Sadness of Endings

 Arun Kumar

It is Friday and the last day of the five-day meeting that started on Monday.

The past four days have been long stretches of work. We are here to put together the first draft of a guidance document on operational practices for objective seasonal forecasting.

At about 3 pm, we would start to wrap things up, begin to power down our laptops, and start to gather our phones, connectors, water bottles etc. to put them back in our bags. Soon after, it would be time to say byes, shake hands, and wish each other a safe and uneventful journey back to respective homes in different corners of the world.

It is Friday, and although I am glad the week is coming to an end, there is also a twinge of sadness inside me. It is not the first time that I have had this sentiment. This feeling is familiar to my heart.

It is the sadness of the endings, particularly of the endeavors with a successful outcome that were a result of long months of planning and hard work. When it all comes to an end there is a sense of relief that is mixed with a sense of sadness.

I have been organizing and working on this task for months before our face-to-face meeting — organizing the layout of the document, thinking about what chapters, and sections in them, are going to be. Once that was done, assigning lead and backup authors, and making sure that they were aware of what is expected.

After all the hard work we all have done, at the end of today there will be a tangible document in our hand. For sure, there will be months of reviewing and editing that will follow but I do know that the task I took on has come to an end.

In this ending there is a sense of pride of a job well done, of meeting the expectations that were placed in me, of rising to the occasion and steering the boat safely into the harbor.

In this ending there is a sadness of needing to say goodbyes to coworkers. For the last few days, a small group of us huddled together at this particular point in space. Soon that group would start to disperse, and we would go our own ways to our little universes.

The space-time diagram after 3 pm would show eight different trajectories diverging. Some of these trajectories may never cross again. It is a possibility that we may not be cognizant of now but may become aware afterwards when we look back and remember that it was that afternoon in Geneva five years back when I saw Arun the very last time. I wonder what he is up to these days.

In this ending there is a sadness that carries a hint of serenity that although I do not know what is next, at this moment all is well. Right now, there is no tear in the fabric of space and time and the future holds promises for further blessings.

And perhaps, in this ending there is a subtle premonition that just like this, life itself would be ending one day. Somewhere inside there is a softness of realization that not too distant in time my show would be over. Slowly as time marches on and that realization gets more acute, I need to start gathering my belongings or start emptying my bags, say our last goodbyes, and be ready to board the very last train.

I know the feeling of this sadness would only be temporary and would not last more than an hour. After I leave this building and head back to the hotel, soon after I would start thinking about the one last walk around Lake Geneva then come back to the room and start packing. In between I also need to decide on a place for dinner.

Soon, life in the present, as always does, will take over.

Even though the feeling would not last, but in the present, its sadness holds a sweet promise of some vague eternity that could be mine. The same promise of vague eternity that some lazy summer afternoons when everything around is quiet and occasional gust of wind feels cool against the skin, hold.

Another vivid image that comes to mind is a hall after a night of a big event (perhaps a political convention, or a marriage celebration), and in the quietness of morning the floor is littered with confetti or petals of roses. Months of preparation and hard work are now over. Soon cleaning crews would be here, and for me it would be time to move on.

Or it could be just the image of Clint Eastwood riding into the sunset but not quite knowing where to.

I wonder what others around me are feeling. Do they even have a trace of feelings that are inside me? Or they just can’t wait for the meeting to end and get out of the room and be on their way while thinking about the need to look for presents to carry back home.

Do they wonder if our trajectories would intersect again, or this was it?

Ciao.

An ice cream shake topped with caramel

It was a lot of eating
five strips of
deep fried chicken
with golden fries
sitting on the side

a piece of creamy cheesecake
followed by,
an ice cream shake
topped with layers
of amber colored caramel
running down its side.

And by jove,
it felt good,
that is,
until the moments
of reckoning

when drifting away into sleep
and getting warmed under the quilt
there was a visitation from guilt

for breaking the quest to
to be simple and be humble,
and for not staying the course
and so easily tumble.

All there was to say
that there is another tomorrow
wake up in the morning
and try to
get back in the flow.

In dreams I am a hero

 Arun Kumar

Cabo da Roca. I am told this is the westernmost point in continental Europe. It may just be a gimmick to popularize this place in travel books. A distinction a traveler can take back home and say to their friends that look I visited something unique, and now, I carry another badge of honor on my chest.

Or it may indeed be the westernmost point in continental Europe. Either way, it is a stunning place to be.

Standing high on the rocky cliff looking at the blue waters of the Atlantic, strong gusts of wind rush around wanting to lift me even higher. The blue horizon and I think I can see our home on the other side of the Atlantic.

I am glad that on the spur of the moment, while taking a trip to Cascais, I decided to come here. The rocks I stand would also be the farthest point away from home during this trip.

