Last year a friend put a counter on my computer he labeled “countdown to retirement.” I figured as he was a prominent Zen teacher, it must be okay. Well, maybe not fully okay. On the one hand I didn’t like anything that could feel like wishing away my life. I’ve never seen much profit in living too far out into the future. On the other hand, it is such a significant marker in the cycles of my life, looking every once in a while and seeing how that calendar stands brought with it a small thrill.
For those early months I rarely looked at it, mostly only when going to the application where it was stored with a calendar I occasionally checked, or the calculator I even more rarely used. I would notice, and fritter away a few moments thinking abstract thoughts about that magical word “retirement.”
Of course, what that was supposed to mean has changed over the year since I announced I would be leaving as senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. At the time it meant I would put down the parish minister part of my life, and when we got to Long Beach I would focus on writing and tending to a new Zen sangha we assume we will start.
As Jan & I have started Zen sanghas everywhere we’ve lived for the past thirty years, no doubt that will happen one more time. But, then I began to think about my writing. For the past fifteen years I’ve been able to crank out a book every three years. Pretty much like clockwork. My method however, has been to write through theft. I am, for instance, supposed to be working on a sermon. At that magical moment I find the current book project totally and completely fascinating, and steal a couple of minutes to work on it. Turns out the words accumulate fast that way. And then, within the rhythms of a Unitarian Universalist parish ministry life, I would have a month every summer where I could focus on putting the words together and massage them into something beginning to look like a manuscript. Now, critical to that summer project was the ending, the fact there was a deadline. One wag observed I would likely still be rewriting my first sermon if a Sunday hadn’t rolled around. I write by fear. I need deadlines looming.
And, I began to realize in full retirement I wasn’t looking at many deadlines. So, I let the people who make decisions about such things know that I would be open to a less than full time, temporary job as a UU minister in California, so long as it was close enough to our condo in Long Beach that I could spend my nights at home. So, in September I will begin serving as the three-quarter time interim minister at the Pacific Unitarian Church in Rancho Palos Verdes, about half an hour from our home.
For me it means a little structure to my time. (Well, maybe quite a bit. There’s a bit of conventional minister wisdom that says there is in fact no such thing as part time ministry, only part time pay for ministry…) That said a paycheck for a while longer doesn’t hurt. And, while I’ve been too focused on my work in Providence to give it much attention, and won’t yet, until we get to California in about two weeks, the particular problems that PUC are experiencing are problems I think I have skills to be helpful addressing. And even here launched into our long anticipated holiday drive home from the East, I on occasion am rolling particular issues around in the back of my head.
So, given the givens. That I haven’t actually left parish ministry as of yet, that I continue to write (I actually am in rewrites at the moment for my next book with Wisdom, and have an ms being shopped with an agent), and that I cannot see the end of working with a Zen sangha, what actually is the word retirement supposed to mean?
Now, over the past several months, particularly when we left the apartment, and then spent a month in a friend’s house, and then another couple of weeks at a Zen temple while I was still working at Providence, I admit I went back to that counter a number of times, and not to look at the calendar or calculate a date. I remember when the counter announced one month. And then two weeks. And, then the thrill when it hit single digits.
At some point my current life, the past that led to it, and the future with its mysterious possibilities began to blur. I’m always retiring from something. I’m always embarking on something. And the joy of it is within the tension where those things meet.
It reminded me that those who think living in the moment means being oblivious to the past or the future are missing the point. The reality for us as temporal beings is that we are not solid fixed things, rather we are dynamic and open, our reality bleeds into the past, and it bleeds into the future.
Now is a state of mind.
Living too far out into the past, too much into the future is unbalanced. But, not being aware of that past is in fact dangerous. And not having some sense of future creates a static existence, a tape loop of repetition, without the possibility of change.
Now is delicious, and to be fully engaged.
And it is a bit of a fiction. Just as we’re conscious of this moment, it is gone.
Just this, and passing, passing. One thing. One wildly open and dynamic thing.
And so, here I am, sitting in a motel in New Haven, a cup of coffee at hand, the morning light beginning to pour into our room.
My past, not some general past, my past, so rich, filled with too much sadness, and filled with so many joys, and flooding memories of these past weeks in particular as I’ve come to the end of such an important part of my life, leaving not only the church that has meant so much to me, but also the core Zen community that has given me more than words can ever convey, and which from now on will be a continent away, and, now, also in this now, I glance over at Jan still sleeping, and I find the rush of excitement as I consider our adventures awaiting us.
Here.
And, I find it all so wonderful.
And I find I’m so grateful.
For it all…
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