Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.