” The Lord spoke to Moses in the Sinai Desert, in the Tent of Meeting on the first day of the second month, in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, saying …” (Bamidbar/Numbers 1:1). Somehow I thought of those words today when I was trying to figure out how to describe entering 2010 (which, incidentally, has been confirmed all day on TV today as “twenty-ten”) and with only a little revision this works for me.  It’s the first day of the ‘first’ month in the second year after my exodus from the government office I’d inhabited in body and soul for the last 14 years.  That I so quickly made the connection between Eretz Mitzrayim (the land of Egypt) and my ministry work kind of startled me, and got me thinking a lot more about this metaphor I’ve developed for how I so often felt about my workplace.  Please note that I have never felt that the work that I did – trying to improve public education – wasn’t important or meaningful; it’s the atmosphere of the workplace that was oppressive.

In an interesting article, Allegory in the Bible, David E. Teubner made this statement:  ”allegorically speaking, Egypt became the land of bitterness and slavery, the land of forgetfulness.”  This metaphor has been familiar to me my whole life, repeated on Passover each year when we sit down and retell the story of the slavery of the Jews in Egypt and their exodus to the Promised Land some 3500 years ago; their return to the land that God had promised to Abraham some 500 years earlier and which we’ve inhabited – other than during those times when we were expelled – for most of those 3500 years.

Okay, I’ll admit it.   I had three favorite movies as a child: Inherit the Wind, White Christmas, and The 10 Commandments.  What can I say?  I wasn’t a “normal” child I guess … whatever that means.  I loved Inherit the Wind because it spoke to my mind and my thirst for knowledge; I loved White Christmas because it spoke to my heart – romantic in every way; and The 10 Commandments spoke to my spirit and rooted me in images of my history and my people.  The scene I always remember first from The 10 Commandments is the one in which Moses – still strutting around as an Egyptian prince – sees a Jewish woman/slave about to be crushed between two enormous sections of moving rock sculpture.  As a result of this, Moses institutes numerous reforms which are not only extremely popular with the slaves, but are dramatically effective in improving their productivity despite it going against the rules.  Get it!  He sees what’s wrong and sets out to right it.  The same theme resonates in White Christmas when Wallace and Davis see the unfairness of what’s happened to “The Old Man” and set out to make it better, and in Inherit the Wind when Henry Drummond so gloriously represents Bertram Cates and our right to think.

Right the wrong.  That’s what I’ve tried to do for pretty much most of my life.  Mediate the crisis.  Mitigate the damages.  Minimize the losses.  Soften the blows.  Cushion the fall.  It’s why I first tried Social Work and then became a Teacher.  I have worked to improve things most of my life.  The goal hasn’t changed with retirement.  Yet at the same time, the process for reaching that goal, my imagining of the journey towards that goal … well, that’s changed completely.

It used to be about what I was doing in the world; today it’s much more about who I am being in the world.  It used to be more easily quantified:  I wrote a policy and provided the resources and training that could make it come to life.  It was about how much I could accomplish.  Not so much so today, when I’m more concerned with developing the kind of mindfulness that lightens a path towards those goals.

It was easier – I think – being retired a year ago; I’d just come back from Antarctica and was enjoying writing the blog and taking it easy.  I was in the retirement equivalent of a honeymoon.  I saw the first steps of the transition that lay before me, and I was sort of excited.  I think that I’ve found this first full year of retirement much, much harder than I’d anticipated.  Much harder.

And today – entering my 15th month in retirement – I am starting to feel as though something has shifted yet again.  I am planning to spend my days over the next few months actually take care of myself.  I think I’ll book nothing earlier than 2 in the afternoon and will see what it’s like to spend mornings in a combination of being at the Y, enjoying long walks, and meditating.  I’ll teach my Bar/Bat Mitzvah students (two – a father and son – will continue until June and I have a new student beginning shortly) in the hours between two and six.  I’ll have choir on Wednesday nights.  Perhaps David and I will take an Intermediate Bridge course one other night.  Best of all, when an opportunity to travel for a few days to Ottawa or for longer to other warm places (I’m still thinking about a week in Nicaragua doing some ESL volunteering) arises I am going to take it.  You might have noted that I’m not using the imperative form in any of this; it’s all feeling very tentative, it’s all hopes and plans and perhapses.  That’s not easy for me to life with but I’m going to try my best to truly not only tolerate all this ambiguity but embrace it.

Oh – a bit more context there.  The redesign of my kitchen and lounge began as soon as I returned from Florida.  It’s moving forward cupboard by cupboard.  This afternoon Leo and I were still redesigning a few things; adding a 4-socket plug, changing the surfacing material, solving a laptop-won’t-quite-fit problem.  There are things in bins against the Dining room wall where the new light-fixure’s been hung but the old one is still sitting on the table.  Bits of chaos all around me adding to my sense of tentativeness.

But it’s okay.

By the end of the winter I think I’ll have a wonderfully functional kitchen and restful lounge.

By the end of the winter I hope to be stronger, leaner and less-often complaining about a sore back.

Oh my!  Have a just turned the end of this posting into a Weight Watchers meeting?  Sorry.