Retirement Without the Blues?
From the Introduction…
“Retirement” is a simple but loaded word to mark such a major rite de passage in the human life cycle when, after many years of work serving an employer who returns your labour with income, you find yourself with that odd experience of serving yourself.
It is a strange, bitter-sweet reality for most; so much anticipated freedom, so much time for personal use and late life flourishing; and yet so much apprehension and fear of loss.
Gone, in one stroke, forty years worth of social identity and social status; gone, colleagues to joke and commiserate with; gone, the circumstances and systems to moan about; gone, the predictable daily activities to fill a mind with habit, the comforting certainty of the familiar and knowledge so finely honed from a near lifetime’s accumulation of a small, manageable corner of total human expertise. It takes people differently and they take it in different ways.
These are a few personal reflections on how it has taken me and the kind of background connections that always capture my curiosity.
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About the author
John Hills is the co-vice chair of AFT, and the longest serving member of the group that produces Context. His book, Introduction to Systemic and Family Therapy: A User’s Guide, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.