Compass and Camera

Kevin A. Butler - Correspondent. By Gemini

I've struggled for some time now to determine just what or who I am now in retirement. 20 months in, I'm still trying to find a rhythm and my pace, my footing. I have spent plenty of time traveling, driving thousands of miles across the US, visiting Belfast and Londonderry, Cairo and Luxor, Normandy, Champagne, and the Alps. Long-time friends will recall my old pre-blog blog I was sharing photos and stories when Picasa was still a thing and a new HTML page had to be done for each trip.

Traveling was what I did for work. Over one million miles flown on United, close to another half million across other carriers I've seen 80 domestic airports and countless international terminals. You can see the result of this at Vibe Coding to my travel map. Hundreds perhaps thousands of nights in hotels that are long since forgotten. It would be easy to look down my nose at mere tourists as I sling my duffle and backpack over my weary shoulder.

I think the tourist versus traveler debate is a bit pretentious, though. I've done my share of both. I have my photo with King Tut. I hiked the Inca Trail on a guided tour. I've also stepped off a plane in Santo Domingo, DR, and Barranquilla, Colombia, as a solo traveler where the US State Department warnings about personal safety were quite stark. I earned the right to be pretentious, but I won't.

Writer, traveler, photographer, even observer are the keywords if I read back through my extensive travelogues written over years. I objectively am all of these things, but putting that on the business card as an early retiree never quite felt right. While I am up to my ankles at least at this point on a novel and am trying to work through my extensive photo backlog, all of these are apt descriptions. I guess I'm finding friction with the label "retired".

Now "retired" is true. I wrapped up a 30-year career in tech, and despite dabbling with a bit of consulting and lifeguarding a few hours a week, by all definitions I am retired. But I'm not comfortable with that. I feel like it indicates some form of completion or end to a story I'm not even close to done writing.

I chafe at the wisdom you need to retire to something. I'm perfectly content with my to being a long bike ride or a road trip. I'm not looking for an 8-5 job and I'm not even actively seeking consulting work that would be easy to come by. I am enjoying reading books, seeking out craft breweries, and hanging out with my dog, wife and friends.

What is unresolved is that I still want to have output. I still want to make things. It will be different than when I was making vision testing equipment. I have largely closed that particular chapter, but the book is far from over and calling myself retired feels like what is next is epilogue.

Revisiting the keywords this morning led me to a flash of what's important. What I have always been is a correspondent. My audience was often just 1 person, but through college and early adulthood I wrote frequent letters, sent many postcards, typed many emails, on life, on travel, on bicycle racing, on work. As my cycling career waned towards 2010 and my work travel would take over my life for some years I lost track of that impulse to record. It came back from 2016-2021 again as I waged extreme travel that included a circumnavigation of the globe on one particular hard trip. In the push to retirement it waned again. My journals never quite capture the detail and feeling like when I was writing to audience, though. The particular feeling gets lost when I'm just scribbling to myself.

Going forward I'm going to embrace my role as a correspondent. I'm going to step into the role I have always loved, one that I've maybe always been, but kept under wraps save for a few close friends. It is time to embrace change, to give myself a title I'm comfortable using, and to move forward capturing the world as I see it.

Kevin A. Butler - Correspondent