An anniversary of independence

Four years ago, on June 8, I retired.

How time flies when you’re having fun.

Am I having fun? You bet, but it’s not the carefree kind of fun.

I’m free, but not free of care.

The fun is in the independence of a daily grind dictated by someone else’s demands, someone else’s deadlines, someone else’s expectations.

My demands are my own, my deadlines are my own, my expectations are my own. My daily grind is whatever I want to make it.

Thus, my successes and failures are my own.

The fun of working retired is deciding what is worth my time and effort and what is not.

If the need to ski on a weekday winter morning is overwhelming, then so be it. If the need to surf on a weekday summer morning is there, then to the ocean it shall be.

If I need to visit my daughter in Connecticut or my son, late of New York City, now of Washington, D.C., then that’s what I’ll do.

If I can’t stand looking at the grass that I see needs mowing outside my window, I’ll hop on the lawn tractor and get to it.

There is still care about the bills that have to be paid. They don’t stop coming due each month just because of some notion of ‘retirement’.

Visa, Hyundai, Verizon and the rest of them still want their money.

So you work enough to pay the bills, work enough to send the quarterly payroll taxes check to Uncle Sam, and work enough to hopefully help family and have some fun.

I like working in my jammies first thing in the morning, having taken my cup up coffee down the hall to my office, where I also keep my guitars and my piano and my music.

I like it that, if work becomes too much of a bother, if the muse isn’t there to inspire me to write, I turn to my music. I couldn’t very well do that in the corporate life from which I retired.

I miss the people of work. I miss the camaraderie, the singular purpose of a shared vision, the interaction. I don’t miss corporate budgeting, layoffs, and frustration of being told “we can’t afford to do that.”

Here’s to the fourth anniversary of independence, to four years of care, and four years of free.

I'm now unretired

I officially declare myself unretired.

I've retired from being retired.

It doesn't make sense to say that I'm retired anymore when what I do every day doesn't feel like the retirement manual written by my parents' generation and their parents' generation.

My un-retirement is a template for Baby Boomers everywhere. We are redefining retirement as we rewrite the manual on how to do it.

Here is a pretty typical example of how "retired" is defined: "A retired person is an older person who has left his or her job and has usually stopped working completely."

More and more you see and hear how us older persons are continuing to work, either in our jobs or in new jobs, and a lot of us have not stopped working completely.

The redefinition of retirement is driven by economic needs, to be sure. Survey after survey shows that as a group Baby Boomers haven't saved or invested nearly enough to retire to life without working.

But there is also a personal need to be un-retired, to not simply withdraw from life and society and the grind we regard as work. We still want to contribute, we're driven by a desire to show the value in what we have to say and what we can do in the time we have left to do it.

Three Junes ago, I thought of myself as retired because I had retired from my job.

I called myself retired because, at the time, I liked the sound of it. But I knew there was still more work -- albeit different work -- to be done.

My work schedule is now as full as ever.

It is a work schedule defined by me and controlled by me according to the deadlines and expectations of the people with whom I have freelance contracts.

The definition of work hasn't changed among Boomers. Work is work. It is a task to be done. It still requires our time, treasure and talent, and it doesn't matter that the work is for yourself.

I'm chief blogging officer for my one-man company. Certainly it's a different kind of work. I can commute to the office in my underwear. I take a break and play the guitar or piano. I rearrange my writing duties to spend a part of the day at the gym or at the beach or skiing.

The work can involve nights and weekends, which it rarely did when I was someone else's employee. Work doesn't necessarily have to be an office. It doesn't have to be 9 to 5. It doesn't mean having to wear big boy clothes every day.

As Baby Boomers redefine retirement, perhaps they're also redefining work in the process.

When the salt mine is home

I love the fact that I have a home office where I occupy myself with the daily tasks of writing, blogging and social networking in order to promote the writing and blogging.

But the most difficult part of a home office is that it's located at home.

It's not the distractions that are bothersome. I don't have a fix-it bone in my body, so I'm neither compelled nor distracted to do anything related to painting or fixing a leaky faucet or changing the filter in the furnace or anything like that. I'm fairly disciplined about the tasks at hand. I approach the writing with a deadline in mind, the way I did as a reporter in what seems like a lifetime ago.

I have a few distractions -- the guitars and piano in the office that beg to be played. I can call up Fancast on my computer and watch old episodes of "Spenser: For Hire" with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks. I can cruise the web to my heart's delight, all in the name of research.

The real problem with working at home isn't the occasional distraction, it's the fact you're home all the time.

I used to have a salt mine to go to every day. You know the drill: You get up each morning and prepare to commute to the salt mine to do battle in the work-a-day world of meetings, telephone calls, emails, fires to put out, action plans to strategize. After a day in the mine, you'd return to your sanctuary, your home, the place of rest and rejuvenation.

But now when I commute to the office it's down the hall and to the right. I can do the commute in my jammies and flip-flops, carrying the mug of coffee I just poured in the kitchen. There's no official start time, and there's no official quitting time. The rest and rejuvenation of being home gets a little muddy as it mixes with the need to wander into the office to check my DIGG account after dinner to see how much activity there's been through the day.

There is no rest for the home office weary.

Which is why I can't wait to get out of the house. I look forward to the walk to the end of the driveway to get the morning newspapers. The same is true in the afternoon when I walk out to get the mail. When I go to the gym I extend my workout far longer than I ever did when I was working at an office.

