Make Room For Yourself, Just By Choosing To

As a coach, I really enjoy working with people to understand and tap into the power of choice. And one of the prime areas in which many people feel a pervasive lack of choice is their schedule. If you, like me, tend to  1) overstuff your schedule, and 2) often use the words “have to” and “need to” when talking about your day, you’ll be happy to find out that making room for yourself can actually be easier than you’d think.

It’s become way too common to cram our schedule down to the minute, with little to no wiggle room and to double and triple book ourselves (In the cult of busy-ness, I suppose some people might even be proud of having so much to do and places to be). Anyway, I was talking with a client recently about creating boundaries and scheduling. With her permission, I’m sharing her insights. She began by describing how she really needed to make time for herself and about how she could possibly schedule some personal reading time. And then she went to a more powerful insight. Most musical instruments have to have hollow space in order to create beautiful sounds. The reed can’t be played unless it is hollowed out. In the same way, she realized how much she was craving open, unstructured spaces of time in which to unfurl. She could read, go for a bike ride, or just sit and let her mind be blank.

But it's a challenge, she said, because I still have so much else to do every day for family and for my career. And it’s true. There is so much experience of obligation and duty to our employer and colleagues, our friends and family, and even to ourselves. We talk about these activities using words like “have to,” “need to,” and “should.” As in, I’d love to meet you for coffee, but I need to go to a committee meeting. In these situations, it’s the need that dictates our actions.

Using language of having to and needing to is grounded in fear of loss or guilt. It might seem a little dramatic at first, especially because it is such a pervasive way to think and be. But let’s consider that at the end of every one of these sentences is the ominous and usually unspoken second half, which starts with “otherwise..”  As in, “I need to do this thing, otherwise I might not get promoted this year.” This fear of loss is in turn connected to a fear of, ultimately, not being good enough.

Instead, we can replace “need to” and “have to,” with something more powerful and perhaps even more true ~  “I choose to.” It’s a simple tweak, and the results can be instantly positive. Even in undesirable and stressful situations. For example,  “I have to have a difficult conversation with my spouse” gives the power to the difficulty of the situation, so we’re bracing for impact. But with “I’m choosing to have a difficult conversation with my spouse,” I’m shifting the power to myself and to our relationship.

So if you’re feeling like your schedule is rather more in control of you than you of it, it’s completely understandable. And you can start to regain control by hollowing out the reed a little, and by shifting to choice.

Let’s Stop Calling It “Retirement.” Instead I Claim “Refreshment,” And It Can Be For Anyone, Anytime

Some folks’ reactions about me retiring have been .. fascinating. These particular congratulations have been a strange concoction colored with pity, superiority, and envy both real and pretend. Kind of the way someone saying “I love that for you” often has more than a little “bless your heart” subtext. It’s made me realize that there’s something fundamentally wrong with what the word “retirement” evokes.

The word “Retirement” comes from the Old French, meaning “to withdraw,” as in after a defeat or into seclusion. Sounds really grim.  But, using this definition, people actually do retire from toxic or misfit jobs in all phases of the working years.  

With that much negative energy, it’s clear that a new word with a different attitude is needed. And it should also be inclusive of the growing number of people who are making changes that are all about moving toward rather than withdrawing away from. Making a choice for big change isn’t limited to a certain age threshold; it can happen at any time. It may happen at the beginning of the working years as part of an intentional sampling period. It may happen at the height of careers, right when all that grit and grinding is paying off, when conventional wisdom would advise staying the course.

But back to finding a better word. I like “Refreshment” as a possibility. From the Old English, the word “fresh” derives from “not salt,” meaning “fit for drinking.” It means replenishment and hydration, both essential for freely flourishing new growth.

That’s much more the right energy. Where retiring invokes fading and declining, refreshment is a brightening and an ascent. In Refreshment, you can change shape, follow your curiosity to try small or radical new things, and live in expression of your core, catchphrase-free, values. You can grow not on a stepwise linear track but on explorations that have detours, loops, and that are guaranteed to open up onto completely unexpected vistas.

