Retirement
Is it in fact a change of tires?
Front and rear
Replacing the balding spots
With new tread
Pumping in fresh air
To get a better grip on the road ahead
Getting ready for some bumps
And preparing to gently apply the brakes?

Or, more bluntly
Retire
As in re-tired
Tired again
More tired
Or just plain tired

The gentle slowing down
Of mind and body
And mission
Looking back not forward
To the good old days
Loosening the thread
Reflecting on what was
And could have been
Breathing deeply and channeling sadness
Resting the body
Peeking gradually into the darkness?

Or perhaps a more dialectical view
A life lived
A new one emerging
The end approaching
As it always has
With no date certain
No known final curtain.

Here the bell tolls
But the phone doesn’t ring incessantly
The emails don’t intrude obsessively
The mind sheds the many tasks
For the few

The daily churn of meetings
And greetings
Constant revisions and decisions
The swirl of people
Good, bad and ugly
All this is let go
Passed on
Left behind

But then, can one imagine
A new roaring lion emerging
Unleashing a passion of righteous fury
A project so intense
It absorbs the quite enormous energies
Of one whose tires have bumped up against
Many curbs
Testing many proverbs
In unfamiliar territory

What if one gigantic session on life
Broke through the sadness and frustration
And new vistas were revealed
Magic with electricity and zest
With all the pizzazz
Of Jazz that rhymed
And raged
And the body and mind and spirit
Wheeled off into the sunrise

What about that?

Gene Bruskin
August 7, 2011