I am close to my retirement, but not there yet. It has felt like a long final stretch since I came back from my sabbatical. People say, it's so soon, can you believe it, time goes by so fast, and the like. But to me time is going slowly. I don't mean to complain; it's just how it feels to me. Maybe because once I made the decision, my mind was halfway out the door while the rest of me has had to stay in place. My anxiety has been higher than ever during these weeks. I just went back to count up how long it's been since my sabbatical ended and it's about three and a half weeks! It feels much longer than that.
Now I have three more workdays ahead, and, fortunately, I will be able to work remotely. It's been so hard to get up and go to the office; I've really had to fight the heavy weariness. A couple times I was too weak to fight and simply could not get up in the morning. I'm baffled by this struggle. I did not expect this last month to feel like such a long, difficult time. Even the three days ahead of me this week feel like a huge challenge. I hope I can meet that challenge. At least it will be easier to get up and come to work at my computer in my living room than to get up and drive to the office in Bellingham.
When I was depressed some years back, probably around 2011 or 12, I got up with difficulty in the morning and told myself all I had to do was live through the day, just live through the day. I'm in a similar state now. For three more days.
The piece of a song lyric keeps coming into my mind, "Just a few more days for to tote the weary load." That's a line from a Stephen Foster song, another of those where it comes across as black people getting nostalgic for slavery. Pernicious. But from what I just read at the Bodleian (on my favorite podcast The Rest Is History, "the Bodleian" is code for Wikipedia) Foster actually was an abolitionist. Go figure. Anyway, I appropriate just the one line, not the rest of the song.
So. Just a few more days. And live through each day.
After that, time will probably fly by until I reach the day of my death.
I want to get my house organized before then. As Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die." Hezekiah got another 15 years after that. If I got another 15 years, I would be closer to the biblical fourscore than to the threescore years and ten. I'm already past threescore years. Oh, well. My death will be when it will be; all the days ordained for me were written in God's book before one of them came to be.
People ask me what my plans are for retirement. I tell them I plan to potter. Elizabeth von Arnim wrote, "Every now and then I leave [my] book on the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception of what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not." That's my goal.
