DUTCH

 

In two weeks I will turn 66. “When will you actually stop working?” I am asked more and more regularly these days. “I really don’t know,” I say. Retiring is a bit old-fashioned to me. My retirement money rests, but with me, rust doesn’t rest for now. Although, with a heart attack or a nasty disease, working life could be over in a flash.

Retirees in the Netherlands are working longer and longer, the TV news reported this week. There are already a few hundred thousand of them. And it will be more and more in the coming years. People are living longer and – more importantly – there is a huge shortage of workers. Therefore, older people need to lend a helping hand.

In America, by the way, continuing to work until later in life is nothing new. There it has long been the case that the elderly just keep grinding along. People don’t know any better. The same will happen here. In the Netherlands too, the new resting becomes working. Relax in that, without letting thoughts of a peaceful old age drive you crazy.

Rest in your head is much more important than rest in your body, I once learned in The Big Apple. In my mind I fly back to the 1980s. My then-newspaper, De Gooi- en Eemlander, sent me to interview the incoming President & CEO of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Pieter Bouw, in New York.

We talked about his immensely busy job, which would be made a little more intense by his promotion to top boss. In the skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, he walked to the window. “Come take a look,” he said to me. We looked at the swarming below. “See that church over there?” he asked me. He pointed to Saint Thomas Church, an oasis of calm in an anthill. “When I look at that it always gives me peace and perspective. That way I never run past myself.”

Peter Contant is the editor/publisher of MAX Magazine. Formerly he edited and published Veronica Magazine.