Worth

When I reduced my work from full-time to part-time in order not to further damage various parts of my body, I was sure that was the right thing to do.  The alternative was to continue to work full-time until I was so badly injured I would qualify for disability, in which case I may never have healed.


But I recall telling a friend that I felt a bit guilty leaving work at 2:00 and going home to read.  She reminded me that at work my job was to check books in and out.


That's been helpful now that I've retired entirely.  This time, I was unable to continue to work at a place that I loved that had seen dramatic and destructive changes.  Just three short months ago, I had believed that if I just did the one-day-at-a-time thing, I could continue to work past early retirement age, and yet here I am, retired at not quite 61.


Again, I know that it was the right thing to do.  Since I left, I have once again been able to talk freely; the depression and anxiety I had been feeling before retiring are gone.  It helps that the local newspaper has validated my concerns by featuring my letter to the editor, following it up with an award, and then publishing as commentary my letter in response to a Commentary piece by the president of the library board.  I have no need to be proven right.  I know I was, and am, right.  But my purpose in speaking out was to inform the community and perhaps cause library administration to be compelled to rethink their bad decisions, or at least slow down the damage because eyes were now on them.  I am proud that I did what I could.


But now I am really, truly retired.  And I am feeling a bit lost, because my worth is defined as my work.  So I do much the same as I was doing before I retired, gardening, reading, blogging, movie watching.  I sleep until I am ready to get up, mostly between 8 and 9, which is a luxury I did not think I would be enjoying for a number of years.  It appears that my body hurts less than it did when I was working, which had not even really occurred to me until the past week or so.


I love being home so much more.  I can sit on my porch and enjoy the daylilies that I was barely able to keep from being killed by weeds and drought until this year.  I actually have successfully grown tomatoes, which have each year come under fire from any variety of insects and critters.  I am, with the help of some netting, beating the birds to the blueberries.  Each morning I "harvest" my little abundance of blueberries, cherry tomatoes and tiny, egg-sized cukes.  I am waiting eagerly for the brown figs that crows feasted upon last year, laughing all the while because I had been unable to put netting up before they took up their positions.


It is still hard for me to sit and read.  What haunts me is the thought that I should be "doing" something.  This is a concept that I think I will be thinking about quite a bit now.


When I think about how much longer I may be around (and I try not to because running those numbers is terrifying), I try to think about what will have been the best ways to spend my time.


And I look at my cat, Molly.  I think my contribution to civilization will be not so much greater than hers, so I watch her sleep, stretch, play, sleep a bit more, all without self-consciousness.  I think maybe that would be a good thing to do with the rest of my life.