The awesome thing about Refreshment is that anyone qualifies at any age and any stage. And Refreshment can of course happen without changing jobs. It’s just a matter of discovering how to unlock the very real, and very magical, power of choice.

I named this blog The Retirement Chronicles, before I fully felt how much that word needed fixing. So I’ll keep the title for this collection, and I’m definitely adopting the word “Refreshment” from here on out.

For What Is Grief, But Love Persevering

A friend told me that they still have old voicemails from their mother who passed away a few years ago, and haven’t been able to listen to them again yet. Sitting in a similar boat as I am, this has been on my mind a lot during these past 12 months. I haven’t gotten a new phone just in case Mom’s voice would be accidentally lost in the transfer.  I wonder why there’s such a human compulsion for yearly milestones.  What they are in truth are markers of planetary motion around a sun, which is itself orbiting the center of our galaxy, which in turn is moving in a universe. One solar system year would be 230 million years to orbit once around our galaxy. Suddenly, the concept of earth years seems trivial.

Anyway I kind of had the idea that once the earth had completed one orbit around the sun, I’d be able to listen to my mother’s voicemails. For sure they are mundane, maybe talking about the weather and how was your day and ending with “talk to you later.”

In medical school, we learned the dominant teaching about grief as comprising five stages.  It prescribes a step-wise progression, at the end of which is “acceptance.” The DSM says that if you still have difficulty moving on at this magical one earth-orbit mark (or ½ an orbit for children!) you have a disorder. As if moving on, linearly, is the only way.

Denial, anger and bargaining haven’t been part of the picture for me. In her last couple of weeks, morning-to-afternoon she changed, so there was no time to worry, anticipate, remember, or even think. It was being fully present in a way I never imagined could be possible. My brother got on the first flight out instead of waiting three more days as had been the plan. We had to be in acceptance because there was no time, and so, through her last breath and since, we have been in acceptance, but acceptance doesn’t mean resolved and “moved on” as in a closed book. Instead, it’s been moving in small currents and eddies, memories both innocuous and heavy popping up randomly anytime and anywhere, bringing with them happiness, haunting, guilt, wishing, wanting, love.

Long story short, who knows when I’ll be able to hit play on those voicemails. Maybe never. But her voice hasn’t receded and I can still hear her how she says hi on the phone, or give helpful pointers about making kimchi, or wish me a happy birthday. And for that, I am infinitely grateful.

I Made Black Garlic Hummus And This Happened

So much of my, and modern society’s, lifestyle has been about doing some things as fast as possible in order to preserve “work-life balance.” In reality this has translated to doing things like taking shortcuts with food so I can watch TV because I want to recharge in order to work more. In my mind, why on earth would I spend time and effort to make something that’s so easily available, and tasty and healthy, at the grocery store?

We have a bunch of dry goods in the pantry that we’re not using but that would be a waste to throw away, so I decided to make hummus.

This means I had to override three reluctances. The first reluctance is my sneaking feeling that I am wasting time by going the long way; it’s not just about food prep, but it’s getting out the stuff I need and the cleanup too. The second reluctance is my worry about “running out” of a special ingredient (in this case black garlic powder) that I buy for a special occasion but continue to postpone using because well, I don’t want to run out. The third reluctance is my low likelihood of faithfully following a recipe. I am prone to rabbit holing and tweaking in ways that sometimes work out great and sometimes terribly. And when you tweak as you go, it’s often difficult to reproduce as desired.

The first tweak was I found some dry white beans too so now it turned into a chickpea-bean combo. I learned the thing about using baking soda while cooking the beans. I curiously incrementally checked on the bean-cooking progress. The black garlic powder had become a solid rock. So that was fun figuring out how to break it into clumps and reconstitute in hot water. I’d learned about sumac from Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen book and added that. I used the olive oil my brother brought me from Spain which I had been similarly saving.

