I was teaching a workshop last week at which someone mentioned her dislike of the word “retirement”. I feel as if I’m being put away, she said, as if I’m meant to go away and hide until I die, as if I’m becoming invisible.
As an older woman, of course there are ways in which she’s right about the invisibility, though some find it liberating. And she’s also right that the etymology of the word ‘retirement’ is about withdrawal, retreat; in both the military and spiritual sense to retire means to pull back or pull away, to refocus one’s energies in a safer and more secluded place. To be a “shy and retiring” person is to be quiet, even withdrawn, uncomfortable with attention.
[ Sometimes convenience works against imagination – in the kitchen and elsewhereOpens in new window ]
The conversation made me think about all the words for turning back. Return, re-cover, reverse, all holding the idea that we can retreat to an earlier time and place, resume a past version of ourselves and our lives. The prefix means “again” in Latin: revise, to see again; revert, to turn again, but in English with the strong implication of going back. I think of this often in the context of my own various “recoveries” from episodes of depression and similar kinds of trouble. They have not been backwards movements, not retracing of steps to some lost age of wholeness or wrong turn, but gentle and tentative new adventures in being alive.
In being well after many of forms of sickness but especially mental illness, addiction and compulsion, we are precisely not going back to the old patterns that took us to that dark place the first time. I want to say we are remaking, reinventing, revising, but the truth is simpler: in changing our lives we make, invent, envision. It’s hardly a startling new insight to tell you that time flows in one direction, and also it can be hard to give up longing for what we know, even if that way of living or feeling or thinking was harmful.
People say ‘I don’t know how you keep going’. The truth is you don’t have a choice
Sometimes convenience works against imagination – in the kitchen and elsewhere
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It’s never easy to walk away from even painful forms of familiarity. The known devil remains preferable for a very long time, often far beyond all reason and self-interest. Confronting change we didn’t choose can be more painful than starting again on purpose, but sometimes inevitability helps. No willpower is required to live with new kinds of normality we never wanted and didn’t initiate, only blind endurance.
There have been a couple of times in my life when unusual bad things happened and well-intentioned people kept saying “I don’t know how you keep going”. The answer, as most adults know, is that you don’t have a choice. There isn’t an exit route for when times are too hard. If there were, obviously we’d take it. It was not my decision to keep going through those times; the times kept going through me, and eventually I was used to the new reality and happiness became possible again, though never quite the same happiness as before.
It does become possible to laugh again after grief. The high note of fear cannot and should not be held for very long. The clarity of vision, the pure sense of what matters that is the gift of terrible crisis is not, in the end and even not long after the beginning, compatible with daily life. We shouldn’t live every day as if it were our last because then the bathroom would never be cleaned, the bills never paid, the homework never done.
And so we get used to loss, even loss that seemed at first unbearable, whether of someone we love or a job by which we defined ourselves or our sense of security or strength. We keep going, in a different way, seeing the world in a changed light but not without beauty still.
That’s the problem with that “re-” prefix. We use it in ways that imply folds in time, the ability to go back. As every emigrant learns, you can’t go home. Home changed while you were away, changing, and after a while the place you visit isn’t the place you left and there you are, strange in the new place and strange in the old, never to be fully “at home” anywhere in the way of people who never left. You can visit, but you can’t revisit. You can’t change place without changing time, and only spatial movement is reversible.
On we go.
