The Search for Meaning – The Possibilities

As I mentioned in a previous post, the job of teaching can be an all-consuming one, often with few psychological rewards. In my first year of retirement, I intentionally avoided making any long-term commitments on my time since, for the first time in many years, I had the prospect of unstructured time. During that year, I did some house redecorating, a great deal of reading, honed my crossword puzzle skills, started this and my book review blog, and worked on a small research contract. All in all, not a bad introduction to retirement. Since the fall, however, (once a teacher, always a teacher – I think I‘ll always regard the fall as the start of the year!) I’ve begun to consider the real possibilities and opportunities that the freedom of retirement provides. In October I started to do some volunteering.

During my working life, for the most part the only volunteering I did outside of helping prepare an annual meal that my wife organizes for a local shelter and drop-in centre was within the context of the teaching profession. I sat on committees both within the school and with the local branch of OSSTF; I never regarded those activities as particularly altruistic, given that they were designed to benefit the very profession I was a part of. As well, I never felt, given the time commitment that committee work entails, this was a particularly good use of my time, and afforded little in the way of personal satisfaction. I found the same to be true of a civic-minded committee I joined that sought to make a difference in the election of municipal politicians – ultimately it seemed to me time wasted. However, one personal benefit was the confirmation that I am the type of person who craves more hands-on, immediate results from my actions. God love those who enjoy the world of minutia, rhetoric, and glacial progress I identify committee work with, but it’s clearly not for me.

The volunteer work I am doing now is very hands-on and physical – helping to sort and pack food in a foodbank. Its immediacy is something I really enjoy, and I intend to stay with it in the long-term, but I am still looking for other meaningful activities to be a part of. My next posts will reflect some of the research and reading I have been doing in pursuit of that goal; I hope that these posts will not be seen as exercises in self-indulgence. I intend them only as a very small means of helping people see the many opportunities that exist for making a difference in the world and finding meaning in life.

The Search for Meaning

They say that when people reach a certain stage in life, they look for things to make their lives meaningful. Throughout my years as a teacher, that search for meaning eluded me, partly because the job both haunted and consumed me, leaving little time for engagement with the larger world, and partly due to my belief that whatever I accomplished in the classroom had less to do with me and more to do with the innate talents and discipline of my students. Now into the second year of my retirement, I find both my interests and the focus of this blog diverging from its initial purpose of offering observations and commentary about education and moving into areas of which I feel an educated person should be aware. You might say that I am now trying to reengage with the larger world.

To that end, I suspect that more of my entries henceforth will be eclectic in nature, reflective of this search for meaning, although I have no intention of allowing them to devolve into maudlin self-indulgence. (I’ll leave that to people like Shelagh Rogers and her execrable program on C.B.C. radio, Sounds Like Canada.) To mark this shift, I would like to begin a series on how we, as individuals, through either acts of omission or commission, can have a positive impact on the world. The first act relates to retired teachers.

While I realize the situation varies tremendously depending upon where you live, in my school board, there are many retired teachers who do supply teaching and take long term occasional positions. The problem with this is that it deprives a large number of young people the opportunity of working and making themselves known to administrators. One young man I know, for example, who had worked for about three years on contract at my school, is now on the supply list but gets called an average of once or twice a month, while many retired teachers drawing healthy pensions are called much more regularly, owing to the fact that they are well-known due to their former status.

So my suggestion is a simple one: when you retire, unless your board is chronically short of supply teachers, make a young person’s life a little easier and future employment prospects brighter by consciously choosing NOT to supplant them; elect NOT to be put on the supply list. I have never regretted my decision to make way for a new generation of young people.

If I can find the file, in my next post I would like to provide an amended version of an article I wrote on this topic about a year before I retired.