Anthropologists long ago recognized that in many primitive cultures there were fixed points at which individuals passed from one age-status to another: the child passes into puberty, the adolescent into manhood or womanhood, the active adult into the elder. Each of these transitions was marked by tribal ceremonies, pleasant or painful, that marked the tribe's acceptance of the individual in his new status. These ceremonies were, long ago, given the name "rites of passage."
In our country, there have been at various times and in various classes similar rites: the boy's first long trousers; his first razor; college graduation; the debutante's "coming-out"; the celebration of marriage itself.
"Retirement" has become, in our accelerated machine culture, a "rite of passage," and, like those in other cultures, it is looked forward to with both happy anticipation and anxious dread: anticipation of the new freedom it promises; dread of the new worries it creates.
One famous recipe for retirement, for example, is that offered by a President of the United States: "You put a rocking chair on the porch, and sit in it. Then, after about six months, you--very slowly--begin to rock." Other models have been exemplified by other Presidents; and many enticing pictures of the life of retirement have been drawn by insurance and investment advertisers.But certain sobering facts remain. In the words of a recent author, "We think old people should be glad to lay down the burden of work. Turns out that retirement is our number one man killer in the mid-sixties. Medical miracles can prolong life threatened by illness; but no one has yet found the cure for retirement." The very values our society teaches us to cherish most highly-self-reliance, work and achievement, contribution to family and to society--are the ones retirement threatens. Our very identity may seem to be lost as we step off the merry-go-round of gainful employment, and face the threat of dependent idleness.Yet the wisdom, the experience, the judgment, the skill of our older persons constitute one of our greatest national reservoirs of human resource.
It will not, however, be tapped by any social miracle. Its value must be realized through (1) community and company planning, and (2) individual and group initiative.In the last decade or two, enormous amounts of study, discussion, and experiment have been devoted to the economic, social, and personal gains and losses of retirement. Labor and management alike have debated the compulsory age limit, the possibilities of job transfer, the questions of educational planning and economic cushioning. The U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has staffed a permanent committee on the matter of aging; and most large communities have committees studying its implications for them.But much--indeed most--of the job remains to be done by the individual: You. And the two most important things to recognize are these:
Gradually, just as "aging" has moved from the status of a "problem" to that of a promising achievement, so our thinking is moving from the painful prospect of "retirement from" to the more optimistic--and more important--question of "retirement to." The affirmative meaning of leisure, and the opportunities for creative personal fulfillment and service, alone or in company with others, are vital to one's planning for the later years.
The time to prepare for retirement is before the event. We begin "aging" the day we are born; and all of life is, in one sense, a training for its later years. Increasing recognition of this fact is leading to courses or units on aging and retirement in college, and even in high school, when the personal aspects of the problem pertain mostly to one's parents. Adult education, including radio and television, is putting increased attention upon the prior study of our later years.
Remarkable in our society also is the increasing gift of leisure it is making to all of us in our working years: leisure which we can, and should, use to develop, test, and practice the kinds of things we will do, and the kinds of persons we will be, after retirement comes.
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