'Disengaging' from Your Career

About a year ago, I was sitting at a sidewalk café in Split, Croatia, trying to decide how to get my monthly column written and delivered to my editor at the Daily Journal in time for a September publication date. I had been writing monthly columns, more or less regularly, since spring of 2009. I had developed a devoted readership and I didn’t want to let my readers down. Then, I thought again, here I was on my first three-week vacation in my entire 40-year career. Surely, I could take a break. So, I did. In fact, I took a full year.

Here, I begin again with the concept that I had been considering, while idling on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. When and how will I disengage from this extraordinary career? I don’t use the word “retirement,” because I don’t intend to be “retiring” in my post-legal career life. I expect to be every bit as engaged with nature and society as I am today.

And for those of you about ready to “sign off” from further reading due to your age or embryonic career status, I urge you to read further. In the past year, I have had extensive conversations with friends, colleagues and new acquaintances about career “disengagement,” and have come to a fundamental conclusion. It is about how your career is built into your life that determines your disengagement path. If you live your life for your career, failing to investigate and nourish your passions, your family, your friendships, and your engagement with the world, your career will become your prison. The number of colleagues who have confessed - “I don’t think I ever could retire. It is all I know. It is who I am…” - is legion. This, from fathers and mothers, esteemed in their communities, who fail to appreciate that others often hold them in higher regard than they are able to hold themselves.

From my own perspective, I fear “disappearing” as I disengage from my career. By this, I mean the regard in which I am held by most colleagues and acquaintances would appear to stem as much from “what I do” as “who I am.” If I no longer were an accomplished professional, recognized by my deeds, what would it be like to not be “seen”? As I write these words, I recognize how insipid they seem. Yet, I hear this notion articulated time and again.

I once witnessed a colleague, who had greeted me early in the morning at the office that day, entering the hospital from which I was departing from one of my quarterly cancer checkups - he would not leave that hospital alive. I sat in the office of an 83-year-old attorney, who appeared daily, but did no meaningful work as both his specialty and his clients had passed him by. The point is, there are far worse circumstances than “disappearing,” which, at bottom, is merely a state of mind.

And as I have learned as a hospice worker, at the bedside of the dying, purposeful life is about relationship - its breadth, depth and richness. Your most valued business relationships very likely will not make an appearance, once you are stricken by illness, disability or dementia. Remarkably, it will be easier for them to attend your funeral.

And so I offer the following perspectives on how to re-engage your career, no matter what stage you are in it, so that your career transitions become opportunities rather than obstacles:

1. Recognize that you are always “in transition”; that you are rarely “in control”; that developing your curiosity and awareness will reduce your fear and create flexibility and resilience.“Retirement” is just a label attributed to one type of career transition. Your best approach to it is inquiry into what you want your life to be; who you want to be in it; where you wish to live it; and how to enhance your flexibility and expand your resiliency with your existing capacities and capabilities. Then, live your life accordingly.

2. Everything about you affects your world and everyone in it. Working to improve your professional skills is laudable. Working to improve yourself is extraordinary.Following my bleak cancer prognosis at age 41, I really didn’t know what to do with myself, except to become a “better person.” I was to learn that this path was life itself. But one particular engagement along the way, working as a hospice volunteer at a public hospital, would contribute the most to my evolution as a lawyer. Serving the dying taught me to slow way down, look fear in the eye, grow my awareness, develop my compassion for others, withhold judgment, and expand my capacity for generosity.

3. Re-establish your priorities.When I first fully embraced the fact of my mortality, I reviewed what had mattered most to me in my life and committed to “rebalancing” my life priorities. Priorities, by the way, best organize themselves in the context of a life’s purpose. Something as simple as, “I want to live a rich and meaningful life, filled with love, caring and generosity” will help you put gardening, hiking, music, dance, community service or spiritual practice back into their proper places in your “world order.” Guided by your purpose, you won’t feel like you are “cheating” your career by pursuits that heal and grow you, both as an individual and a professional.

4. Build relationships; build communities.Some of my greatest teachers in life have been some of the most unlikely - the schizophrenic, street lady who taught me about forgiveness; the 35-year-old man, with 17 years of incarceration in four federal prisons, about compassion; the 70-year-old Guatemalan Supreme Court justice, with advanced dementia, about laughter. Some of my deepest relationships have been formed in community with people doing what I love - music, hiking, and travel. Others have been reinstated after I recognize that some of my oldest friends have the greatest understanding, despite the fact that our paths in life grew so far apart. In a world rich with these diverse relationships, you can never disappear. You only can be seen for who you truly are.

5. You never need be “retired.” You can be “more highly evolved.”When I first considered writing about retirement, I was 64, traveling Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia. Thus far, my 60s had proven to be the most engaging, creative and fulfilling decade of my almost 40-year career. Now that I’m 65, approaching 66, nothing really has changed. I don’t imagine that I will appear “retired” in my professional capacity for years to come. But I am consciously transitioning. I see the possibility of applying some of the skills that I have developed as a professional to support the environment and my various communities of interest. And as a relatively well-conditioned 65-year-old, there are a lot of steep and slippery parts of the world that I want to experience (Galapagos, Machu Picchu, etc.) before my body or climate change denies me the experience.

6. Live your life as if you are ready to die.One of the few gifts that a life threatening experience bestows is the opportunity to look death in the eye and see that it is both inevitable and not so frightening. But so many of us live our lives in such a manner that if we just keep our heads down, keep working, don’t take risks, don’t talk to strangers, we somehow can elongate our time. My discovery has been that embracing mortality offers us an extraordinary degree of freedom - freedom from the stranglehold the fear of death imposes. My hospice volunteer work keeps me in the face of death.

You have the choice of one of two viewpoints: either death always wins or death offers you the opportunity for an extraordinary life. I choose the latter. I choose embracing a post professional career life. I choose never to retire!