When Engagement Must Be Its Own Reward

A meditation on retirement and the quiet challenge of giving oneself fully to what serves no long-term purpose.

In retirement, making peace with the thought that engagement may be its own reward is no simple task; it is a quiet discipline, and perhaps even a form of grace

Arun Kumar

Not long ago, I opened a book on brain maps with the quiet expectation of delight. Its subject seemed full of promise: the body traced within the brain, smell and sight, touch and motion each taking up their residence in the folded landscape of the brain. It seemed reasonable to imagine that whatever mattered most for survival would be granted the broadest territory there. The book held out the hope of one of those rare journeys in which knowledge does not merely inform but gently enlarges the world.

And yet what began as an interesting journey soon acquired a certain weight. Weeks would pass before I reached for the book again, and when I did, I often found myself skimming rather than reading, gliding over the pages as though some inward eagerness had quietly loosened its grip.

Part of the reason was plain enough. Once I had understood the central idea — that different bodily functions belong to different regions of the brain, and that the share of neural territory given to an activity reflects, in some deep evolutionary sense, its importance — I felt little need to linger over the finer grain of detail.

By the time I was halfway through, I had begun to suspect that a briefer telling — thirty lucid pages, perhaps — might have yielded all that I had truly come seeking.

Lately I have noticed the same rhythm with other books as well: an opening spark, then the slow dimming of the will to continue. A book I that eagerly reached for initially, begins, almost imperceptibly, to feel less like a companion than a duty I am carrying.

Because this pattern has returned with other books, I have begun to wonder whether the difficulty lies less in the books themselves than in some alteration in the conditions of my reading. More and more, I suspect the change may have something to do with time itself — or rather, with the altered concept of time in retirement.

Retirement offers a paradox of time: the long-imagined freedom of unclaimed hours, joined to a sharpened awareness of life’s finitude. I am freer than before to choose what to do, and yet that very freedom is shadowed by the question of what, in the end, such choosing comes to mean.

How does one surrender oneself wholly to play, to the simple act of being, when nothing beyond the moment is asked or promised? How does one enter deeply into an effort that raises no monument? And how are we to make peace with the spending of our energies when they do not gather into achievement, legacy, or future necessity, but seem to vanish almost as soon as they are lived?

In earlier seasons of life, much of our effort was fastened to visible outcomes — work completed, children raised, obligations met, reputations earned. Retirement loosens those bindings. What remains is a different economy, where motivation can no longer be borrowed so easily from usefulness alone. One must learn, perhaps for the first time, how to stay with an activity that does not improve one’s standing, solve an urgent problem, or offer an immediate reward. That lesson is harder than it sounds, because it asks us to trust that attention itself is meaningful.

To engage in something for its own sake sounds like beautiful advice. We are often told that engagement is its own reward. Perhaps that is true. And perhaps it becomes true only after a long apprenticeship in attention, in the patient art of learning to be fully present. For many of us, the phrase arrives worn by overuse. To internalize, and then to live by it, is another matter entirely.

We understand rewards when they arrive as praise, income, or progress. But the quieter reward of absorption — the kind that leaves behind no certificate, no promotion, no measurable gain — can feel difficult to trust, especially when the mind has been trained for decades to ask what every effort is for.

For now, I find within myself a less modest ambition: to understand the terms on which attention is still possible. Perhaps the task of retirement is not to recover the motives of youth that once propelled action, but to cultivate a different, more unhurried form of devotion — to choose a few things and remain with them, even when there is no promise that some larger purpose will declare itself.

In retirement, making peace with the thought that engagement may be its own reward is no simple task; it is a quiet discipline, and perhaps even a form of grace.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

Do I Feel 68?

At 68, life feels both long and fleeting. A reflection on memory, time, age, and the mystery of what growing older means.

The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact.

Arun Kumar

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 68. Sometime during that day, J. asked, “Do I feel 68?”

Perhaps what J. meant was not whether I felt 68 in any literal sense. The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact. They accumulate quietly, like rings in a tree, recording time without telling us what it should feel like to stand within it. Or perhaps it was only a rhetorical question, one of those small remarks that drift into the day and leave behind an unexpectedly large echo.

The question made me look back over the 68-year arc of my life — where it began, and where it has brought me now. In one sense, it feels like a very long journey, stretching from my boyhood, through my years at Indian Institute of Technology, then onward to America and all that followed after. In another sense, it feels as though the days, months, and years have slipped past with astonishing haste, as if time, after lingering in childhood, eventually learned how to run.

Living through time can feel like walking through a hall of mirrors. Events recede, enlarge, bend out of proportion, or return unexpectedly from strange angles. What once seemed immense may now appear small and insignificant; what felt ordinary at the time may glow in memory with a significance it never announced when it first occurred. The relationship between memory and time is rarely faithful. It is impressionistic, almost dreamlike, preserving sentiment more readily than sequence.