Then the hummus was ready. In the process, I’d wandered down some additional rabbit holes, like learning about how sea salt has a high level of micro/nano plastics because of all the plastic in the oceans. I was happy about using ingredients before it was too late. And it was delicious.

The best thing of all was experiencing the choice to imagine, not just picking which of the flavors they’re selling in the store, but real choice about each and every ingredient. The long way can be exhilarating. Next time, I’m thinking chocolate hummus.

The Top Three Things On My Mind At 100 Days Out

3.  Leadership Ramp Down

Even though I feel pretty much free of any attachment to legacy, still, old habits die hard. It’s been challenging, mostly because I haven’t thought of it until I came to this particular bridge, on what and how much to participate as old and continuing questions and issues present themselves.  New issues and new business, that’s easy.  But what about an ongoing challenge with significant impact on staff in the unit I direct, the solution for which we’ve been working on but still haven’t figured out? There are some decisions and strategies in which I will participate with the full weight of my leadership position until the day I  retire, and others which I will partially or completely defer, I just don’t know yet which ones they will be. Having lived a life where future work extended indefinitely, proceeding through this rampdown been a rich experience in developing definitive boundaries that I wish I’d learned years ago.

2. Retirement paperwork and other logistics

I’m discovering that the amount of logistics and paperwork is just as extensive for offboarding as onboarding. Some of the pages and pages of paperwork includes weird stuff like having to track down my spouse’s birth certificate. Where do I even get a notary signature In order to get retirement health insurance, I have to do some other stuff, plus be aware of what needs to happen at the age we transition to Medicare (if it still exists in a viable way). I’ve never been more acutely aware of how yoked we are in the US to employment-based health insurance and how different all this would be with a national healthcare plan. I’m thinking about tax implications. About whether or not and how much to put into IRAs. And getting ready for the reality of the first month without a direct deposit.

1. Letting the nostalgia sink in

I’m really starting to feel all the feels in these borderlands between endings and beginnings. Years ago my mother taught me this Korean term that has no true English counterpart, “Jung,” which means experiencing the lack of something. At the time I think there was a mean girl who had moved away. Mom explained that there are two kinds of Jung, beautiful-Jung and ugly-Jung. It’s deep because missing what has been awesome is only half the equation of endings. It means that no matter what it is, once it’s no longer there, you feel the presence of its absence, like hearing silence once the music ends. Once you never have to deal with that toxic individual or go to that tedious meeting again, along with the relief and gladness, there is still a note of something there. And for the many magical things and magical friendships that have been nourishing and joyful and exhilarating, well, they will continue to be every bit as magical as ever.

What Are We All Waiting For, Anyway? Part 2 or “Go ahead and eat the marshmallow”

I’ve been thinking about the so-called virtue of “delayed gratification” and how the ability to postpone immediate satisfaction and wait for bigger benefits later has been touted as a superpower to success. It makes sense for some things of course. But in the work context it feels ever so slightly like indoctrination to grind culture when taken as a blanket statement. In other words, how true is it really for most people that the more self-denial and self-sacrifice one does, the more solid the line to ever better payoffs.

So I did what anyone would do, started Googling. And lo and behold, I found something shocking about the experiment where the little kids who were able to resist eating the marshmallow were more successful than the ones who ate it up carpe diem style. The experiment that has come to dominate beliefs about the virtues of success.

A new study tried to reproduce the same results with a much larger pool of 900 children drawn from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Guess what, the researchers failed to replicate the results of the famous marshmallow experiment; rather, their results now indicate that socioeconomics was the determining factor behind delayed gratification and later success in life. SOCIOECONOMICS was the determining factor behind delayed gratification AND later success in life. Makes sense ~ if a person can afford to wait because it’s their expectation and experience that marshmallows and titles will be given, then anticipation can feel maybe even almost fun. I guess postponing the gratification is neither a one size fits all approach nor one with equitable payoff.

