Peter Cardinal Part 3

And then I gradually retired and read Jan Amos Comenius' book The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.

Gradual retirement was a considered strategy. Everybody wants to be freed from the foolish demands of work, but most of us are heavily invested in that environment. Employment does define who we are and what we do, both to ourselves and to others. Work even defines which particular kinds of foolishness we spend our energy complaining about. Cutting back my hours from full time to two-thirds time and then to half time allowed me to grow my definition of who I am in terms other than those of employment. Gradually decreasing my employment also let me test how prepared I was to be without the psychological support of regular hours and a predictable set of acquaintances.

I mention Comenius' book because it is a great book, but mostly because it was the particular great book that I read at the beginning of this process. The Labyrinth of the World struck me as being altogether too accurate a description of my life, especially that part of life dominated by my employer.

Passion

One of the tasks I set for myself in preparing to retire was to identify those experiences of life about which I presently felt some passion. One might say that I tried to enumerate some of the ways that the paradise of the heart was most available to me at this moment in my journey. Here is the list that I came up with.

For most of my adult life, employers provided the resources to play at some of my passions, certainly to play at programming. Now I found that work was no longer providing opportunities to engage in any of these passions. I began to feel ready to move away from the Labyrinth of corporate employment.

Rank	Activity	Explication
1	Programming	I can still sit and program for hours at a time. Nothing else can absorb my attention this way.
2	Writing	Especially Biblical commentary and sermons but sometimes social analysis and occasionally small bits of fiction.
3	Quaestiones disputae	Thomas Aquinas, in lingua Latina legens.
4	Preach/Lecture	Pontificating and sounding intelligent but with an expectation of diligence.
5	Other reading	Including especially (so far) Bolt's A Man For All Seasons Juan de la Cruz Dark Night of the Soul Ascent of Mount Carmel Maimonides' Guide For thePerplexed Luther's Lectures on Romans Mabinogi Nibelungenlied Rahner's Foundations of Christian Thought world creation stories
6	New psych	Psychology is just now entering the era of truly quantitative research. Many of the experiments could be done in someone's kitchen — providing that the experimenter is rigorous in planning, conducting, and analyzing the experiment. For example, recent work has quantified the common observation that a person may make a better decision by turning attention to other things. (It depends on the complexity of the decision.)






	July 15, 2010






	Randy Kostichka
	Medco Health Solutions, Inc.
	1400 Lombardi Ave.
	Green Bay, Wisconsin




	Working at ProVantage and its various subsequent identities has
	provided me with the opportunity to utilize my existing knowledge
	of claims data in RationalMed and closely connected applications.
	Our team redesigned and expanded the core application in a
	remarkably collaborative way, making effective use of a variety
	of different backgrounds to improve health outcomes as well as
	reducing the costs of providing health services. The process of
	successfully converting RationalMed from its natural environment
	(however poorly implemented that was) into an all-Teradata RDBMS
	environment was a fascinating technological challenge, one which
	I believe our team met with surprising success.

	In addition, I was permitted the interesting side project of
	creating a skunkwork software development process which I believe
	has the potential -- as yet unrealized -- to support an effective
	life cycle process for Teradata RDBMS-based development.

	More recently, my specialized claims knowledge has become stale
	and outdated for lack of continued contact with claims data and
	standards. The long-term goals for the RationalMed product and
	related applications are no longer as clear to me as I would like,
	while the relationship between the RationalMed applications and
	other corporate initiatives continue to be obscure.

	With the near dissolution of our collaborative team environment
	and the ubiquity of work assignments more suited to short-term
	contractors than to permanent, expert employees, and absent any
	clear sign of a change in management style, it seems to me that
	the more productive course will be to invest my time and abilities
	elsewhere.







	Peter Cardinal

[No work of literature should be allowed to exist without critical commentary. In the case of my resignation letter, the astute reader will notice that the first paragraph says, Working here used to be fun, years ago, under a different corporate identity. Since Medco took over, we've had to do things which make very little sense, but at least there were interesting challenges and the hope of improving things. The second paragraph says, I liked doing some of the extra-curricular activities, but it none of that is really bearing fruit. The third and fourth paragraphs say, Now we've come to the point that we're just thrashing about.]

Commitment

Knowing that prudence is a virtue, and being risk averse to the point of anxiety, I undertook a careful financial analysis before making the commitment to abandon salary income. Life can never be risk free, but eventually my financial models all agreed that I would be unlikely to starve or become a ward of the state. The two professional financial planners who offered their opinions were far more optimistic than I.

Besides mere financial planning, my tactics included substituting post-employment activities for the gradually reduced work hours. I resumed tutoring (at the Salvation Army), added more volunteer duties at the railroad museum, and expanded my park photo archive, the Parchive, to include researching park histories.

Feeling that I was as prepared as I was likely to be, I informed my boss that I was going to quit working. Uncharacteristically, I even held a retirement party. Characteristically, I planned the party first and announced it only as a celebration of my half-birthday and 25 years back in Green Bay.

Unaccustomed as I have become to making lifetime commitments, I was a bit surprised to find that turning in the letter reduced anxiety, improved the quality of sleep, and set Medco Health Solutions firmly into the category of the irrelevant.

My Life: Part 3

Passion

Commitment

Next Life