Donald Hall is a writer I can identify with. Not because of literary talent, which he has in abundance, but for other reasons. He is my same age; he gets up early in the morning; and, most of all, he loves his work.

This year he issued another edition of his book “Life Work,” first published in 1993. Since that time, his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died at age 47, and he himself has survived cancer that seemed sure to kill him.

For five years after his wife’s death, Hall was not able to write in his usual range of forms. Even children’s literature in which he had excelled –  –  “The Ox-Cart Man” being his most celebrated book –  –  no longer stirred his creative powers. Nor could he find any pleasure in the essays at which he also excels.

As his grief diminished in intensity, he rediscovered the satisfactions of daily work. Some of that work includes tending to the farmhouse and the yard in Wilmot, New Hampshire where he has lived since 1975. To him, gardens are important; so is walking the dog and daily dealings with his fellow townspeople.

This balance of activities seems ideal to me, a contented urban dweller far removed from frequent contact with the good earth. At least in theory, I recognize the therapeutic benefits of chores outside the house that keep a person in contact with bedrock reality.

I strongly identify with Donald Hall’s vibrant sense of family members, some of them long gone. The farmhouse in which he lives was bought by his great-grandparents in 1865. There his mother and grandmother were born, and there were other family members living in the area. The church that Hall attends, some two miles away, was the site of his grandmother’s organ playing. She played for an astounding 78 years, starting at age 14.

Many of Hall’s activities evoke the presence of these ancestors: fixing things in the house, doing chores in the yard. They summon up the memory of family members who came before him, and continuity with them remains important to him. He knows a lot about his forbears and relishes much that he has learned of their accomplishments.

The stories told of his family members form a precious legacy for Donald Hall. Of them, he says: “I repeat stories I grew upon, stories that created me.” This is a man rooted in family history, much to the benefit of his own psyche.

But back to his main work, writing, I take inspiration from what he says about it. For him, “work is my obsession but it is also my devotion.” He gets out of bed at 4:30 or 5:15 in the morning, reads the newspaper during breakfast, all the while feeling excitement building in anticipation of turning to his writing projects.

But he is not an intellectual detached from the world. Every evening in season he watches the Red Sox on television. In the winter, he watches the Celtics’ play basketball. While following sports on screen, he writes letters to his friends, pays bills, shuffles through magazines, and prepares his tax returns.

Of all the insights Hall shares in his book, I like best those shared with him by the sculptor Henry Moore, expressed at age 80. “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is –  – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

To me, this statement suffers from exaggeration but, still, it expresses a vital ideal, namely being passionate about something. Yes, it is easier for artists than for the rest of us to commit themselves entirely to one quest. But, those elders among us who have found such a similar ideal in whatever they do are indeed fortunate.

Hall also caught my attention when he wrote about a byproduct of work: “Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know you are working.” And he adds: “You are only content when you have no notion of contentment.”

In my working life, there is nothing that pleases me more than getting lost in a project. Forgetting about myself, becoming wrapped up in what I am doing, losing all sense of time – these are my most precious experiences in work. Unfortunately, they are altogether too rare.

Would that more of us in later life – – yes in retirement – – could find activities that can bear this kind of meaning. Many of us, to be sure, have learned to reshape retirement to make of it a time of flourishing, in both our inner and outer lives. Work may mean something quite different now from what it meant when we were paid for the job we did: it may even have more significance for our lives at this point.

Richard Griffin