One year of retirement: Edgar Seikaly

One year ago today, I retired.

At least, that is what the paperwork said.

This year I wrote. Not just reports or strategies or frameworks with executive summaries. I wrote memory. War and kitchen smoke and a wooden spoon that carried more history than most archives. I began a book that does not yet have a final page, because some truths take time to find their ending.

I traveled, or planned to, which is its own kind of travel. I mapped roads across America. I deepened my roots in Lebanon, that stubborn, beautiful, infuriating country that never quite lets you go. I worked on questions about reconstruction, governance, and what a nation owes its people, and I offered what I had: decades of hard-earned perspective, given freely, without a title attached.

I became, for the first time in a long time, available. To my family. To ideas that used to get crowded out by calendars.

People ask if I miss it.

I did not leave the work. I left the parts of the work that were never really the work.

What I do now is closer to the original reason I started. Not the meetings. The mission.

One year in. Grateful. Still building.

Here's to year two.