A lifewide perspective on being retired

I stopped working for an employer over three years ago. It came as a surprise as I had not planned to retire but the opportunity suddenly presented itself and I realised that economically I could afford to do so and surprised myself by deciding not to seek further employment. That's how it happened - no long term thinking or planning just here's your chance take it or leave it.The fact I did retire never ceases to amaze me given how much I said I enjoyed work and how much I defined myself through my work.

This week I participated in a small group discussion in which we shared our perceptions and experiences of the early stage of retirement. The first question was How do I represent my status when I'm completing a form? I admitted to often being frustrated as I don't like saying I'm retired, I often tick the box saying semi retired even though I don't work for an employer and I receive an occupational pension. So on that score I'm definitely retired.  I guess the reason I find it an issue is that I feel a) guilty - I'm too young not to be working for a living b) guilty - because I'm not working for a living when everyone else is around me c) disconcerted - because my concept of retirement is one of older people sitting in front of the telly ( a gross injustice I know especially as I'm quite happy to sit in front of the telly in the evening!) d)) denial - this tag can't apply to me because I'm too busy with self-created work. I also find it hard to accept that I left fulltime employment over 3 years ago when it still feels as if I left 3 months ago! But that is just a measure of how quickly time seems to be flowing at this stage of life.  So when these feelings and perspectives are taken together perhaps I am in denial!

The next question was how did I see retirement? I think I have made the transition although perhaps its actually a never ending process of adjustment into the stage when I will, like my 90 yer old father, be sitting by the fire with my slippers on. He has of course earned his rest after a lifetime of slogging and looking after other people.

It feels to me that how I see retirement, just like the rest of life, is constantly evolving. Even in the relatively short period I have been retired, the balance of what I do, the way I choose to use my time, continually changes and it is this balance of what I choose to do that determines how I see and feel about the situation called retirement.

So what does being retired mean to me?
Like the rest of life it's definitely a state oe being and becoming. The optimist in me sees it as a time of relative freedom when I have the choice, unfettered by employment commitments or restrictions to do what I choose to do within my capabilities, life situations, time and economic constraints. I am fortunate in enjoying good health (apart from a wobbly knee) I have a reasonable income and a very supportive family so I am in a privileged position to have considerable choice and opportunity within my life. This freedom to live the life I choose without the constraints of being employed is the most important benefit of retirement. In such circumstances retirement is about privileged opportunity - I feel I'm being paid to do things that I find meaningful and fulfilling, and it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfies my wellbeing. In this respect retirement is like any other phase of life with its own affordances and opportunities that we have to make the most of within the context of our life.

Another way of looking at retirement is what is different about it compared to when you were working 'what did I miss about not being retired?' The first thing that comes to mind are the social aspects of work, of being with people who are involved with me in working towards something. As a teacher I also miss not being around people where the relationship is one of teacher-learner and when I have taken on roles that are akin to teaching (like some recent work I did in Limerick) I have been reminded of this. I guess attached to this is I miss the sort of work I was involved in, much of my working life has been about self-created work rather than being told what to do so I miss the opportunity to invent and be creative in a work context. With that I suppose comes the fact that I was also the leader and architect of the work so I miss the challenge of leading within a large complex organisation and all that goes with it. And allied to that is the idea of identity and status within my organisation and beyond into the wider community of practitioners in my field. So I guess I miss much more than the 'social aspects of work' but until I make myself spell these out they sit there in the background as a set of unarticulated feelings.

According to (August 2011:353) 'most studies of the meanings people assign to retirement have described categories of meanings people make of retirement. For instance, some retirees conceptualize retirement as a new beginning in which they discover life beyond work; others have difficulty letting go of work in retirement and feel that work has become an irreplaceable lifestyle; for still others, retirement means extensive unhappiness and the feeling of having little to live for' (Kloep and Hendry, 2006). I certainly don't subscribe to the latter view, I do recognise that working for and with purpose (ideas and for others rather than for an employer) is important to me and is something I want to continue. And I also recognise that it is an opportunity to do things that lie outside the world of work.

Everingham et al (2007) suggest retirement can alternately mean the end of the working [for an employer] life, an opportunity to slow down from work and/or build up a more leisurely life, or an opportunity to build up another, better working life over which they have more control. I can see that it means all of these things although my leanings at this stage are towards creating a life with a different blend of work and other non-work activity.


My life spaces map reveals the life I am choosing to lead. It shows spaces and places I inhabit every day, some of the things I do in those spaces and places, the significant relationships I have and value, and the ways in which I try to maintain and develop my physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.

A lifewide perspective
Retirement is sometimes seen in terms of the lifelong dimension of life - you reach a certain age and you stop doing work-related things and start doing non-work related things. But like any other stage of life it has a lifewide dimension containing many spaces and places, real and virtual, that we inhabit day by day and who we are and what we become is the totality of what we do in these different habitats (Jackson 2011). The reality of living is that we interact with these different places, spaces and the situations we inhabit and retirement is a phase of our life where the nature and balance of these habitats changes. So in terms of time and effort, and my purposes the balance of what I do across my life spaces day to day has changed and it is this context that is our life that shapes the meanings we give to our life and to what retirement means to us.

