THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 18

Turn the Page

There are only a few steps between the recliner in our living room and the spare bedroom that became my office, yet retirement has managed to stretch them into a much longer journey. On one side sits the life I am supposedly entering, with fewer deadlines, less professional noise and no sensible reason to feel guilty about remaining where I am. On the other side sit the computer, the files, the clients and the accumulated evidence that I once knew what I was doing and that somebody occasionally needed me to do it. I can cross that distance in seconds, but I cannot always tell whether I am going into the office because something genuinely requires my attention or because I still require the office to confirm that I have one. Turning the page is easy when it is only paper; it is rather more difficult when the page you are leaving has paid the bills, introduced you to the world and supplied most of the answers to the question of who you are.

People speak about retirement as though it arrives with a clean sheet and a complimentary pen. Finish the old chapter, they imply, turn the page and begin the next one, preferably with a caravan, a golf booking and a cheerful disregard for whatever day of the week it happens to be. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, but the language conceals the size of the transaction. The previous chapter did not merely contain work; it contained income, status, routine, relationships, anxiety, purpose, irritation, achievement, disappointment and the daily proof that I remained useful to somebody beyond myself. I was not just closing a business chapter and opening a retirement chapter, because the binding had been tightened over more than forty years and several of the pages appeared to have been stapled directly to me.

Bob Seger wrote Turn the Page, but the voice that placed it inside my life belonged to Jon English.¹ I knew the song through the Australian voice, the one that seemed to carry both theatrical force and the tiredness of somebody who had already spent too long being looked at. The song did not sound to me like an invitation to adventure, despite all the roads, stages and movement contained within it. It sounded like endurance being mistaken for glamour, a man continuing because the next place was already waiting and because stopping would require an explanation he did not have. Even the title was not triumphant; it was the instruction given after another difficult scene, another performance and another night that had failed to provide the fulfilment promised by the posters.

The road in the song is long, repetitive and numbing, with the machinery beneath the traveller producing its own monotonous accompaniment. That part has always made sense to me, although my touring vehicle was more often an office, a telephone, a computer and a mind that refused to leave a problem alone. I did not spend my professional life travelling from town to town with amplifiers in the back, but I moved through years of clients, deadlines, restructures, tax seasons, rescues and explanations that often began in different places and ended in remarkably similar rooms. The engine note was the continuing hum of responsibility, and after long enough it became difficult to distinguish between the work I had chosen and the momentum that carried me towards the next obligation. There were days when I no longer felt like riding, yet the trip had acquired a timetable of its own.

I was never quite alone on that road, and this is one place where the song and my life do not line up neatly. I had band members and roadies of a sort, people who carried equipment that was not always visible and who kept the show moving while I stood where the audience could see me. Robyn carried more of the practical and emotional weight than I properly recognised while I was busy calling my own load responsibility. Staff, colleagues, family members and those clients who became something closer to friends all contributed to the performance, even when the name on the front of the practice encouraged the convenient fiction that it was a solo act. A man can feel lonely without being alone, and he can also make other people lonely while insisting that everything he is doing is for them.

The passion was real, which is part of what makes the exhaustion harder to dismiss. I wanted clients to understand their numbers, avoid preventable disasters and make decisions before events made the decisions for them. I wanted to be more than the accountant who arrived afterwards to record the damage accurately, and I built much of my working identity around the belief that advice should come before compliance and courage before convenience. There was satisfaction when somebody listened early enough for the advice to matter, but there were also countless occasions when the work disappeared into the machinery of another person’s business without leaving much evidence that it had been heard. The fee paid for the service, but payment and fulfilment were never the same thing, and I often gave more of myself in pursuit of the second than the first could possibly justify.

That imbalance can sound noble when described from a comfortable distance, but it was not always noble while I was living it. Sometimes it was service, sometimes pride, sometimes fear and sometimes the need to prove that I could solve the problem everybody else had allowed to grow. I liked being useful, but usefulness can become a drug that presents itself as duty and sends the invoice to everybody nearby. The client receives the rescue, the adviser receives the temporary authority of being necessary, and the family receives whatever is left after the emergency has been given the best hours of the day. I can now see that I was not merely carried along by the road; I also kept finding reasons to put fuel in the vehicle.

