I’ve noticed that increasingly I’ve been getting irritated with friends when they refer to me as “retired”. They seem, fairly enough, puzzled by this. Wasn’t it Peter who held a wonderful online retirement party when he stopped teaching high school in 2003, who happily lives on the pension with which the Ontario Teachers Pension fund continues to supply him, and who collect Canadian Pension payments from the federal government? Most of all it puzzles them because I described myself as retired. And now all of a sudden I’m bridling and sputtering that I’m not retired? How does that work?

My answer starts with the word “retiring”, which Websters defines as “withdrawn from one’s position or occupation: having concluded one’s working or professional career”. For 32 years I taught in secondary schools. While I’m no longer in a high school, I am still teaching. I put out a weekly distillation of the week’s online politics and entertainment; I co-write an international blog about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being seen in the online world; I teach creative writing to a group of adults online. Together these three forms of teaching take up as much of my time and use as much of my energy as did teaching high school. And I do my own writing, which is slowly moving forward and out into the world.

Many people with whom I taught chose to supply teach after they left full-time teaching. It’s an easier version of the same job; you don’t have lesson planning before school, or marking afterwards. You go in, find the lesson plan on the real teacher’s desk, supervise the class, then leave. To me that seemed like stopping at McDonald’s on the way home from a meal at a wonderful restaurant to grab some fries. Even if it paid far better than the choices I was making, it seemed a diminishment of our capacity to be educators, rather than an expansion.

So part of my resentment of being referred to as having concluded my working or professional career lies in the implicit disparagement of the amount of work I’m doing. For me, this form of teaching is in many ways more challenging than teaching high school. In a traditional math course it was always clear what came next; even in an English course I knew that If I’d taught Macbeth, act V, scene 4 today, the odds were rock solid that we’d do scene 5 tomorrow. And so it went, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in that petty pace to the last syllable of classroom time, which was a good part of the reason for leaving. Now the only limits on what I choose to include in the magazine, write about in the blog, or teach in the course are my own limits, so the challenge becomes to expand and deepen those limits. My professional career has expanded, not concluded.

But it seems that the core of what defines a career in this society is whether, and how much we are paid. Susan Musgrave, a fine Canadian poet, loves to tell her story of trying to get a phone installed and being asked her occupation by the phone company. She responded, “Writer.” Without missing a beat, the person at the other end asked, “And how long have you been unemployed?”

When I left secondary school teaching, I realised I had been blessed with a rare and wonderful gift: choosing what I was going to do next without being dependent on how much it paid. So I chose to do things that both expanded my own creativity, and that I hoped would help to do good in the world. I feel pleased both with the places that road has taken me and those to which it continues to take me. So it is the privileging of money over creativity or spirituality that ultimately most rankles. Kurt Vonnegut once pointed how the classic question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” makes money the measure of mind. “If you aren’t making real money, you aren’t really working,” analogously credits cash as the consummate criterion of career.

“Work”, I believe, is the name this society uses for the way we choose to put our energy out into the world. That choice might be to put our energy into making money, into being creative, into healing, into spirituality, or into our personal mixture of such flavours. The form we select changes the way that energy comes back to us. If you need to make a lot of money this week to feed your children, writing novels may not be your wisest choice. But if you want to change the world, and speak your own truth, it might be the perfect one. The essence of “a job”, it seems to me, is to make that choice, then strive to perfect your skill in your chosen form. It is how you play at life with the universe. And whether one chooses the playing field of spirituality, creativity, or monetary skills it is still ultimately the same game.

And that’s the nub. Retiring carries a sense of withdrawing from the world, (re-tirer, pulling back, is the French etymological root). It is always a struggle, whatever our age, to be more fully present in the world, more involved with the reality of what lies in front of us. It is perhaps the great challenge of our lives to change ourselves so we can grasp the world more fully to us, to not repress, deny, block out the pain in the world and what we can do to heal it. The word for what I am doing is not retirement, but repurposing. I’m not sitting and watching from the sidelines; I’m still in the game.