Category Archives: Third Phase

Humor, Retirement, Third Phase

What Do You Do?

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

At Barbette’s last week.  The usual question.  And what do you do?  As always, sorting through the possible responses leaves me with no idea where to start, so I say, “I’m retired.”  With my hairline long ago fully receded and my beard white it seems like the easiest way to deal with a question something like, “What’s your major?”

Still it leaves me unsatisfied.  As if I’m denying the fullness of my third phase self.  The problem is there’s no handy hook, “Anthropology.”  “Clergy.”  “Organizer.”  No terms like those for gardener, grandfather, writer, apprentice Latin scholar, eternal student.

And I don’t want there to be.  One of the facets of the third phase I enjoy so much is the freedom to move between and among activities without feeling defined by them.  Of course, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that for the last 25 years or so, yes, but it feels different post-65.

No easy answer here, I guess.  It will probably emerge over the next few years.

Aging, Latin, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Splitting Wood

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon

Each day has its lessons.  Today the Latin was harder than yesterday or the day before and I had to spend time in the grammar book reminding myself about supines and gerundives. On top of that I still couldn’t wrestle a sentence out of the two verses that troubled me.

When I’d run my brain as far as I could down the old Latin way, it was a good time to go IMAG1084outside and split wood for the Samhain bonfire.  Boy, it had been awhile since I split wood.

The splitting maul combines a dull axe and a sledge hammer. When you’re splitting wood you want to force the fibers apart, not cut them, as a sharpened felling or limbing ax will do.  That results in ax blades sunk deep into the log.

Besides, as often happens, the splitting maul wedges itself in the wood, allowing for a secondary maneuver which involves lifting maul and with it the log into the air, then bringing both down on whatever solid surface you’re working with, in this case a chunk of the elm formerly in the vegetable garden.  The more slender handle of a felling ax is not designed for the force generated by this action.  The splitting maul, however, has a plastic handle that absorbs the blow and keeps right on working.

Here’s the completed work, which consists of two cedar trees blown over by a windstorm aIMAG1081 couple of years ago.  They used to be beyond our deck, between us and the vegetable garden.  I still miss them.  Well, this is actually about half of it, but you get the point of what splitting accomplishes.  It creates a surface that more easily catches fire; and, if it were an issue, which it isn’t, makes them easier to put in a fireplace or stove.

Anyhow, after lifting the maul and the occasional log in the air and slamming them back down on the elm, I was glad I do regular resistance work.

Garden, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Go Now, The Growing Season Has Ended

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Fall                                                                          Samhain Moon

Today chain saw bar and dental hygiene.  Real gritty home stuff.  A bit more Latin, of course.  My paperweight is still in the annealer.  Cooling down.  I can get it Wednesday.  It will sit next to my Father’s Day mug I made at Northern Clay Center.  Back to kindergarten only now I’m making my projects for myself.  Is this the beginning of the second childhood I’ve heard so much about?

The hosta and coleus have all gathered in on themselves, drooping in that post-frost finale.  As the Minnesota Updraft Blog said:  The Growing Season Ends.  It ended for us here last week when we pulled the tomato plants, the egg plants, the beets and the last of the greens.  Frost bit plants look hurt, their cell walls burst by ice, what was contained now loose and sharp.

This is the way the growing season ends, not with a bang, but a droop.

Aging, Humanities, Latin, MOOCS, Third Phase, US History, World History

Anco Impari.

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon
T. S. Eliot       Little Gidding V

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The hurry of last week has receded and today is an outdoor day, raspberries and fertilizer. It’s chilly out there, but physical labor adds its own heat.

The end is in sight for both MOOCs, Modern/Post Modern with only two more weeks and ModPo with four.  Like the course I took last year on Greek Myth both of these have been excellent.  The interactive discussion forums and the video lectures in small, accessible chunks work well for the at home classroom.  The reading in all three has been challenging, definitely college and post-grad level material.  Did I mention that they’re free?

The Great Course’s cd and dvd classes, taught by professors of proven teaching ability, are excellent, too.  The lectures in these courses are longer and in more depth, but I have not found the spur to do the reading as I have in the MOOC’s.  That’s me, of course.  And, there is no interaction at all.  An advantage is that you can do them over any time frame and in multiple venues.  The MOOCs require a computer screen.  These are not free.

