In April as my planned European summer music festival vacation fell victim to my passport problems I began to search for alternatives for a place to visit and be on my sixty fifth birthday. I wanted to do something meaningful. Dropping money on luxury for the sake of indulgence of my preferences has long lost its meaning.
I’ll drop cash on luxury when that enables something meaningful: enjoying a meal with VIPs, upgrading an airline seat for a long flight, or getting good seats for something fun. I won’t just drop cash for the sake of just being able to say I did something nice on my birthday. Who cares? I certainly don’t
I indulge in meaning. I will spend money, stay up late, walk more than I want to, be somewhere I don’t want to be, or tolerate something or someone I usually won’t, in pursuit of meaning. It is truly a comfort to have discovered that meaning is what makes me tick. When I am making difficult choices I now just make the most meaningful choice.
The single-minded pursuit of meaning doesn’t always make things easy, but it does make things simple.
So, as I was pondering my options for my now-open summer I was also pondering what to do about the timing of my retirement. I want to retire, that wasn’t even really a decision. That just hit me in mid-2023 like the gradual onset of age. As much as I enjoy my work life I want something else now. I want to write. I want to read, study, and teach. I want to spend time with friends. I want to stop caring about what day of the week it is.
Knowing THAT one wants to retire is not the same as knowing WHEN to retire. Lacking any mandates about retirement age professionally, I turned inward to face my fears. I have experienced relatively few weeks of unemployment over my lifetime. I have never been prepared those few times I did find myself unemployed, and I still don’t feel prepared now despite the promise of Social Security and the lengthy numbers I see in my retirement accounts.
No, on the contrary, I have to keep reminding myself that I am enjoying a PAID vacation today. I seem to regard paychecks like a kind of functional oxygen, I really don’t know how to live confidently without a payday coming in my future. I am fully aware that is a specious notion, but irrational fears don’t care about being irrational.
As a hospice nurse I often have had conversations with the dying about regrets. Particularly if a terminal illness was unanticipated, the dying are often full of regret. People trying to comfort the dying often shoo away discussions of regrets as somehow pointless, but I don’t. I’m interested in what is important enough to say on a deathbed, so I just let patients talk.
The regrets of the dying I’ve known (it is worth mentioning they were practically all Manhattan residents) follow two common themes (I hope to write about this in more detail soon): (1) regret for what they did not do much more than what they did do, and (2) an astonishingly high percentage of the dying people who have confided in me wish they had spent their money more freely early in their retirement years, when they could physically do what they wanted to do.
More often than one might expect, this latter regret is accompanied by resentment of their heirs whom they imagine as financial vultures slowly circling them as they die, waiting to get their hands on what they saved by years of flying economy with arthritic knees and a well-funded 401k. I have been sworn to secrecy a number of times after these disclosures, I respect that, but I have to confess it does color my regard for the rest of the family
I take all this to heart, as those dying patients who grew fond or protective of me have asked me to do. More times than I can count I have leaned over a favored patient as they issued a breathy imperative, summoning all their strength to put emotion behind it: “promise me you’ll spend your money.”
Life tells me to put up or shut up.
I was a younger man when I got all that advice. Retirement was a certainty, but not imminent. Now, where did all these chickens come from and why are they roosting around me? Ah, they’re here for my sixty-fifth birthday.
I have discussed this with my contemporaries but few have solved this puzzle for themselves. The only people in my life who have a certain answer were on their deathbeds when they advised me. Experience is something you get right after you need it.
So, with all this swirling in my head I looked to what Buddhists call the refuge of the sangha (the term for congregation of zen students). I want to ponder these issues now. I am done getting advice.
However, I did not want to ponder this in the midst of feeling isolated. I wanted to be by myself as I thought of all this, but not alone. Where does one go to be around friendly and warm people but not talk to them?
Zen students are taught not to judge other people’s practice. It isn’t your business. In the zendo, one typically only interacts directly with another for a ritualistic purpose. Otherwise, they aren’t watching you, or if they are, they won’t mention it to you.
When practice is over, you find yourself in a group of people who see the world as you do and social conversations often get animated and deep very quickly. Zen students will engage in rich and useful conversations when doing such is the point, but they won’t pry and they refrain from issuing opinions.
As a bonus, they all know me, but not well enough to pry about my life. What interests them most is why I come to Minneapolis for zen practice. This is an explanation I have well honed and it most involves (much deserved) praise for my guiding teacher, Steve Hagen. I am here because he is my zen teacher.
