It seemed apt that the first person I met after I registered at the last conference I will attend as an employed professor was an old colleague from St. Francis Xavier University, which was the first place I worked when I left the real world and joined the academy. We chatted and caught up on our news, which was actually very similar – he also is retiring at the end of June. He’s leaving Nova Scotia, though, as he and his wife have been living a version of a traditional Maritime life, where one person stays home and the other works away. She continues to work away, however, and so they are relocating to Ottawa once he retires. He commented that it will no doubt be difficult to pack up and move from a small town where he has spent his entire career, to a place where he knows few people, and where the social networks have all been developed by his wife. It seemed to me that the ebb and flow of life is splashing up against his shins.

Later I had brunch with a colleague with whom I shared a couple of classes when she was a doctoral student and I was doing my Master of Education degree at the University of Saskatchewan. She is still academically strong and is a very productive scholar. She has negotiated with her university to move to a half-time position, where she will continue to teach and research from August to December and then be basically unemployed from January to July. Apart from anything else, this gives her the opportunity to travel, and to see those few parts of the world she has not yet visited, and to do so far from the trials of a northern winter. She told me that she couldn’t just stop working, it would be too difficult as she feared she would simply shrivel up with nothing to do, there would be no purpose to her days. It seemed to me that the ebb and flow of life is splashing up against her knees.

At a reception that evening I met a retired professor, one whom I remember from my own doctoral student days at the University of Alberta. He still comes to the annual conference as it helps him feel connected to what is going on in his field. He told me that he enjoys talking to students and trying to help them by providing answers to their problems, most of which he has heard many times before. It is the highlight of his year, he said, to come and listen from the edge of a room. It seemed to me that the ebb and flow of life is splashing up against his hips.

As I look forward to the next few weeks, time to empty my office and see if I can give away any of my books – books! What quaint objects! Who uses those now, I wonder, those once treasured artifacts of an ancient time? – and fill a blue bag with research papers and other documents to be shredded, I consider myself fortunate to not be facing those pressures. I am not relocating to another province, I am not going to be lacking purpose in my life, I am not going to try and maintain a presence as an elder scholar. Nonetheless, I feel a gentle splash against my toes.

Three more marbles in the jar.