Though I am at heart an auto-didact and can develop my own reading plans, I appreciate these compressed experiences where an expert in a field alerts you to current issues and literature.  They’re a quicker way in to a broad foundation in a discipline and for an overview of what might have additional interest.

Over the years I’ve pursued in particular the history of ideas, ancient history:  Rome, Egypt, China, mythology, philosophy and literature.  In literature I’ve tended to focus on the classics and on the classical tradition.  These broad areas have fascinated me for a long time.  I plan to challenge myself over the fallow time with calculus.  Kate’s promised time as my tutor.

I suppose I could gamble or drink or run naked through the streets, but, hey.  Each to his own?  Right?

Third Phase

If We Have the Energy

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Lughnasa                                                     Harvest Moon

Then again.  After my presentation this morning, Be Glad You Exist, (see Third Phase header above for the full text) a lively discussion ensued.  One man, a bearded man in his late 70’s, spoke of advice his father, who lived to 96, gave him, “You have to decide whether you want to be an animal or a vegetable.”  An engineer by training, this same man talked of early volunteer experiences which wanted his skills, from age 13, not the mature, thoughtful skills of a lifetime’s learning and practice.  He now volunteers at the Rondo Library in St. Paul as a tutor.

Another woman, also well into retirement, saw many of the folks who had less than $100,000 or less than $25,000 in retirement savings.  They needed, she said, prompts to admit they needed meals on wheels, congregate dining.

Another man, also retired awhile, said, “We invented rock and roll.  And youth culture.” We’re still dealing with the consequences of that we decided.

Leslie, an attorney, whip smart and wanting to lower her stress level by cutting back, admits she fears no work.  How would she keep sharp?  Exercise her mind?

Ginny, who talked about her life on the reservation growing up in dire poverty, said, “Western culture puts so much emphasis on money, but on the res it’s community.  My sister has cancer and I love the way the community has rallied around here.  Whether she’s to stay here or not, she knows she’s loved.”

There was, too, excitement about defining this time, helping it become a new thing under the sun.  “If we have enough energy,” Leslie said.

I believe we do.

Art and Culture, Third Phase

Prospective Nostalgia

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Lughnasa                                                             Harvest Moon

Do you ever have a twinge of regret or a moment of disappointment about all the things you won’t be able to read, to learn?  I do.  And sometimes the ache is terrible.  It can be non-specific.  The library, that is my library, has more threads than I can follow in one life time.  My own library.  What about the UofM library?  The internet?  A good bookstore?

(Amour, Foi, Esperance – Maurice Denis)

It can be specific.  I won’t be learning Mandarin this time through.  I’m not going to get a good feel for geology either, or biochemistry.  Even sociology, beyond a brush in college, is out.  So are most of the world’s literatures and all those paintings and sculptures I just can’t get to see.  It could be, of course, that I wouldn’t want to know the sociology of Poland, but I bet I would.  I’m sure I’d like to understand the working of plate tectonics at a deeper than cursory level, but I won’t.  The same for the chemical exchanges that make life possible.  Nope.

This makes me sad.  Not in a terrible sadness way, not grief, not even really regret, more a prospective nostalgia for something that will not happen.  I can fell it creeping up on me when I look at book, say a history of Japan, and wonder if I’m really going to devote time to reading that.  If I’m honest and say to myself probably not, that’s when the feeling rises.  Oh.  But if only I could give some time in the evening.  Maybe then.  But no.  Not likely, not really.  Oh.

(Psyche’s Kin Bid Her Farewell on a Mountain Top – Maurice Denis)

Most of us have, I imagine, a small collection of sayings that recur to us, sometimes often, that help guide us in making decisions.  One that comes to my mind a lot is this:  Purity of heart is to will one thing.  When I have to prune, to focus my life, to move my attention toward some task that will take a long time, I remember it.  It feels important to me, true.  Right.

Yet.  To will one thing is to rule out all those others.  To leave them on the shelf, to abandon their discovery, the excitement of learning what they may have to teach.  Thus I have this difficult (to me) internal contradiction between wanting, even needing, to focus my energy and desiring broad as well as a deep learning.  This is one of those paradoxes with which I have to make my peace, I suppose, but I don’t find it easy.  It may not be possible.

