Not retiring from society
MY FATHER started working as a baker’s boy at age 12. At 16 he became a gold miner until he retired at 60. My mother was a dressmaker. Her sewing machine was the background music of our home.
The message they gave their children was that, except for an annual seaside holiday with its thrilling train journey and bunk beds and dining car, everyone always had to work.
So, at 16 I went to medical school – six years of fun and slave labour. Then 36 years as a doctor, mostly in rural practice which were exhilarating and exhausting. As you dashed off for lunch the loudspeaker would often screech “urgent case doctor”.
As you fell asleep after a long day in the wards, the sister would ring to say a shocked baby had just been admitted. This could translate into a long night tinkering with a drip to revive the child. In fact you were so in demand, you had to guard against self importance!
Next came politics where, as the Eastern Cape’s first health MEC, I worked the longest and hardest years of my life. The first three were epochal. The next three were traitorous because, instead of serving the poorest whom apartheid had betrayed, it further ran down their services.
My response was to resign in a holy huff and instead establish Loaves and Fish, an organisation designed to rally kind people to respond to all the sick, hungry, abandoned and abused children who abound in poor South African communities.
Then, three years ago, I moved to my present rural coastal village. One early morning standing on the speaking deck of my home which overlooks an exquisite and philosophical lagoon, I heard it say that, at 75, it was reasonable for me to retire.
I am enjoying retirement. I read a lot. I go for walks and jump in the waves. I watch the eagles fly and feed the monkeys and the family of visiting peacocks. I admire my garden. I shop in town once a week. I do pilates twice a week. I cook a big family dinner on Sundays. But I sometimes feel guilty. Should I be enjoying myself so much? Should I not still be formally working?
No, comes the answer from my wise deck. Your father only worked – quite correctly – to put food on the table. When he retired he took to playing bowls with gusto and also even learnt to slalom on the lagoon at Morgan Bay when we holidayed there. In fact he enjoyed himself so much that my mother accused him of being a playboy!
Now I know that you do not need to work for wages to be a giving and receiving part of your community. You only need to engage with it and that makes you a living part of the community matrix.
It presents numerous opportunities. Like delivering groceries to the village woman who keeps an open door for needy children. Like being an all hours on call granny. Like giving uphill lifts to women who have charred all day in a madam’s home. Like scoring beautiful rustic garden tables from planks under your deck made by a generous handyman with a standard 3 from a rural Transkei school.
So now I am bunking from work without guilt. I only rarely miss the self importance of diagnosing sicknesses and prescribing medicines.