Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
“Qhow old are you?”. The colleague who stands out as usually well informed today seems to have targeted me and my springs. “Why?” I ask cautiously, just to avoid depressing conversations that usually start like this. “Because, if I remember correctly your age, in a couple of years you too may start thinking about retiring. You know, there are many slides, advances, discounts, opportunities to be seized to get out a little earlier».
I look at her astonished, imagining an Ikea-type shelf at INPS: yes, but how long ago? In my mind as an elderly young man, retirement for now was placed in a time horizon of which I did not perfectly see the boundaries.
In short, the latest projections that I sketched out, having to do with pension matters for work, still gave me about ten good years of work. A long enough span of time that I didn’t immediately start thinking of myself as a pensioner.
And instead the colleague insists: “I can’t wait to stop!” she confesses excitedly. While I, who often pretend to complain about the greater effort I feel in concentrating compared to a few years ago, I don’t feel the urgency to take leave of my active life, like any baby pensioner.
As, for the past couple of nights, i’ve been tossing and turning in bed thinking about me without work: my daily metronome. And I find that the unedited perspective touches me more than other events in the life of an aging woman have.
Suddenly all the activities that I seem to have sacrificed for work seem unfit to replace it without making me miss it. “I’m not ready,” I say in defeat.
Just like my colleague who yelled this sentence at the nurses during her first birth, protesting because she didn’t have time to take the course. And I tell myself that there aren’t any courses for young boarders, but that in the near future I need to come up with an exit strategy that is up to my concerns. My porter was right: “There is no work more tiring than to stop working, ma’am.” Or maybe yes: learn to do it.
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