It is definitely time to start writing again.

While it has been an easy transition to make, moving from teacher to retired person, it hasn’t been a quick one. As a teenager I always loved to ride on buses by myself. Perhaps it had something to do with growing up in an upper-middle class community where so often people knew who I was where ever I went. Being on a bus became one of the few places where for some reason I had a sense of being anonymous. Whether I truly was or not I couldn’t say, but in that context I could step outside of who I knew I had to be and reinvent myself, if only for a few minutes, and if only on the inside. Unlike those in the famous Vancouver Stanley Cup riot pictures, my moments of anonymity never lead  to any outrageous, crazed or thoughtless actions on my part. That’s not who I am. For me it was always a good experience simply in terms of being able to recount the qualities about myself that I liked or didn’t like.  In the same way retiring has given me yet another pause of anonymity, time perhaps to reconsider who it is that I am, who it is that I want to be. I’ve had a chance to strip away the label “teacher” and examine what is left? Like cleaning out the closet, I have had time to try everything on and keep what I like, throw out what I’ve outgrown or no longer choose to wear.

Re-evaluating one’s strengths and qualities is a great exercise at any point in one’s life but perhaps easier to do when the constraints of work, time, schedules and family demands have been quieted. For me retiring has coincided with my youngest child being ready to launch herself, my son moving off to San Francisco and my oldest child and her husband starting their own family. Now that they are no longer underfoot I’m conscious of my desire to work with my husband to stay connected to our children in more adult ways. I’m enjoying more time too for my husband and I to be with friends. I’ve joined a book club and even a senior’s center. I have time as well to consider my own interests such as relearning to play bridge, still-learning to speak Spanish, and even beginning to cook and garden, beyond the survival stuff which I’ve done for so many years. Those have all become chosen high-priority activities. But what has been missing, what I’ve had to soul search for, is what I will commit myself to beyond that.

I have so many concerns about the state of our world, our environment, our democracy, our public school system and even our public infra-structure in general. I worry about children in poverty, seniors in poverty, our growing sense of helplessness, corporate power and overall, the need to improve the state of social justice world wide. There is so much work to be done and mostly I just haven’t known where to begin, where to focus my effort. Oddly, perhaps, I’ve been trying to choose a single issue only to realize as I’ve been reading and trying to get a handle on what/where to start, that all of my concerns are so very connected, that there really is no beginning place to start or single strand to follow. It doesn’t matter where I put my efforts so long as I put them out there. So long as I contribute my voice and my energy to a larger group, to our democracy. After all, the idea is that when the 100th monkey gets on board, change starts to occur. And that’s what we need, to create some change.