Retirement Balance and the Value of Work

By Kathy Hendricks

For several years we lived up the road from a beautiful golf course. Because so many of its members lived in houses on its perimeter, it was not unusual to see them riding to and from the course in their golf carts. For some this is a classic image of retirement.

I can’t say it attracts me all that much. I have nothing against golf. I took a class in college and loved the sensation of driving a ball up and across an expanse of emerald-green grass. The hushed tones that accompany televised tournaments are a nice counterpoint to the boisterousness of football games and hockey matches. It’s not the game of golf; it’s the idea of not working that lacks appeal.

We have an ambivalent relationship with work in modern-day life. While often deriving our identity from “what we do,” we also make retirement – the cessation of such work – a lifetime goal. I don’t begrudge anyone the space and relaxation that retirement affords. The opportunity to spend more time doing things one loves, as well as being with family and friends, is good for heart and soul. Nevertheless, there is an intrinsic value to work, whether one is drawing a paycheck or not. This has come into sharper focus as my own retirement opens up new possibilities for both work and leisure.

As we come off of the Labor Day weekend, it is helpful to consider the place that work has in Christian spirituality as well as the value of striking a balance between work and rest. In her primer on the Benedictine Rule, author Jane Tomaine describes how it calls for “…a balance between physical activity and rest, work, and prayer, time alone and time together, work with the mind and work with the body” (St. Benedict’s Toolbox). This understanding makes retirement less a goal and more of a movement towards other kinds of labor. All of it, in the end, works together for a greater connection with the Divine and the betterment of the world around us.

Response by Barbara Anne Radtke

Thank you, Kathy for raising the question of our relationship to work. I heartily agree with your description of our attitude as ambivalent. It also prompted me to think of how often our work-life connection is off balance.

With retirement comes the realization that our work has shaped us as much as we shaped it. It has defined our schedule and dictated our family time, our leisure time, and the time we had to explore other interests or passions. It is woven deeply into our identity. Then, in retirement, we are asked to let go graciously of that which has fashioned much of our life and re-create time, meaning and purpose, and identity.

Our consideration of work-life balance has cultural dimensions. For example, a friend who lived in France for the first five years of her marriage and had her first child there, often says her time in France was her initiation to thinking differently about work. In her new milieu, vacation, days off, and parental leave were longer and more sacrosanct than she knew them to be in the U.S. In the U.S. she was complimented for “staying ahead of the game.” In France, she was known as somewhat of a workaholic.

Today, in the U.S., we are making a cultural pivot about work. Having experienced lock-down, working from home, changes in the needs of our employment, we are re-thinking our relationship to work. First there was the “Big Resignation;” now there is the movement of some to “un-retire,” not always based on financial necessity. Currently there is the tension of coming back to the office or continuing to work from remote.

This leads me to the most provocative of my reflections from your post, Kathy. Maybe one that our readers can help us with my most basic question: What makes some activity or group of activities “work”? You suggest, and it seems true, that work is more than employment. After all, unless we have outsourced some necessities, in addition to employment, we have houseWORK and yardWORK. From the beginning of our formal education, we have homeWORK. A friend spent his vacation photographing his grandmother’s needleWORK, just one aspect of her handyWORK. Is it the outcome that makes it work? The compensation? The effort? The consistency of the effort expended? I am curious what everyone thinks.