Then, from deep within this rabbit hole, it hit me.  I was reminded of something my father told me during a difficult period, when I hoped, with bitterness, that once I slogged through this with blinders on and nose to grindstone, life could be good again. I’ll never forget the few seconds of silence on the phone that followed. “Your life is now,” he finally said. “You’re waiting for your life to start, but it’s already going by.” At that time I was really pissed at what I thought was a platitude.

Now I get it. Less living now doesn’t mean more living later. Instead of waiting for the ship to come in, it seems possible to shift to a belief that we *are* the ship and that it’s our choice to go wherever and whenever, eat the marshmallow AND the peach, and throw a bit of caution to the wind in the sails.

What Are We All Waiting For, Anyway?

I once spent 3 days as part of a Buddhist Temple Stay program in Korea, in the Wol-Jeong Sa temple, in the eastern mountains of Korea. This region is famed for its amazing potatoes, my mother told me.

It was in the middle of a particularly cold winter. On the first day, the monks teach the guests basic temple manners. This is how you greet one another. There would be a chant and bell to sound the 4:30 AM hour. We should not throw any away food in order to honor the labor of those who grew, harvested and prepared the food. We had a sitting group the first evening, where a monk facilitated conversation about whatever was on our minds.

The private sleeping quarters were small, heated traditionally through the floor, and closed with a sliding inner door. Then there was a kind of “foyer,” not freezing but cold enough to see your breath, where you left your shoes, and a sliding outer door. The next morning, after a glorious sleep on the warm cotton floor mattress, and a breakfast including the most delicious potatoes I’ve ever tasted, I found myself expectantly waiting. Where were we supposed to go, and who was going to give guidance about suggested activities?

Then the obvious.. It was up to each individual to exist in their way. I could read, go for a hike up the mountain or not, wander the grounds, sit in the temple, sleep, meditate, or even connect to WiFi with my phone, but no one was going to offer suggestions.

As there was nothing to wait for, I stopped waiting.

Wol-Jeong Sa has a walking path along the river and through a forest of thousands of tall fir trees, about 2 km round trip. That day I walked the path three times because why not. Another walker passed by and we shared a thermos of instant coffee. There was very little thinking.  The partly frozen river, the wind, bird sounds and even my footsteps changed, and I neither wondered what was next nor tried to remember. The concept of waiting for something evaporated. You could say it was an experience of being present that was magically outside of time.

So much of my life has been about waiting for (and hoping and planning for) the future, that effectively I’ve been a hostage to time. However I start answering the question of what I’m waiting for, by continuing on, and then what, and then what.. the same ultimate conclusion appears… for time to run out.  So, part of my current journey working with my own coach is about changing my relationship with time. As we are time-bound creatures, I’m not exactly sure what that’s going to look like, yet, but it’s fun to explore and hear as many perspectives as possible.

What My Dog Taught Me About Being 50% Happier

Leo is my fluffy white part-Maltese eternal puppy with a light brown patch of heart-shaped fur across his back. He’s going on 16 now, and when he was about a year old he taught me something that I often relive as if it was yesterday.

It was cold, overcast, and early evening. So not a dark and stormy night exactly, but it was unpleasant, made even more unpleasant by the fact that I had been kept late at work for no good reason and Leo was now *really* overdue for a walk. I rushed in the door, was relieved that he hadn’t had an accident, and threw on his plaid Puppia vest, ignoring how cute he looked in it. In fact I was annoyed at his excitement because it took that much longer to wrangle the vest on him. Out on the sidewalk, it was starting to drizzle. Let’s get this f’n walk over with. Things looked and felt really grim.

Literally out of the mist came two big guys, looking like football jocks. One of them practically flopped down in front of us. OMG, your dog! can I pet him? he gushed. Leo basked in their beams, they basked in Leo’s. Fifteen seconds later, the one stood up and announced, Wow, now I’m 50% happier. They went on, talking about whatever they had been talking about.

I was left standing there, stunned. Because why didn’t I let Leo instantly make me happier? Nowadays, my spouse and I live with a menagerie of dogs and cats, Pepe and Chewy who have gone over the rainbow bridge, and Capone, Ziggy, Pablo and Queen Junebug. And their superpower is to make people at least 50% happier, every moment of every day. And we get to make them happy too. That’s a lot of happiness.