I knew I could come and without bothering anyone or disrupting any routine I could stay in the dormitory for students, attend all services and classes, and occupy myself with odd jobs that always need to be done around the zen center. No one would need to know what was otherwise on my mind. No one would try to form their own narrative about what was behind my unexpected visit. I was here to practice zen. We all are. Enough said.
But, when I wanted the warmth of conversation it would be readily available. I was right.
The “guiding teacher,” what we call El Queso Grande in American Soto zen, offered to pick me up at the airport. My original and most beloved teacher is retired, busy writing a book. He has fully turned over the duties of being a zen teacher to the student of his whom he certified to teach Buddhism after he retired from the position. My original teacher is now nearing ninety years of age.
When I last visited, the now guiding teacher was a senior student. On this visit he occupies the seat in front of the altar and directs the curriculum in Buddhist studies offered. This is a very important role, he is a link in the chain of the lineage of Buddhism that can be traced all the way back to the man regarded as the historical original Buddha. The first thing he wanted to schedule with me was lunch the next day. That’s the kind of place I worship.
After I arrived I was welcomed to the dormitory by the caretaker of the property. Everything was right at hand, he had laid out a towel for me. It was obvious that my quarters had been recently cleaned. He reminded me that since I was here in residency so he would be leaving me alone and he asked me to show him the same deference—this was his home and he’s dealing with a chronic illness as well as caring for the grounds, so there wouldn’t be a lot of small talk.
That evening, the chairwoman of the philanthropic concern which oversees the organization asked me to dinner. We had never before met, she was relatively new and curious about the guy from New York City who had been an active member for more than a decade before her arrival. Just as predictably, over dinner she told me she would be relatively busy this week so she scheduled our rendezvous as early as possible because we might not see each other again before I leave.
I did not alert my now-retired teacher before my visit out of respect for his retirement, and also because I wanted him to see that I was accepting of my new teacher—I wasn’t going to make my visit about seeing him in particular. I knew word about my visit would get back to him. I was equally confident he would find a way to touch base which did not disrupt his intensive devotion to his new book about Nargajuna, one of the most enigmatic subjects in all of Buddhism.
As it turned out, he had family business out of town for most of my visit, but this morning we went to breakfast with another retired teacher from a sibling zen center. I found myself sitting over coffee and eggs with two of the most important and influential teachers of my particular corner of Buddhism.
They reminisced casually about events that were legendary to me like the days of San Francisco Zen Center when Suzuki Roshi rented space from a Jewish synagogue for meditation. These two men had helped build American zen practice in my lineage of Soto Zen the last half century from their own hands. Those hands were now pouring my coffee. That was quite the treat.
Otherwise, I have been left alone. There are meditation sessions twice daily, ongoing classes two days a week, and full services on the weekend. No one had to design any kind of program for me. I just went to everything.
I requested work practice, and they honored me in the traditional way by first assigning me to clean the toilets. You may chuckle, and go ahead, but ponder for a moment the times in your life when you have encountered a poorly maintained bathroom. Whether it is an office, a restaurant, or any other public place, the condition of the bathroom colors your entire experience of the hosting organization. Only the most serious and respected students are assigned the task, particularly unsupervised as I was.
It took me longer than usual because the supplies are routinely kept in a different place than I usually expect to find them during retreats (I could have also just forgotten where they were kept, but I like the first explanation better). I located the supplies with a clue from the student serving as the work leader, he had given me his number to text him questions during my stay. I was otherwise alone in the zen center, they gave me keys upon arrival.
While you’re doing it, scrubbing the toilets seems very important. They were pretty clean already, but the point of work practice isn’t accomplishing a task. The point is to bring the mindfulness of meditation to your work. One simply takes the time it takes and does what there is to be done.
It was also raining outside, so I couldn’t do that day what I did for the rest of my stay—work on the grounds of the property. The caretaker’s health condition rendered it painful for him to bend-over or get up off the ground, so there was a lot of work to be done that could not be done standing up. I wrote about that earlier, but the practice is the same—bring mindfulness to every action, do not concern your mind with completion of tasks. Just work.
I am now within a day of my departure. I have work practice today and tomorrow, evening meditation tonight and morning meditation tomorrow. I have been alone with my thoughts my entire visit while enjoying the supportive warmth of my congregation.
I have made decisions about my retirement. For these to be final, I have to consult with others, but I know what I am going to seek to enable. I had time to collect my mind, but suffered none of the loneliness and isolation that can beset a plan for going off to ponder something in solitude.
That’s why I went to church to celebrate my birthday. I had a happy one.
Thank you, Dharma Field.
Happy Belated Birthday!! Beat you to 65–no end in sight for me!