson suggested, “life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a ride!’”
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