My life spaces map (above) shows how I am trying to realise my own potentialities and it contains the opportunities I have for expressing myself in ways that are valuable and meaningful  to me. They are the experiences that give rise to my inner life that ultimately encourages or stops my creativity flourishing.  Since I retired I can see that I have created a business that has itself evolved over the three years. The reason I started the business was to make money to invest in a social enterprise Lifewide Education which I knew would not make any money. If I look back over the three years the balance of my lifewide activity has changed. Three years ago I was quite heavily involved in my business as a researcher and did not have any childcare responsibilities but in the last year I have been helping my daughter who has 2 year old twins one or two days a week. It's these shifts in the balance of what we do that gives us the continuously evolving sense of what our life (ie what being retired) means as a husband, father, grandfather, son, brother, founder, director, researcher, writer, drummer, cleaner, gardener, childcarer  or whoever else we are.

These are my initial thoughts but I'm going to continue thinking about this.

References
August R A (2011) Women's retirement meanings: context, changes and organisational lessons Gender in Management: An International Journal v26, 5 351-366 available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1941519&show=html
Jackson, N.J. (ed) (2011a) Learning for a Complex World: A lifewide concept of learning, education and personal development. Authorhouse
Kloep, M. and Hendry L B (2006) Pathways into retirement: entry or exit?' Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology  v79 569-93
Everingham, C., Warner-Smith, P. and Byles, J. (2007),  “Transforming retirement: re-thinking models of retirement  to accommodate the  experiences of women”, Women’s  Studies International Forum, Vol. 30 No. 6, pp. 512-22.

This week we (the editorial team) have been working on the next issue of  Lifewide Magazine which is formed around the theme of personal and social technologies. We have been assembling and editing contributions for a few weeks but its now reached the interesting stage where we can begin to see how it all fits together. I call it the 80% stage where there is still a lot to do but for the first time we can see how our initial abstract vision is becoming a concrete reality.  Looking back I can now appreciate the process as an ecology driven by the shared goal of producing and distributing a collection of related articles that are more than the sum of the individual contributions because of the way they are organised, connected, illustrated and commentated.


In the jargon of wikimedia the process is akin to crowdsourcing 'the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community.....combin[ing] the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers...., where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result'. Our Magazine is dependent on this happening every three months!

The enterprise is one of co-creation and co-production and involves a lot of learning on the part of the production team. Firstly, the editorial team created a vision and identified possible content and these formation documents were deposited in google docs so that the four members of the team could access them and comment on them. Then the guest editors used their professional and social networks to engage possible contributors able to provide personal narratives and perspectives on their use of social technologies. For this issue most of the contributions were placed in drop box so that they could be viewed and edited. We also made good use of blog posts several articles were sourced in this way and social interactions with bloggers resulted in new collaborations. Our content also made use of content on YouTube and other social media sites.

We publish our Magazine under a Creative Commons license and once produced we post it on our Magazine website and distribute the link to our community via email and through mail lists, twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms and we hope that our readers will do the same. To make the most of the content we will use twitter to distribute selected articles and try to promote discussion about key ideas in some on-line forums. By tagging our own illustrations we know that in future people will be drawn to the Magazine and overtime thanks to the analytics embedded in our website we can see who is visiting and downloading our Magazine and where they are coming from.

In this way the life of an issue of Lifewide Magazine is greatly enriched and its value and reach extended by utilising the social media that is now part of the everyday world of community publishing. I find the process of co-creating and co-producing the Magazine a stimulating and rich learning process. 

The goal of producing the Magazine which is a thing of beauty is all I need to motivate myself and sustain my interest over many weeks. I put a lot of thought into the content and spend a lot of time searching for materials and adapting them if necessary. The editing process is one of trying to shape and add value to someone's contribution by helping them make a better fit with the whole. This process requires new relationships developed with people I have never encountered before (like Julian Stodd in this issue). It also involves conversations with Kiboko our community artist as ideas are considered, tried and sometimes rejected and eventually the best ideas (or the ones I think will fit best) are surfaced and developed. And sometimes it involves designing and participating in our own research studies. All these things require, time, energy and intellectual effort and all result in ownership and love for the relational product that is produced.  

The evolving ecology which produces the Magazine is an act of co-creation which can be visualised through Rogers (1961) contextualised concept of creativity ie the editors' self-determined and self-expressed process for achieving tangible goals, within which we create our novel relational products [our Magazine and our own learning and development] grown out of our individual uniqueness and the materials, events, people and circumstances of our lives.  There is something quite magical about starting with an idea and ending with a Magazine.

This week I began in earnest to begin helping to shape the next issue of Lifewide Magazine which is guest edited by Chrissi and Sue. They have organised the most of the content but there are always what I call 'bits and bobs' to be gathered, illustrations to be commissioned, images to be found and above all an identity to be created that is much more than the sum of the collection of articles. As I was googling 'social technologies' - one of the terms that defines the issue I came across Julian Stodd's blog. I immediately recognised a kindred spirit in someone who is thinking and writing about the everyday world of contemporary learning with a particular interest in the role played by technology. I read many of Julian's blogs and loved his simple visualisations. I felt that here was someone I would involve in my learning ecologies. I found one that I thought we might use in the Magazine - Our complex relationship with technology. I emailed him to check it was okay and received a friendly positive response such that it made me want to invite him to connect with our work in a significant way. So who knows what the future will bring?

