Who wants to ‘retire’?

Featuring excerpts from the book

Having reached a certain age, I’ve been reflecting on my strong aversion to the word ‘retirement’.  The word apparently comes from the French re and tirer and means to withdraw or retreat to a place of safety or seclusion.  I don’t really feel like withdrawing to be honest. To make matters worse, a 1660’s definition of ‘to leave company and go to bed,’ appeared. No wonder I don’t like it much!

I investigated further: apparently funded retirement - in the form of the state pension - was introduced in 1909 and the first retirement age was set at 70.  However, in 1909 the average life expectancy was 47 for men and 50 for women.  You see the problem here?

It seems that retirement was historically synonymous with retreating, going to bed, withdrawing or dying… And quite frankly I don’t plan on doing any of those things any time soon. 

Right now, official retirement age for me is 67 (for avoidance of doubt, I’m not that old yet) and life expectancy for a woman my age is 87.  In rough terms, retirement could therefore constitute a quarter of my life. I certainly don’t want to spend it withdrawing to bed!  Instead, as I gradually abandon my professional persona, I feel like I’m re discovering an important part of myself.

I mention this part of me in The Wrong Story.  Whilst the novel is a work of fiction, there are actually two cameo autobiographical bits hidden within it. I can’t share one of them without divulging a major plot spoiler, but the other is this paragraph that is actually about my time travelling in my early twenties:

I had climbed mountains in Nepal, bought a black-market ticket on the trans Siberian railway and had even been smuggled into Burma illegally under a tarpaulin on the back of a truck. I had stayed with the Karen Freedom Fighters for two weeks, listening to their stories and watching truckloads of young boys, some only fourteen years old, leave for the font lines. I still had a photo hanging on a bedroom wall of one young boy, his eyes haunting me whenever I looked at it. Somehow, he managed to look both defiant and terrified at the same time, like he knew he was going to die.

It’s probably the most unbelievable paragraph in the whole book, but it’s actually based on real experience, right down to the picture of the young boy on my spare room wall.  There are other, equally unbelievable, stories of my time travelling that I haven’t put in the book – I delivered a baby at 5000m above sea level whilst climbing the afore mentioned mountains in Nepal; I got bitten by a rabid dog in Burma and had to give myself rabies shots; I shared a carriage on the trans-Siberian train with a very stoned German guy who punched a Russian guard, resulting in the whole carriage being frog marched off the train and interrogated individually (one of my most terrifying experiences ever).

Whenever I told the stories of my travelling adventures, someone would always say, “You should write a book about it.”  I did the next best thing and included them in a book, but I also experienced something else whenever I talked about travelling and I wrote about it in The Wrong Story.  Maggie sums it up:

I never spoke of it now. Most people I knew now had never met that Maggie. I didn’t know that Maggie; I didn’t recognise her anymore. She certainly wasn’t the same woman I was now. If I told the story of Burma, it would feel as though I was talking about someone else.

That was also true for me at one time.  If I spoke about those stories they felt as though they had happened to someone else entirely.  But when I, very apprehensively, reduced my work by about 80% (one of the luxuries of being self-employed is that you can do this ‘retirement’ lark gradually) my adventurous side started to slowly and tentatively raise its head again.

I found and joined a Facebook group called Love Her Wild which aims to encourage more women into adventure.  I discovered wild swimming.  I bought a paddleboard…  And then a rucksack…  And then a backpacking tent.  I felt drawn to the idea of doing a solo multiday hike and hesitantly broached the idea with my husband.  I was worried he’d be upset as we always hiked together up to then, but he was actually incredibly supportive and encouraging.

Solo hikes carrying my own pack, wild camping with the Love Her Wild group, cold water swimming and paddleboard camping trips make me feel alive and somehow re-connected.  Connected to nature yes, but more importantly re-connected to myself.  I can breathe, slow down and hear my own thoughts.  And I definitely feel more like me than I ever did whilst working in the corporate world.

So for me, retirement has very little to do with withdrawing or retreating and everything to do with adventure, connection and, cliché or not, self-rediscovery (although I don’t plan on staying with freedom fighters any time soon).  We definitely need another term for it. ‘Refirement’ maybe?