My Shrunken World

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend asked how I was doing one year after retirement. When I opened my mouth, I blurted out, “I feel my world has shrunk.”

I have no idea where those words came from for I haven’t been conscious of such a feeling in the past year. However, now that the words are spoken, their reverberations are ringing me like a bell. Suddenly I am haunted by something I had no idea existed. Since that conversation, I am spending a lot of time thinking about what I meant by that, how I feel about it, and what, if anything, I do about it.

And if I needed another mental “hello?”, my car insurance renewal papers arrived in the mail the other day and I discovered that I am eligible for the low mileage discount. I’ll get a break on my costs this year because I have driven less than a regular driver – and not just a few kilometers but a whole 30% less. Concrete, irrefutable evidence that, indeed, the circumference of my world, where I go and how I move around in it, has shrunk.

My first reaction to my own words was shock. I’ve been pretty smug about how well I’m adjusting to retirement. I have kept busy exercising, meeting friends for coffee, doing some volunteer things. I started out with clear goals for being a retired person: more writing, being with my family, and working in the garden.

The thing is, I am doing all these things and they are fulfilling, nourishing and interesting. So what I did I mean when I said “my world has shrunk?” In my head I run through the litany of retirement advice and woes. Were my goals not enough? Am I missing the social life of work? Have I lost a sense of contributing to the world in some meaningful way? Do I feel cut off from the culture at large because I have little contact with young people? Have I allowed my intellectual life to shrivel up?

While all these things probably do affect me, I wonder if in addition I am also actively choosing to shrink away from the world. In light of all the terrible happenings around the globe, the news of wars, massacres, human-caused starvation of children, sexual violence against women and children, the burning planet, the self- destruction of the US, the corruption and hatred and greed running rampant—maybe I’m deliberately pulling myself away from the awfulness of our time. I can’t really run away—where to go?— but maybe I’m curling myself up into a little ball and crouching under the furniture.

On the other hand, has my world really shrunk? Yes it has, but also it hasn’t. This summer my tiny, quarter-acre bit of the world is bursting with excess. When I look at my garden, which because of our so far (knock on wood) relatively cool, smoke-free and fire-safe summer is extraordinarily productive and gorgeous, I think there is no shrinking going on in this little patch of planet earth.

My garden is a daily explosion of colour, countless foraging critters and copious harvests of food. My yard may be small but life and vitality fill every inch—the hummingbirds dart madly into flowers and joust with each other. Butterflies land on a blossom and suck at it like some industrial oil rig.

Gangs of young house sparrows and goldfinches dodge sunflowers, trees and lethal windows. Mice sabotage my tomatoes by nibbling the nearly ripe ones. Each zinnia and dahlia bloom bounces up and down with the weight of a voracious bumble bee. Quail families produce more and more babies and lead them to their early deaths by car and coyote. Squirrels and deer and raccoons make nightly raids on our grape vines. Weirdly, as my human world shrinks, my garden world spills and overflows with beauty, life, death, survival, desire, theft, pleasure, and chance.

So, I am back and forth, yes/ no, maybe/ maybe not about my claim that I have a shrunken world. I suspect sorting out that statement will be an ongoing process for the next little while.

Meanwhile, I am fascinated by my sense of shock when I spoke those words. Clearly, lurking in my unconscious mind must be some kind of uncomfortable awareness of loss and constriction. Over a hundred years ago, bad good old Freud told us that we store an unacknowledged boatload of stuff in our unconscious, and psychotherapy developed out of his belief that “by articulating your thoughts, you could uncover these buried elements, allowing for healing and self-discovery.”

Therapists have many tools in their toolbox but language must still be one of the big ones. To name, to articulate, to realize by hearing something said is intensely powerful. A few key times in my past, I have experienced a moment of dismayed revelation when someone has said something that hits me like a lightning bolt. Decades ago, I was talking to another good friend about problems in a relationship, and she said, “It sounds like you’re experiencing abuse.” As soon as she said that, everything I thought I knew about my life shifted. Soon after, that abusive relationship ended, ever since my life has been immeasurably better, and I am eternally grateful to that friend.

Self-knowledge seems to be an endless task. Long before Freud, there was “Know Thyself,” the Oracle’s directive inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi in Ancient Greece (though Socrates is also credited with this aphorism). You’d think when you get to retirement age and you’ve done six or more decades of knowing thyself, you should be able to relax and enjoy your lattes, your trips to visit your grandkids and your lounging about reading a book in the middle of the afternoon. But no, apparently there is always more to do, maybe all the way to the bitter end when you’ve got to really, really know thou art mortal.

In the end, I can’t help but be a bit thrilled by this experience of blurting out unexpected and gong-ringing words. It’s good for a writer to be reminded of the power of naming and speaking.

Poetry, my first literary love, often slides through barriers of the busy mind to light up unconscious spaces in me. In poems, like with my friend’s question, I often get “aha” moments and sideswiping jolts.

For me, poetry, and art in general, is good practice for living through these unexpected moments of self-knowledge and new awareness. Just as any day now a friend or therapist could ask a question that shines a light onto something that can no longer be hidden, so art can burst out of its borders and tap you on the shoulder.

Apollo spoke through another Oracle, the great 20^th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his marvellous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”. In this poem, Rilke envisions how a work of art can:

… from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Now there is a directive. In art, every part of you is potentially open to an unexpected experience or shocking demand. A poem, no matter how small, never shrinks your world.

Dear Oracles of Apollo: thanks for all this, I guess. I’ll be brooding about my blurted-out words for awhile. And wondering if there is anything wrong with a shrunken world and if I really do need to change my life. Do I need to get my head out of the compost heap and crawl out from under the cupboard?

But there is no doubt that there will always be the Oracle’s prime directive. I have lots to think about as I putter about in my ever-changing garden and go for pitifully-short jaunts in my car. Know thyself, woman.