Doing my best

It was a Friday much like any other, the day I retired. Such a strange year, though. Most of the office had been working from home, the rest split into long shifts, so those still on site could maintain social distancing. This meant each shift squeezing the working week into three twelve-hour days. It had worked, as far as I know, and none of my colleagues had caught Covid, though we were all looking pretty worn out, as we approached the year’s end.

As I counted down my last hours, after forty-three years of working there, it felt unreal that I would soon be walking out forever. There was just this final tick-sheet of tasks to make sure I left behind a tidy ship. The last one was the handing over of my pass to the security guy at eleven forty-five. The sparsely populated office was absorbed in their separate calls and video-conferences – eyes glued to screens, headphones to block out the world around them. At the appointed time, I rose from my desk, put on my jacket and walked down to the security desk, unnoticed by anyone. I didn’t want a fuss, and in any case, shaking hands was forbidden, so it would all have been a bit… well… awkward.

The guy on duty didn’t know me, but he wished me well when I said I was retiring, that I wouldn’t be coming back. His sentiment was genuine. I’d noticed an uncharacteristic tenderness amongst my male colleagues in those last weeks. It was as if the fact they wouldn’t be seeing me again had granted them permission to speak from closer to their hearts than they would normally. We were all trying to make the best of it, to put a brave face on things – the pandemic, I mean – but we also needed to speak of the feelings we had for one another.

Thinking back on this, the obvious lesson is not to wait until that old guy is retiring. You should tell him now. Tell your mates, tell your colleagues how much you respect them, how much they mean to you ­– or even just tell them you think they’re doing a good job. And okay, maybe I’d been lucky with my work-mates, but if you think your colleagues are a set of lazy, incompetent, bullying, bastard psychopaths, you should tell them that too. But those were the times, and they were like no other. I suppose we've all moved on now, moved back closer to the way things were.

It had rained all day, rained like the devil on the drive in, this being my last commute, thank God, pitch dark at half past seven, down the M61. It was all rain and spray off the heavies, the usual tit-mobiles brightly lit on full beam and speeding blind. The rain hammered down all morning, but as I stepped out through the sliding doors that lunchtime, a thin, watery sun came out, like it was doing its best to mark the moment. I appreciated the effort.

It was perhaps not the best time to be changing course, but is it ever? I wasn’t sure I’d caught the wind right, and BREXIT was a worry. The markets had been recovering well from the first shocks of Covid, but they’d been jittery again all week, scared of another dip, while the lorries were queued for miles either side of the English Channel, and the supply chains lay broken in a million places. But I’d been planning this for a long time, and there was no going back.

Stepping more into the soul-life is what I was aiming at. I’d twenty years until I turned eighty. Any time beyond that would be a bonus, but I wanted a good crack at the time I’d got before then. What for? Well, if you’re young you might think a guy just turned sixty is pretty much spent, and better off dead, but I think the last few decades of life are as important as the first, and I was looking forward to them:

“A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning”

So said Carl Jung, and I’m not going to argue with him.

So, my early and middle-stage work was done, but I felt I still had important connections to make. Indeed, this latter stage of life is potentially where the way becomes most interesting, provided we can let go of this idea we are still young, when clearly we are not.

The nature of work had changed a lot and, in truth, I was no longer of a mind to be charitable towards it. I had a hands-on job, one I enjoyed – a technical specialist, lab based. But like all workplaces increasing amounts of useful time were spent simply answering emails, or sitting in meetings doing nothing except listen to others sounding off. Take any time away, and there might easily be hundreds of emails waiting for you on your return, so much so one hesitated before taking any leave at all. Most of them were junk, but each had to be eyeballed for the one that was going to ruin your day. I was unable to develop a strategy for dealing with any of that, without increasing amounts of anxiety.

I wondered about casting round for a fresh identity, since I was no longer a fully functioning, commuting, salaried C Eng MIET. I didn’t like the idea of becoming just another grey old man pushing a trolley round the supermarket, dithering over brands of breakfast cereal. I could call myself anything I wanted, I suppose: writer, poet, photographer, but none of it sat right. And of course, I was still the same as I’d always been, this guy who writes and walks, and takes pictures, only now had more time to do it. I felt blessed to have escaped that email inbox, which I still imagine filling up in my absence. Neither do I miss the snarling deathtrap of a twenty-mile commute on pitch black roads, in pouring rain, lit by dazzling headlights on hateful winter mornings.

If I can close in on the meaning of my own life, if I can correctly judge my journey in this time of “spirit”, is yet to be seen. But whatever, success or failure, the adventure continues. Many of my well-wishers in the run-up to that day wished me a long and happy retirement, which I translated as meaning: “Don’t drop dead too soon.” And fair enough, I knew what they meant. So to those well-wishers, to whom I wished an equal share of wellness and more, I said this:

I’ll do my best.