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Michael McLeod
There's a famous and rather droll passage in "The Sun Also Rises," which I think is considered as Hemingway's greatest novel, in which a man who went bankrupt is asked how it happened.
"Two ways," he says. "Gradually, and then suddenly."
That's how I feel about this week - my first week of being absolutely retired.
It was no big surprise and yet once it happened to me in actuality I came a-cropper. (I just love that expression. I'm pretty sure it's a reference to a horse being startled and pulling up suddenly. At least that's my notion about it.)
Suddenly I don't teach anymore; taught my last class at the pretty little private college near my home. I don't freelance anymore (though I might get fidgity and still pick up some assignments down the line). I had quit my full time job as a journalist at the Orlando Sentinel about ten years ago but between freelancing and teaching had been putting in about a 20-hour week of part time work.
It just hit me, this sense of being suspended sans gravity mid-air, as I kinda sorta figured it might, when I let go of all of it this week.
This is my fourth day of being absolutely positively unemployed, though I would guess I may still pick up an occasional freelance assignment, though not with the regularity that I've observed over the past ten years.
And you know what?
I'm scared.
If I had to boil my emotions down to a single word, that would be the one. I'm a grown-ass man and I'm skeered.
I'm sure I'll get over it. But it's quite the tingle at the moment.
This is...well this is probably the rawest thing I've ever said here. But I figure I'm safe among you folks and it may be that some of you at least have felt that skeery jumpity feewing in your wittle tummies. Again, I'll get over it. I'm just bemused and a bit startled by it at the moment.
(But all of that is unimportant given that, yes MY DANG BUCKEYES ARE NUMBER ONE IN THE COUNTRY!)
Lived and breathed bucks given that my dad worked at the u all his life as the head of osu's finance department, we had great seats to all the games, and we lived close enough to campus that if the wind was right we could hear the cheers of the crowd at football games.
Anway I wouldn't mind if any of you have observations, experiences, memories and/or advice about handling retirement.
I can't dissect my emotions; I'm just surprised that along with a sense of elation and freedom I also had a tingle of uncertainty. If I had to diagnose it I'd say that it's just - well of course it's knowing this is the final chapter of my life, but also there was a certain comfort in the workaday routine, dreary though it sometimes was, and I'm suddenly in a gravity-free environment and it makes my little tummy feel all a-tingle.
Just wondered if anyone else recalls feeling a sense of un-groundedness, which I assume I'll gradually get used to. Gonna paint my house; being industrious ought to help. I looked forward to retirement for so long and I have been taken aback by the feelings of uncertainty that have accompanied the delight I do feel at being free from the workaday life.
PS Dave: there was snow on the ground in Florida - up in the panhandle, where I once lived before I came down here to Orlando - where, today, sunny as it is, there's a chill wind blowing around and temps have been in the forties and when you're as wimpy as I've become it feels to me like the twenties used to feel to me when I was a kid in Columbus, I swear.
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