Susan Gee Rumsey
and John J. Gee
Richmond, California, USA
Wishing You All the Best in 2012!
Though my Endless Summer Vacation of Retirement turned out to be just another term in the School of Life, it was not without compensations. And now — we’ve got a new year coming. Let us hope, by its conclusion, we all will be able to say for ourselves, as the American artist Winslow Homer once wrote about himself:
The life I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment.
May each of you have your “full hours of enjoyment” in 2012!
Jordan Pond
Acadia National Park
Maine USA
cache/wst.opf.1827029.xml
Susan's Aloha Retirement Party
UC Natural Reserve System
June 29, 2011 — a slideshow
(Photos by Gordon Jeong)
It's That Merry, Happy, Lucky,
Ho-Ho Time of Year … Again!
Alo / Oha / Ha Joyfully creating / this present life / in our shared world
M y Endless Summer of Retirement began June 30.
Turns out, stepping down from a longtime career is excellent rehearsal for leaving life itself. Here are a few ways in which Retirement resembles Death:
- As you make ready to go, you want desperately to settle all your affairs and not leave a mess for those who must stay behind.
- But you discover you can’t finish everything, no matter how hard you try.
- When your time finally comes, it’s not like anything you’ve ever experienced before.
- Most people seem sorry to hear you’re leaving.
- Afterwards, you get a great send-off party to which everyone comes.
- You believe you are wearing the last suit you will ever put on.
- No one has a bad word to say about you — in fact, several passing acquaintances claim to have been your best friend.
- You aren’t sure where you’re going next or what you’ll be doing from now on.
- Others are also speculating on your future.
- Finally: you can get as much sleep as you want.
The pros and cons of retirement — I had them all figured out.
The cons: I would miss my work family and being an integral part of one of UC’s finest programs, the Natural Reserve System (NRS).
The pros: no more long meetings for me; no more sitting on my butt all day long everyday; no more never-ending deadlines.
That last item — no more deadlines — deserves special emphasis. After rushing from project to project for decades and developing a chronic case of what the Japanese refer to as “hurry sickness,” now for the first time in 40+ years, I am not on deadline. I could get used to this, I told myself July 1 — I intend to get used to this.
But not right away.
I spent the months of July and August, working halftime for the NRS, finishing my contribution to a major NRS project: a full-color book on UC’s 46-year-old reserve system, to be published by UC Press.
Then the rest of the year happened. ...
