I keep thinking....

I keep thinking about the conversation I had with my friends at book club last night. They are about my age – maybe a few years younger – and both are professional hard working women – one a doctor and one a writer. And both don’t want to stop working. In fact, they are looking for future careers if they do retire from their current work. Like me they are afraid if they stop they will fall apart – emotionally, intellectually, physically. I know that working every day, getting up to exercise, getting ready for work with the makeup and the hair straightener and the Maxmara suits, then working with hordes of people, and continually making decision after decision keeps me young and with it. It keeps me up not only on the technology involved with my job but with what’s going on around me in my town, my state, my country, my world. I listen to the news on the way to work, I read my New Yorker or listen to the news at the gym, I talk to people about music and the movies and what’s the best place to buy a piece of salmon for dinner. If I stayed at home I wouldn’t have those contacts and opportunities. Like my friends said last night, we’d have no reason to get up and get out and find out about what’s going on in the world. We’d become ignorant and irrelevant. I can’t let that kind of life happen to me.