“The only thing missing is professional life.”
A Question I Often Asked Myself
When I was working as a self-employed IT consultant, I often asked myself a question: what should I do about my children?
Should I involve them in my work? Should I prepare at least one of them to carry on my profession one day? Part of me liked the idea. It would have been good to pass on to a child what I had learned over many years of work, give them a store of experience already built up, perhaps spare them some of the mistakes I had had to learn from myself.
But another thought immediately followed. If I had involved one of my children in my business, I would have felt obliged to do everything I could to keep it going well. And that responsibility probably would not have ended when I retired.
I would have gone on worrying about clients, problems, financial difficulties and decisions to be made. In other words, I would have retired without ever truly retiring.
That prospect troubled me. I wanted a time to come in my life when I could say, peacefully: my work is over. Not because work had been a pointless burden, but because every season of life must eventually be allowed to make room for the next.
When the Children's Work Becomes the Parents' Work Too
I knew people in a very different situation. Some acquaintances had helped their son start a restaurant business. They themselves worked in entirely different fields, yet every evening they were there: one in the kitchen, another serving, hoping their presence might help.
On top of that came substantial financial support, needed to accommodate their son's choices and plans. This was not just an occasional helping hand: it was continual physical, mental and financial involvement.
Sadly, the business eventually failed. That can happen, of course. No enterprise is guaranteed to succeed, and even ventures begun enthusiastically can fail.
What struck me most, though, was the parents' total involvement. What should have been their son's business had inevitably become theirs as well. I saw something deeply sad in that situation: parents who, instead of being able to bring their working lives to a peaceful close, once again found themselves laden with worries, responsibilities and sacrifices.
I did not judge their choice. I understood perfectly why they did it: when a child needs help, a parent can hardly stand by and watch. But that was exactly why I thought it better to avoid creating a mutual professional dependence in the first place, one that would be hard to undo later.
My Choice: Keeping Work and Family Separate
Over time I became convinced that my working life did not necessarily have to coincide with my children's.
I did IT consulting of various kinds. Fortunately, I was never short of work, but I had not built a company or professional practice that needed to go on after me. When I stopped, that activity could simply end.
I must admit that this made my choice much easier. There was nothing I had to pass on. There were no employees to hand over to a successor, no family brand to defend, no practice whose name had to be kept alive.
That realisation gave me a great sense of freedom. I could decide to continue, cut back, change course or stop without feeling that I was harming anyone in my family.
Eighteen Years of Teaching
That freedom also had an important practical consequence in my professional life.
For eighteen years I taught as well: mathematics for eight years and computer science for another ten.
Because I did not have to protect a private business that would continue after me at all costs, I could gradually change the way I worked. As retirement age approached, I progressively reduced my private consulting and gave more and more room to teaching.
In a sense, it was a natural transition. I did not need to hold on to clients for someone who would come after me or prepare a professional succession. I could choose.
And as the years passed, the ability to choose became ever more precious to me. I could leave work. I could reduce it. I could change it. I could devote myself to a different activity, such as teaching, and use what I had learned in another way.
Perhaps that too was a kind of continuity: not necessarily passing my profession to my children, but passing knowledge to others. Not a private professional legacy, then, but a wider sharing of the experience I had gained.
The Family Remains; the Profession Does Not
Of course, keeping my professional life separate from my children's never meant withdrawing from their lives.
My involvement remains when financial support is needed. It remains in sharing their happiness and comforting them in difficult times. It remains in being together on holidays, anniversaries, important occasions and ordinary days alike.
In short, everything that truly belongs to family life remains.
The only thing missing is professional life.
And over time I have felt that this distinction is increasingly right: being present without being involved in everything; helping without having to direct; supporting without becoming permanent partners, employees or guarantors of my children's professional choices.
The Real Problem Comes Later: What Do I Do Now?
There is another aspect, though, that I have learned to notice over the years. It concerns not our children, but ourselves.
Many people reach retirement as if they were facing a void. For decades, work has set the rhythm of their days: the time to get up, appointments, problems to solve, responsibilities, people to meet. Then, suddenly, all of it disappears.
And a frightening question arises: what do I do now?
Sometimes it almost seems as though retirement ends not just work but part of our identity. We no longer know how to fill our time and begin to think that without professional commitments our days lose their value.
I know and see many people who keep working for as long as their strength allows. Not necessarily because they need the money. Often money has almost nothing to do with it. The point is that they still see work as the only possible way to feel useful, occupied and alive.
That is understandable. If for forty years we have associated our worth with what we produce, breaking that pattern is not easy. We almost have to learn again how to live without an outside structure deciding how each day should be organised for us.
Learning to Live at a Slower Pace
Perhaps one of the hardest things is exactly this: accepting a life at a slower pace.
A life without daily obligations, a packed diary or the need to prove that every hour has been productive. A life in which you can take a trip without squeezing it between commitments, visit someone, read, take a walk, deal with something put off for years or simply do nothing in particular.
