Going Alone: The Story — No. 001: The Road Out

Three Layers of Retirement (So Far)

At Huntington Beach, the Pacific was turning copper, and the old BMW waited loaded for the road. The aluminum cases were marked by years of use. A copy of Going Alone traveled with the rider, along with the tools and ordinary possessions that make a journey possible.

The rider was Kurt Bell—or rather, the Traveler drawn from his life for this imagined adventure. His daughter was grown, his family secure, and the long years of employment behind him. He wasn't fleeing any of it. He was setting out to see what a lifetime of work, responsibility, and inquiry might make possible next.

The road would take him east, away from the coast and toward the East Mojave. Yet the first landscape he found himself considering was not outside the windshield. It was retirement itself.

A year and three quarters after leaving work, he had begun to suspect that retirement did not arrive all at once. It opened in layers, each one a different sort of freedom. Three had come into view so far.

The first freedom: the day the work ends

This is the obvious one. A job ends. The schedule stops commanding the morning. There are no meetings to prepare for, no office to reach, no employer claiming the next hour. Space suddenly opens in the calendar.

That first release can seem the easiest part of retirement because it is immediate and unmistakable. Yet there is a complication: the easiest change to recognize may be the hardest to settle into. A person can be free of work without yet knowing what to do with freedom. Habits formed over decades do not simply disappear when a final paycheck arrives.

The motorcycle moved through the last familiar streets, and the question rode alongside him: what does one do with a day that no longer belongs to someone else's expectations?

The second freedom: shedding the great coat

The next change is quieter. For years, perhaps decades, work stress can become a kind of great coat worn over everything else. Its weight is so familiar that it scarcely registers. The shoulders remain braced. The mind rehearses tomorrow's demands even on a day off.

Then the work is gone, but the coat may remain. Months pass. Perhaps a year or more. Perhaps some people never put it down entirely. Its presence is harder to detect while it is being worn than its absence is when it finally slips away.

This freedom is not announced by a retirement party or a date on a calendar. It may become clear in some ordinary moment when an old worry fails to appear, when an evening feels unexpectedly open, or when the body stops preparing for a demand that is no longer coming.

The third freedom: the world's machinery

There is another layer, less settled and still difficult to name. Working life builds a network of encounters and obligations: colleagues, routines, requests, negotiations, favors, appointments, and the countless small machinations by which we maintain a place in the world.

Once the immediate schedule and its lingering stress begin to loosen, something about those social connections may also change. The traveler cannot yet say exactly what is being released. Is it a burden of expectations, an identity tied to usefulness, or merely the old pattern of continual engagement? And what relationships endure when their practical machinery has grown quiet?

He does not mistake this for a reason to turn away from other people. It is an observation still forming: that the social circumstances of work may continue to shape a life long after the work itself ends, and that recognizing their change may be another kind of freedom.

The road ahead

The bike carried him farther from the coast. Behind him lay a life he valued; ahead, a desert that had given him questions before and might do so again. The book in the luggage held some of the answers he had reached in earlier years. None relieved him of the need to keep looking.

Three layers of retirement, discovered so far. Perhaps there would be a fourth, and a fifth. Perhaps some of the first three would look different after more miles and more time.

For now, the engine hummed beneath him and the road opened east. The next part of Going Alone had begun.

Going Alone: The Story is an illustrated fictional serial inspired by Kurt Bell's life, writing, and travels. Its scenes and narration are newly developed, not historical passages from the 2017 book.