Tag: retirement

Anantanand Rambachan on Considering the Sacred

The most recent episode of Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Anantanand Rambachan, scholar of Hinduism and interreligious studies and professor emeritus of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

The most recent episode of Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Anantanand Rambachan, scholar of Hinduism and interreligious studies and professor emeritus of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is also a co-president of the global interfaith network Religions for Peace and is active in the dialogue programs of the World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue at the Vatican. His numerous books include A Hindu Theology of Liberation and Pathways to Hindu-Christian Dialogue.

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Retirement as Rehearsal

Retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

As a young academic hired into a largely older faculty in the mid-1990s, I watched certain colleagues become increasingly grouchy as they approached the final stage of their careers. Thirty years later, I get it: your sense of self, your vocation, the edifice that has housed your purpose and given your days and years meaning—all of it coming to an end. The conventional wisdom on this life phase invokes the perils of aimlessness and loss of identity as we step away from our work. Yet the research on the relationship between retirement and purpose is not all negative, and Hyrum W. Smith, the “father of time management,” urges “purposeful retirement.” Still, retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

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The Winding Road: Discerning Vocation Late in Life

Photo by the author.

I’ve been thinking recently about how many different points there are at which one pauses to consider what comes next and what one is called to do. Vocational discernment isn’t just for the young! We tend to focus on the paths students take through their undergraduate years as they weigh possibilities, confirm values, assess habits, commitments and preferences, and make choices about majors, graduate school and career. We seek to foster our students’ meaningful journey through college to successful engagement with the next steps in their journeys.

But this is not the end of the story, and it is good for our students to hear our stories, so that they can see beyond the first set of choices, beyond the first turns in the road. This essay is about the costs of choosing paths, of selecting one option over another, and thus also about the fact that opting for one’s most meaningful calling may come best after the midpoint in one’s career or even upon retirement.  Continue reading “The Winding Road: Discerning Vocation Late in Life”