At first it can even feel strange. We are so used to thinking of free time as a break from work that we struggle to imagine it as a normal condition of life.
But a day does not have to be full to be a good day. And a life does not have to be frantic to be a complete one.
Perhaps retirement calls for precisely this change in perspective: not desperately looking for a new job to replace the old one, but learning to value what brings no income, career advancement or recognition.
Writing Without Needing to Gain Anything from It
Now that I am retired, I have found an important part of this new freedom in writing. My background is technical, not literary, and that is precisely why artificial intelligence has become a faithful collaborator. I give it raw material: a memory, an episode, an insight, a few phrases jotted down without order. That material is organised, developed and given shape; it comes to life without losing the content and meaning I entrusted to it.
I like to think of this relationship not as a machine writing in my place, but as a collaboration particularly well suited to who I am: I bring the experience, memory, ideas and judgement; AI helps me turn what first takes imperfect shape into a readable, lasting text. In the end, it is a new and very natural way, for someone from an IT background, to keep using technology not to work more, but to give better form to the things I consider important.
I look after a space where I gather memories, episodes and moments that I consider significant. When a memory, a person, an experience or a thought worth preserving comes back to me, I try to put it into words.
It is a way of recording the past, but also of giving it new life. As long as a memory remains only in the mind, it is fragile: it can fade, become confused or lose details. Writing it down makes it more stable, almost permanent.
This is not nostalgia for its own sake. Rather, it is a way of questioning what one has lived through and understanding, perhaps many years later, what it meant.
Alongside that space I maintain another, devoted to mathematics and computer science. There I collect problems, insights, observations, short essays, teaching methods and ideas that come to mind.
The best thing is that I do not have to gain anything from it.
I do not have to meet deadlines. I do not have to satisfy a client. I do not have to ask whether what I write will be profitable, whether there is a market for it or whether it will help my career.
If a memory occurs to me, I write a memory. If I find an interesting mathematical problem, I try to develop it. If a thought arises about computing or teaching, I put it in writing.
I do it because I am interested in doing it. And I have realised that this is a very particular kind of freedom: to keep thinking, studying, building and creating without everything necessarily having to become work.
Producing Without Being Required to Produce
For many years we become used to doing things because we must. There is a client, a contract, a school syllabus, a deadline, an appointment.
After retirement, we can discover a different way to be active: doing something because we enjoy it, and stopping when we no longer do.
That does not mean giving up being useful or becoming passive. On the contrary, it can mean finally choosing more precisely where we want to put our energy.
The difference is subtle but enormous: work used to decide an important part of how I spent my time; today I decide what deserves my time.
And perhaps this is exactly what I was seeking all those years ago when I thought about my children and wondered whether it was right to involve them in my work. I wanted not only to leave them free to choose their profession. I also wanted to preserve for myself, one day, the freedom no longer to have one.
A Second Freedom
Writing without deadlines is one expression of this second freedom, which I have lived since retiring. I also feel it in the tangible possibility of choosing what to do with the time I have left, for however long God grants me.
There is, however, one painful thing, the only thing I had not foreseen.
I had wanted to live this part of my life with my beloved wife Stefania: to reach the slower time of retirement with her, to share unhurried days, perhaps a trip, a visit, the small things that become precious when one no longer has to race against time. But before she could retire, a terrible illness took her from me at only sixty-five. Everything I had imagined as a freedom to be lived by two people was suddenly left without the person with whom I wanted to share it. We can learn to fill time, pursue interests, write, remember and keep looking ahead. But there are absences no activity can fill. For me, the pain of not being able to share this stage of life with Stefania remains impossible to overcome. It was the one thing I had been unable to foresee when I thought about the future.
Free to devote myself to the things that interest me. Free to learn something new. Free to write. Free to travel. Free to be close to my children when needed. Free even to do nothing, if I wish.
Without clients to keep. Without a business to defend. Without the burden of work that must go on indefinitely just because it was built over many years.
A parent can pass on knowledge, experience, values, method, discipline and curiosity to their children. But that does not mean they must also pass on their profession.
Children have the right to build their own working lives. And parents, at a certain point, have the right to bring theirs to a peaceful close.
Not to stop living, but perhaps, at last, to learn to experience time in another way.
What I Would Like to Leave My Children
I would like the three of you to know this: I did not want to leave my profession to you as an obligation. I tried to be there as your father without asking you to become a continuation of my work. Choose your own paths, build something meaningful to you and, when the time comes, keep the freedom to enter a different season of life.
I would also like you to remember your mother, Stefania, as part of this story. I dreamed of sharing with her the free time we had waited for. That was not possible, and no new occupation can erase the loss. Continuing to write and to live does not mean forgetting her: it means carrying what we shared with me and trying to pass its value on to you.
Papy