cynicism

For ten years I want to retire. I slump at my desk at EACH in 2006 and 2007 wanting work to end and something else to begin. I see myself pottering around the garden, cycling every day, writing and reading as I choose. I want to leave the world alone and hope it lets me be. But the chance of retirement is nil because, well, I have no money and scant super.

While I work in Bendigo my mortgage recedes like the tide. Visions of books and bikes dance on the screen of my closed eyelids. As I close on 60 and the end of my contract at St Luke’s draws nigh, the prospect that retirement might inexorably engulf me looms. The choice of time and place might not be mine.

My contract does end and I explore the possibility of sliding into retirement, coupling a bit of self-employment with volunteerism. It means choosing relative poverty. But when I crunch the numbers, retirement comes literally to nothing, no money, life as I know it grinding to an unentertaining halt.

I resign myself to five more years in the paid workforce. In the two months since my contract ends I look at countless jobs in the paper and on the web. I apply for three: two I don’t want and the rejection letters get me fist-pumping.

Then along comes a job that I genuinely desire as MindMatters project officer: it incorporates everything I’ve learned in my working life. It entails three things I regard as anathema: working in Melbourne’s CBD, working full-time (and then some), wearing more upmarket attire than I’m used to, but I can do these things.

What’s going on here? Far from embracing retirement, I’m hankering after a big job, a tough job.

I realise that it’s not retirement I’ve been wanting, just a job that inspires me. I’ve been chasing my tail for years. The challenge of new roles—publications, youth mentoring—moves the blood but fades quickly as a gnawing sense of the futility of contract work in community health and welfare gets to me.

I do good things with people and programs but always with a feeling that little worthwhile will endure. Government departments will cruel my legacy. What is learned in this funding cycle will be unlearned in the next. Ten years hence parent drug education, or youth mentoring, or whatever, will be flavour of the month again at the whim of some politician, and the squeaky wheel will come full circle.

I won’t be around to see it. But I will say I told you so.

Rock on.