On being retired

Reflections on the ashramas

Photo by Mehdi Mirzaie on Unsplash

My junior year of college I took a course entitled “Hinduism.” As you might expect from the title, it explored the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent. I was fascinated, having had very little exposure to any religious ideas outside of evangelical Christianity. In particular, I found the concept of the ashramas or stages of life very compelling.

In traditional Vedic religion there were four such stages. The first stage, Brahmachyarya, focused on education and moral formation during the first 25 years of life. The second stage, Grihastha, constituted the married life of a householder from age 25 to 50. Work, wealth generation, and child-rearing are the priorities, as well as supporting elders in the later stages of life.

In the third stage, Vanaprastha (forest dweller), household responsibilities are taken over by the next generation, allowing one to gradually withdraw from social life to focus on spiritual liberation from age of 50 to 75. We might think of this as retirement, but with a decidedly eremitic quality. Think more wilderness hermitage rather than canasta and golf at The Villages in Florida. In the last stage, Sannyassa, the final years of life are to be spent as a wandering ascetic, detached from material desires and entirely focused on being a living example of spiritual freedom and inner peace.

Granted, this idea of life stages is aspirational and was almost exclusively available to men of the Brahmin class. But it provides a framework for thinking about how to balance different priorities and values over the course of life. At its best, it offers a vision of the good life and informs social and economic structures that make it possible.

While spirituality is a component of every stage of life, the Vedic ideal allows for varying intensities of religious practice at different stages. It also recognizes that the good life includes the opportunity to focus increasingly on spirituality in the second half of life. This allows us to imagine “retirement” in new-old ways that can make it a more fulfilling experience.

The word “retire” comes from the Franch retirer, meaning “to withdraw” or “draw back.” Its earliest usage was in a military context, signifying retreat to a safe place. It came to refer to withdrawing from society – going into seclusion for a temporary period (going on a retreat, as we now say) or simply going to bed for the night. By the 17^th century it acquired the meaning of withdrawing from one’s occupation. It is only with advances in life expectancy and the development of modern pension systems that “retirement” took on the meaning of a more-or-less permanent, post-work phase of life in the West.

In modern Western society, we are completely preoccupied with wealth accumulation and social prestige. Our identity is entirely defined by productivity and its value as reflected by society. The student and householder stages loom large, and are nearly devoid of moral and spiritual formation. There is precious little time or energy to cultivate an inner life and spiritual freedom. Economic utility crowds out every other value.

If and when one is able to retire, the end of working life can seem like an abyss that needs to be filled with new and more external activities. We have to stay busy! The Vedic ideal of the Vanaprastha stage invites us to recover this older understanding of retirement as temporary withdrawal from society. It can be a time for cultivating a rich inner life, rather than escaping into new forms of entertainment, distraction, and busyness. This includes taking time for critical reflection on our identity and attachments, confronting the shadow-side of our psyches that needs integration and healing, and cultivating our capacity for solitude.

The shift here is from “doing” to “being.” It is less about being “productive” and more about the inner, alchemical work of generating the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. At a spiritual, energetical level, the focus is on the transmission of these qualities into the cultural atmosphere, providing desperately needed nutrients for our collective spiritual health.

Rather than filling our lives with more, we can begin to empty them in order to create space for the cultivation of awareness, wisdom, and presence. The quality of our being can be a blessing that is generative in ways that far exceeds the quantity of our doing. Time, attention, silence, and stillness are the conditions that foster this inner work. Far from being selfish, retirement in this sense is a withdrawal from society in the service of the very qualities of life that make society sustainable, just, and meaningful.

Retirement is not an end in itself. The Vanaprastha stage leads to the Sannyassa stage, a re-entry into social life as an icon of spiritual freedom embracing human vulnerability, entrusting one’s self to the care of God and of others. There is no longer anything to defend or protect. We “return” from our “retreat,” ready to face death with a radiant joy that inspires generosity and hope in those still working in the earlier stages of life. In Christian terms, we enter into eternal life, the life that really is life, resurrection life; before, not after, we die.

We die before die, in the service of life. That is an ideal of retirement worth embracing.