AHSS The Gift of Years: Productivity (Lesson 26)

“The answer to old age is to keep one’s mind busy and to go on with one’s life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis” wrote Leon Edel. To insist on living until we die may be one of life’s greatest virtues. It is easy at any age simply to stop, to be satisfied with what is, to refuse to be more. But when we go on working – at something, for some reason, for someone, for something greater than ourselves – when we go on giving ourselves away right to the very end, we have lived a full life. That is, in fact, the very definition of fullness of life.

What it does not mean is that we will become accustomed, happy even, with allowing ourselves to go to seed, to grow dry and brittle from the inside out, to stop thinking when it is precisely thought that the world needs most. Instead, it is the fine art of going on, of making life something I need to get up for every day. It is a sign to the world around us that we have each and all been put here to make this world different than it was before we came.

The purpose of retirement is to free us from working. It is to free us from being chained to work.  It has something to do only with the kind of work we do. Work is a necessary dimension of spiritual life. Without it, “tilling and keeping” the globe, tending to our own garden of paradise, is impossible. The work we do and the way we do it is what we leave behind for generations to come.

Retirement may be the first time in our lives that we really are free to choose work that brings out the best in us and so brings out the best in the world around us. We become co-creators of the world. The only question is, what work will we do? The answer is whatever work needs to be done where we are!

These years are for the development of the soul. These are the years we learn to paint, or go back to playing an instrument again, or become a Little Leage coach, or visit nursing homes so that the people there, so many of them alone in the world, have someone to talk to about important things.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is that we begin to think of ourselves as superfluous simply because we are no longer tied down to a corporate schedule anymore. A blessing of these years is that they enable us to change our part of the world in ways that are as expressive of us as they are good for others.

1. Sister Joan states that “Work is a necessary dimension of the spiritual life.” Has this been true for you? If yes, explain several ways your work informed your spiritual life. If no, give a reason or two why not. Journal or discuss your choice.
2. “…retirement does not free us from the responsibility to go on tending the world,” according to Sister Joan. If you are retired, how have you continued to “tend the world?”