The passage that has always reached deepest begins when the traveller enters a roadside place to eat. I will borrow only the brief doorway, “you walk into a restaurant,” because what follows has long since ceased to belong solely to a touring musician. The man enters carrying the cold, the fatigue and the accumulated strain of the road, while the people already inside see none of that history. They see an appearance that does not fit their expectations, exchange their assessments and reduce a complete human being to the feature that makes him different. He has not walked into a place of rest at all; he has walked into a room in which judgement was already seated and apparently had nothing better to do.

I know that room, although the furniture has changed many times. It has been a schoolroom, a seminar, a client meeting, a boardroom, a professional gathering and almost any place where certainty was valued more highly than thought. I could enter with years of experience, a carefully reasoned position and a genuine desire to prevent harm, yet still sense that some people had decided what sort of person I was before I had completed the first sentence. Sometimes the offence was that I did not look or sound like their idea of an accountant; sometimes it was that I would not provide the answer they had already chosen; sometimes it was simply that I noticed the flaw everybody else had agreed not to mention. The glances were rarely as obvious as those in the song, but their meaning was familiar enough: you are not quite one of us, and we are deciding whether that makes you amusing, inconvenient or dangerous.

Not fitting in has never required me to be physically alone. I could be surrounded by people, invited to the table and even asked for my opinion, while remaining aware that the acceptable version of my opinion had already been determined. The room wanted intelligence so long as it confirmed the room, humour so long as nobody important became its target, and courage so long as it did not delay the preferred decision. It wanted the adviser but not always the advice, the performer but not the person, and the unusual accountant provided he became ordinary at the precise moment ordinary thinking was required. That is a particularly efficient way of making a person invisible, because he remains present enough to be used while being absent from the conclusion.

The restaurant scene is not only about being mocked; it is about being misread when you are already depleted. Had the traveller entered after a week of sleep, warmth and affirmation, the sideways looks might have been dismissed as the small-minded entertainment of strangers. Instead he enters frayed by distance, and the judgement lands on a part of him that has no protective covering left. I recognise that vulnerability in the occasions when a client questioned the value of advice after ignoring the earlier warnings, or when somebody treated a carefully considered position as though it were merely an obstacle placed in front of their convenience. The immediate issue might have been small, but it arrived carrying every earlier moment in which competence had been demanded and the person supplying it had been taken for granted.

The rage in that part of the song is not decorative anger. It is the sudden internal expansion that occurs when humiliation, fatigue and restraint discover they have been stored in the same container. The traveller wants to release it upon the room, not because an explosion will repair anything, but because containment has begun to feel like cooperation with the insult. I understand that urge far better than I would like to admit. There have been moments when I wanted to put every unspoken objection, every ignored warning and every piece of condescension on the table at once, then stand back while the truth did what I had been prevented from doing.

I did not explode, at least not in the rooms where the professional Jeff was expected to remain composed. The suit, the title and the responsibility all demanded control, and control became so practised that most people would never have known there was anything to restrain. I could translate the fury into explanation, turn the insult into a question and continue the meeting with the outward calm of a man who had not just imagined clearing the table with one sweep of his arm. That capacity helped me build a career, because clients generally prefer their accountant not to erupt between the balance sheet and the tax estimate. It also meant the anger had to go somewhere, and emotions denied an exit have a habit of finding the people and places where the locks are not as strong.

Robyn saw more of what the audience did not. She saw the pressure that survived the journey home, the irritation that attached itself to something trivial and the exhaustion that made ordinary conversation feel like another demand. The people who had earned the anger often received the measured adviser, while the person who had supported the adviser received the residue. There is no noble interpretation that makes that fair, and being under pressure does not convert collateral damage into a professional expense. One of the uncomfortable truths in the song’s restaurant scene is that the traveller’s rage may be understandable without being safe, justified without being useful and real without being entitled to choose an innocent target.