One of his blogs elaborates his idea of the social age we now live in.. which he describes in these terms..

I use the term ‘The Social Age’ to talk about the environment we inhabit today: it’s a time when the very nature of work is evolving, changing to reflect a revised social contract and the advancement of technology to facilitate sharing and community. In the Manufacturing Age, we used to make stuff: banging together lumps of iron, burning coal, wrestling value from the very earth itself as we wrought iron and carved railways through the landscape, smelting and creating, until we outsourced it all and specialised production in a global network of trade and exchange, bringing us to the Knowledge Age. We convinced ourselves that this was ok: we no longer made stuff, but we had the knowledge, we did the clever bit ourselves and the knowledge was what really mattered. But then the internet evolved and Google was born, phones got smart and small and our relationship with knowledge changed. Finding stuff out is easy. Making sense of it is what counts. Welcome to the Social Age. Power and authority, that used to be gained through knowledge alone, is now based more in effectiveness, in being able to create value and meaning through the effective use of knowledge and resources in agile ways. Simply knowing stuff is not enough............... The Social Age is about high levels of engagement through informal, socially collaborative technology. It supports agility by allowing many and varied connections and the rapid iteration of ideas in communities that are ‘sense making’.

I have undoubtedly grown up and through the knowledge age. I was (and still am) a knowledge worker so the question for me is to what extent I am also part of the social age. As I look back over the last twenty years I can see that many of the roles I had involved co-creating knowledge in a social way. The basic social technology tools I used (and still use) is email, either in the form of an open mail list or in the form of surveys. More recently I have orchestrated on-line questionnaire surveys or posted questions in LinkedIn Groups. I have a Facebook page but rarely use it but I do use twitter for disseminating ideas and work. I have barely begun to utilise the social technology tools that characterise the social age and perhaps I never will embrace them in the way that people who are now growing up in this age use them as if they are second nature. Perhaps I will always remain a knowledge worker operating in a social age without really making use of the many social technologies that grow day by day - only time will tell.

It's funny how some of the big events in life sometimes don't inspire you very much to write about them. It's almost as if they drain you of energy and enthusiasm for thinking about them any more. Our recent benefit gig for Ollie feels like that.. by our own measures it was a success. We packed the hall with nearly 150 people. We raised £2300 for the two cancer charities we were supporting and the feedback we received was very positive and sometimes highly complementary and people genuinely seemed to be having a good time. Our music was some of the best we have achieved and we combined really well with two other musicians, and we sold over 40 CDs. The effort was considerable from everyone involved - the band worked hard and we were all wiped out by the end. All my family helped with the organisation and sales of drinks and making sure that things ran smoothly. I was very proud of them.  Furthermore we had good publicity on local radio and at least two more gigs on the back of it as well as a new working relationship with the musicians that we worked with. I thought I would find writing about it a joyful experience but for some unexplained reason I can't muster the energy. This lethargy is also affecting other things I'm doing. It's a strange experience for me and I can't explain it. 

To rekindle my energy and enthusiasm for writing something I thought I'd look again at Ollie's unfolding story on his website, Facebook page (which has 149 friends) and the YouCaring webpage hosting 410 donations given by friends and people who don't know Ollie or his family. I found the messages of support, love and friendship, and the stories of things that people had done to raise money truly inspiring. Many people had not just given but organised or hosted some sort of event like raffles, auctions, pub quizzes, table top sales, coffee mornings. One person had run a marathon and a group of office workers had donated their lottery winnings foregoing the pleasure of a fun night out. Ollie's illness and the journey his family are making have touched many people and made them want to give and in some cases create events that encourage others to give. So that one little boy's fight against cancer has spawned a whole ecology of action aimed at raising money both directly for the Lovis family and more generally for charities that are helping other children with cancer. This is a wonderful story and it shows how a horrible situation can inspire many people to do something positive and good. And it made me feel good that I and my band have been a part of this ecology of love and support to achieve something worthwhile on behalf of friends in need.

The band was happy to keep going with the fund raising using the Song for Ollie as a way of focusing attention on the issue of children with cancer. I set up our own YouCaring webpage and linked this to the Freeworld's website which now hosts 8 tracks of our CD which can be downloaded free with encouragement to donate. I set ourselves (myself) the target of raising £1000 for Children with Cancer and my sister was brilliant in kick starting the campaign with a £100 donation. 

So on reflection all sorts of actions, new ideas, new products, new relationships and friendships have grown out of this ecological process. Ollie has inspired many people to do many new things. He is the inspiration for much human enterprise and creativity and has enabled many people to feel better about themselves because they have connected in some small but deeply human way to his life story. 

This story has given me another perspective on the idea of ecologies for learning and achieving something we value so I wrote a piece for the next issue of Lifewide Magazine