I stood at my own front door for twenty minutes trying to identify who I needed to inform before going for a walk.
The answer was nobody. There was no bridge watch to notify. No officer of the watch expecting a handover. No departure time logged with anyone. No ETA to file at the other end. Just a coastal path, available to me freely, requiring nothing except that I walk along it.
This took approximately twenty minutes to process. I eventually informed a seagull of my intentions. It gave the matter three seconds of consideration before finding something more interesting on the roof.
The thing about a career at sea is that the permission structure runs very deep. Not as bureaucracy — as architecture. For forty-six years, every action I took existed within a framework of accountability. Someone always knew where I was, what I was doing, and what would happen if I didn’t return when expected. That accountability isn’t restriction. It’s the precondition for purposeful action. It organises everything else around it.
Remove it, and the purposefulness goes too. Not permanently. But in those early months of retirement, the freedom that was supposed to feel liberating felt, more often than not, like standing in an empty room looking for the load-bearing wall.
Building that permission internally, without the institutional scaffold, is the actual work of retirement. Nobody told me that. I’m telling you now.
The mornings when the old machinery doesn’t start up automatically — when I walk out without looking for a clipboard, change direction halfway along the coastal path for no reason and with no paperwork required — those feel like something I didn’t expect to get.
I’m 67, based in Hartlepool, North East England. Two years into adjusting to my own permission structure. This week’s piece is about the waiting, the habit of accountability, and what quietly happens when you finally give it up.
Free on Substack — because these things should be available to everyone currently standing somewhere, waiting.
Read it at https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/i-caught-myself-waiting-for-permission
And if you need a nudge: greythinker.gumroad.com/l/khidv