For much of my life I treated anger as fuel because fuel at least appeared productive. It helped me fight through bankruptcy, rebuild a practice, challenge advice I believed was wrong and remain standing when surrender might have been more comfortable. It also sharpened the part of me that could see hypocrisy, incompetence and self-interest hiding behind official language. The problem with using anger as fuel is that the engine eventually assumes anger is necessary for movement, then begins manufacturing its own supply. A slight becomes proof, a disagreement becomes dismissal, and an ordinary failure to understand becomes another restaurant full of people whispering about the stranger who has just walked in.

I do not believe the anger was imaginary, but neither do I believe every room was guilty of the same offence. Some people did listen, some clients valued the work, and some relationships survived because the person across the table recognised there was more to me than the service being purchased. There were also times when I entered the room already expecting to be misunderstood and arranged the evidence accordingly. A lifetime of not fitting in can make exclusion easier to detect, but it can also make belonging difficult to trust. The analytical part of me wants to examine each case separately; the human part remembers the accumulation and asks why it should once again be required to begin with a presumption of innocence.

The song then moves from the public judgement of the restaurant to the public approval of the stage, and the contrast is brutal. The same person who was treated as an oddity by strangers is soon standing beneath lights while a crowd demands everything he can give. He is no longer ridiculous because he has become useful to their evening, yet the distance between performer and audience remains enormous. The energy flows outward, the applause returns, and neither movement guarantees that anybody has seen the man rather than the act. Being wanted for what you can produce is not the same as being accepted for who you are, although a busy career can postpone that distinction for a remarkably long time.

My stage was usually less dramatic, but it had its own lights. There were seminars where I could hold a room, client meetings where a complicated problem became understandable, and conversations in which the right combination of logic, humour and urgency could move somebody towards a better decision. I knew how to perform competence because competence was real, yet performance was still involved in making it visible and useful to other people. The nervousness, uncertainty and personal cost remained backstage while Not Your Ordinary Accountant stepped forward and spoke in language the audience could follow. It was not a false identity, but it was a selected one, arranged for the room much as a set list is arranged for the crowd.

Every ounce of energy can be given to work that matters and still leave the giver wondering what the performance achieved. The client may avoid a disaster and later remember only that the fee seemed high. The audience may applaud the explanation and then return to the behaviour that created the problem. A business may survive, a family may retain its livelihood, and the adviser may receive no enduring proof that the intervention became anything more than a temporary clearing in the weather. This is not a complaint that gratitude should have been another line on the invoice; it is an admission that I often looked for emotional payment from transactions that had never promised to provide it.

That search for fulfilment made the road longer. Another client might listen more carefully, another book might reach further, another article might produce the echo that proved the words had landed somewhere beyond the screen. I told myself that the next performance was for them, and much of it was, but the need was not travelling in only one direction. I wanted to help, and I wanted the help to establish that my presence had mattered. When those two desires travelled together they were difficult to separate, because service provided the respectable clothing and the deeper hunger remained hidden underneath.

The strange thing about professional success is that it can hide disappointment more effectively than failure. Failure at least announces that something has gone wrong, whereas success allows a man to keep appearing on stage while privately wondering why the applause has not reached the place he expected it to reach. I built businesses, advised clients, wrote, spoke and became the person others contacted when the situation was difficult. Those achievements were real, and false modesty would be merely another costume, but they did not permanently settle the question of belonging. The room could applaud and still not feel like home.

After the stage in the song comes the room where the noise should have ended but has not. The performance is over, yet its sound remains inside the traveller, and sleep is no more available than peace was in the restaurant. I know that room as well, even though mine has often been the office after a call, the house after everybody else has settled or the hours before dawn when the radio in my head decides the program should continue. The amplifiers are replaced by remembered conversations, alternative answers, calculations and the sentence I should have delivered three hours earlier. The body may have left the stage, but the mind is still conducting a review for an audience that has already gone home.

This is where the command to turn the page becomes most revealing. It does not arrive because anything has been resolved; it arrives because there is another road, another place and another performance waiting. The page turns not as an act of renewal but as a mechanism of continuation, much like moving a completed file from one side of the desk to the other while the next file is already open. There is weariness in that repetition, but there is also safety. A man who knows how to continue does not have to answer what he would do if continuation were no longer required.

