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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Sienes: There's life after retirement
By Cris G. Sienes
Different Strokes
IS THERE life after retirement? You bet there is. We can't just stop living simply because we've retired from our life's work. Life, like a stream, goes on. So we must also go on living until the Gray Angel comes to claim us.
When I returned to my DSWD home office from the Office of the President for Mindanao, where I was detailed for several years, I had only a few years left in the government service. So I started preparing for my retirement.
My impending retirement from the government service made my mind pregnant with one burning thought: I would finally be able to rest from my work and from all my travels and get to enjoy moments of blessed idleness, of sweetly doing nothing but chasing rainbows or watching clouds go drifting by.
A sedentary job I've always hated, the kind, which would keep me a virtual prisoner within the four walls of an office and pin me down behind an office table all day long. I felt that with such kind of a job, I would suffer early from my asthenia or grow old fast, maybe even have a heart attack. Thank God I was spared from such a job in the government service.
In the government service I was assigned tasks which kept me picking up my toes most of the time. For instance, as the designated action officer of the DSWD under the Complaints and Investigation office of the President, I traveled frequently to look into complaints and irregularities in our different DSWD provincial, city and municipal branch offices in Region 11.
At other times, because it was part of my functions, I traveled for days or weeks assessing and evaluating our day care workers and day care centers all over Region 11. Likewise, as administrative officer and chief of the general services division, I headed our DSWD audit and inventory team, which conducted yearly audits of all our DSWD provincial, city and municipal branch offices in Region 11. Region 11 then still included Surigao del Sur, South Cotabato and Sarangani. So imagine visiting each and every province, city, and municipality in the region. We traveled for months.
But if I traveled a lot for my DSWD home office, I traveled even more when I was detailed at the Office of the President for Mindanao. My travels covered not only Region 11 but also other regions in Mindanao.
Modesty aside, I enjoyed the full trust and confidence of then Presidential Assistant for Mindanao Paul G. Dominguez. I attributed this to the fact that I taught him at the Ateneo de Davao High School. So I was assigned various tasks: presidential visits, disasters, flagship projects of the President, veterans, GSIS and SSS benefits, audit of the President's calamity funds, labor disputes, public assistance, ancestral lands, and others. So I traveled most of the time.
Although weary and way-worn after every trip, I welcomed all my travels. My travels took me to places all over Mindanao that I had never been to before. They gained for me new friends and broadened my outlook in life. More importantly, they gave me ample opportunities for appreciating and enjoying the quiet compensations of nature in God's great outdoors.
For instance, sitting on a windswept shore and watching the marvelous pageantry of colors as the sun goes down can be a more rewarding and exhilarating experience than sitting in an office and listening to the irritating hum and screech of computers or the monotonous tick, tack, tack of typewriters. The sight of rain drifting across hazy mountains or a swarm of yellow butterflies flitting over a meadow under the white coruscating silence of noon can do wonders to a heart weary of the ennui and boredom of casual and importunate office contacts.
Still, the thought of my impending retirement and of complete freedom from my work and from all my travels made me anticipate uninterrupted moments of carefree relaxation and idleness with opium-eating eagerness. But now that I've retired, I've come to realize that I was wrong. Dead wrong.
When you're used to hard work and frequent travels, simply doing nothing engenders boredom and dysphoria. I'm now missing my work, my travels, my friends, and all the fair and beautiful places that I can now visit only in my dreams. If I can only remount the river of my years!
Thank God I write a column for this paper. Writing kills boredom; otherwise boredom will kill me.
Point to ponder: "Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works, which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility." (Emerson: Society and Solitude)
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (March 16, 2005 issue)
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