Mobility -- And Damn The Cost!

THE SUMMING-UP

When young I scribbled, boasting, on my wall.
No Love, No Property, No Wages.
In youth's good time I somehow bought them all,
And cheap, you'd think, for maybe a hundred pages.
Now in my prime, disburdened of my gear,
My trophies ransomed, broken, lost,
I carve again on the lintel of the year
My sign: MOBILITY!—and damn the cost!

~Stanley Kunitz

I had two very contradictory experiences today.

This morning, I was in a meeting, with two men I consider brilliant, discussing strategy for a rather complex Supreme Court case. And, I had this moment when I realized, removed a million miles from the conversation, this is why I went to law school. This is the kind of work that I love to do, this is the glass bead game I can play for the rest of my life. For this "one white singing hour" of intellectual stimulation, I'll "count many a year" of traipsing up the road to school "well lost." Being a witch, my first reaction was to ground. To dig my roots deep into the Earth, to bind myself and my future to that experience.

But, coming home, I was thinking about early retirement. When I was younger, I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to retire early. I'd read articles in, say, Fortune Magazine about people who did all this mad planning and investing so that they could retire at my age, 50, and I'd wonder what was wrong with them. Why would they want to drop out of life so early??? What I couldn't imagine when I was young was that there would come a time when it would make me very happy to never have to do another day's labor for someone else. It's irrelevant now; I spent too many years in public service. I'll be working until I drop. But now that I'm 50, I understand the urge, which is more than I ever understood before.

So, all in all, I count it a very good day.