Retirement disturbs that safety because it removes the next scheduled performance. The diary may contain appointments and the practice may still contain clients, but the broad direction is supposed to have changed. Nobody is waiting at the next venue with a stage already assembled, and there is no external timetable strong enough to prevent me from asking whether I still wish to make the journey. That freedom is attractive in theory and unsettling in practice. Structure can feel like imprisonment while it is imposed and like shelter once the door has been opened.

Income is the most obvious part of the old page, and perhaps the easiest to discuss because numbers behave themselves in public. They can be calculated, tested, modelled and placed into a plan that says whether enough is likely to remain enough. Status is less cooperative, because few people wish to admit they miss being introduced by what they once did. Relationships are more complicated again, particularly when many of them grew around the continuing exchange of advice, assistance and responsibility. Proof of usefulness is the most difficult of all, because no financial plan can guarantee that tomorrow will contain a reason for somebody to ask what I think.

For years, the answer to “What do you do?” was available before the question had finished. I was an accountant, adviser, mentor, problem-solver, business owner and, when circumstances required it, the person prepared to tell somebody that the preferred answer was not supported by the facts. Those labels did not contain all of me, but they provided an efficient introduction and spared everybody the awkwardness of asking what lay underneath. Retirement removes the efficient answer and leaves a space in which I might say I write, I think, I help where I can, I play golf, I spend time with Robyn and I am trying to understand the life I was too busy living to examine properly. None of those answers is smaller, yet they do not carry the same immediate authority, and I am not immune to noticing the difference.

There is a temptation to turn retirement itself into another stage performance. I could become exceptionally organised about not working, set targets for leisure, measure progress against an imaginary retirement plan and quietly convert freedom into a new form of compliance. I could publish enough, contribute enough, help enough people and remain sufficiently visible to ensure nobody mistakenly believed I had become irrelevant. The costume would change, but the need beneath it could continue touring without interruption. A retirement built entirely to prove continued usefulness would not be a new chapter; it would be the old chapter printed in a larger font.

The band and the roadies have an interest in whether I recognise that. Robyn did not support decades of work merely so I could bring the entire production into the lounge room and call it retirement. My children do not need a father who remains professionally impressive at the cost of being emotionally elsewhere, particularly when the urgent work is no longer entitled to claim every available hour. The people who love me may value what I know, but their relationship with me cannot depend upon requiring an answer from me. One of the tasks of turning the page is learning that being wanted and being needed are not identical, and that love may become easier to hear when it is not competing with the applause of usefulness.

That sounds reasonable while I write it, which is often the danger. The analytical Jeff can create a persuasive retirement strategy, identify the objectives and allocate sufficient time to relationships, health, writing and community contribution. The human Jeff may still wake on a quiet morning and interpret the absence of demand as evidence of decline. He may cross the few steps into the office, not because the plan requires it, but because the familiar machinery produces a reassuring noise. A page can be turned deliberately while the eyes continue reading the words showing faintly through from the other side.

The anger also complicates retirement because work gave it an authorised target. There were systems to challenge, errors to correct, clients to protect and foolish decisions to oppose before they became expensive. The professional role allowed me to convert outrage into action and to tell myself that the heat existed because something important was at stake. Without that arena, I have to ask whether the anger will diminish, attach itself to smaller matters or finally demand that I examine the older injuries from which it learned its method. It is easier to fight somebody else’s fire than to admit how much of the smoke has been travelling with you.

The restaurant in the song therefore becomes more than a memory of not fitting in. It asks what happens when I am no longer required to enter those rooms, and whether I will miss even the rooms that made me angry because they gave the anger shape. There is identity in opposition, especially for a person who has spent years being Not Your Ordinary anything. The ordinary room needs the outsider almost as much as the outsider needs the room against which to define himself. Retirement threatens that arrangement by suggesting I might no longer have to prove that I am different, which leaves the uncomfortable question of who I am when nobody is insisting that I conform.

