FREE TIME KEEPS ESCAPING ME
Doing nothing? If only. Here’s what the seniors around you are busy with
This came over the transom from one of my excellent editors at the Toronto Star:
“How is it that retirees can’t seem to get more done?” he began.
“Why is it the retired people I know are constantly ragging the puck on doing things that they need to? There seems to be a ‘we’ve been too busy to get to that’ refrain so often, from those boomers who are not working 50 hours a week, that the working stiffs among us can’t help but wonder how do retirees spend their time? I would like to read the other side of the argument.”
Gauntlet thrown! Be prepared to lose this fight, sir.
I’m busy all the time since I retired in 2022. For example, I’m currently managing three separate text and email chains. In one week. There’s the trip out West with my four siblings next October, with four months of online discussion and planning. There’s the organizational behemoth of the dinner party a week from today — table’s set, tick that off the list — with the main email thread plus essential side-texting:
— I wish Sally would reply to my reminder about what she’s bringing to dinner on Saturday.
— This is Sally. Green salad. Her text is followed by an emoji so tiny I need a magnifying glass to see if she’s sent me praying hands or the finger.
And there’s Book Club, which requires no in-between communication because the eight women agree at the end of each meeting what we will read and when and where the next meeting will be.
— Confirming it’s all right we’re switching our late May book club
from May 27 to May 29. Many emails ensued explaining who was where on each of the proposed dates, followed by calls for clarity when replies were cryptic. Are you saying the proposed switch doesn’t affect you because you’re away on both dates, or are you saying you are here for one date?
In addition to this online work with friends and family, time-consuming like my old jobs but more
enjoyable, there’s the daily food shop because otherwise things pile up in the fridge. “Two slices of roast turkey please.” The butcher doesn’t mind. And still, I find time to read and talk on the phone. It’s difficult to understand why I never picked up when my mom or a beloved aunt called me at work. I’d look at the number with burning resentment and think, don’t they get how busy I am? Now I answer no matter who it is, and that’s two hours of my day right there.
But there’s no need to take my word about how flat out I am since I retired. I have evidence because I’ve kept a daily tally of my tasks since 2006. For many years I lay in bed at night, thinking about the list I’d write the next day. Ticking off what I did the day before, writing down what I’d do next. I made the day what it would be. I created it on the page. I still do.
I took two stacks of day timers from my bedroom closet spread them over my duvet. They meant business, I noticed that right away. These day timers from my big, consequential jobs were 10-inches-by-12-inches, black and hardcovered. I flipped through the pages. They looked like I was planning the invasion of Normandy every single day. I followed a geographical battle plan. Above the lines for personal reminders: Marsha’s birthday; Dr. Kleib (underlined). Upper right-hand corner for urgency around bosses, always men — Richard!/Michael/Keith?? — and numbered in the middle for tasks, with daily subtraction and addition carryovers. This part of the page was as comprehensible as division by zero: Get through all rates and prepare for Jennifer (2019). WONGA & Dick (2015). Joe: Referral control re RFP (2011) Sci-fi disability (2007). Multiple check marks signified completed tasks. Mint: book January trip. Check!
Since retirement, I’ve switched to softcover six-inch-by-eight-inch orange notebooks with a spiral spine. They’re pretty. I opened this morning’s list next to one of my black books to compare then and now.
1. Bag. Whose bag, where bag? It comes back to me like a pop of colour on a dark suit. Get my bag from shoe repair!
2. When I go to the drugstore. This is a bit of a puzzler, like the middle line of a haiku. I’m not sure where that task came from or where it’s going.
3. Dig up old day timers.
I’m not becoming childlike. Fast Cathrin’s transition to endlessly distracted Cathrin hasn’t come to that. But where it used to be something to fix (to read the online lists of how to overcome, manage, trick and defeat, being distracted is to experience second-rate infinity), now the wandering focus of distraction is where the action is. To pay attention not to what needs doing, but what is doing.
