At the
University
Dear George
It’s nearly four years since
I retired. Whew – that whizzed
by! It’s a little scary. Long before I made that big step, I’d
ask retired acquaintances how they liked it. Without fail, they’d say it’s wonderful, better than they
could imagine, absolutely perfect, etc.
I never say things like that.
I’m more likely to say it’s okay, or it’s so-so, or it’s all right but I
really liked working better. I
wasn’t completely insane about my job, but it did offer more in the way of
social contacts, opportunities for achievement and recognition, and a sense of
contributing to a common mission.
I still go in to my office multiple
times a week, so I haven’t completely severed my ties. The other day I passed by the lecture
hall where I’d taught my large social psychology class for many years. Looking through the doorway, it still
seemed completely familiar. I’d spent hundreds of hours facing those same rows
of seats, the projection screen hanging from the ceiling, the clock on the back
wall. I had a lot of mixed
feelings. Part of me missed the
opportunity to address batches of students on topics I was highly interested
in. On the other hand, I always
felt a lot of unpleasant pressure in classroom teaching – mostly fears of being
boring or found to be incompetent.
I wasn’t sure whether to be sad or relieved.
I recently got a chance to
return to one aspect of my ex-work life when the department head asked me to be
on a committee to organize a celebration for retiring colleagues. I was excited
about the prospect and volunteered without a second thought. However, much to my surprise, working
on a department committee was nowhere as enjoyable as I’d remembered. Though I arrived full of enthusiasm and
commitment to the task, my fellow committee members were all suffering from
work overload. We even had
difficulty finding a common meeting time.
No one wanted to chair the committee, so we operated in a pretty
disorganized fashion. Members had
mild disagreements on just about everything -- location, numbers of speakers,
whether to have gifts, what kind of music to have (if any), food choices,
etc. At one point I wondered if
the celebration was going to come off at all. It brought me back to when I was a brand new junior faculty
member and a more senior mentor told me that that committee work in the
university was inevitably chaotic and aggravating. I think I’d just gotten habituated to it over the
years. Now, with the benefits of
some distance, I realized that it was pleasant to be free from frustrating
tasks. I wondered if I’d
fabricated too rosy a picture of what my work life used to really be like.
A week or two later I got a
phone call from a former colleague at the University. He was incensed about a personnel decision being made about
one of our long-term associates and felt that the person’s department had made
a terrible mistake. He implored me
to write a letter to the university president to protest the action. I had no information about the reasons
for the uproar and felt caught in the middle -- uncomfortable and unsure what
to do. It reminded me of the
occasionally nasty side of university politics from which I’ve been removed for
several years. I wound up writing
a letter to the president but was not happy to be back in the thick of such
conflict.
I had an interesting dream
the other night, a variation on an academic anxiety dream that I’ve had my entire
career (though with a brand new twist).
It was the end of exam week, and, even though I’d been on the faculty
for decades, I’d never finished my Ph.D. while in graduate school. Nobody knew that, but it put me in a
perilous situation. I was enrolled
in a graduate seminar to finally complete requirements for my degree and make
up for my long-time failing.
However, I’d missed the instructor’s deadline for a take-home final
exam, and I realized that I’d never be able to get it done. Even worse, I was completely unprepared
for my doctoral prelim exams which were coming up in a few days. I realized that I would never finish my
Ph.D. At first I was in a state of
total despair. Then it suddenly
dawned on me that I was now retired.
It no longer mattered whether I had my Ph.D. or not. Such a great revelation. I felt like a huge weight had been
lifted from my shoulders. In
reflecting afterwards, it dawned on me that I’m now free from the many sources
of strain in my former bureaucratic work environment and that my level of
stress is lower as a consequence.
Maybe, I thought to myself, being retired isn’t so bad after all.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Linda K-C (10-22): Great
story, and dream. I too have
had a dream that haunted me forever, it was a dream with in a dream, I
would dream that I had never taken a necessary class to finish law school. It
would take me hours going through buildings to find where to sign up for the
class. Then I would attend the first class, ( the other students in class changed
from each time I had the dream, grade school friends to law school professors)
during the class i would decide i would skip the classes and just take
the test since I knew all the material. But of course I would forget to take
the test. Then during the dream I would say to myself, this is a dream I
think, I think I practice law, then revert to , oh no I have to take that
test. On waking, for a
second I thought it was true. Retired 7 years ago, stopped having dream about
three years ago. What we do to
ourselves worrying about our careers.
I still miss work.
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