Letting Go Of Legacy

Perhaps the most common word I've always heard in the same breath as retirement is "legacy." In fact it's pretty much touted as some kind of trophy from the beginning of one's professional career. "What will be your legacy?" say all the pundits, advice givers, mentors and peers. What will be my stamp on the institution, how many young minds will follow in my footsteps while reverently invoking my name, how can whatever innovation I created continue on forevermore, where will my portrait be hung, my statue erected?

Maybe craving legacy comes from scarcity mindset, a human need to gather. The need to feel a sense of permanence, and permanent recognition, about how what I achieved will go on and on, like that Celine Dion song for the Titanic movie. Why such a need to leave a residue behind? Perhaps because it's a way to indulge a kind of fantasy of timelessness, or time travel, I guess to help our existential anxiety.

It's not that I want all the progress I've toiled over to be erased, yet who knows, maybe it will, and I choose to be OK with that. But "legacy" doesn't actually make me more real or my achievements more legitimate. And this instinct for legacy can get ugly. It can lead to greed; for if a little legacy is good, then isn't more better? More money, more fame, more stuff. And.. sadly, we've all seen those individuals who should have retired a long time ago, but still hang on, endlessly seeking an audience for the discoveries and adventures of their youth.

So to leave aside an attachment to legacy is to go forward in a Buddhist way, with curiosity, neutrality and unattachment to the past and permanence. And even though most things will be let go, some things, like treasured friendships, will be coming along for the adventures ahead.

The Question Of What’s Next

As immigrants to this country, my parents had to work hard and maintain a laser focus and dedication to make it. It makes sense that they passed down these values to their kids, values of never giving up, giving 100% to our efforts (or don't bother), and being serious about what we do. As a result, I developed an avoidance of dabbling, because dabbling seemed wasteful.

So I've been working on commitmentless exploration. A few years ago, I started ukulele lessons. I bought a tenor Ko'Olau ukulele that is way above my skill level, and learned some chords and a few songs. The next year, having not practiced at all for the previous 10 months, I was starting over. Now in my third year, it's taken discipline not to give up based on my completely unserious study, but it's been fun to just be a semi-permanent novice.

Another time I took a stand-up comedy class, which is scariest thing I've ever tried. The week before the final "graduation" performance, I had an existential crisis, but told myself I would get up there even if it meant standing there for 4 minutes in silence. In retrospect, silence might actually have been profoundly funny. By performance night I had some stuff, and got some laughs. It's true that the audience got explicit instructions to laugh loudly and a lot, but it still felt good.

Getting certified as a coach admittedly started as a curious dabble, on the encouragement from a friend who is also a coach. But, big reveal, this was the proverbial lightbulb moment. Accidental wanderings somehow landed me in the exact right place. I love lateral thinking, exploring a world of what-if, asking fun and deep questions, and daydreaming ideas into reality. (Even as a kid my friends always wondered, where did THAT come from? what if we recreated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a puppet show set to the soundrack of Footloose for example, where "Almost Paradise" is the song for the final scene?)

As a coach, all of these can work in perfect synergy to help people who are wanting to leave the status quo. Whether that's pursuing a level-up, a new gig, or retirement like me, helping others shift into a different gear while being my authentic self is a beautiful alignment, and one that I intend to nurture for years to come.

Exit Stage Left To Freedom

If all the world’s a stage and all the individuals merely players, then that has seemed even more intense in the world of employment. At work, we are even more aware of the characters we play. And even as I have brought authenticity to those characters, they still have been characters, subject to the unrelenting grip of all the other characters and elements of the play ~ the Boss, the Office Mate, the HR chorus, the set, and the script. We re-enact the scenes over and over: the Performance Review, the Meeting About The Budget, the Holiday Party, the list goes on.

