The train pulled away,
carrying you in its belly
and belching black smoke,
leaving behind a throng
jostling on the platform.
I knew
it was the last time
I would ever see you.
Standing there, I hoped
that for a few miles
you might look out the window—
watching poles and trees zip by—
and trace my name
on the dirty glass
with a twinge of sadness.
A small gift
to validate my own.
It is awkward to be suspended in the unfamiliar grammar of a strange bed, trying to read the rhythm of a house that is not my own.
It is morning, and I am suspended in the unfamiliar terrain of a strange bed, trying to read the rhythm of a house that is not my own.
Above me, a ceiling fan lazily traces circles in the shadows. Through the slatted blinds, the first silver hints of dawn begin to filter in. I am wide awake.
Next to me, J. remains lost in some distant dreamworld; a late sleeper, she will not return to the surface for at least another hour. She is rarely visited by the quiet conundrum that finds me now—this peculiar paralysis that arrives on the very first dawn of a stay in a friend's home.
In these suspended minutes, lying still beneath the sheets, I feel less like a guest and more like an intruder. I am gripped by a sudden, irrational certainty that if I rise and move, I will desecrate a sacred silence. It feels as though the objects around me—the heavy armchairs, the framed photos, the quiet floorboards—are accustomed to sleeping late, and my presence might startle them awake.
Before we retired last night, our host traced the geography of the kitchen for us, pointing out the tea, the coffee, the milk. When they asked of my morning habits and learned I am an early riser, they offered an easy benediction: “Make yourself entirely at home. Sit anywhere, do whatever you like. You won’t bother a soul.”
And I, wrapped in the easy confidence of the evening, promised I would.
But here, in the cold clarity of dawn, my evening proclamations lose their weight. Perhaps they were never anchored to begin with. Perhaps they were merely the perfunctory architecture of social grace—a courteous tête-à-tête spoken without the scaffolding of real conviction.
To step out into the hallway now feels like trespassing on the very soul of the house. I am heavy with the awareness that I do not yet belong to this space. I can almost feel the inanimate things watching me with quiet, collective curiosity, wondering who this interloper is, disturbing their peace before the day has properly begun.
A strange inversion happens when the roles are reversed.
When we are the hosts, and I am the one who wakes before our guests, my morning is spent on a gentle vigil. I find myself listening for the small stirrings of their waking, eager to ease their transition into a brand-new day. I know too well the awkwardness of navigating a new terrain, and I want to shield them from it.
On those mornings, I will make intentional, domestic noises. A soft cough, the deliberate click of a door being opened, the distinct, metallic rattle of a kettle being placed on the burner. These are not disturbances; they are acoustic flares. They are acoustic beacons sent out into the quiet hallway to let them know that someone is already awake, that the coast is clear, and that they do not have to map this strange territory entirely alone. I want to meet them at the threshold with a hot cup of coffee or tea, offering a familiar ritual to anchor a day waiting to be lived.
I know how this story ends. After a few more visits, or perhaps just a few more nights under this roof, the tension will dissolve. I will grow accustomed to the landscape, the geometry of the hallways, and the unique vocabulary of this house’s morning rituals.
But until that familiarity arrives, I choose to stay exactly where I am. I lie patiently in the dim light, listening to the house breathe, waiting for the first authentic sign that my hosts are awake—and that it is finally safe to step into the day.
Ciao, and thanks for reading.
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
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.