There are differences between what I did when I worked full-time as a city manager and what I am doing as an interim manager, consultant, volunteer, writer, and podcaster. The quantitative differences are obvious. The qualitative differences are found in expanded opportunities for variety, curiosity, discovery, and learning.
I do not need to work to meet the basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. I choose to work for the challenge it offers to do more than I have already done, to enlarge my usefulness to the world around me.
There is an intellectual restlessness that draws me toward subjects about which I wish to know more. That is mostly about thinking. There is another restlessness that inspires me to accept opportunities to utilize what I know to accomplish different things than I already have.
I am not alone in experiencing this kind of restlessness, I suspect. It is what motivates the semi-nomadic careers of many local government professionals, among others. Some of us elect to work for a single community for much or all of our adult lives. More of us move from place to place, looking for new reasons to get out of bed in the morning.
I cannot assume that my more mobile colleagues share my inclination to seek out new challenges for the same reasons I do. I have known many managers who, when they reached the point at which they no longer wished to be employed in that line of work, did not hang out a new shingle. The majority, it seems, elected to pursue other ways to fill their days. They opted for retirement over repurposing. That is their right.
I opted for repurposing over retirement, for avocations over vocation. Using this language might make it seem to some that my pursuits are frivolous. It is the element of choice and the degree of control, as compared to traditional employment, that contribute to this characterization. I am living a portfolio life crafted by one who has the freedoms of old age.
A couple of years ago I thought I needed to design a business card that captured my repurposing. In the spot usually reserved for a title I listed the following: adviser, booster, facilitator, thinker, learner, teacher, writer, worker, volunteer. I also included the following quote:
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. -- e. e. cummings.
The list of roles is not inaccurate, but it is messy, overly long, and still incomplete.
The next time I have business cards printed, I think I will sum this up the following way: Explorer of New Horizons.
That feels about right. And I should know. After all, I have been revising the job description for this position every week for the last two years without knowing what to name it.
Gregg, after meeting last week and talking about our work/volunteer and for me travel post fulltime job, your blog rings true. Maybe the word "retirement" needs to be renamed. I see what we both are doing as "post fulltime work." It contains different elements which is why we both are fullfilled by it. Thanks for sharing.