Last week, I was asked to serve on a vital committee responsible for shaping leadership in our church. I quickly declined, citing my understanding that the role of a retired pastor in a congregation is to support pastoral leadership, not to shape it. My knowledge of my role in our congregation is accurate. However, there was another, perhaps more straightforward reason why I resigned: I wanted to avoid meetings.

My career involved a lot of meetings. It is part of the nature of being a leader in a congregation that takes seriously the role of its members in forming policies, choosing leadership, being responsible for budget, and planning the future. I mostly enjoyed the process and the people, but some meetings were stressful. Like any executive in any nonprofit, my salary was a significant portion of the total budget of the congregation. For most of the years of my career, my salary and benefits made up the largest single item in the church’s budget. As a result, it is hard not to take budget conversations personally. Years went by without pay raises because the congregation and I saw other parts of the congregation's mission as vital, and we chose not to balance our budget by cutting programs and outreach. I often dreaded annual meetings because budget conversations were an essential part of annual congregational meetings and because full participation of members, including expressing their ideas about the budget, is encouraged. I breathed a sigh of relief when they were over.

Yesterday, our church's congregation met to discuss its annual budget, and next Sunday, the congregation's annual meeting will be held. I confess that these meetings are much more fun for me now that I am not the pastor. Still, I’m not a big fan of meetings. One thing I value most about retirement is that I don’t need to attend so many meetings.

But meetings happen anyway. And I ended up with more meetings than I wanted in my schedule. One day last week, I had three meetings in one day. It occurred during the video conference, so I didn’t have to leave my house to participate. Still, I had to scramble to make myself a cup of tea and use the bathroom between sitting in my chair and staring at my computer. It isn’t that the meetings were required of me. But each was important to me. One was a meeting with my editor, who is working with me on preparing a manuscript for publication. Another was a class that I am taking. The third was our church’s Green Team, who work on helping our congregation make more sustainable choices about consumption, energy use, and care of the environment.

Today is another three-meeting day. I’m meeting with a group of writers who give feedback to each other. Some of those writers will provide reviews and possibly endorsements of my work, and I am asked to provide them with reviews and endorsements. My second meeting is a different class that I am taking. Although I am retired, I chose to keep up with my continuing education. I want to keep up with advances in research and new ideas in ministry. Education has been such an essential part of my life that being both teacher and student is natural. The third meeting is just for fun. We participate in a generative poetry group. The group generates and shares prompts that we share, each of us writing a poem about the same prompt. We share a poem we’ve been working on during the past week and write poetry during the meetings. The people in the group are delightful and although I doubt I’ll become a poet, the writing challenge is good for my mind and spirit.

So, I go to meetings not because others make me but because I choose to participate in activities that involve meetings. Although I now think three meetings in a single day is a bit much for me, I also don’t want to become the kind of retired person who is only up for one thing daily. When working full-time, I often put in a twelve-hour day with four or five meetings. I was mildly put off by folk, usually those who were retired, who told me they couldn’t attend a meeting because they already had another meeting that day. I resolved not to become a retired person who is up for only one thing each day. I enjoy filling my days with a wide variety of activities. I have no intention of spending all of my time in meetings. I go for walks every day. I ride my bike most days. I play with my grandchildren. I do chores at the farm. I tend my garden and do light repairs around my home. And, increasingly, I keep a schedule involving many more visits to various doctors than when I was younger.

I’m not complaining. I have a good life filled with very good people. I also have a lot of control over my schedule, as demonstrated by my decision not to serve on the committee to which I was invited. However, I need to continue developing skills in seeking alternatives to meetings. Just as I looked forward to having fewer meetings as I anticipated retirement, I look forward to days when I have no meetings now that I am retired. I want more of those days and must be conscious of how many meetings I agree to attend. It is a bit of a conundrum for me. There is much that I need to learn about this phase of my life.

Before I retired, I thought I would reach my goal and that my life would become less complex. However, I have discovered that retirement doesn’t work like that. Like other phases of my life, it involves continually reinventing my role and making new choices about investing my time. I’m not sure that I’m getting any better with experience. I do, however, plan to cut back on meetings.