Of course, the sacred rule in the grand play called Employment is, never go off-script. You can’t walk up to the director and say, “I feel like my character would do this instead so that's what I'm doing,” god no. There isn’t even a director as such, but the collective royal "We" of dominant culture, informed by tricky things like hierarchy, race, and gender. But I digress.

By making the choice to forge new paths now, I've decided to reclaim retirement, not as the old idea of going out to pasture after one is mostly used up, but as a choice for freedom here in my last dozen or so years of "productivity." It’s about awakening, full time and not just on nights and weekends, to the me that is not described by employment accoutrements.

Being retired will mean renewed and renewable energy to create, strive, and work in a state of flow. Because now, I get to choose the terms of my labor and the terms of rest. And since I've never become an early morning person even after 30 years of hitting snooze at 5 AM, it's going to be glorious.

The Difference Between Missing Something and Regretting Something

In high school physics I learned about how essentially there is no new energy in the universe but that it's being recycled, changing form. It fits with the idea of karma coming around to bite you in the a$$, but also the idea of there being no wasted efforts in life. The veering off course, the chases down rabbit holes, the random weird things we try out, and the decision to exit stage left ~ it all comes together to make cosmic sense.

Back in college, English Lit was my thing. It wasn't just any run-of-the-mill lit, but I learned to read Middle English and did an entire thesis taking a deep dive into the concept of alchemy in two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Oh, the fond memories of late night runs to Wawa's to buy and devour entire bags of Smartfood popcorn while pulling all-nighters poring through deep scholarship on medieval literature. After all that, I decided to go to medical school as a practical measure, fearing that being a lit prof would be a fast track to burnout (side note, this should have been the first hint that I was not cut out for academia). From there I was smitten with general surgery, loving the fast pace and doing beautiful technical things. But somewhere along the way as a resident I began to notice some divergence between myself and surgery as a specialty. During my research years, it was a struggle to understand the strong instinct for changing specialties compared to the real fun that it was. I was in a funk.

Then one day, sitting in a tiny closet retrofitted to be a research lab, it hit me, accidentally and out of the blue. If I left surgery, would I miss it? The answer was absolutely yes. I loved the satisfaction of a perfectly executed procedure and a great patient outcome. I loved the camaraderie with co-residents working 100+ hours a week. But, what was lacking was curiosity. Things didn't bother me much. And it seemed like things should bother me to inspire questioning, exploring and discovering, things essential for a fulfilling career. The second question that occurred to me was, if I left surgery, would I regret it? And the answer there was, resoundingly, no. That's ultimately how I landed in anesthesiology and simulation-based education, both perfect fits.

So, more recently that same pair of super useful questions popped back up. By retiring, will I miss what I'm leaving behind? Definitely yes for some of it. But will I regret leaving the work? Most decidedly no. I realized I can indulge nostalgia for as long as it's enjoyable, but knowing there'd be no regrets made it sparklingly clear what my decision would be. This is the way.

Step 1 Is Saying Yes

I'm getting ready to retire! And I thought it might be nice to share some of my thoughts during this transition time. I never thought I would be retiring now, years before the "official" age, in fact, I never gave it much thought at all. In the before days, I equated retirement with "old age." Now, retirement means something so much more, transformation and liberation.

Last year, my mother passed away after a shockingly short and intense illness. Processing and coming to terms with her loss has been a journey not only of sadness but also of having a long hard look at what I've been doing, currently doing, and want to be doing with however much life there is ahead for me.

It turns out that there have been hints along the way. About 10 years ago, a prominent and highly decorated work colleague passed away before the age of 50. In all of the eulogizing about this individual, the most common comment was about tragedy of a career cut short. This describing of a life defined not by their humanity but by their professional output seemed tragic to me. And authors like Tricia Hersey have written powerfully about the fatal disease of grind culture.

So it's time to think about life in terms of how I choose to live, cherishing who I love, and enjoying what it's like to be more of a rolling stone. And step one was saying yes to retirement. What's ahead is still largely and refreshingly unknown, but more on that to come... Stay tuned.