Not the Retiring Type
They’re all over the place, aren’t they? I mean professionals who just never retire. Mick Jagger is 80, Joe Biden is 80, Donald Trump (who rages that Biden is “too old”) is a mere 77. Queen Elizabeth II was 96 when she passed, still serving her country to the end.
Elton John is 76, Paul McCartney is 81, Stevie Wonder is 73. Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Judi Dench, Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Helen Mirren, and Harrison Ford are all over 80, and at the time of writing, still “at work”.
Ottawa’s unequaled Gordon Henderson practiced law until his untimely death at age 81, and his colleague down the street, John Nelligan, practiced well into his 90s.
This is not to get into the wrangle whether one or another of these is or was “too old”, rather, just to come to grips with the fact that many artists and other professionals simply never retire. And more important, let’s think about why that is the case, and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I think it comes down to three things: necessity, duty, and joy.
Some never retire because they can’t. Leonard Cohen continued to tour into his 80s, partly because he enjoyed performing and loved his audiences, but in larger part because he couldn’t afford to retire. When he was 70 he learned that his long-time trusted financial manager had bilked him out of nearly everything, and as a self-employed professional, he had no employer pension. He did what he had to do, and went back on the road. And wrote some of his best stuff.
It used to be said that British barristers “lived well and died poor”, simply because they spent all they earned, and more. The bitter truth of the professions is that it’s altogether too easy to do this, coming to an age when all your friends and family are retiring on nice employer pensions, and you can’t.
Queen Elizabeth could have abdicated years, decades, before her death, but didn’t. Without parsing her reasons, she felt that her presence was critical to the wellbeing of her subjects, and she kept up a robust schedule until just a few years before her death. Duty.
Hazel McCallion served as mayor of Mississauga, Ontario until past her eighty-eighth birthday (and lived nearly a further twenty years). The former women’s professional hockey player and engineer was always a force of nature, and saw it her duty to remain mayor until she was nearly ninety, because it was the right thing to do for her community. Duty. And she also admitted to enjoying it.
Many professionals, especially those in the creative arts and in leading edge science, law, and other fields of exploration, don’t retire for the simple reason they’re having too much fun. Gordon Henderson, by way of example, went into the office until almost his last day, gleefully working the halls, discussing cases, tactics, and trends in the law with senior partners and articling students alike, splashing his love of the law around like some kind of legal holy water.
So there you have it. Some carry on because of the joy, some because of duty, and some because they have to earn their daily bread.
But that’s not the last word. The last word is “choice”.
No professional and no artist should ever have to be grimly chained to the slave-galley bench until their cold and lifeless body is thrown overboard. That’s why it’s so important for professionals to be in the center of their Giftings and for professional firms to be leveraging these. Enjoying what you do, and being fairly compensated, is key.
Key not just for today, but for tomorrow.
Do we need to talk?