“Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible.” ~ George Washington Carver.

When you start a family in a country not of your birth, with traditions similar in some ways, but quite different in others, you stumble around for a while.  School should be the same the world over, and yet it isn’t. When my eldest child was a senior in high school, I attended a parents’ evening designed to prepare us for the landmark events (and expenses) of senior year.  What was ‘grad night’? Who knew that they closed the Disney park to all except high school seniors, for an overnight experience.  That has morphed through Grad weekend to trips to Mexico or even Europe! But there, at the beginning of the school year, the teacher informed us that our children would now be experiencing ‘senioritis’.

This apparently widely known (though unexpected to me, since this was my first high school senior) phenomenon, is the restlessness that infects these young people as they stand at the doorway of the rest of their life. They become impatient, think they are already grown, find the last months of school to be annoying, a waste of time, restrictive.  They feel they have arrived at the end of one stage, or the beginning of a new, and they will test your patience, he explained.  I looked around the room and saw some, who must have experienced this before, nodding their heads.  He was right.

There were many other occasions with my kids where I felt lost, living in a country where the language was the same (or at least somewhat the same!). English and American are quite different! So many traditions had to be learned, though some never did take root.  Thanksgiving weekend is a great four-day holiday, but I always felt slightly uncomfortable, knowing that thanks was given at the expense of a nation of people who had many reasons not to be thankful for the arrival of the pilgrims.  As a hospital nurse I was happy to work and get extra pay for that day, while my kids went to celebrate a Jamerican Thanksgiving with their cousins.  My kids, when in elementary school, would be embarrassed by their father who, being entirely too ‘woke’, would insist that any drawing they were doing for school of the arrival of the pilgrims, should include the below deck Africans, chained together.  Perhaps his timeline was a bit off, but any history of the United States that did not include the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade to him was a lie, and not to be promulgated. Who knows what would have happened to the drawings in today’s educational system, where ‘woke’ is a bad word, and history has been whitewashed.

This week it occurred to me that I am experiencing my own version of ‘Senioritis’, and no, I do not mean that annoying way of forgetting why you left your room, or what you were going to say, or where you left your phone this time.  This year, a few years after the official retirement age, I announced that I would be retiring at the end of the year.  I gave plenty of notice, wanting to ensure that the transition for the new program director would be smooth, and ensure her success. 

It took me a while to be ready to retire.  There was an important accreditation visit to prepare for, and I could not see leaving without seeing that through.  I have been at that college for fifteen years now, the longest I have been at any job of my career.  I have worked my whole adult life, with my only significant breaks being maternity leave, and each of those got shorter and shorter as life, bills, and other responsibilities meant I needed to get back to work. 

I realized that I let friends and family know my intentions by saying that I was ‘planning to retire’ at the end of the year, and wondered why I placed the conditional, as if my plans could go either way!  I remembered some years ago when I called a friend to see if I could get a ride with him to go to a school event the next day, and he replied ‘I would like to say that I will be going…’ and it seemed a very strange way of saying no! But now I understand his hesitancy.  When work is a part of your ethic, when duty and responsibility are part of your DNA, you almost feel guilty as you prepare to step away.

Yet in other ways I am excited at the possibilities that stretch in front of me, the freedom to travel without a return date firmly fixed.  The opportunities to explore hobbies which are squeezed into available minutes, or parked altogether.  My co-workers keep offering me suggestions of what I can do with my time (somehow they all involve working!).  They tell me I won’t be able to stay retired, that I’ll be back. 

But the ‘senioritis’ keeps slipping into my behavior or misbehavior.  I seem to be less filtered, less making sure I say the right thing.  I keep seeing freedom, free time, tantalizing me as I try to stay focused, clearing out my office, remembering all the things I still need to pass on.

I know many retired people that are busier than those still working, and I have no doubt that will happen to me.  I am excited to move into this next phase of my life, impatient to get started. And perhaps I will finally finish and publish that novel I started back in the twentieth century, then rewrote and serialized up to but not including the final chapter.  Where did Mali and Ajamu end up?

Have a wonderful weekend, Family, at whatever stage of life you are.  May you find purpose and meaning in all your activities, whether paid or unpaid.  And if you see me getting too restless, whisper ‘Senioritis’ and I will try to calm down!

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.