Riddle: How is retirement like a potted plant? We had a houseplant that was drooping sadly after years in a small hanging pot. Prune it, I said, trim off the leggy vines and give it some fertilizer. Pruning is fine, my wife replied, but it won’t work.
The problem is, the plant is root-bound. The roots are jammed in a container too small for it to grow, breathe and nourish itself. It needs repotting in a larger container.
That’s the answer! Retirement and root-bound plants both call for repotting. The pot that our childhood stuffed us into was too small for adulthood, so we repotted into a larger pot. That repotting was a complicated mess called adolescence.
When the pot of early adulthood got to be inadequate, we went through another repotting, a transition called midlife crisis. And the transition from middle age to old age can also be fraught. That transition is usually marked by “pruning” events that trim away things which have given us pleasure, identity and status until now — things we may not want to lose! Aging for Amateurs: The first day of school is a threshold to a new world Some of these prunings are physical.
We lose hearing and night vision, we can’t play as hard, we can’t jump; we become more vulnerable to illnesses or disabilities. And some of the trimming is social. Many who’ve been employed, when we retire, we lose our schedule, our sense of contribution, even our identity.
We may find that none of our friends are around anymore. Nor are our k.