On Retirement and Tending a Garden

Many working persons I know look forward to retirement. This is understandable especially if you have been teaching in a village public school or have been pushing and piling papers in some government office for 30 to 40 years.

As a public school teacher, you may want to take a break from inhaling all those chalk dust and all the tensions that go with the profession. Ditto with those engaged in both white- or blue-collar jobs. A clerk tinkering with photocopying machines day in and day out for years definitely needs a break lest he overexposes himself to too much radiation.

We all need a break from the drudgery of our jobs. That’s why we all look forward to that day when we are 60 or 65 so we can retire. So we contemplate ourselves relaxing on a hammock tied to two coconut trees while reading one of our favorite books and sipping buko (young coconut) juice.

We want to retire because we want to do what we have been wishing to do while we were tied up to our 8a.m-5p.m. jobs. Many of us look forward to tending a garden or catching up with some missed hobbies such as ballroom dancing, culturing bonsai trees, painting, or perhaps even writing our own biographies.

Many young people today also want to accelerate their careers because they want to retire young or to take second or even third careers.

But in life, there is actually no retirement. Either you shift to another career or another activity or choose to do nothing but sleep and eat. But the latter option can only hasten your permanent retirement, which is death.

At 65, or even in our 40s, we may already feel that our knees are weakening. But we can still do something worthwhile. We can still be active in some endeavors, which can give our Supreme Life-giver more reason to extend our lives on this planet. Some people I know are taking advantage of their retirement as an opportunity to serve others. After working for themselves and for their families, these retirees, who never consider themselves retired, now want to give back or share with others all the abundance of life they have enjoyed.

Retiree friends, who serve as my elders and mentors, say that they have come to realize that there’s more to life than earning money and spending, if not accumulating, it. So they engage in civic programs and charity work. One retiree I have just met, for example, is now helping give legal advice to some indigenous folk in Kalinga province, who have sought to manage and explore their own mineral resources through a new community-organized corporation. It’s time that indigenous folk themselves, he says, manage and utilize their resources primarily for their own communities.

Another retiree friend, who has not retired, still practices his medical profession, catering mostly to poor Cordillera folk, often times giving out his services for free. Apart from this, he is engaged in helping develop a grassroots-based sports program for the youth. That’s not all. He is among the key persons in helping mobilize local historians, educators, and other professionals to finally write their own history. Our history has always been written from the colonizers’ viewpoint. So he says it’s time we write history from our own perspective.

Since they are busy with still plenty of unfinished businesses, these un-retired and untiring retiree friends are showing no signs of aging. If ever they are aging, they are so in the same way that aging wine becomes tastier as it ages. This is why they are aging gracefully as they are growing in wisdom.