How is it possible for retired life to feel so busy? I write lists, some on paper and others on the chalkboards of my mind, and whenever I complete a task, I scratch it off and add two new ones. One item on my internal list (girdling worthless pine trees) is no whim. It’s a requirement in my Current Use forestry plan, but I could roam my woods with a chainsaw for the rest of my life and not get them all. My forester understands. “Do the best you can,” is his implied message; but there is haunt in my nature that wants a job done and over.

My wife feels the same stress in her life. Sometimes we laugh at how absurd it is to feel beleaguered by what little we actually have to do. Remembering a typical day from our working careers or hearing our children talk about theirs will restore our perspective, but before long one of us will be worrying if there will be time after a dentist appointment to shop for food. To be honest, I should admit that when we entered retirement, we ignored the good advice of friends and took on more volunteer work than was wise. Still, how is it possible to feel harried when I know I can open a book in the middle of a day and just read?

The answer isn’t complicated. My career was in education, most of it as a teacher and coach at a boarding school. Our students were brilliant, ambitious, and diverse, half of them on scholarships funded by a hefty endowment. You could not imagine a better setup, but every year the faculty would wrestle with the issue of burnout. We had rigorous curriculum, a music program with two orchestras and a jazz band, a theater and dance program with performances nearly every week, student-run publications that included a weekly newspaper, and an athletic program with a national profile; and our students wanted to do all of it, all at once! Whenever we tried to impose limits on what we allowed them to do, we faced fierce resistance from them and from our own ranks. Every time we tried to find a solution, we realized we were the problem: faculty and students, all of us hopelessly Type A.

I loved that life, but in the spring of the year I retired, I sat at graduation with the same feelings as our seniors: it was time to move on and restart my life. In so many ways my life now is different. I sleep more, I worry less about money, and a third of my thoughts are about grandchildren. As before, I daydream, but now more about the past than the future. The one thing that has not changed is my Type A gene. It’s a little ragged with wear, but here it is, prompting me to make lists of things I need to do.

Technically, it is hyperbolic to use the word “stress” for this senior-citizen feeling that life is too busy. The same would be true for my working days. One year back then, the faculty spent nearly a year studying the stress we were experiencing and its effect on our health and well-being. We brought an expert to campus for a week to examine our lives, a cardiologist with a national reputation; and at the end of that week, she told us that what we were experiencing was fatigue, not stress. Real stress, she explained, the dangerous kind, happens when you feel as if you have no control over your lives. We had that control; we willingly made choices that harried our lives.

For me this was a helpful paradox, and even today it goes a long way to explain my life. Gone are the crazy pace and the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude necessary for survival, but I still view life through a Type A lens that stirs my tattered, and sometimes comic, ambition. There will be moments when I have a book in my hands, and my mind wanders to the firewood I need to cut or the twine I should string to the eaves so our morning glories will something to climb. This restlessness may be annoying, but it is spurred by curiosity and the belief that at my age, it is best to keep moving.

When I was in my early 60s, I had a vision of retirement that looked something like this: a late breakfast outdoors after a run and a shower, a newspaper opened to the sports page and anchored by a mug of coffee to a table, caressed by a light tropical breeze. Ahead of me stretched an entire day available for idleness or adventure or what have you.

Now that I am retired, my morning routine is a parody of that original dream: a late breakfast after a run and shower, no tropical breeze to ruffle the digital newspaper I scroll on my phone, and in my mind a simultaneous scrolling through a list of unfinished tasks left over from the day before.

Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.