I still have a schedule at 69, but it’s infinite in nature, it expands like a concertina. A list of five things takes nine times as long to write, because there are 16 steps between moving from item one to item two. I don’t know what I do all day, but it takes me all day to do it, somebody said that.
Science reports older people are more easily distracted than younger adults, that we become diverted by things that are irrelevant to the task at hand. A University of Cambridge study had 218 subjects aged 18 to 88 watch an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” while hooked up to an MRI to measure their brain activity. The younger subjects’ brains were all the same, lighting up in similar ways and at similar points in the show. The older subjects’ thought processes were more idiosyncratic; each responded differently to what they were watching, and often had nothing to do with what they were watching.
As I laid on my bed flipping through my day timers … sunshine lovely warm on face … just a quick nap … I saw one of my black books had the name Umberto Eco on the To Do part of the page. Eco was the first famous writer I attempted to conduct an interview with. He eventually declined, but I remembered as I laid on my bed that Eco had a thing for lists. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading everything I could about Eco and lists.
“How, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists.” This was Eco to Spiegel Magazine in 2009. Eco had just published his latest book, “The Infinity of Lists,” I read on, and curated a Louvre exhibition on the essential nature of lists in painting and literature. “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
My black books did let me escape thoughts of death, and I thank them for it. But they’re too flimsy to stand up to my quickly encroaching mortality. Lists are heuristic, shortcuts for thinking rather than actual thinking, they give the illusion of order and completeness where none exists. But I don’t judge the short-sightedness of the daily tasks from my working life. It’s just that they matter a lot in the moment, and then they don’t matter at all.
A great joy of retirement, perhaps the greatest, is having a schedule of your own choosing. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to pin a retiree down about what they’re doing when. All those laze-about boomer parents were you once, my esteemed editor, slogging through the brutal trenches of working for a living. I look back with wonder, and bafflement.
The last years of my career were as a senior news director at CBC News, some during the COVID lockdown when suddenly a huge part of the workday was removed: The to and fro of working life. Get up, feed yourself and the children, pack lunches, get everyone dressed. Hustle out the door to school and a flat-out day at work. Repeat at the other end. Then lockdown happened and going to work meant turning on my computer in the same room where I slept.
On one of my first days back at the office post-lockdown, I bumped into a top-brass CBC woman, about my age, on the elevator. We both looked exhausted, like we’d already put in a full week. It was Monday morning. “How did we ever survive?” she said. How did we do it, working the way we did our whole lives?
I concede defeat to all of you in the 50-hourweek. You work incredibly hard, and you’ll look back in absolute amazement that you accomplished so much in a day. If I could do it over again — and this isn’t advice, more a personal regret — I’d try to find a way to do less. To look for the heart of what it means to get through another day on this planet, rather than writing a list of how to get through it. If that would have been possible. Likely not.
When my mother died in 2015, I kept her day timers. I got rid of her coats and pants and furniture and jewelry but her day timers I wanted with me. They seemed to tell me something essential about my mother, I wasn’t sure what. I kept them in the same closet as my own black books.
I took them out as I wrote this column. I knew she was a devotee of a packed day. “I’m going to wear out, not rust out,” was her motto, and her day timers showed that’s exactly what she did. Every page was crammed from top to bottom, like my working life books. Until they weren’t. Her entries became slimmer and slimmer until they were just a word slating down the page. As she became vaguer and more tentative, so did her lists.
When you get frustrated with the faux-busy schedules of your boom-y parents who groan about how busy they are, it means that they’re vital and living fully before the time when they won’t do anything much at all; the time when you’ll miss them, even when they’re still there. It might not seem like it, but that’s why there’s urgency around what retired people do, whatever we’re doing.
I still have a schedule at 69, but it’s infinite in nature, it expands like a concertina. I don’t know what I do all day, but it takes me all day to do it, somebody said that