Track season started yesterday. The weather was glorious, the sort of sunshine-y, not-too-hot-not-cold day that reminded me why I love living in Southern California. Mother Saddleback loomed in the distant background as runners circled the track in their new singlets and shorts. The race announcer backed out at the last minute so I was on the mic. This put me in the position of amiable commentator, calling out each race and its contestants while also turning off the sound so I could coach my runners as they passed. Tacos and Co. sold burritos for lunch, which meant that I bought mine at 10:15 to beat the rush. Carnitas with spicy red sauce.
We have a small building next to the starting line for storage of spikes, wickets, cones, whistles, stopwatches, phone chargers, and everything else needed to coach track. I took a break to eat my burrito inside the Track Shack and listened as the two timers from Finished Results went about their business. A track meet is a leisurely pursuit. A day in the sun where any topic of conversation might surface. The subject of retirement came up, Scott from Laguna talking about next steps in his professional life. I've been hearing a lot of that talk lately as my friends wind down their careers.
Way back when I worked in the corporate world, I'd hear chatter at lunchtime as we all took the escalator down to the cafeteria at 11:45. Lots of people counting down the days until they could leave their cubicle, cash in their 401k, and get on with their lives. I was twenty-five at the time. Retirement at sixty-five was forty years away. From this side of things, forty years is a blink. I don't know where they've gone but it doesn't seem like four decades. Births, deaths, travel, graduations, laughter, and tears. That's what forty years feels like now. Forty years at twenty-five felt like a death sentence.
The purpose of retirement is to end one period of activity and begin a new focus on whatever may come next. Some say the purpose is to have no purpose while others believe life without purpose leads to a quick death. But with all this talk about retirement in the air, a man can't help but think what that would look like. I mean, does a writer ever really retire?
Standing in the sunshine, listening to the bell lap bell and crack of the starter's pistol (stand too close and your ears ring), surrounded by teenagers doing their best to run fast around the oval and having absolutely no idea about the cavalcade of extraordinary things that will happen to them in the next forty years, I realized I've been retired for quite some time. I get up when I want, drink a little coffee, spend a few hours alone writing, play my music too loud, work out in a wilderness forest, indulge my passion for coaching distance runners for a couple hours, have a pint at the local as the sun begins to set, then spend the evening with Calene. There might be some travel, maybe a lunch or dinner to alter the routine. But if someone told me that writing and coaching were jobs and I needed to stop doing them in the name of retirement, I really wouldn't know what to do with myself.
Writing professionally has its difficulties. Coaching does, too. I'm not saying it's all a bed of roses. But when I look back at those forty years since I left the corporate world, I don't remember the checks from publishers that arrived two months late and woke me at 3 a.m. with fear about paying the mortgage. I don't think of the visits to a principal's office to justify why I coach the way I do. I just think of how lucky I am to do this at all.
My goal going forth is to keep on keeping on, living large with Calene. She's the one who got me to leave the corporate world, just as she's been my companion on so many incredible journeys in parenting and travel and that thing called love, which takes on many shapes and sizes in this thing called marriage.
Life is an adventure or nothing at all.