Some life events are completely foreign to me like retirement, for instance. Someone retired today from where I work. Imagine it. Imagine you’ve been working for over forty years. Imagine you decided to work at least half of those forty years at one place. And then one day along that road you decide you’re finished. You don’t have to do what you’re doing to make a living anymore. You get to hang out for the rest of your life. And god knows how long you actually get to do that because you’re “getting up there”. But regardless, everyone at the place you work at decides that they should have a party in your honor. They order catered food and give everyone conservatively poured glasses of champagne. Everyone is in good spirits until the people close to you over all those years give speeches of their memories of you and then raise their glasses, and everyone else raises theirs too and drinks. Everyone takes a sip. More people come up, breaking down halfway through what they need to say. They say everything quickly and shudder. They cry. They’ll miss you, they say. They love you, they say. They thrived off you, they say. They depended on you. You were there for them when they needed you even if it wasn’t work related. But you’re going and you’re not coming back. You’re going to rest your body because it’s been working for so damn long. Anyway, everyone hates to say “Goodbye”, so they don’t. You just go, go, go and spin, spin, spin until you’re finished. All the while Life continues. All the while people continue work and the same thing happens again some time for another individual.