There is still a remembrance of moving through that timeline, but the specifics have faded. The individual days of my thirteenth year on earth, no longer possess enough sharpness to be distinguished from one another. They survive not as dates, but blurred visions.

With time, memory itself becomes a blurred spectrum. What remains are recollections without timestamps: the school I attended, the evenings spent playing in the park across from our house where children my age gathered, the shy ache of a crush on someone I never quite found the courage to speak to, the bicycle rides to the vegetable market. If I reach inward, I can still draw these scenes from their slumber, though they guard their secret well and refuse to tell me the exact year or day to which they belonged.

My mind still carries these small fragments without attaching them to any particular moment in time. Perhaps that is because they were woven into the ordinary fabric of life, part of a rhythm that extended across those years between twelve and seventeen years of age. Routine, while we are living inside it, often feels unremarkable; only later do we understand that it was quietly building the emotional landscape of a life.

And yet there are certain days that remain sharply individualized in memory. September 11 is one of them. I remember the beauty of the day — the clear blue sky, the slight chill in the air hinting that winter was not too far away — the drive back in the green pickup to collect our son from school, and then the hours at home in front of the television, watching the events unfold and trying, like everyone else, to make sense of what could not yet be understood.

In general, though, stretches of time do not possess the same firmness as distances in space. A road can be measured; a year back in the past is not held with the same certainty.

By some strange distortion of time, my earlier life now feels immeasurably distant, as though it belongs not merely to another era, but almost to another self.

So now I am 68. A lifetime has already passed behind me, and I am retired now, living with a clearer awareness of mortality than I once did. At this stage, one no longer takes for granted that time will continue to unfold indefinitely.

In two years, I will be 70, and I am certain someone will ask again, perhaps half in jest and half in wonder, what it feels like to be 70. I am equally certain that I will not have a satisfactory answer then either.

And if, in the community clubhouse, I were to meet someone older than myself, I might ask in return, “Do you feel 90 now?” I would not expect an answer. There is no handbook that tells us what one is supposed to feel at 90, or 70, or 68. The question is less about information. We ask it because age is visible from the outside, but never fully knowable from within.

Answer or no answer, I am glad to be here. I am glad to be 68. I look forward to the pleasures that remain — playing pickleball, and now and then finding myself on a river cruise, watching towns drift past as time continues its patient onward march, carrying me toward 70. For now, that is enough. All I can hope is that I will still be here to hear the question--Do you feel 70?

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

The Vortex of Happenings

A candle burns.
Time slips.
You and I
caught in the vortex of happenings
—oblivious to death.

 

The Weight of Leisure

Retirement brings time affluence, but it also brings a vivid view of the horizon. How do we learn to live purely for now?

If time is running out, how can you justify spending the remaining currency on something that leaves absolutely no footprint behind?

Arun Kumar

How do we bring ourselves to engage in an activity fully for its own sake when confronted by an enhanced awareness of mortality? For me, this question began as a shimmering, smoky pattern — an ambient background noise that only slowly took shape after the structure of retirement set in.

In the workforce, time was an external currency. It was budgeted, traded, and justified by outcomes — a paycheck, a project completed, an objective achieved. Over decades, I was conditioned to live a strictly goal-directed existence, where the value of the present moment was always borrowed from the future milestone it served. Then, the career ended. The calendar cleared. I entered a state of time affluence, handed a blank check of hours to spend exactly as I please.

It should have been a dream come true.

But this sudden abundance arrived with a dark companion: a heightened view of the horizon, and a stark awareness of the limited time that remains.

And here is where a paradox of retirement bites: a sudden affluence of time, vast enough to support any pursuit, colliding with the narrowing corridor of a finite life. I am finally free to choose activities entirely for their own sake, yet the gravity of finitude raises awkward questions when I engage in them.

How do I summon the devotion to play, to create, to simply be — while knowing the act is entirely self-contained? How do I throw myself fully into an activity when the effort is not for a monument, but a moment? How do we justify the expenditure of energy when it is not preserved in a repository of achievements, carved into a legacy, or used to build a bridge to some future destination?

You would think that knowing time is limited would make us savor the pure, unadulterated “now” — to paint, to read, to play, to walk, purely for the joy of it. Instead, the awareness of mortality twists the autelic activities into unsettling questions that arrive unbidden, crashing into the very middle of doing. A persistent whisper demands to know the ultimate point of an arbitrary pursuit. If time is running out, how can I justify spending its remaining currency on something that will leave no footprint behind?

For now, I do not have answers. I know this interior monologue will go on. It will often feel tedious, spinning in exhausting circles without offering the grace of immediate closure or a neat solution.

But there is also a quiet necessity in keeping this introspection alive. By refusing to look away from the friction, I hope to slowly inch closer to a deeper grounding — a way to inhabit activities purely for the sake of the doing, and perhaps, lengthen the beautiful, tranquil spaces between the echoes of autelic anxiety.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.