I’d Like it Bald on the Sides and Four Feet Long on the Top, Please

I’ve sort of given up on the extreme savings plan already and now feel entirely free to have a $115 haircut. I think I can hear that sound my father is making right now from clear across the country. He cuts his own hair, and so does my mother.

I realized things were seeming faintly gloomy after I decided on my projected retirement date. I suppose that’s because “retired” basically means “old,” and, as we all know, old is bad. That is, the explicit message of our culture is that old, not to mention fat, non-white, disabled, poor, un-blond, etc., is bad, so we must keep reminding ourselves that that is true only to the extent we decide to believe it.

Also, pondering retirement carried a not-so-subtle connotation of waiting: I’m going to work for however many years, and then I’m going to have fun.

In retirement I plan to do exactly what I do right now when I’m not at work, just more of it: meditate, play the trumpet, listen to music, write, read, ride my bike, walk, go to the movies, see friends.

Maybe a spot of travel, if there’s anywhere outside the United States a U.S. citizen is welcome by then. I see George is now trying to alienate the Russians. What an unbelievable mess he makes of everything he turns his attention to. It’s disturbing to reflect that Iran was working on our behalf until he announced they were part of the Axis of Evil.

The retirement plan also seemed to lay my life out right up until the moment of death: Work ten years (or fifteen or twenty, depending on number of expensive haircuts). Step up preferred activities. Become ill. Die.

That’s probably what’s going to happen, anyway, but picturing the overall arc makes it seem particularly dreary.

In truth, my life is not something that’s going to begin when I retire, and I hadn’t thought it was, until I picked out a potential retirement date. It’s this here, right now, sitting in front of this computer typing this. That’s what it is right now, and in five minutes, it might be something else that also deserves my full attention.

I have no idea when I will actually retire, what I will actually do when I retire, if I will live for ten more years or ten more minutes. I don’t know if my circumstances tomorrow will be as imagined.

This brings me back, as is often the case, to the question of the job: Is this the right job for me? Does it make me happy? Not particularly, though many moments at my current job, I’m perfectly happy. There are jobs I had more fun doing, but I’m not sure if the ratio of happy moments per se was any higher.

It’s also probable that a job that is more fun would pay considerably less, changing the retirement timeline from a possible ten years to more like thirty or never.

My ruminations about this always end happily, however, with one of two conclusions:

• This job is as good as any for practicing (as in I’m not good at it so I have to keep practicing) kindness and being present, which is my real task.
• I’m totally free to look for another job if I feel like it.

I try to avoid constant agonizing about whether there is something else I’m supposed to be doing. While I do believe in better and worse fits (in jobs, relationships, apartments, cities, etc.), I don’t really believe in supposed to.

I’m doing what I’m doing, and later I might be doing something else, and really, it seems to kind of unfold by itself, but it’s also fine for me to make choices and take action, should I be so moved.

The question is how to enjoy the life I have, which can’t be a matter of doing more of anything, since the job takes up eight hours five days a week, and sleeping takes up nine hours seven days a week. Hence, it is a matter of being awake in more moments, at work and not.

How to be awake? Pay attention. To what? Eugene Cash said Sunday night that if in doubt, the body and the breathing are always good objects of awareness.

By the way, when I said recently that Tom’s mother was knocked down by a youngster, I didn’t mean she was decked by a hoodlum. Rather, a two-year-old lost control of his Big Wheel (or whatever they have these days) on a downhill stretch and ran into her, even as his father was calling to him to be careful.

I have to retract my endorsement of the Radio Shack answering machine, as of a few days ago when a friend telephoned in the evening and said, in a flat statement of accusation, “So, you don’t have an answering machine.” I protested that indeed I do, but she said she had called earlier in the day and it hadn’t answered. However, it does dutifully record all hang-ups: Message number five: Click. Message number six: Click. That’s something.