I had an epiphany regarding retirement while planting onions today. Onions are fiddly to plant out and demand deep finger holes in the soil into which their little roots can be spread. Spring might be the right season for epiphanies, the flush of growth connecting with one’s creative spirit. Or it could just as well have been the confluence of going to a Community Art exhibition at Te Atamira yesterday and having lots of conversations that stretched my brain in regard to connections between writing, art and music.

Writing, art and music aren’t the work milieu to which I aspired when young. I was going to be a geologist because I liked collecting and I liked collecting rocks better than anything else. Mum and Dad gave me a sizeable wooden playhouse for my 5^th birthday and I made it my museum. The museum housed my horse skull, collected from a forest in which I vomited in a bout of carsickness on the way to Akaroa on Banks Peninsula. It included boa constrictor skin and alligator skin from my grandparents’ traverse of the Burman jungles in the 1930s. There were many carefully labelled rocks, using white paint and Indian ink. I laboriously recorded the details of the rocks in a hard-backed exercise book.

When asked, “What will you do when you grow up?” I said, “Geologist.” I liked having a concrete answer to the question and the positive approval I received for my answer so I stuck with it and a geologist is what I became. Long term, this has left me with an aversion to asking young people the same ‘What will you do?’ question. It risks trapping young people in a box whose dimensions and characteristics they have no measure of. I veer towards, ‘What are you interested in?’ or ‘What do you enjoy doing?’

When I say I became a geologist, I really became a research scientist. I was never a geologist in industry because my University graduations both coincided with commodities bust periods when geologists were being laid off, not hired. Then I shifted from carrying out research to helping others get funding to do research, staying in the community of scientists but moving away from having my own practice. In my cohort of scientists, the book end of the ‘What will you do?’ question is now being asked … ‘When will you retire?’.

In the same way that child me never saw marriage as a milestone in my future, I have never seen retirement as a milestone. I see time like a set of piano keys, stretching forward and backwards, changing in scale depending on the timeframe I’m considering. I recently learned this is a form of kinaesthesia (funny, I thought everyone had their own visual concept of time). On my mental piano, there has never been a standout key sounding, “Retire now.” While I like and remain good at my work, why would I stop?

Not to mention that paid work (or volunteer work using the same skill set) is only one of a suite of activities I undertake, so retirement from it would only minorly change my life. Every day I need to apportion time between paid work, physical exercise, seasonal garden tasks, music practice and performance, creative writing, reading, talking with Chris, stroking the cats. Everything’s important and a meeting with myself, or a friend, is as significant as a meeting with a ‘client’.

However, my particular epiphany over the onions, was that people who practise creative arts as their raison d’être – music, art, writing – never retire, as such. I don’t think anyone’s asking Margaret Atwood when she will retire. Pablo Casals famously said, ‘To retire is to begin to die.’ Practising creative arts is intrinsic to how and who you are. And, critically, practising many creative arts can be done for little money – most creative artists have a lifetime of practising making do with very little income! Science, on the other hand, is an increasingly expensive occupation. Long gone are the days of gentleperson scientists roaming the hills on their horse making observations which they wrote up laboriously with ink pens (although Darwin was reliant on someone else paying for the expensive boat trip he went on and many early science observers were independently wealthy). Science now requires laboratories, huge digital libraries, large pieces of equipment costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, field excursions with a fleet of people and vehicles.

The result of this dichotomy is that, not only do practitioners of the creative arts want to continue their art practice as they age, they can continue. Whereas scientists must contemplate the point at which they will no longer be able to find the money to provide the resources they need, even if they would like to be able to continue scientific discovery.

Was my subconscious sending me a message during COVID when I started my blog and songwriting? Was it saying, “Start transitioning to creative arts, because they’ll provide you a forever purpose while science will one day leave you behind?” As much as I’m no adherent of any religious text, the sentiments of Ecclesiastes 3 can make sense: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Godtube [!] says that this means whatever God takes us through has purpose. I say it means find what’s right for you at this time of life, then get on and do it.