LIFE'S WORK

What a strange and spiritually alien concept is 'retirement,' premised as it is upon strange assumptions, all of them negative and detrimental, inimical to the spirit and its natural course: a tacit admission that what you do is not your true life's work, but something that keeps you from it for most of your lifetime, in return for which sacrifice you are compensated with the duty to pay taxes and health insurance premiums and social security, then one day when you reach 'retirement age' you will have your own time back again, and can return to your true life and its true calling, if you can recall it. You can only retire if you haven't been doing your life's work. "After you retire, you can live the life you've always wanted to live." But by then you're so far from who you really were as to be lost in time. "Retirement brings security." Well not only is that sheer bull, it can be a painful goring, as so many imminent retirees are about to find out, and then the flood of baby boomers. So you folks that are coming along behind, don't swallow all the propaganda unless you're comfortable with it. In the first place, 'security' is just a word insurance salesmen use to up the premiums you'll never see hide nor hair of; there's no such thing as security outside yourself. That's the first thing you learn in the wilds of life, where thrive all the arts, action, adventure, discoveries, revelations, epiphanies, excitements and beauties. Social security is a big pyramid scheme. The whole of society has for decades taught us as children that life consists of a career and its end, and that this is the only path open. I remember getting my social security card when I was 14 and getting my first taxable job (now you get your SS# at birth!!), and hearing that I'd have to retire at whatever age they'd set it at back then; I remember trying to figure out what in the world it meant: me retiring in 50 years was somewhere beyond the far reaches of the solar system. But the idea that whatever I was doing, I would be forced to end it, was very disturbing. So as soon as my college loan was paid off I quit and took my life back. I took to the road. That would be my life's work.