Yes, I do. I enjoyed all 43 years of my professions and I remember being dragged away from the last while kicking and screaming. My body, they said, was no longer reliable to do the real work I loved. Ha. I could still cycle one hundred miles in a day, I could press over 200lbs comfortably, I could go without a night’s sleep at full speed and my mind was still 100%. But my medical record stated otherwise, so I had to take a desk position or go. I became despondent for a time as for the first time in my life I felt unnecessary.
So, one day I went sailing. I went sailing and I never came back. I sailed mostly alone for a couple years to islands and other continents. And today I’m doing precisely what I want to do on somebody else’s ranch with my horse and dogs and my boat in the harbor below waiting for the odd charter. It turned out alright. I’m necessary to the animals on this land. They’re good people and we get along well.
And now I’m no longer nostalgic when I think about all those Sunday evenings spent in mild anxiety, prepping for all those Mondays when I would have to face over 100 urgent emails from various authorities much higher than I, see patients—the best part of my day—then spend my afternoons in documentation and case management meetings. And suddenly, out of the blue, I would get a call to fly off to some flood, hurricane or earthquake disaster zone—which was the very best part of all. That was what I worked for. The ultimate bus-man’s holiday.
I am no longer leashed to a cell phone, or a computer console and nobody makes urgent demands upon me. It’s strange how we, kicking and screaming, must discipline ourselves in our early years to the workday grind and then 40 years later we kick and scream when we get the gold watch. It’s all so unnatural, but we learn to love it. It becomes our identity. And when the time comes, we are as lost as sheep dogs without sheep.