Retire? I think I’ll just retread.

In a short while I shall be crossing the demographic threshold of seniority. It’s the time of life when people generally take stock of their professional and personal past and smile wistfully, or so the Instagram world would have us believe. But here I am sitting at my study table surrounded by handouts from three different courses I am enrolled in concurrently. I’ve been a writer by profession but the only writing I have done for the past couple of months has been assignments. Written by hand. My handwriting has improved tremendously as have certain other skills. Such as walking into a classroom, flashing my best smile and repeating, “Hi, the faculty should be in any minute, I’m a student; like you.”

Sure, I’m basking in the incidental halo of a back-to-school high for a senior. Yet, at my study table I’m struggling with Spearman’s rho which I learn can be used at those times when Pearson’s correlation coefficient cannot be used. I’ve actually enrolled for a postgraduate degree in Psychology that will help me understand human beings better so someone please tell me why statistics is a compulsory subject on the syllabus. “So that your psychological test results can be scientifically validated and so that your assessment does not fall in the realm of 'it looks like you may be'...” the faculty explained to me kindly.

I take the point because, of late, I’ve been aware that nothing is what it appears to be. Take retirement, for example. The UN defines a country as “ageing” or “greying nation” where the proportion of people over 60 reaches 7 per cent to total population. In 2011 India has exceeded that proportion (8.0 percent) with 10.3 crore seniors and is expected to reach 12.6 percent in 2025. With mortality rates going down life expectancy has gone up. For women it has risen from 66.1 years in 2001-05 to 69.6 years now and is expected to cross 72 years by 2021-26. Ditto for men.  So at 50, you can expect to have 30 more years in your third phase of life and the concept of retirement as we knew it has been turned on its head.

Our second careers begin at the age that our parents walked out of their’s with the mandatory “wrist watch” in the time-honoured tradition of saying farewell to a retiring employee. More often than not second careers are also meant to give ourselves a second chance at working in a passion area that we either could not or did not choose when we joined the workforce. A schoolmate of mine teaches soft skills to underprivileged youth and S Krishnaswamy, the founder of the counselling skills course at Samadhan, Bangalore, is into his second career as well after “voluntary retirement from an insurance job”.

A second career calls for re-skilling ourselves in areas totally foreign to us, such as Statistics in my case. And while I never cease to complain about crunching numbers, my plastic brain is actually firing up a whole new set of neurones and hard-wiring areas that hadn’t known they existed. Scientists now say that the brain continues to reshape itself when it encounters new learning, even something as silly as a card trick. And when done over a period of time even hearing, memory and hand movements are known to improve.

Transactional Analysis (TA), a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth pioneered by Eric Berne explains this with the Cycles of development theory. Pamela Levin who explored this theory of  TA says each individual goes through seven stages of development roughly correlating to biological age as follows: Stage 1: Being - (0 to 6 months); Stage 2: Doing (6 months to 18 months); Stage 3: Thinking (18 months -3 years); Stage 4: Identity (3 years – 6 years); Stage 5: Skills (6 -12 years); Stage 6: Integration (12-18 years); Stage 7: Recycling - the rest of our lives.

What is interesting for seniors here is that when one cycle is over we begin a whole new cycle all over again. So if you deduct 19 (the age at which a new development cycle begins) from 60 (your age at retirement) then you are at Stage 4 – Identity. Bingo! Now I get it; that’s where a bunch of us from this generation are headed – recreating an identity that’s quite possibly not just different from what we were but also different from the transgenerational script of ageing as we have introjected it.

Look around you, there are more seniors on domestic and international flights than you ever saw before. They are giving themselves permissions to travel, learn new skills and practise new professions.

If all of this somehow sounds idyllic, let me confess it’s sheer agony. You will be required to burn the midnight oil and end up compensating for it by taking a power nap at high noon. But you can live with this. The worst of it is when you see people around you racing ahead and here you are in Kindergarten so to speak. Your new co-workers or class mates may be discussing their glowing annual appraisal reports while you may be struggling with getting your head around a key concept in your field of learning.

It was, for me a loooong moment of pause. It’s not that I have been shortlisted for the Pulitzer or the Man Booker; yet. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t coincidence that as I looked up from my slumped perch on the sofa my gaze rested on my first original abstract work that I had hung up just a few days ago. Why this should be important to me is because when I had walked into my fine arts hobby class at the Chitrakala Parishat, Bangalore, six years ago, I could not draw a straight line to save my life.

As I struggled with understanding perspective, Nithin Muralidharan, the faculty, said to me: “You’ll get this Ma’am, don’t worry.” Miraculously, I did. I’m still not Raza or Gaitonde, but thank you Nithin. You just reiterated what we as human beings should just ‘know’ - getting the perspective right is also about looking at your life in the right light.

Such self strokes are far too rare. And often I wonder if all is okay with me or I’m signing up for insanity. I mean if the whole quest of human life is ‘Being’ can we just skip a few stages and zip back to this stage without too much discomfort? The mystics knew something about this. Ahh the mystics! May be that ought to be my next stop... I can hear my husband groan at yet another shopping trip for Nirvana...

I’m beginning to feel like Dorothy Parker, the American writer, who said it best, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Don’t we all?