Irrevocability, Inevitability, and the Line Between Them

[No, I don’t know what this represents in the real world. (I found it at a site somehow related to optical engineering, and am too distracted to make sense of it at the moment.) But it feels right: obviously a span of time, with three bright lines each clearly demarcating… something.]

Yesterday I passed a milestone of sorts: I signed the various forms which will, as of July 13, render me officially “retired.” Only… not so retired.

It used to be — although I’m sure it’s a fairly recent development, only in the last 75 years or so — that when someone retired, at least in the US, he parted company not only with his current employer, but with any employer. He stopped working, at least working for pay. Retired life, the retired life of fantasy anyhow, featured white-haired protagonists tending their gardens, writing memoirs, downsizing their homes with wandering RVs, becoming cranks, lovable curmudgeons, and (sometimes bound up in the same soul) chuckling old-timers. Given enough resources, especially retirement savings, they could do pretty much what they wanted with the rest of their days.

Different world now.

Far from staying home and puttering, or taking up new hobbies and so on, I will instead be coming to work five days a week, eight hours a day: to my same office, to perform the same work I’ve been performing for years. I can do this for up to five years, if I’d like. My accumulated pension savings will go into an interest-bearing account meanwhile; otherwise, I’ll continue to draw my salary, have the same benefits, build up and use personal and medical leave, and so on, just the same as always.

So no, as of July 13, I won’t really be retired. Not in the old sense. However, no matter what my official or semi-official status on the job, I will have entered a new life phase…

As humans, we grow up cursed (or possibly blessed — I can see it both ways) with the foreknowledge of our own extinguishment. There’s some date out there in the future on which we will not exist, and not just some date centuries or millennia hence. Might be years, decades. Might be a moment or two. It’s a visible terminus, even if we spend pretty much our entire lives pretending that it’s not there, or that we don’t really care about it. Because — and a big “of course” belongs here — why fret about the inevitable?

So that border, that horizon, stays ever fixed and ever closer. We know this. I know this, always have.

Now, though… One unnerving aspect to the whole process of declaring a retirement date and of enrolling in this five-year so-called DROP period: the presence on the forms, generally in boldface, of the word irrevocable. (As in, Your decision to [fill in the blank] is irrevocable.) I’ve been thinking about that word for a couple of weeks, and wondering why it has struck me so. I think I’ve got it: it marks the low end of the band in which the upper end starts to come into focus.

Up till now, I believe I’ve always thought of myself as having had only one truly irrevocable experience in my past, one single thing which I could not by any means undo, even if I went back in time with memories intact: I was born. Maybe I didn’t choose that experience. But everything else? I could re-do it all differently: in a different way, at a different time, with greater or lesser confidence, with more or fewer or no other persons present, and so on. If a teacher threatened me with a failing grade for shoddy or incomplete work, I could throw myself on her mercy, pleading for a second chance, and if I did this convincingly enough then I’d get that second chance.

Not this time: when I gulped and signed each of those dotted lines labeled “Employee,” I was driving nails — no, rivets: unremovable steel fasteners — into the start of a block of time which really, no fooling, will now end sooner rather than later.

And the present? It’s a gleaming vertical line, moving from left to right between those two nailed-down points. Starting July 13, I will know — irrevocably, now — exactly where the left-hand end is. Eventually that moving line will converge with the right-hand one, of course. (I may or may not know where that convergence happens, as it’s happening.) I can continue (or not) to pretend that I don’t know that point is out there.

But now there’s no denying the upcoming point of no return, to which I am now, as of yesterday, committed.

A strange feeling. Probably clumsily described. But… well, strange. I’ve talked to others who’ve already entered DROP, told them I couldn’t imagine I’d feel any different when I come into work the first time after my start date, and just proceed as always. Oh no, they say. You’ll know. You’ll feel totally different. Maybe this is what they mean.