How To Handle Retirement

We are living in an interesting time. The population has become so much older because we are all living so much longer. So the whole attitude toward reaching retirement age has changed considerably. It has necessitated a whole range of rethinks.

My father was expected to retire at 65 but was forced to at 72. He was a vital man and very much alive and ready willing and able to continue working at 72. However, he was a clergyman and the church dictated that 72 was maximum. It was excessively difficult for my father to find a way of being and living as a retired minister whom he felt had no real use or place in society. I personally feel that the prevalent attitude and customs of the time hastened his death. It certainly quickly destroyed a vibrant and vital human being to a depressed and unfulfilled man. He had been extremely successful as a pastor and had helped so many people cope with their problems.

Nowadays at least there is beginning to be the recognition that certain people can remain useful and able to work to one degree or another for many years after what once was considered retirement age. There are just too many people who are still active and able to contribute into their 90s to try to bury them soon after 65 or 70. There has to be a sensible way to use the resource and to honor the human life without assigning qualities or lack of them to numbers which we use to identify age. After all we have all known people who are for all practical purposes dead at 40 and others who are very alive at 90. So the chronological age of a person really should be relegated to a position of very minor importance. There surely are better yardsticks to measure how effective and/or useful someone is in and to society than the number of years they have been alive.

One of the things I have had to face personally is that with age has come a perception of irrelevancy. I am now 76 years old but far from finished. I have most of my professional life been a free lance conductor of symphony, opera, ballet, music theater as well as a pianist in solo and chamber music. There were many years when I badly needed at last 80 weeks in the year to fulfill the opportunities I was given to work in my chosen field of endeavor. However, now we are living in a kind of cult which worships youth and in my profession people from overseas.

I well remember being a young conductor and thinking that I could do it better than anyone and could not understand why those old conductors (past 50) couldn't just gracefully move over and let us, the younger generation , do it. We certainly would do a better job than those old guys who really were mostly past it. Now, of course, I can't understand how those youngsters out there have the audacity to even think that they can compete with us older ones who have the age, maturity, experience and knowledge they can only dream of attaining.

So, what do we do in order to have a meaningful life after those in politicsour profession} have labeled us irrelevant and well past our use by date. We are to be considered only in an extreme emergency.

Well I feel I have learned a lot about coping with the world's concept of my irrelevancy. I would welcome the opportunity to talk with, work with, consult with and possibly even advise people who are passing their mid 60s and beginning to find that where they once held a place of honor and respect they are now considered irrelevant and mostly only a nuisance.

I think I have found a decent, useful and satisfying way of coping. I would like to share my feelings in this area, which are far reaching and fairly complicated. I think we could all profit from an open discussion of the problems we face. It could not only help us get it right but also could contribute to helping alter the attitude of the younger ones who only wish we would just disappear. I genuinely hope that I will be able to find a way to be of use to my friends as they approach this business of aging gracefully.