I have shied away from the word 'retirement' for a couple of years now. I think I kept part of my freelance business going purely to avoid facing up to the concept of retiring. I didn't like that idea of withdrawing from the world. It smacked of quitting, of leaving the stage.
There came the point however when I knew, to be blunt, that I just wasn't interested in the work anymore. Things I had been passionate about were boring me. Boredom may necessarily, for some people, be a way to earn a living, but it's no way to live a life.
I reached that point, and I have done the deed. I am now officially retired. I have spent days shredding un-needed paperwork and steeling myself to bin things that I know I will never look at again. Things, to be fair, that I haven't looked at in years anyway. Security blankets that I no longer need.
Clearly I'm still not comfortable with the word though, because when people ask me what I'm going to do with my retirement, I have a mini-panic moment. What? Plan? I thought the whole point now was to not have a plan? Oh dear…I don't really know.
Then, in the context of a Replenishment writing retreat we were prompted to think about how the elements manifest in us. I started with “where do you find your fire?”
And I felt not my fire but my fear.
For a long moment, my response to the question was: I don't!
I felt that I had lost my fire. It seemed the answer to my recent lowness of mood: a lack of fire.
I asked myself what I am passionate about these days and found no answer.
The calming down, the departure from the world of work, the lack of pressure, the absence of stress, the growing simplicity has dampened down my fire. Or so it felt some days. And that worried me.
Until I remembered Claire telling me how I light up when I talk about writing.
The smile arrived.
So here it is. This is my passion. My fire is in the spinning of words.
I wrote that last sentence and found another small illumination.
I had called it spinning.
Until now I’ve generally spoken about weaving words. Spinning comes before weaving. To go from weaving to spinning is to go deeper, to become more elemental about the process.
I knew instantly that I care deeply about spinning words in the other sense as well: in the sense of turning them around. I look for word-swaps that we can use to change the way we see the world and ourselves, to change how we feel, and then how we choose to live in the world.
Is this a mere attachment to an idea, or is it strong enough to call it passion?
I recognise that there is such a thing as quiet passion. Fire can be a tiny candle flame; it need not be a raging inferno. I need only keep that flame alight, tend it, make sure it is never extinguished and use it to light other candles.
A wise person once said that when one candle lights another the candle is not diminished but the light is doubled.
I see that my fire burns less fiercely these days and that can be a good thing, a less destructive thing.
If I continue to live by my mantra that my job is to make your job easier, then passing on the smallest of flames that you can tend and allow to shine in your own way is no small thing.
I can use my quiet passion to light others, or to supplement their glow. And that makes my own glimmer shine a little brighter.
So my answer is this: my fire is in the words, in my love of language, in my core belief in the power of words and how it matters SO much which ones we choose to use.
Pondering my response to this exercise, I stumbled across another flicker of something. Despite having worked through Julia Cameron's The Listening Path, I'm evidently still not listening attentively enough. I'm not listening to myself. I'm not paying attention to the stories I tell, the memories that keep nudging their way to the surface.
In the context of conversations about fuel-use, about childhood, about the weather, about all manner of things, one tiny detail kept emerging. When we were very small our council house had an open fire. When I was about five, it was replaced with a Raeburn coke fire (an enclosed stove with a back-boiler that fed the radiators and hot water system).
This threw up a whole quandary about how Santa was going to get down the chimney and whether the door could be opened from the inside, but apart from that…
The detail that was relevant in all those conversations was that these things were designed so that you could light them with the gas poker: a contraption that fed mains gas that you'd light and then place under the set fire, turn it up and wait for the fuel to catch. It meant that you could let the fire go out because you could re-light it really quickly. And that is how many people used their new central heating system. Only put the fire on when you need it.
I don't know whether it was because my dad was a boilerman, a stoker, or because of mam's heritage in the mining villages, but it didn't work that way in our house. Other than when we were away on holiday, the fire only ever went out by accidental neglect. The ethos was: keep it burning. Let it burn low, but don't let it go out. It is easier to keep a house warm, than to warm a cold one. Warm water heats up quicker than cold. Don't let the fire go out.
And besides, we proved over time that you also use less fuel that way.
This was the tale that I repeated to different people in different contexts. One or two of them must know it by heart by now.
But I clearly wasn't listening. The very simple message at the heart of this story: don't let the fire go out. Tend it. Notice it. Change the fuel if you need to. Let it burn low, or open the vents and let it burn strong and bright and hot. But pay attention to it. See how it is serving you and adjust.
This was my subconscious telling me to look to my fire. And I wasn't listening.
Thank you Spirit ~ and Jackee ~ for eventually putting the question to me much more bluntly.
As I sat in that zoom-room with other women writers, I tried to work through the other elements, but I kept coming back to this question of where is my fire?
I am pleased to have re-found it, and I am pleased it still burns as brightly as the world needs it to (even if that is 'not very') but I also take from it the lesson that my fire needs a little more tending, a little more fuel, perhaps a bit more air.
A bit more air…what would that look like? I'll let you know next week.
~ / ~
