Plato, Aristotle, And Me On The Contemplative Life And Retirement

As I approach my seventieth birthday, I look back in wonderment at my careers, defined in the broadest sense, as a student (to age 33!), then a physician and consultant, as well as a real estate developer, and more recently, as an author, publisher, and keynote speaker. Today in my “early retirement ”, I have been as busy as ever, jousting with challenges and opportunities, instead of simply lying on the beach, enjoying a life of leisure.

The key question may be: What is the ideal retirement life? How does one go about making wise choices as to how to spend one’s time, energy, emotions, and money in the golden years? As a life long student of the sciences, religion , and philosophy, I decided to address and answer these Socratic questions by returning to some other ancient Greek philosophers for wisdom and advice.

Plato, the Greek philosopher (424 BC-348 BC) wrote in The Republic that the best life of all is the life of philosophy, of rational thinking and reasoning. The life he defined was one of contemplation and leisure, in Greek eudiamonia , best translated to modern English not just as happiness , but as flourishing. He did note that you did need to have assets (money) and a safe place in which to live to enjoy such a life.

Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), a student of Plato for 20 years, agreed with his teacher as regards the basic concepts of the contemplative life, of seeking excellence and virtue ( arête ), in ones life. However, he felt that it should not be a life of leisure, but one of action, of activity ( ergon or function) in one’s world. His position, clearly defined and supported in his Nicomachean Ethics , also indicated that in many other avenues of life beyond just philosophy, one can enjoy eudiamonia , translated literally as “good demons.”

When I reached the age of 57, in 1995, I took early retirement because of some health concerns that might shorten my life. I had enjoyed decades as a student, with college degrees in Chemistry and Bible, an M.D. from Cornell University, pathology residency at the University of Vermont, and a stint as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the CDC in Atlanta. Perhaps due to some clerical error, at the tender age of 33, I was selected as Chief of Pathology at a medical center in Maine and co-founded Dahl-Chase Pathology Associates. I survived, even thrived and succeeded “in-the-trenches” of group medical practice for 25 years, as well as in consulting, lecturing and a side career in commercial and industrial real estate. In this process I gained insights and even some expertise in the world of leadership and the most important leadership skill, strategic thinking and planning.

As I entered retirement, I soon realized that I had carried with me the baggage of too much education, too many interests, too many opportunities, and too much money to simply live a peaceful and blissful contemplative life ala Plato. The greater problem was the process of selecting which specific projects would take my time, energy, emotions, and money (my favorite acronym TEEM). But then again I was an accomplished strategic planner, so this project should be very easy, both short and long term, since I may live longer than I expected.

I easily jettisoned the practice of medicine completely, by giving up my medical license. Yes, I had spent a great deal of time and money gaining those skills, but I had been consumed by it for 25 years. I had never been sued for malpractice, so why press my luck? It was easy to leave the practice, which carried my name, for I had designed the enterprise as a flattened hierarchy, maximizing synergy, the equal sharing with all the associates in the group. I did, however, maintain my contacts with key medical societies, where I networked and shared my wisdom and folly with younger physicians. It was time to give back, to be a mentor to repay my debt as a mentee. That has been most enjoyable and satisfying.

With the medical career gone, my commercial/industrial real estate career surfaced, as did my ownership in a small construction company and the Overhead Door Co. distributorship for half of Maine. As with the medical group, I shared ownership with the key managers, so again, I could easily work my way out of these ventures. It was euphemistically sort of a slow “garage sale” to get rid of real estate.

The scholar had always been was given full access to workshops, mostly on writing, and courses on cassettes and CDs. After retirement I became an even more ardent workshop junkie and a steeped myself in philosophy, psychology , and religion , as a student and teacher. Having been banished to my parent’s native land of Norway for the summer when I was 12-years old (to get me away from the “bad influence” of my friends), I have always had a Viking-style lust for travel, but without the classic raping and pillaging, of course. As a result, I merged my new world of scholarship and foreign travel, and added my life long pursuit of high-altitude mountaineering, sort of mountain madness with an element of class.

My life took an odd detour on October 23, 1999, when I just completed giving a workshop on Optimize Your Life! The One-page Strategic Planner in Portland, Maine and went up Mt. Washington, New Hampshire for a weekend to hike and enjoy the late fall foliage. Unfortunately, on Saturday morning there was a light rain and clouds hung oppressively in the valley and up over the mountains. My hiking buddies declined the joys of a day of hiking in the rain, so I went up to Tuckerman’s Ravine solo and then up Lion Head Trail towards the Alpine Garden Trail on my way planned hike to the Auto Road and home.

As I climbed, the light rain turned into giant snowflakes. A veritable winter wonderland had replaced a dreary fall day. I was lured into a bright winter hike, and continued on for over an hour in spite of a marked increase in the wind. Then, “whiteout” conditions forced me to stop next to a huge cairn (a pile of rocks marking the trail) to wait out the storm. I climbed into my aluminized material bivvy sack and realized that I had my cell phone with me. I made a series of increasingly frustrating 911 calls, which left me wondering if my rescuers would come, let alone find my location.

