I’ve been thinking of stopping, is the long and short of it. Stopping calling what I do each day my work. Here’s why.
On 12th July 1976 I began work at my first permanent full time job, and have continued working at one job or another every day since. Until today when I began this thinking about stopping. Thinking, as I did so, that a working life of forty-six years plus a few extra ones in bits of temporary jobs, so let’s round the working life number up to fifty, might be just about enough?
I first heard myself say I might stop working the other morning when I was talking with a friend about “afterwards”. The various things I thought I might do after my current PhD work is done, whenever that might turn out to be. We’d talked through various possibilities and ideas before I surprised myself by coming out with “Or I might just stop.” At which our conversation moved easily onto the walking, writing, reading and music that we both knew perfectly well would occupy me whatever happened. Whatever I might decide.
Then in the days since that discussion this stopping thought has kept recurring, and is each time greeted like a friend I’ve been waiting for. Waiting for since a book I read in the summer called “Waiting for the last bus”. Since all last week in a retreat I took myself on. Though it was more like “a beginning” than a retreat, really. The beginning of stopping. A beginning which led me into the slowing down of this week, and the possible coming to rest of now.
Not that I’m envisaging a future where I do nothing. Only that whatever the something I do is, it won’t be a new phase of my working life. Fifty years was enough of that. That constant busyness. Especially once I became self-employed 27 years ago. All the “Who are you working with” of that. The “Have you got much on” of it. So, from now or soon, I’ll only consider doing whatever things I feel like doing for the love of them, or perhaps the idle fancy of giving something a go. As a kind of day out. A day out that will never be agreed to as any kind of permanent commitment. Because all permanent commitments, and I can feel this in my bones, are approaching their end. Replaced by occasional days where I might be persuaded to break into this retirement, this leisure, occasionally. And after which I’ll be off to being off again. Off work, forever.
And I’m including the Utopian book I’ve been writing for a PhD in this off work thinking. I’ve treated the PhD so far like my later life return to university was to another self-employed job. Full of short-term agreements, submitted completions, working to deadlines (that slave of a word) and being gently but nevertheless progress chased. By me as much as anyone else. Well all that is coming close to done with now. And was clearly on its way to being done and over with when I’d read that “Waiting for the last bus” book I mentioned and then went to that library last week. Even a few weeks before then, when I’d sat in Liverpool Cathedral one Saturday afternoon and read a David Graeber book he and a friend had just written, not for their work or for contracts, but for the love and the doing of it. Because it contained all Graeber had left to say. Since he knew he would be dying soon.
Unlike David Graeber I have no reason to think such a thing about myself, but I do know that in less than a month I’ll become 68, closing in on 70. High time to stop living my life like it’s work. It isn’t. It’s more important than that, to me anyway.
So, the Utopian book I mentioned there? It might get done, only might. But in my own good time. And never if it still feels like work. Because work is nearly over. And my present to myself this Christmas is the present of the rest of my life.
So all that’s what I’m going to go off and think about over these next quiet days, these next quiet couple of weeks. I’m going to walk around and think about this idea of stopping. See what it feels like. Then I’ll decide.