"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.’” - Margery Williams from "The Velveteen Rabbit”

Today, I find myself reflecting on endings and beginnings. Mostly, I’m thinking about the process of wrapping up my decades-long career in IT. As I do, I think about how I am planning for what I hope will be a long and fulfilling retirement. Soon, I will begin talking more directly with retired friends and loved ones about their experiences, and my plans, and I look forward to benefiting from their perspectives.

I find myself thinking of this final year as the last lap of a race I’ve been running. It is interesting for me to notice how I feel as I pass each annual milestone one last time, wrap things up and prepare for what’s next. If I think of the “race” as one that I will win or lose, and for which there is a prize to be won at the end, the analogy isn’t very apt. Instead, I think of my friends who are runners and who enjoy the training for, and running of, their races. For them the goal is more to thrive in the process and to strive to do their best. That’s the kind of race I’ve been running and the finish line is coming into sight for me just up ahead. I don’t expect to win, and I don’t see any prize. This race has allowed me to earn the reward of a good living for my family all along the way and I will be deeply satisfied to finish it honorably.

I am in the midst now of the last summer I will spend as an IT manager for the university. I’m working for the last time to support the staff who work for me as they re-image our computer labs, make sure faculty have the technology they need, and prepare for new faculty to join us in the fall. The staff supporting the administrative divisions are managing updates to technology, and refreshing systems for some of our colleagues. Everyone seems to be part of supporting temporary moves to allow for remodeling and maintenance work in campus buildings, and adapting as we replace infrastructure and upgrade services. It’s one of the busiest of all our busy times.

In the midst of all this, we are working through our annual budget update, I am supporting what I hope will be my last audit here, managing one of the large projects, and participating in several others. We have already begun taking steps to prepare for the busiest time of all as we ready our systems, and ourselves, for the start of the fall semester. I won’t miss the stress and deadlines of these times and I think I will feel relieved to see them completed just once more. I will not miss rising early to report for work at 7 am during our summer hours. I am beginning to decline meetings being proposed for next year after my planned retirement date, and I am enjoying that!

What I will miss most is the people. I have had the great pleasure of working with a team of dedicated, hard-working, intelligent, and creative colleagues. Early on, I was a member of that team working to deliver the best IT capabilities for the university. Since I became a manager, I’ve seen my role more and more as being “a person who takes care of the people who take care of the computers.” I’m proud to part of a leadership team here where I have deep respect and admiration for every other member of that team. I know I’ve done my best for our people and I also know how much I appreciate their grace and patience when my best wasn’t all they hoped it could be. I will be ready to pass the responsibility of caring for them on to my successor when the time comes. It’s been very satisfying to be useful and make a difference here and I’m also ready to move on.

All my life, I have struggled with some amount of loneliness and some self-doubts. Much of the stress I’ve felt in my career has been the result of the gap between my own high expectations of myself and my ability to meet these. They say “it’s lonely at the top” and I imagine they’re right. I’ve never been at the top, but the closer I’ve gotten, the more conscious I’ve been of this loneliness. I am hopeful that I’ll feel more comfortable in retirement with fewer external demands from a smaller set of people! I’ve been reading Ian Brown’s “Sixty” lately and I don't think I agree with Brown that getting older is necessarily a process of getting lonelier. I think this can, and does, happen but I don't think it has to. To me it seems that the elders who work to stay engaged with family and community have less of this accumulating loneliness. I will strive to be one of these.

I do expect that one transition I will experience as I move on to the next phase of my life is that I will focus more on the spiritual in a search for inner peace. Even when I was a boy, I was interested in how various spiritual traditions and philosophies suggest we should live, and in how similar this guidance is from most of those. The common idea that we need to find a place of inner peace and proceed from there feels right to me. I’ve written about the Hindu Ashram system of life stages before and I very much like that they call this next stage in my life Vanaprastha (वनप्रस्थ) which can be translated from the Sanskrit literally as "retiring into a forest". I’ve found that meditation, mindful moments, and time in nature help a lot for me in seeking peace, as does remembering happy times, and I plan to devote more time to these activities.

Moving from a stage of life where the vast majority of my time has been focused on the needs of the university, and of the people and teams I’ve lead there, to a new stage where I can focus more time and energy on being my best self, and with the most important people in my life, my loved ones, will be wonderful.

Looking back, I’m proud of the race I’ve run, and glad that I ran it in a way that reflects who I genuinely am. I can see times of growth and joy, and times of struggle and pain. Races are like that. Looking forward I see about ten more months of running the best race I can and then embracing what is on the other side of the finish line. I may come back to do some work at the university if there is a place for me to work part time, and they see a way for me to contribute. I think doing this for the next couple of years might help me shift gears in a healthy way.

There are more milestones yet to pass on this last trip around the sun as a full-time employee at the university. I look forward to turning over my current role to my successor once they are hired, to the start of two more semesters, the holidays, and one more graduation. I am advised that the holidays will feel like a busier time of year, instead of a break, once I am retired! I hope I will make it to the end of my career making the right kind of difference for our team and the people I serve, and that I will walk away essentially satisfied with the contributions I’ve made.