Family, Third Phase

Third Phase: A Defining Stage

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Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon101

We renewed Kate’s medical license today for another two years.  She’ll almost certainly not use it but a career defining document like that, woven tightly into her daily life for several decades, is not surrendered lightly.  Wrestling with who we were and who we are now is a defining stage of the third phase.

 

Family, Retirement, Third Phase

Visiting Our Money

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Lughnasa                                                                   Honey Moon

Our financial planner has an office across 169 from General Mills.  When we go see him, we call it visiting our money.  The reason for going today resulted from thinking about retirement money in a somewhat new way.  It involves recalibrating expectations currently set by an “abundance of caution” approach, an approach that understandably conservative advisors use.

According to the best projections our money can buy, under current conditions (not guaranteed to continue) our assets should last well past my 100th birthday with a sizable nut still available.  In fact, a nut larger than our current assets.  Now this is good news of course, but I view these projections as a speedometer and this one tells me we’re going too slow.  That is, we’re leaving money on the table that we could be using to see the grandkids more often, do more work on our lawn, take a trip, whatever.

So we went into negotiate some ground rules with RJ about withdrawals.  By making certain conservative moves years ago, at the advice of yet another financial counselor, Ruth, we have put together a fairly large savings account which we hold in a low volatility mutual fund outside of the IRA and under our immediate control.  This account allows us to self-fund any shortfalls from our IRA withdrawal in case of a correction and, even, a crash.  This is necessary because we have set our withdrawal rate at a steady 4%, no matter what, the 4% number arrived at in order to preserve capital over the long term.

With this safety mechanism in place it then becomes possible to identify an asset floor, if you will, above which we do not need to retain the money in investments.  Which we did today.  When our assets move above this floor, we’ll make occasional withdrawals that exceed our monthly draw.  Below it we won’t.

Feels good.

Cinema and Television, Third Phase

The Quartet

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8/14/2013     Lughnasa                                                                        Honey Moon

As soon Ancientrails goes back online, I plan to create a Third Phase page.  There I will publish titles of books, movies, poems, plays, music that relates in some way to the Third Phase idea as well as continuing thinking about the idea of the Third Phase.

Kate and I watched a powerful movie tonight, soft and comedic, but also tender and challenging for us all in the Third Phase.  The Quartet.  This is a BBC movie about a home for retired musicians, Beechman House, and the lives of those who live there.  Where it challenges us is in its open-hearted support of our life passions, even after our performing days are over.  This lesson, one we often need to learn over and over again, comes at us in so many different ways in this movie.  Dustin Hoffman directed.

Politics, Third Phase

Reverb

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8/11/2013 Lughnasa                                                                         Honey Moon

Having an intellectual experience with a lot of reverb right now.  I read the Communist Manifesto as I said above, but I also read estranged labor, also by Marx.  The two together make for surprisingly contemporary and trenchant critiques of our political economics.  A key point Marx makes is the problem for the working class is that their labor becomes, literally, objectified.  That is, the thing they make, whatever it is, contains their effort and energy but belongs to another, usually, too, becoming unavailable to the ones who made it.  I thought of workers on a Cadillac assembly line or LPN’s working in hospitals but not having adequate health care.  The object, the product of labor, leaves the hands of the worker and his/her life, then becoming estranged from them.  Thus, labor is an act of self-estrangement from the product of your labor.

Marx believed that labor should reveal and reaffirm the who that you are, make you more of, better than, the you were before your work.  In this case the work is subjective, or the subject of the laborer, not an object.  Here is an article from the NYT yesterday about the arguments over raising the minimum wage.  And another about worker deaths in Texas.  And, most tellingly, this one:  U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind.  These are from just this last week.  I never immersed myself in Marxist thought so I don’t know the objections to his analysis, but from my cursory look at it, it explains a lot of the headlines.

Here’s the thing.  In the third phase I have been promoting the idea of doing the work only you can do.  Does that sound like work that reveals and reaffirms who you are, work that makes you more of, better than, the you before the work?  It sure does to me.  And that congruence feels fine to me, reinforcing.  But.  What if the third phase of life, life after formal education and life after full-time work, is the first time you can take up the work that only you can do?  Doesn’t that mean you engaged in alienating labor that estranged you from the product of your labor?