In 2010 I decided, in the absence of any other idea of what retirement from paid employment might entail, that I needed an interesting and exploratory set of things to keep myself occupied.
I stood a fairly good chance of living to age 80 or beyond. This gave me a 15-year opportunity to see retirement, initially, as a 15-year creative undertaking, steering my life in new directions. My work had culminated in managing long-term extended city-wide projects. There was no reason why this retirement thing couldn’t simply be just one more such project, approached in the same way. I drew up a long-term Plan; established a tentative budget; established some principles and some lines of exploration; created a loose Thinking Framework; and sketched out some possible ways forward ….
This drew on what I was already comfortable doing. Looking back, it was a useful approach for stepping into the unknown.
There was general advice about surviving into older years relatively fit physically and mentally: Connect with other people; learn new things; be active, especially outdoors; be curious; dedicate time and energy to something; get the basics right so time could be focused on more interesting things; see things as an opportunity; have a healthy diet; and so on. Whatever I did to occupy myself would be done within that advice.
My Plan had these as its core, and was developed more specifically around a number of strands:
- Wanting to understand the meaning of concepts such as ‘progress’, ‘contemporary’, ‘value’, ‘usefulness’ , ‘public/private’ and ‘change’.
- Wanting to get a better understanding of the ideas and practices of contemporary art.
- Delving more into how cities work, and the changing nature of urban living. Having a reason to visit cities e.g. to look at how different cities approached their use of public art.
- Thinking about places, spaces, localities and neighbourhoods.
- Thinking about the construction of identities (of people, of places).
- Exploring the different approaches to research, to evidence, to understandings, to learning and to developments.
- Acknowledging that most things might have degrees of uncertainty, contingency and complexity.
- To get more focused on writing in a range of ways and for a variety of purposes – maybe producing around 8 or 12 very different books.
- Exploring ideas, researching in a quite general way, puzzling over some social issues – and jotting my thoughts onto a dedicated website.
- Doing things for enjoyment, in my own ways and at my own speed. So probably not signing up for long set courses. More setting my own wanderings, going where ideas took me, and avoiding doing things for the sake of it.
- Finding ways of doing these things in contact with others, in manageable ways.
Quite a bit of the early time was spent thinking about the elements of a framework that would enable a bit of structure whilst being open enough to let me go off along various pathways.
I thought about all the words that might fit with what I most wanted to do. This formed a development vocabulary (and is described in another section). Revisiting this list of words, from time to time, kept reminding me of the overall directions I wanted to go in, and identified emerging gaps for me to consider.
I listed a number of social puzzles that had intrigued me for some time (also described in another section), Revisiting these helped keep the momentum going.
I drafted some general topics that I had kept coming back to before retirement. These acted as some kind of matrix for me to think within.
Taken together, this created a flexible framework for steering my way forwards into the unknowns of retirement. Flexible enough to give me space to do things in my own way and at my own speed; robust enough to give the whole undertaking some momentum to carry it through over fifteen years; and interesting enough to keep me engaged.