I have often described my work as giving everything for the client, and that remains substantially true. I cared about outcomes, carried problems beyond the hours for which I was paid and felt responsible for consequences that were not entirely mine to control. Yet the song will not let me remain only the exhausted traveller unfairly judged by strangers. The traveller chose the road often enough for it to become a life, returned to the stage and accepted the bargain in which energy, identity and applause were repeatedly exchanged. I must therefore allow the possibility that some of my frustration came not only from what others demanded, but from my unwillingness to stop offering what I later resented them for taking.

That does not absolve the clients who ignored advice, devalued expertise or treated concern as a commodity purchased by the month. Nor does it excuse institutions that reward certainty over competence and prefer a compliant professional to an honest one. It simply returns some agency to me, which is less comfortable than assigning every failure of fulfilment to an ungrateful audience. I could have said no more often, charged differently, withdrawn earlier, protected the family time and refused to make rescue the centre of my professional mythology. There were reasons I did not, but reasons are not the same as inevitabilities.

The desire to explode contains a similar contradiction. Part of me imagines that one complete release would have been honest, perhaps even cleansing, because everybody would finally have seen the cost hidden beneath the calm. Another part knows that an explosion is indiscriminate, and the truth it reveals can be buried beneath the damage it causes. Rage may announce that a boundary has been crossed, but it does not automatically know where the boundary should have been or why I failed to defend it earlier. The more difficult courage may have been to speak while the voice could still remain measured, rather than waiting until silence had accumulated enough pressure to feel heroic.

This is where the song applies most strongly to my life, not because I have lived the literal experience of a touring rock musician, but because I recognise the sequence. Fatigue makes the world narrower, judgement makes it hostile, anger offers a sudden form of power, performance restores usefulness, and the quiet afterwards reveals that nothing essential has been settled. Then the page turns and the sequence is allowed to begin again. A career can be built from that cycle, particularly when competence ensures each performance is good enough to justify the next booking. It can also become a way of postponing the question of whether the road still leads anywhere I wish to go.

The title therefore carries two meanings for me now. The first is the weary instruction I have followed throughout my working life: finish this matter, absorb what happened, move to the next one and do not allow the audience to see how much it cost. The second is the possibility contained in the physical act of turning a page, because a book can continue without repeating the sentence that came before. The earlier pages remain bound into the same volume; they are neither denied nor torn out, but they no longer have to dictate the next line. Retirement may be less about becoming somebody new than allowing the same person to use a different tense.

I do not want to pretend the working chapter no longer matters. It gave me skills, relationships, stories, failures, resilience and a language through which I learned to make complexity less frightening for other people. It allowed me to support a family, rebuild after collapse and discover that humour could carry serious advice further than solemnity ever managed. It also took time, attention and emotional energy that cannot now be recovered by describing the sacrifice as necessary. Turning the page honestly requires me to carry both accounts, not merely the one that produces the more flattering balance.

Nor do I want retirement to become an apology for having worked. There is a modern tendency to look backwards with the wisdom purchased by the years being judged and then condemn the younger self for not possessing it in advance. I made choices within responsibilities, fears, ambitions and expectations that were real at the time, even when they later proved expensive. The man on the road was not a fool simply because the older man can now see another route. He was doing what he believed had to be done, sometimes bravely, sometimes stubbornly and often without understanding which of those descriptions applied.

The question is what remains when the stage lights change. Advice remains, although I may offer it more selectively and with less willingness to carry the consequences for somebody who refuses to hear it. Writing remains, perhaps because it allows the analytical and human parts of me to occupy the same page without one being asked to leave the room. Family remains, not as an item to be scheduled after the urgent work but as the place in which usefulness is not the admission price. Curiosity remains, along with the inconvenient habit of noticing where logic has been bent to serve somebody’s preferred conclusion.

Anger remains as well, but I would like it to have a different job. It can identify the places where something matters without being appointed manager of the entire operation. It can sharpen a sentence, expose an absurdity and refuse the comfortable lie, but it does not need to set fire to the room in order to prove the room was cold. The rage I hear in the restaurant passage deserves acknowledgement because denying it merely sends it underground. Acknowledgement, however, is not surrender, and I am not obliged to let every old insult choose the direction of the next page.

