Unbecoming — to Live with More Meaning

A reflection on retirement, identity, and starting again

For thirty-six years, my days had a structure. I’d be up in the morning for my routine and ready for the unexpected. The phone will ring many times, making it difficult to attend to my personal work and my emotional connection with my children. Walking into the office, people stood up when I walked into the room. My word moved decisions across the lives of many.

And then, one day, it all just stopped.

There was a farewell, of course. Garlands, speeches and gifts. Some said, “We will miss you” Another comment I heard was, “The institution will miss you,” and I think they meant it. I smiled, shook a lot of hands, and drove home.

And the next few days were relaxing and resting. But slowly, a different kind of void was making space for itself.

The Silence After the Summit

No structure for the day, no to-do list, no targets. No phone ringing. Nobody is waiting for a decision that only I could make. I woke up at the time I used to — pure habit — sat at the breakfast table, and realised, almost with a jolt: I had absolutely nowhere to be.

It’s a strange kind of grief. Nobody really prepares you for it. It’s not the grief of losing a person — it’s the grief of losing a self. The self that had a designation, a desk, a purpose stamped into every single hour of the day. I’d spent more than three decades climbing toward responsibility. And now here I was, sitting in my own living room, feeling like I’d fallen — not slowly, but all at once — from the summit straight down to the floor.

The days just blurred together. I’d walk up to the window, look out, and walk back. Pick up the newspaper, put it down without reading a word of it. Old colleagues called less and less — their world had simply moved on without me, the way a river moves on without the rocks that once shaped its path. And I remember thinking, almost embarrassed to even admit it to myself — who am I, if not what I did?

It would have been very easy to just stay there. Honestly, a lot of people do.

A Different Question

But somewhere in all that stillness, a quieter voice started speaking up. Not loud. Not urgent. Just persistent. And it asked me a different question. Not “what have I lost” — but “what have I never had time for?” and with my knowledge, wisdom, finances, health and time available at my disposal, what best can I do for myself and for others for which I never had time.

I started thinking about all those years I’d spent managing people. Calming down a junior officer who was panicking. Listening to a colleague quietly confess his huge work pressure and inability to cope with the pressure. A few cases of their personal life filled with troubled relationships. Mediating disputes that were never really about land— they were about pride, about fear, about grief. I realised I had always been good at sitting with people in their hardest moments. Nobody had ever taught me that. I’d simply learned it — the way you learn a forest. Slowly. By walking through it, year after year.

So, at an age when most people are told to slow down, I enrolled to study something I had never formally studied in my life: the psychology of the human mind.

It was humbling in a way that command never was. I sat in classrooms with students decades younger than me, taking notes, struggling at first to unlearn the certainty that had served me so well in the field — but worked against me in psychology, where the answer is rarely some clean, straightforward directive. I studied late into the night, the way I once studied— except now the terrain was grief, trauma, positive psychology, the whole architecture of a person’s inner world.

And slowly — so slowly I almost didn’t notice it happening — that floor I’d fallen onto stopped feeling like the bottom. It started feeling like ground. Solid. Something I could actually build on. I started feeling youthful and vibrant with young colleagues, who were so eager to connect with me because of the depth and wisdom that I could put into the new knowledge we were reading and absorbing. This new knowledge, seen through my decades experiences I life really produced something about which even I was wondering. After completing my post-graduation in Psychology, I registered for some more certificate courses to upskill myself in certain therapeutic tools, which I am continuing.

Building My Own Desk

I didn’t go back to some desk that someone else had built for me. I built my own. First, just a few sessions. Then a small practice. Then workshops — for the very kind of people I used to be: officers, executives, the quietly exhausted, the ones who look completely composed on the outside while they’re unravelling within. And I kept studying even as I kept practising, because I’d learned something important in that long, hollow year after retirement — a life doesn’t end when one chapter does. It only ends when you stop learning.

I remember the first time someone sat across from me, eyes wet, and said, “I don’t know why I feel so lost.” And for a moment, I didn’t say anything. Because I knew exactly what that felt like. I’d sat in that very same lostness — alone, in my own home — for the better part of a year. I knew the particular silence of a phone that just doesn’t ring. I knew what it was to look in the mirror and not quite recognise the man looking back, because the title, the desk, the purpose had all quietly walked out the door without me.

So I didn’t offer that person advice first. I offered recognition. I know. I’ve been there too. And something in the room softened.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

That, I’d come to realise, was the real gift hiding inside everything I’d lost. Command had taught me how to be obeyed. But those empty years afterwards taught me how to be present — fully, quietly, without rushing to fix anything in the first five minutes. It was a harder lesson than anything I’d learned in thirty-six years of service. And I could only learn it by being broken open first.

Today, people walk into my little office carrying the same fear I once carried — that the best of their life is already behind them, that whatever comes next is only going to be smaller. And I get to look at them, with the full weight of my own experience behind my eyes, and tell them something I wish someone had told me, during that long, hollow year:

This isn’t the end of your story. It’s just the part where you find out who else you can become.

I used to believe my life’s biggest work was over the day I retired.

I know now — it had only just begun.