Ithaca or What Comes Next?

 

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would never have taken the road.

But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.

With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience

you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

 

 

This poem of the modern Greek poet Cavafy is one of my favorites; I printed it years ago and it remains posted on the bulletin board over my desk at the office.  The city of Ithaca is both the place of departure and the goal of that prototypical wanderer in all of us, Odysseus.  In the poem, Cavafy warns Odysseus to pray that his road be long, his adventures many and, perhaps most importantly, not to rush the return journey.  The stanza above is a further warning to Odysseus not to return with concretized expectations about what he will find when he finally pulls into the harbor of his homeland.  In short, the poem tells us that perhaps the goal of the journey was the journey itself.   

 

Likewise, as I scan the horizon of my impending retirement, and as I consider the recent retirement of one of my oldest friends (shout out to Sandra!), I find myself meditating on what the journey has been all about, what expectations I am clinging to regarding what retirement will look like when I finally land on its shores, and perhaps most importantly, what arrival at the actual destination of retirement will bring.  An extended dream vacation?  A late life crisis?  The time and energy for more meaningful endeavors?  Depression stemming from the recognition that the incoming tide might, on any given day, bring illness and even death, at a time when I envision only freedom? 

 

Let's face it:  for those of us who are looking at retiring near or at the age of 60 or thereafter, the journey of retirement is simultaneously the journey into our old age.  While I have devoted much time and psychic energy in the past couple of years or so to planning--psychologically, financially, and spiritually--for my retirement, I recognize that retirement signifies not the end of the journey, but the start of a new leg of the journey.  Yes, I will take time to celebrate having made it through Dante's dark woods of midlife, and I will certainly take the time to decompress and reorient my energies.  But then the work must resume.  For me, that will involve letting go of my identification with the successes of my career, letting go of my children (a tough one that), and devoting serious time to the odyssey of my own creativity. 

 

Most importantly, however, will be accepting the mystery inherent in the journey to come.  I am re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  In exploring mystery as it is involved in different ways of seeing, Dillard writes the following:  

 

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . .  "Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

 

Grappling with the mystery, for me, means continuing to take responsibility for myself and recognizing that whatever path I take, the one taken by others is not necessarily for me.  This, in turn, means truly grasping and living the reality that what I am ultimately seeking lies within, not outside of me.  As the Grail legend admonished, it is "a shameful thing to take the path others have trod."