Who Am I When I’m Not the Captain?

As it turns out: considerably more interesting than expected.

There is a particular kind of decision that doesn’t reveal its full significance until you’re already on the far side of it.

Retirement, for most people, is something that arrives. For me, it was a choice — one I examined from every angle, like walking around an unfamiliar aircraft before deciding it’s airworthy and I’m willing to climb aboard.

I did that. I checked the structure. I kicked the tyres. And somewhere in the process, I found myself asking the obvious question: if I hand back the four stripes, do I hand back something more fundamental about who I am?

The answer, it turned out, was no.

I’m a pilot. I earned that. No-one gets to take it away, including the passage of time, the expiry of a medical, or the entirely reasonable decision to stop flying airliners and do something else with the next several decades. The licence may lapse. The identity doesn’t. That’s not stubbornness — it’s just accurate.

So that was settled fairly quickly. What remained was the more interesting question: what next?

The view from the gate

I had, of course, understood that retirement involved stopping work. I had a vague sense that people filled the time with golf, gardening, grandchildren, or an astonishing amount of daytime television. I had also heard the cautionary tales — the ones about people who defined themselves entirely by their careers and then discovered, almost too late, that they had misplaced themselves somewhere, possibly as they were handing back their airline pass at Uniform Stores.

My expectations, however, were different.

What I had not fully anticipated was the sheer spaciousness of it.

Not emptiness — spaciousness. There’s a difference, and it matters. Emptiness is the absence of something that should be there. Spaciousness is room: genuine, generous room to fill with whatever turns out to be worth filling it with. One is a problem. The other is an invitation.

The roster had always answered that question for me. Where to be. When to sleep. Which city to eat dinner in. I didn’t, while in its care, have to wonder what to do with a Tuesday afternoon.

And then it stops, and Tuesday afternoon looks at you with mild expectation. The surprising thing is that the question of what to do with it is considerably more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

Rather like standing in front of a very large menu, having just discovered you’re hungrier than you thought.

Because Tuesday afternoon, it turns out, is not a void to be managed. It is a blank page — like a clean notebook fresh from the stationery shop. And I think we all know the particular pleasure of a trip to the stationery shop.

The beginner returns

There is something that happens to you over a long career that you don’t notice until it stops happening: you become professionally competent.

This sounds like a good thing, and in most respects it is. Competence is the point. Competence is what several hundred passengers per flight were undoubtedly hoping for. But competence has a side effect that nobody mentions: it gradually removes the pleasure of not knowing what you’re doing.

The beginner’s mind — genuinely open, genuinely uncertain, capable of being surprised by almost anything — gets slowly and professionally sanded away. By the end, you are excellent at your job but rather poor at being a novice. You forget, somewhere in thirty years of accumulated expertise, what it feels like to begin something with no idea whether you’ll be any good at it.

I got a second-hand taste of that watching my daughters begin their own careers — one as a pilot, one as an actor. Big choices, both difficult, both uncertain, but both lit by the energy of someone who does not yet know how the story ends. Retirement gives that experience back to you.

I am currently a beginner at several things simultaneously, with varying degrees of dignity. Some are physical. Some intellectual. Some are, frankly, humbling in ways I had not budgeted for. All of them are interesting in a way that pure competence, for all its virtues, stopped being some time ago.

The trick, I’m finding, is to treat each new beginning the way you would an unfamiliar airport: gather the information, understand the layout, accept that local procedures may differ from what you’re used to, and proceed with a confidence that is both genuine and entirely unjustified by your level of experience.

Dignity optional.

The answer, for now

So who am I, when I’m not the captain?

I’m still a pilot — that part doesn’t change. But the question was never really about the licence. It was about the architecture underneath: the curiosity and bloodymindedness that made the career possible in the first place, the appetite for understanding how things work, the instinct for preparation, the appreciation for doing things properly when doing them approximately is perfectly adequate.

Those things don’t expire. If anything, they become more useful now, applied to a brief that is considerably wider than one aircraft type.

I’m also, it turns out, someone who finds cooking over a live fire genuinely pleasurable — particularly when the results don’t taste like charcoal. Someone who can spend an unreasonable amount of time walking somewhere slowly with no destination in particular. Someone who is building a body that objects a little less often to the general proposal of existing. Someone who has started this blog as an adventure in creativity and communication, which has the pleasant side effect of making all of the above feel as though it counts for something.

The answer, in other words, is still being written.

Which is exactly how it should be.

The captain has left the aircraft. The adventure is only just beginning.