Someone recently expressed sadness that I was retiring and leaving The Mindfulness Network. I explained that I was not leaving, just changing roles. Ah, she said, we call it rewiring in America.
I “retired” in the traditional sense a decade ago. By that I mean I took my occupational pension, which was more than enough to cover the bills, and set out on a new adventure as a mindfulness teacher. I certainly did not see it as an end to work, but I did see it as a changed relationship with work – I no longer needed to work to pay the basic bills.
Many years ago I read a lot of Charles Handy (The Age of Unreason, The Empty Raincoat,…) and he talks about “portfolio lives”. Rather than dividing our lives into work and pleasure, he suggested thinking about work as effort with a particular intention, and that much of the work we do is unpaid – as a parent, a grandparent, a carer, a volunteer, helping a friend. His contention then was that we need a portfolio that satisfies not just our income needs but our wider needs as a human being.
This view is quite liberating. In the last decade the paid work I have done would not have been enough to sustain me if I relied on it, and that means that I chose to do it not because of the income but because it somehow meets my personal aspirations. People have often expressed surprise that I took a role as a director of a charity when I did not need the income, and that I worked two or three times more hours than I was paid. The role came with all the challenges a position like that has, but I came at those challenges with a different perspective to someone who needed the role for income.
So, I like the idea of “rewiring not retiring”. I can offer some skills back into The Mindfulness Network that got squeezed out because of the time it took to manage the organisation. I won’t need paying for those, so the motivation is not financial, rather it is to keep connection with an amazing organisation and group of people that share my values and vision. I am, in Charles Handy’s terms, adjusting my portfolio. As I take something out, there will be more space for other things.