If you think of it, every trip away from home has the farthest point that we reach, turn back, and start the journey back to home. It is like throwing a stone up in the sky and following the laws of nature, the stone makes a graceful arch, reaches its highest point, and returns back to Earth, its home.

I am that stone.

High above the blue waters of the Atlantic, for a moment, I feel glad that I made this journey and actualized it from merely being a plan into a reality.

It is not always so. Sometimes I just keep dreams for the sake of dreaming and am in no hurry to crystallize them into diamonds they could be.

Unrealized dreams have a certain warmth to them. They can be an anchor that does not let us drift. They are the safe harbor we can fly back to when at the end of the day, the sun starts to descend. On occasions, they can be something for us to look forward to when we wake up in the morning.

During the day, they become daydreams to bring solace under the summer sky; they become fluffy clouds that float by and offer moments of shade.

Why actualize dreams when they have so much to offer. And who knows, dreams turned into reality may not be something they promised to be.

In The Alchemist there is a crystal merchant who is a middle-aged man living in Tangier and gives Santiago, the protagonist, a badly needed job. The crystal merchant’s dream is to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. However, he does not want to fulfill his dream because he thinks he would have nothing left to live for if he did go to Mecca and realized his dream.

This story encapsulates another niche of emotions dreams can fill. While dreaming, it feels like there is always something we can start tomorrow. The possibility is always there. If we actualize the dream today, tomorrow we may have to face our fears of emptiness. What next? Where do you go from here?

Perhaps, the same happens with our tendency for making endless plans and not taking the steps to lay the first few stones of what may turn out to be the next Taj Mahal. Well, not really that majestic, but still.

Somewhere, there is also a fear in taking the first step out from the dreamworld that after all, we may not be up to the task and might fail.

I want to write but feel afraid that I may not have ideas worth penning. In the end, what I will end up with would be two pages worth of mindless drivel.

Taking the first step, going from plans to taking the first step is also breaking the laws of motion — inertia. It is so much easier to keep doing what I am doing — dream — than to make a change.

In dreams and endless plans, I am a hero. In them, I do not fail. The promise of something is so much sweeter than the reality may turn out to be. Why tempt pricking the balloon?

While thinking of realizing dreams, it is easy to fall prey to the finistophobia — emotion of fear generated by anticipation of endings often followed by a sense of emptiness.

But …

…then I look back, a lesson from my own personal history tells me that taking actions often is the seed for new challenges and opens up more possibilities. Endings end up becoming new beginnings.

I need not be afraid of the prospect of emptiness. The universe offers an infinite number of challenges to pick from.

Oftentimes, finishing an article gives ideas for two more to follow.

While I stand on the edge of the cliffs at Cabo da Roca and look at the horizon far away where sky touches the turquoise water, and as the wind caresses my face, it all looks so much better than it was in my dreams.

On the journey back, I started to dream of visiting Diamond Head the next year.

One dream is realized and in its wake another dream sprouts.

Ciao.

The soft and the hard side of retirement

 

Arun Kumar

As far as I know, the wheel of life gets a single turn between birth and death, and after completing that one cycle, it self-destructs.

In doing so, the wheel goes through the innocent years of childhood, the learning years of youth followed by the years of building a career, and finally, if all goes well, then hopes of living many years enjoying a contemplative retirement.

For retirement years we nurse a dream that we would sit back, relax, and live a life on our own terms.

Perhaps we will, but only if we do spend time and effort in preparing for the outcome we dream for, thereby increasing the probability of its being realized.

It is important to recognize that the dream of spending years in retirement sitting on the porch in a rocking chair watching orange and purple sunsets is not a natural outcome of evolution that brought us here. Retirement is a modern construct and does not have any teleological reasoning to exist.

The notion of retirement is a consequence of the accelerated pace at which human evolution has progressed. By doing that, we have disassociated ourselves from the much slower pace of the process of natural selection that molds the development of our skills necessary to propagate the genes in response to the environment we live in.

Within a time span of the last 200-years or so, improvements in the basic hygiene practices, advances in medicine and vaccination, have resulted in us living much longer than our DNA and genes really require us to do.

200 years ago, the concept of retirement did not exist. How to best deal with a longer life span is something that the evolutionary process did not prepare us for. In developing skills required to have a successful retirement, we are entirely at our own wits.

A fundamental requirement that comes with living longer is a continual need for resources to keep us functioning. These resources are the calories we need to keep our cells humming. In the past this need was met by hunting and gathering. But not anymore.

In earlier days, as we got older and our limbs began to get weaker and we were no longer agile enough to surprise an impala or walk miles to forage fruit and berries at the other end of the forest, it was a call for our inevitable demise.