I suspect I will continue to enter the office on days when no client emergency requires me. Some of that will be habit, some genuine contribution and some the lingering hope that the familiar room will tell me who I am. I may still feel the pull of the old road when somebody asks for help, particularly when I can already see the answer forming before they have finished describing the problem. Retirement will not remove the part of me that wants to step forward; it may only require me to ask whether stepping forward is necessary, wanted and worth what it will cost the people waiting elsewhere.

There may also be new rooms in which I do not fit. Retirement has its own expectations, its own cheerful uniforms and its own suspicion of anybody who continues thinking too seriously about the meaning of it all. I am unlikely to become entirely relaxed simply because the calendar no longer grants tax deadlines the authority to ruin an otherwise decent month. I may carry a notebook to places where other people carry only sunscreen, and I may turn an ordinary conversation into a question about identity before somebody has finished opening the packet of biscuits. Not fitting in will probably remain one of my more consistent skills, but it need not always be experienced as rejection.

Perhaps belonging is not the discovery of a room in which nobody looks sideways. Perhaps it is the ability to enter without allowing the glance to determine who I become, and to leave without carrying every judgement into the next place. That possibility asks more of me than anger does because anger provides an immediate explanation, while belonging requires uncertainty and the risk of being seen without the armour of usefulness. I have spent much of my life trying to earn my place through what I could do, solve, provide or endure. The next page may ask whether I can remain in the room when I am not performing.

The song does not promise that the next town will be kinder, the next audience more perceptive or the next night more peaceful. It simply recognises the exhaustion, the judgement, the energy expended and the repetition, then moves again. That honesty is why the title belongs here at the edge of retirement. I do not need a song that tells me the future will be wonderful once I close the office door, because I would not believe it and the song would have wasted its breath. I need one that understands how difficult it is to stop when continuation has become both burden and proof of life.

I am still learning the difference between turning the page and fleeing the chapter. Fleeing would require me to dismiss the work, resent the clients indiscriminately and pretend that none of the applause or achievement meant anything because it did not mean everything. Refusing to turn would keep me circling the same venues, giving more energy to performances that no longer justify the journey and blaming the audience for accepting the show I continue to advertise. Turning the page allows gratitude and anger to remain in the same book. It permits the earlier chapter to matter without granting it permanent control of the plot.

The computer in the spare bedroom will not disappear when I retire more completely, and neither will the person who sat before it. The files may reduce, the calls become less frequent and the authority of the professional title slowly detach itself from my name, but the ability to think, question, explain and care does not belong to the practice alone. Those capacities travelled through the business, yet they were never created by it. The challenge is to use them without rebuilding the same road simply because I know how to drive it.

For now, I remain somewhere between the venue and home, carrying enough of the old equipment to recognise its weight and enough curiosity about the next chapter to keep moving. I can hear Jon English delivering the song with the force that first made it mine, but I hear something different in the title than I did when work seemed endless and retirement belonged to another species of human being. The page is not blank, because the pressure of everything written before has left its impression, and I would distrust a page that pretended otherwise. It is nevertheless available, and I do not have to fill it with another performance merely to prove the book has not ended.

Turning the page will not make me fit neatly into retirement, extinguish the rage or compensate the people who sometimes received too little of me while clients received too much. It will not answer whether the work was worth the cost, because a life is not a ledger in which every contribution can be matched cleanly against a withdrawal. It may allow me to stop treating movement as the only evidence that I am alive and usefulness as the only evidence that I belong. The road behind me remains part of the story, the band and roadies remain part of whatever comes next, and the man who wanted to explode remains inside the one learning when not to perform. This time, when I turn the page, I would like to notice what is already waiting there before I begin writing the old chapter again.

Notes

1. Turn the Page was written and first recorded by Bob Seger, appearing on his 1973 album Back in ’72. The version remembered in this chapter is Jon English’s recording, released on his 1974 album It’s All a Game. It was through English’s interpretation that the song entered Jeff’s life.