I have been ‘retired’ for about seven years now. But by no means have I stopped writing. No. Writing is a blessing and a curse and it’s something, I am finding out, that doesn’t get time off once you have committed to it.
For the better part of my life, I was an advertising writer. This was back in the day when advertising was a truly creative process and not the endless show-and-tell crap it is these days. I spent twenty years working in ad agencies and that equipped me for another 25 or so on my own, where I also became and strategist, producer and art director.
The bottom line is that it was lucrative enough to finance a worry-free retirement.
So the question became ‘Now that you can do pretty much anything you want (within reason), what do you want to do?’
That question is a lot harder to answer than it would appear. But for me, it was fairly simple. My wife, Heather, had gone back to work in the school system after the kids were grown, after spending a more than decade in the music business. What she wanted, more than anything, having been born and raised in Toronto, was to get the hell out of there.
So that was the first thing. Fortunately, when we decided to do that it was at the pinnacle of the housing insanity in Toronto and other cities in the country. We ended up getting an obscene amount of money for our house, and we found another house in a small city on the other side of the lake, (Ontario) called St Catharines where the real estate insanity hadn’t hit. So we were able to buy our new house outright and still have a ton left over for our investment people to play with.
The Reality Of No Longer Working
When we got here, I have to admit that it took about a year and a half before I got it through my rather thick skull that I did not need to work. I think a lot of people, especially the self-employed, have a good deal of trouble understanding when they have actually crossed the finish line work-wise. Maybe it’s because they loved their work, which was the case with me. Or maybe it’s because they are terrified by the question of ‘what will I do now?”
In my case, even after we had relocated, I will still in the worker bee headspace, Then I met someone who was thinking pretty seriously about starting a boutique agency here in St Catharines, so, of course, I jumped in.
But, and that was very revealing, because while my head was all for it, my heart was not. And in my business, at least, if you don’t have both things firing on all cylinders you can run into trouble.
The Much Needed Intervention
One day my wife and my sister ganged up on me. Sat me down and told me to just stop working. And gave me a few good reasons why. Sometimes it takes an intervention. But it worked, and slowly but surely I started to feel like I didn’t need to work.
For the next couple of months, I rode my bike around and thought a lot about how I would fill my time. I used to be a big TV watcher. In fact, for many years I wrote an email column called The Couch Potato Chronicles and sent out all kinds of reviews to a mailing list of about 1200 people. So when Netflix and Prime and Apple TV etc. came along and sucked up all the good talent off the network, I decided to revive that column. So that was one thing.
The next thing that happened was that I got ill and had to have spinal surgery, for an ecoli infection, so recuperating from all of that became Job #1 for the better part of a year and a half. But I eventually got back on my feet. I bought myself a three-wheeled bike because my ability to balance was something that the surgery took away. Slowly but surely I got back into most of whatever groove I was in before all that happened.
The Retirement Solution
Then one day, for no reason that made any real sense at the time. I started to write a story. I didn’t plan it out consciously. In fact, the only motive I had was to see if the surgery had affected my mind. Much to my delight it had not.
So I spent the better part of two months working on this story and as I continued to write, it grew, almost organically into a small novel. I have never written anything quite like this before. It was a completely fabricated story about a girl who wanted to be a writer and slowly but surely became one. I suppose I identified with the character I was creating. There’s a little bit of ourselves in everything we write.
When I finished that, I realized that I enjoyed the writing of it immensely so, almost immediately, I started another story. And I realized that, for the first time since I was a teenager, I was writing stuff for myself. Not for money. Not for other people. Not for big corporations or small independent businesses. Not for government ministries. Not for some film producers. But just for me.
It felt like I was building a road. Every day I would lay a few feet of pavement, then go for a swim, or watch a movie or walk or ride. After a while, writing the stories became an ingrained part of my daily routine. I never thought of it as work. All it was what what I was now doing.
After a year and a half or so. I had written one novel. And close to thirty stories, several of which were adapted and updated from screenplays I had written while I was freelancing and messing around in the movie business. Biz Catalyst was kind enough to publish a couple of these stories recently.
What was interesting was that having the writing to do allowed me to organize and not overdo the walking and exercises I needed to do to get back on my feet. So today, except for some minor balance and stamina issues, I’m pretty much back to normal, no longer an advertising guy, but still very much a writer guy.
I have a huge inventory of stories, several of which I am adapting to screenplays, which I will then start sending out to production companies in Toronto since most of them are set there.
But the best part of all is that I can help my wife do a lot of the outside stuff that needs to be done, which, in turn, keeps me on my feet, which in turn helps improve my stamina and balance. Because now we have a house we have grown to love in a city we love, the last thing we want to do is give it up and move into one of those little boxes where they stick old people.
Retirement Isn’t The End Of Anything
I guess the moral of this story is that retirement is not something that needs to be feared. I know I feared it when it became obvious that I could retire. The key to a good retirement is having something to do that gives you joy and pleasure. Because the last thing you want to feel is that your retirement is the beginning of the end of your life. Oh yeah, I also wrote a bunch of new poems and am in the process of making a little book out of them. This is one of my favorites.
WHATEVER & WHAT FOR
At the end of the day
My thoughts drift away
Through a sky so blue
Through the clouds so grey
And they travel forever
With no rhyme or reason
To a far distant place
To a fine summer season
And as I watch them fly
So free and so light
As the end of the day
Just turns into night
Then my thoughts, they return
To people my dreams
They are the strong stitches
That sew my loose seams
And I wake the next morning
With ideas galore
And a whole day to make them
Whatever and what for
