Edging towards retirement

My new classes have got off to a good start. Once again.

This year, after ages, I have shut off one batch. That's a beginning. As I have been meaning (and threatening) to do over the last few years, I intend gradually to reduce more batches, until by 65 (God willing) I am working only five days a week. After more than forty years non-stop at it, I shall have earned it, surely? Millions of people never work more than five days a week in all their lives, and some of them tell me they are bone weary after earning their living for only five years!

The threat is now beginning to work in earnest. Only minutes ago the mother of a current pupil rang up to say that I absolutely MUST carry on at least until her younger child is through. I have heard this hundreds of times before. So I laughed, trying to mask my irritation. There will be children and children forever ... how long must I continue? how long can I? Who thinks about me? Don't I have a right to retire, like everybody else? And besides, the harsh truth is that within a few years the same people will forget  that I even existed. That is the rule of the world. They will find a substitute, for better or for worse. Who remembers the legendary Father Gilson today, except for a few oddballs like me? Given how 'busy' and distracted people are these days, very few of even my favourite ex students are likely to recall me ten years after I am gone the way my generation and older ones used to recall their old favourite teachers long gone.

Maybe I shall make a rule for the last few years ... that only  kids from families which have sent at least one student earlier to me will be taken in (there are families which have sent me six or seven!), and maybe a few others strictly by lottery while there are still a few vacancies? I should like to see how that works.

I would have liked, in my older years, to have kept in touch with a lot of interested people via the internet, especially through this blog, and maybe through platforms like YouTube. That, I have decided with a sigh, is not to be. It may also be that some old boys and girls, including my daughter, would find me work to do that I can go on doing from home, at my workstation. I have been used to 'work from home' since long, long before that idea came into vogue (it was the norm for aeons before the Industrial Revolution came along, but who cares about history?)

Otherwise, being the kind of private person that I am - many people do not know this - I should prefer to keep my own company and counsel for the most part. That would be vanaprastha enough for me. Only those people should keep visiting who know deep at heart that I am always glad to see them. 

In continuation of something that I wrote in a recent post, our times will probably be remembered as a period when for most people, nothing really happened. What I meant was, I see that events all around us leave so little mark on our memories and psyches that it really seems nothing matters for more than a day or two, maybe a month or two, any more. Even apparently deep, private griefs are forgotten with astonishing, not to say shameful speed. That is the price we are paying for hankering after sensation and spectacle and novelty every waking hour of the day. The more 'exciting' things happen, the more ephemeral they become. 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality', said the poet.