A field, a grocery store, a freeway, a fabric store, a car wash, a ship, a university library, a high school, a college, a church — those are places I’ve worked.
It’s been a thing, a huge part of my identity, my life. And by having careers, by working, I have discovered something about work: Work is work is work is work — and it’s work.
Work is good; work has given me a ton of good, but no matter where I have worked, work is work. With work stuff is required: show up, put in time, do stuff, get along. Workers are pleasers; they must please coworkers, shoppers, clients, students, members. Workers must also please bosses — unless of course they become the boss — and then they have to please lots of people, including themselves, which can be the biggest please.
Now I don’t work, for anyone, at a job, for the man, for the woman, as the man. I quit. I am old enough to quit — finally.
“What’s it like?
People wonder this. They ask, ‘So what’s it like?”
A friend of mine — who quit working before I did — once told me that finishing up a career for good is “like being a kid again, but having money.” Well, he has money. Not everybody does — so that isn’t a universal, by far — but his snappy answers gets at some of it.
Not working is in many ways becoming a small child, a preschooler again. Quitting brings some simple freedoms. You don’t have to get up, get ready, commute, check in, live by the to-do-list or docket or meeting calendar, be social and you don’t have to please, please, please.
Not working is perhaps an opportunity, or a bunch of opportunities, not to have to perform, not to have to produce, not to have be the trick elephant anymore.
After only a month of not working, here is what seems to me to be the best part.
It’s the relief from stress.
I love not being stressed!
My career led me into leadership, and while I love leadership — and I eventually evolved into a leader to my very core — that leadership involved a whole raft of work. It took on the profoundly essential work of vision casting, the important work of welding influence, of public speaking, of teaching, of hiring staff, of coaching and developing staff, of leading a board, of fund raising — and for my job — it added care giving. I loved the people I led, and served and I miss them too, but it was a lot of doing and other various and sundry -ings — and -ings, they have a way of wearing you out.
It was the encore effect, the echo effect, the expectancy effect, the “Can he do it again?”, the “Can he hit another home run speech or project?”, the “can he … can he … can he … see the future, find the people, raise the money, finish the project, make us laugh, make us cry, make us cheer?” — it’s kind of fun — it is what I was made to do — but it wears on you.
Now — that behind me — I wake up, I take deep breaths, I deep relax, I sit with myself, my breakfast, my cat, slow blinking, no staff, no speech to give, no funds to raise, just short prayers and gratefulness and calm and — I like it.
I don’t have to psyche up, dress up, gear up, get out, succeed on and wear out. The calm feeling I have — post-stress — is deep; it’s abyssopelagic, deep breaths, a divine quietness, a robust aponia, a balmy autarky, a constitutive hedonia, a savory delectation. It’s young kid-like, or post-creation God-like. It’s restful.
Other things will follow, reflection, perspective, gratitude, new opportunities, new friends, new places, new stresses, new what-evers, but overall, the initial sensation — it’s peacefulness.
“So how’s it going? How do you like not working?”
” I like it a lot. It pleases me. I like it a non-stressful lot.”
