After the Retirement Party

                                                     by Nick Fels

The assigned topic is a broad one: the nature of retirement thus far and how it compares with one’s prior expectations.  I will try to avoid the obvious and be reasonably concise.

Background

I retired in late 2007 at the age of 64, after some 37 years with a large Washington law firm.  Before that, I had clerked for a federal appeals-court judge and worked in a legal aid office.  My practice before retirement was mainly before state and federal regulatory agencies.  Like others in my general line of work, I tended to work ten- or 11-hour days during the week, and often on weekends. 

My expectations as to retirement were rather conventional:  that I would spend significantly more time on pro-bono or public-interest work (not precluding, at some point, a position with an NGO or government agency), more time with my family, more time reading, and more time traveling, all, of course, in lieu of my former work on behalf of paying clients.  Otherwise, allowing for the inevitable effects of aging, I expected life to be pretty much the same. 

Although I no longer practice at my law firm, it continues to provide an office (and gym), a secretary, and, inevitably, a certain degree of social continuity.  The substance of my work is now confined almost entirely to the affairs of various non-profits on whose boards I serve.  One is a research and advocacy group, focusing on DC problems and issues; another seeks to facilitate community engagement in the DC public schools; a third focuses on K-12 issues at the national level; and a fourth is a start-up school for low-income boys in Anacostia.  I also administer the estate of a former family friend.  None of these activities, of course, yields any monetary compensation.

My work in retirement, much like my former work, tends to be fragmented.  Days and weeks are divided among several different ongoing projects, some grand in scope (cleaning up the Anacostia River), others limited and rather mundane (developing a conflict-of-interest policy for a non-profit board.)  As a general matter, I am in the office early (around 7:00 am), but out by the mid-afternoon, unless detained by a meeting or phone call.  That leaves time to read at home, do chores, or, best of all, take a walk with my wife.  We have also been able to travel more frequently than formerly and see more of our daughter and her family, who live in New York.

Observations

(1)  Disengagement from one’s former work and work patterns may make one feel somewhat removed from the people by whom one is surrounded and who continue to pursue their work and careers.  That sense of distance and difference--surprising to me--can create at least a fleeting sense of irrelevance:  “Everyone else seems to be urgently on task, but I’m not.”  Also, of course, calls seeking one’s assistance or advice on significant legal matters are, at some level, comforting to the ego.  Now those calls have stopped.  I suspect that apprehension about their own continuing relevance keeps some people working into their old age regardless of the satisfaction that their work otherwise produces.

(2)  Conversely, the sense of removal and distance, which may reflect aging as well as retirement, gives rise to awareness of mundane things unrelated to work that previously one may have noticed less, if at all.  Small children, flowers, plants, and animals (cats, dogs) that one encounters at random seem, for some reason, more interesting than they did during the working years, when one’s attention (and emotions) tended to be more focused on the task or tasks at hand.  Somehow related to this, I think, is a heightened awareness of one’s routine personal habits or activities and their broader (notably, environmental) effects.  The species that one notices more will be around well after oneself.  This, too, has been a surprise.

(3)  The importance in retirement of establishing a routine, especially a routine that gets one out of the house, is a commonplace.  That strikes me as correct.  Most important to me is having having a daily schedule that entails some sort of physical exercise--running, cycling, or swimming.  Surprisingly (to me), even as the physical effects of age become progressively more evident, regular exercise has become more of an imperative.  Unlike one’s muscles, the addictive aspect of exercise seems not to atrophy.

(4)  Doing something outside of one’s previous experience to mark the divide between one’s working career and retirement helps persuade one that-- notwithstanding certain similarities of routine-- retirement really is different.  I took a seven-week bicycle trip across the country shortly before my retirement date.  During my working years, a seven-week hiatus in professional activities would have been unthinkable.  But now work and career, as I had known them, were plainly over and a significantly different phase of my life, with distinctly different pleasures and opportunities, had obviously begun.