But now as we have evolved, the rules by which we find calories have changed. We no longer go to the forest to hunt and gather to meet our incessant need for resources. Hunting and gathering has been replaced by bartering our skills with money being the intermediary unit that facilitates the task.

Now, to meet the energy requirements for cells we need money. The rows of trees in the forest have now been replaced by the aisles in the supermarket, and instead of hunting with a bow and arrow the choice weapon is a credit card.

We now need to have money and have plenty of it to be able to realize the dreams of sitting in the rocking chair on the porch.

There is no free lunch. With an increasing life span living could be an expensive endeavor requiring lots of money.

Longevity is a double-edged sword. It is an opportunity to enjoy time, expand our horizons, re-engage in activities that may have fallen by the wayside, but doing so is going to require money to barter for calories.

Long winded story, but the bottom line is that in retirement years, to be able to meet our tangible and intangible energy requirements, we better plan to have money before we get there.

To drive the message home there is plenty of advice out there. We are told to:

● Start saving for retirement early.

● Make regular contributions from the monthly income and make that the highest priority.

● Live within the means and do not get saddled by debt.

● Invest money to make it grow not and let it get blighted by inflation.

● When investing, aim for the long term, diversify, and periodically, rebalance.

● As you get older, adjust the risk profile of the portfolio.

● Be agile and adjust as needed.

● And do not trust your gut feelings when investing. Investing is a game where not reacting to visceral feelings is a virtue.

I wonder if squirrels are given similar advice when they hoard nuts to get through the winter. Even if they are not, the advantage for them, however, is that they live through winters many times and have a chance to get it right. We do not have the same luxury of living through many cycles of the wheel of life and learn from our mistakes.

Being wise individuals, we read the books and implemented all the good financial strategies, bought a rocking chair and are all set to sit in it, blast off and enjoy the ride but…

Whenever there is a “but” at the end of a sentence, there is a possibility for a different perspective that follows.

…but then the engines sputter. It turns out that there is more to realizing the dream retirement than just money to meet our energy (physical) requirements.

Here are how the events play out for lots of people who retire.

We may not think about it but after a long career entering the last phase of life could psychologically be a seismic and a discombobulating event.

Over the years, our work and career morph into a temple of sorts. As for offerings, we give our own heart and soul on the altar. In return, the temple bestows upon us important blessings — a sense of meaning and purpose; an identity; a sense of recognition; a place to compete and be the leader of a pack; a place to belong to a tribe; a structure to our life. The list of blessings the temple of work offers is long and becomes an important religion that we follow conscientiously.

The moment of retirement is when all these blessings get taken away. The day we walk out of the temple for the last time, along with handing over the badge and the laptop, we also relinquish everything that the temple blessed us.

Paradoxically, entering retirement and in the last phase of our life, we become newborns again. Being a newborn, we are ill prepared for life ahead and find that financial preparedness is not the only thing we are going to need for a happy retirement.

We do not know how we are going to fill the discretionary time that we had looked forward to. The time affluence, suddenly, does not look so romantic anymore.

There we stand looking quite baffled, needing to build another temple with our own hands, and in there, build and install our new identity, a new purpose etc. If not prepared, building such an edifice is a daunting task.

To make matters worse, this is probably the first time in our life that we have to build a temple with our hands. It does not take too long to realize that we do not have a bricklayer’s hand. We either never had the required tools, or if did, the skills were lost somewhere in the attics of the past.

Similar to advice we are given to secure the financial side of the retirement life, would it not be good if we were also told of strategies to follow and also develop the soft side of retirement — building an identity, finding a purpose, establishing social connections, feeling needed, having some temporal structure to our days?

The good news is that there is plenty of advice out there for this also. Fortunately, the process parallels that for putting together a secure financial nest egg, sprinkled with some added condiments.

● Start early and invest regular time and effort in pondering what the post-retirement life could be like. What would we do with the sudden luxury of time affluence?

● Regularly Visualize and ponder over the psychological side if you were to the retire, for example, if suddenly work was taken away would you be able to manage?

● Before retiring, put together a portfolio of engagements and activities that you could easily slide into.

● Keep a long perspective when investing in the psychological aspects of retirement.

● As you and your attitudes change, rebalance the portfolio of engagements.

● Take some weeks off and occasionally give a test drive to the portfolio of engagements and see how they feel? Be agile and make tweaks as necessary. Live in your personal temple and see if you can breathe as easily as you are breathing now.

● And first and foremost, do not trust your gut feelings and tell yourself, nah, when time comes, you have the wherewithal to figure out what your new temple would be.

If you do, there could be a nasty surprise waiting for you. One of the rockers in the rocking chair would come with a misalignment and the chair would wobble.

Ciao.