As snow accumulated on my bivvy sack, I became concerned that my rescuers would not see me, so I slowly inched my up onto the surface of the snow and opened the end of my bivvy sack to evaluate my changing world. Unfortunately, gusts of wind filled my sack and, in spite of my efforts, tore it from my body. Now it me in a fall hiking outfit in an area known as “the home of the worst weather in the world” (April 12, 1934 wind speed: 231 miles per hour).

During that long night, with wind speeds up to 98 miles per hour, as I waited for rescue I had time to contemplate by past life. I made six promises that I would keep if I was rescued: to be insensitive criticism about my misadventure, to get rid of real estate, to make amends with my first wife and son, to get rid of excessive things, “stuff” in my life, to network with people from my past, and, above all, to simply my life. What would you be thinking, perhaps promising, as you faced imminent death ?

Eventually, I gave up hope and simply waited for death . However, around midnight, my rescuers found me, took me off the mountain to a regional hospital for treatment of frost injuries, severe hypothermia, and rhabdomyolysis (the breakdown of muscle tissue due to voluntary and involuntary muscle flexing in an attempt to prevent/treat hypothermia).

Soon after my discharge from the hospital, Husson College in Maine invited me to share my experience and what I had learned the hard way. My presentation was entitled:

“Lessons for Living from a Mt. Washington Misadventure” offered three admonitions, pieces of advice from near death :

1) Be prepared to die!
2) Have a plan to live!
3) Do it now!

This presentation was recorded and broadcast on National Public Radio in New England, and I was invited to share my story in a range of speaking venues. About a year later, The Learning Channel coaxed me into a reenactment on Mt. Washington, and as a result of worldwide broadcasts, my new speaking career skyrocketed, featuring the Lessons keynote. With support from Mark Victor Hansen of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, I am writing the accompanying “misadventure book” and have completed Optimize Your Life! a book that merges personal and organizational strategic planning . This book has become an international best-seller with a worldwide Spanish translation by Random House, the world’s largest publisher.

A simple, but deadly hike had lured me into the dynamic world of keynote speaking, as well as publishing , both well outside the confines of my historic world of medicine in which I had so much formal education and experienece. This world of deadlines, promises, and challenges became as hectic and demanding as the practice medicine. What had become of my peaceful contemplative retirement?

As I work on all my six promises, I focus on the toughest, to simplify my life, I remember my days in Benares (Varanasi), India, on the Ganges, when I saw hundreds of older Indian men in that phase of life, so well defined in Hinduism, of an ascetic, the sadhu or the sannyasin . There is a rejection of ordinary life and all that it means, in exchange for a search to attain moksha, the release from the cycle of samsara, re-incarnation. While a person may enter into this stage of life at any time, it is usually an older man that has raised his family , completed his business activities, and was fully retired. It may take an extreme form of the total rejection of household duties and responsibilities of the former stages of life. It may include the rejection of the religious beliefs, wherein ones even burns religious texts.

The sannyasins become wandering hermits, living life without any shelter or possessions. They eat when they can acquire food, but never enter into any work to acquire it; it must be given or found. They become holy men, seeking spiritual enlightenment and power, striving to achieve the true wisdom of the cosmos. Wow! That is easy to define, but a bit extreme. However, all my other five promises would be simply eliminated.

A less dramatic approach might be that described by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs , which describes a person’s motivation and resultant behavior as being determined by ones’ needs. I could focus on the highest level, self-actualization and go beyond the basics of life and simply find a single “calling” and heed it.

But what single calling? I have decided that I would get rid of real estate in an orderly manner and complete succession planning for my business ventures. However, I would maintain a family life and continue my writing, speaking, and traveling on a more limited basis. High-altitude mountaineering might be over, after all, I am approaching 70 years of age, far beyond the ideal age of such risk-taking.

As the author of a monthly newsletter, I included in my January 2008 New Year’s edition a list of the “10 Things I Want to Do Before I Die” and realized that I had drifted far from Plato’s ideal life of contemplation and leisure. I think I will cruise through this year enjoying an Aristotelian life of active contemplation, being fully aware of Buddha’s advice against striving, but in favor of living in the moment.

As I close this essay, I am forced to remember and share several paradoxes, ironies, even absurdities:

At the end of his Nicomacean Ethics (Book 10, Chapters 6 through 8) Aristotle seems to reverse himself and support Plato completely, noting that the contemplative philosophical life of leisure is the best.

The Buddha, when addressing one’s life before death, gave us a poem that suggests the value, the appropriateness, of striving in one’s life:

Every day a birdie on my shoulder asks:
Is today the day?Are you doing all the things you should be doing?
Are you being the person who you should be?

Plato stated that the purpose of philosophy is to prepare one for death.

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