I have been “retired” for just under 5 years now. When I first retired I was acutely conscious of my mortality. Retirement, in contemporary America, means that your time is short, that you will soon die. Since I had open heart surgery just a couple of years before I retired, it was not hard to believe it. And so, I was determined, while I had time, to get at the things a busy life had not provided room for. I was determined to read, write, publish, pour out myself in my local church, and, well, learn the saxophone. Fortunately (but extremely frustratingly), life in our household made all that practically impossible. I still put in time practicing and I still (more or less) showed up at my little church and I still looked for blocks of time when I could write, but my practicing was forced and tense and so went nowhere, my reading and writing were constantly interrupted, and my involvement in my little church became sporadic. I fell into an incapacitating melancholy.
These days things are looking up. I still remember quite well that I will die, that my days are numbered, but I also have remembered, as I did not for way too long, that I don’t have to be productive, I don’t have to become a great (or even good) saxophonist, I don’t have to be a driving force in my local church, I don’t have to read or write or publish, that is, I don’t have to succeed, I don’t have to survive. This has become wonderfully liberating and—for whatever it’s worth—my saxophone playing has vastly improved, my involvement at church has grown, and I am writing again, none of that functioning as the reason for my shift in consciousness, but rather as a sign of the freedom offered by the gospel.