The Body Was The Career

Part One

I left investment banking and the C-suite at a different age, in a different industry, with a different kind of body. The structural parallel between my transition and the transition athletes describe at the end of their careers is closer than it looks from outside, which is what makes the parallel useful.

In my career, the body was instrumental but not the instrument. The mind was the instrument, and the body was something to be kept functional enough to support the mind's output. When the diabetes diagnosis came at forty, what broke first was not the body. It was the assumption that the body was a separate project from the rest of the life.

For an athlete, the relationship is more visible from the outside and more total from the inside. The body is the foreground. The body is the instrument by which the entire career is conducted. The training, the recovery, the diet, the sleep, the medication, the imaging, the testing, the rehab, all of it is in service of one thing, which is producing the performance the body is contracted to produce. The athlete and the body are, for the duration of the career, the same project. The athlete is the body, and the body is the career.

This arrangement works for as long as it works. The body is fed what it needs and is asked to do what it can do, and the relationship between athlete and body is something close to total identification. The boundary between who you are and what your body produces is not really a boundary, because asking it to be one would interrupt the performance the whole arrangement is built around.

What this arrangement means, when the career begins to end, is something almost no one outside of professional sport seems to grasp.

It means that the ending of the career is also the ending of the body, in the only sense the athlete has ever known the body. The body is no longer the instrument by which a public performance is being produced. It is no longer being read by coaches, scrutinised by physios, optimised by a team of people whose job is to keep it producing. It is, suddenly, just a body. Yours. Quieter. Less observed. Less needed in the specific way it has been needed for twenty years.

Most retirement-transition support handles this by treating the body as one project and the career as another, and offering separate solutions for each. Physical health for the body. Career planning for the next phase. The athlete is supposed to feel reassured by the comprehensiveness of this, but in the accounts they share honestly in public, usually does not.

Part Two

The athlete does not feel reassured because, from inside, the body and the career are not two things and never were. They are one thing, and the work of the second half of life involves a relationship with the body that has to be rebuilt from the foundations up, not maintained as a separate project alongside something else.

What this looks like in practice, based on what athletes describe and on the structural parallel to my own transition, is that the body has to be rebuilt as something other than the instrument of public performance. For some, it becomes something the person has rather than something the person is. For some, it becomes the instrument of private presence rather than public performance. In almost every honest account of post-career life I have read or heard, the body needs to be listened to in a way it has not been listened to before, because during the career, the body was mostly being told what to do and was being read for performance feedback rather than for any other kind of feedback. What the body has to say, once it is no longer being commanded, is often surprising and often important.

When I went through my own transition, one of the frames that helped me make sense of what was happening was the Vedic chart. The phase I was passing through was one in which the external supports that had carried me for thirty years were thinning out, and the question being asked of me was whether I was going to find footing in something more durable. Knowing that did not solve anything. It changed what I was working on from a personal failure to be repaired into a phase of life with a shape, which I could see, and could begin to work with. That same frame is one I bring into the practice. For an athlete in transition, the chart would not announce that the career is ending. It would describe the phase of life the person is in and the questions it is asking. Knowing the shape of the phase is what allows the work to begin.

This is part of the larger work of who the athlete is becoming. It is specific, slow, and mostly done out of public view, which is itself part of the adjustment.

Continue reading: The Honest Version →

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