(Editor's Note: The writer is a newly retired college professor and Woodbury resident)

I am a newly retired college professor. After 38 years I won't be standing in front of a classroom anymore. A door, which has been open for me all of my adult life, is closed, which means that others are open. I don't know what they are because, while planning for the financial aspects of retirement, I've thought only in broad strokes about intrinsically meaningful activity. When I mentioned my concerns about finding such activity with a sage friend, who knows me well, she said in so many words, let the game come to you. Those weren't her words; they are mine albeit borrowed from a professional football coach. Loosely translated what she said was look around, feel your way around, let something find you.

As a youthful and later middle-aged professor I had a surrogate father in my department with whom I had a thousand conversations and shared as many lunches. After he retired he needed a place to come once in a while. He visited what he called "the shop" and I bought a folding table on which we ate lunch. I vowed that this wasn't going to happen to me. No visiting; gone would be gone.

When I told my colleagues that I would be retiring, I felt I was leaving friends more than a university in which I'd worked for well over 30 years. I also realized what so many prison lifers must when they are about to be paroled; I was institutionalized. In truth I was burned out. I knew a year ago that I could retire before 65; but how could I give up the money? Then there was the aching realization that, like my surrogate father, I too would need a place to go. I couldn't let go and didn't know it.

What prompted my decision to retire was something I had never considered; a health issue. One winter morning my wife and I sat in our living room to discuss the now real possibility of retirement. I knew it was not wise to continue working and she couldn't take the New York winters any longer. And just like that the door on a lifelong career was closed and hasn't been revisited since.

When I had previously discussed retirement with friends, everyone who knew me said that I wouldn't be bored because of my range of interests. Those interests have evolved over the years. None of them has been more passionate than writing about birds and birding, which I started doing a dozen years ago. A subject that I once knew nothing about has given me the deepest, intellectual and emotional satisfaction that I have ever found in work. The sheer act of creating was truly a magical mystery that changed both my life and my identity. The game really came to me there. However I knew that in retirement it would not be enough. It could become grinding, aching work. I feared not having a raison d'être; my own version of a Holy Grail for which to search.

I took out my old thirty-five millimeter camera and starting shooting pictures with lenses that I'd never really gotten to know. I shot pictures of flowers, leaves, spiders, small branches, clouds and the head of a statue in the grass. The pictures were eye-opening. It was not postcard scenes that I saw in them; I saw art. I took out two old microscopes, which I bought a few years ago when the biology department had a too good to resist sale on them. Putting them on our patio table in the sunlight of a summer afternoon, I saw subjects for photos in microscopic bits of broken herb stems, berries and tea. Something dawned on me. Was macro photography, about which I truly know nothing, much different than looking at small birds through binoculars and telescopes, while marveling at the infinite forms that species took? Was my Holy Grail going to be searched for through a lens?

My definition of a place to go also changed. Maybe that place wasn't an office or classroom but wherever and whenever I found it. I don't know if there's a Holy Grail for me but I know that I can't let it come to me unless I sample what I call the curriculum. As hard as it may be after decades of creating stability, as joyful as unstructured play may be, I'm trying to let the game come to me. This is my time for serious play and I seriously want to play.

Most recently I've been thinking about three students that I worked with on theses and projects, talked to in my office for hours and saw bits and pieces myself in each of their disparate personalities. I listened to them and devised technical academic ways of helping them realize the dreams that burned in their young souls. I like to think of it, metaphorically, as pointing them in the direction of where their future footsteps would go.

I worked with them from both my head and my heart because I knew them as persons and liked what I saw. Truth be told, I identified with and envied these students, the youthful voyages of discovery on which they were embarking. I watched while sadly viewing my own career winding down, without much enthusiasm about where my future footprints would lie.

On a recent, rainy Saturday, with my wife's unwavering and enthusiastic help, I cleaned out my office. It was no small task throwing out files, books and artifacts that I'd collected over the years. I tossed out almost everything. The joy of being unburdened by the soon to be past overcame my sorrow for what had been and could no longer be.

One of the things that I brought home was a framed bird feather that one student who studied for a semester in El Salvador gave to me upon her return. I hung it on the wall of my study but not before taping to its back two cards which she had written to me a few years before. It was only when I looked closely at the framed feather that I saw not a painted feather but her voyage of discovery and the voyages of the two other students. Thinking about their sparkling intelligence, the fire and passion of their youthful dreams, and finally their metamorphoses into being young adults I remembered my own journey in graduate school with a professor who forever changed my life. That's when I saw in the frame not so much a feather but the possibilities of the journey on which I'd embarked. More accurately I felt more than I saw and came away believing in myself, and the as yet, undiscovered possibilities out there.

Faced with an uncertain future I unthinkingly reached into the past for two things. The first was photography, which I brought into the present to do what I hadn't done before. I think that it's called creating the conditions for letting the game come to you; it was a start. The second thing that I reached for was thoughts of my former students, how far they've come and the footprints they are making. I'm amazed at how much they are now pointing me in the direction of my own future footprints.