The Retirement Advantage

This morning I picked up a paper on topological qubits. Read a section, wrote some notes, set it down. Went out on the boat and did a chart plotter software update, thought about Microsoft's error correction claims, saw a dolphin and a manatee, talked to a neighbor, jumped in the pool came back inside and read another section. No deadline, no meeting after, no student waiting on feedback. Twenty years ago I was directing NSF Centers of Excellence, first at STCC and later at UCF, and that kind of stretched-out thinking didn't exist. Staff, faculty, grant reports, site visits, advisory boards, college administration, students, airplanes, NSF program officers, audits. Fifteen minutes between fires, and quantum mechanics doesn't yield to fifteen minutes.

Growing older costs you some things, but not the ones people assume. I'm at the gym five days a week now and feel as strong as I have in years, so it isn't a story about decline. It's smaller than that: hearing aid glasses now, some unfortunate hair loss, a night on the boat that costs me more the next morning than it used to (I still love it.) Nobody sells you on these parts, and nobody should have to.

But the trade is real. At close to 70, semi-retired, I get to choose what earns my attention, and I've learned I do my best thinking in chunks now. Read something, write something, set it aside, let it sit while I'm doing something else entirely. Some mornings that means a quantum computing paper worked through in pieces over a week. For example, I’ve been writing this post for a couple of weeks. Other mornings it means running the boat out of Clearwater before the wind picks up, no agenda beyond fish and water. Last week it meant France with the kids and it was spectacular! I've also had time to reconnect with people I let drift over four decades of building a career, old friends from K-12 and early consulting years, conversations that don't happen when every hour has a client attached to it.

Forty years has taught me plenty of technical things. It didn't teach me to work this way though, small pieces, long pauses, letting a hard idea sit until it loosens up on its own. The job never allowed for it. Retirement has.

I’ll finish the topological qubit paper eventually. Not because I'm slower now. Because I finally have the room to work the way my mind actually wants to work, and the time to take my time.