This need sometimes competes with my wife Jane's needs. By the weekend, I'll have a need to escape from the house where I've been at work all week, while she'll have a need to nest in the house because she has a salt mine that she's been going to during the week.

We are scheduled to be away this weekend and next. I am looking forward to packing a bag, pulling together my toiletries, picking out a book for the road. I won't miss the home office for a few days, but I'll bring along the laptop and Blackberry to write and blog and network when I get the chance. When you have a home office, you can leave the home but sometimes the office has to travel.

Hey, am I still in this race?

There's an old bridge near where I live, crossing a part of Great Bay. Unused by traffic now for several years, it serves as a place for people to fish, walk, run and bike, all the while taking in the sights of the water and landscape beyond. It is a lovely place on my route for walking or running.

The other day I came across some graffiti that had been spray painted on a part of the bridge's aging pavement. "Even if you win the race," it said, "you're still a RAT!" Included with message were spray-painted images of the Three Blind Mice, one in red, one in white and one in blue.

It was a bit ironic really to be running at the time, listening to music through my headphones, contemplating a to-do list in my head and come across a reference to the rat race. And I began to wonder: Am I still even in the rat race anymore?

The rat race, of course, is that euphemistic term that applies to the self-defeating pursuit of working too hard to get ahead, stay afloat. In the normal scheme of our lives, in the every day routine of work, we sometimes feel like the lab rat navigating the maze or the rat on the wheel, running fast but getting nowhere.

The fact that it's called a race raises the notion that we're competing against each other for money, for status, for a higher rung on the ladder at work. We navigate the maze and run in the wheel in pursuit of a nice house in a nice neighborhood with good schools for our kids. We're always racing to get ahead.

But I think that changes as you get older. It definitely changes when you're out of the workforce.

It's not that we're not in the race anymore, it's that the race priorities change. We might be a lap or two behind, we could be a couple of miles behind the race leaders, but we don't care. The rat race can leave us behind at the starting line for all we care.

As I got older, as I approached retirement I got less worried about the self-defeating aspects of the rat race. I'd gotten as far as I was going to get, which was pretty far, and I wasn't going to worry about it anymore. It didn't matter that work sometimes became a maze of worry. It didn't matter that I was running on the wheel and getting nowhere, at least I was getting my exercise of earning a living, providing for my family.

In semi-retirement it's different. There's still work to be done, but it's a different work, at a different pace, on a different rat race course altogether. My pace is driven by me, not by someone else's clock or someone else's deadlines or someone else's expectations. It's like I'm in a rat race of one, competing against myself. And I don't really care what place I'm in.

There will always be a rat race of one kind or another. I know I'm not the fastest rat in the race, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And that's just fine.

Trying to stare down time

I have a lot of time on my hands right now. I mean, literally, I have a lot of time in the form of clocks and watches, and they keep staring at me like I'm supposed to be doing something with my time now that I've retired.

Within my field of vision of my writing space here at home, I have six clocks telling me what time it is. Worse, they keeping tell me I have a lot of time on my hands.

What is it about retirement and watches/clocks? Why are they usually given as gifts when someone retires? A web search to answer that question doesn't offer much help. The search results are almost exclusively gift ideas for retirement and 95 percent of the gift ideas are for watches or clocks. Could it possibly be rooted in the notion that retirement gives us time to do whatever we want? Or is it meant to remind us how much time we put into a particular job?

I received one retirement gift that feeds the notion. It came from my wife Jane -- at the suggestion of her brother David -- and it marks my retirement date and the 30 years I was with the company. And, as I indicated above, it ticks away on my desk along with five other time pieces -- an electronic baseball scoreboard that has an electronic clock, a clock that also keeps track of low and high tides, the clock on my computer screen, the clock on my cellphone and the Timex on my wrist.

Then there's my body clock ... which does a pretty good job of keeping general time, especially when it's time to eat. It tells me when to get up; it tells me when to sleep. (And these days when it tells me to take a quick sleep in the afternoon, I don't have to tell it no.)

It was my body clock that has required the most adjustment -- the greatest amount of re-timing -- in the couple of months since I stopped working full time. My work week for many, many years was fairly regimented, each day a structured effort to get things done. At the gym most mornings to get the exercise part done. At the office by 9 a.m. to get the work part done. Eat lunch at noon to get the nourishment part done. Drink coffee at 2 p.m. to get the mid-day kick part done. Home by 6 p.m. to get the dinner part done. In bed by 10 p.m. to get the sleep part done.

The assumption by most people was how great it would be not to be a slave to time. I could sleep in. I could stay up as late as I wanted. In fact, for a while there the body clock went in the opposite direction. For example, it alarmed me awake at 5 each morning, anxious about what was on the day's agenda, when in fact there wasn't much of an agenda at all. Yes, there was some online content I've been developing, but nothing that required me to be awake that early. I'm an early riser, but 5 a.m. was a little excessive.

The good news is that after a couple of months my clocks and I have reached an understanding. Chill out. There's no hurry, no reason to get anxious, no need to be running mentally through a to-do list at 4:45 a.m. There's plenty of time for everyone and everything. Want to surf? There's time for that. Want to write and develop some online content? There's time for that? Want to do yard work? Well, let's not get carried away.

Time is not the enemy, which is something Jean-Luc Picard, the sage captain of the Starship USS Enterprise, observed during the 1994 movie "Star Trek: Generations."

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives," he said. "I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived."

I have plenty of companions for my journey. If I could just get them all agree to what time it is.