The Next Bend in the Trail

 There is something wonderfully liberating about realizing that you don't know what comes next.

When we are young, we often believe we know where life is taking us.

School.

Career.

Marriage.

Family.

Mortgage.

Retirement.

The road seems to have signposts everywhere.

Then one day you reach retirement and discover something rather surprising.

The signs become fewer.

At first, that can be frightening.

Then, if you are lucky, it becomes exciting.

Because when there is no sign telling you exactly where to go, you get to look around.

You get to choose.

You may have spent forty years following schedules created by someone else.

Now you can begin creating your own rhythm.

And that rhythm doesn't have to look like anyone else's.

This is where I think we sometimes misunderstand retirement.

We treat it like the end of something.

But what if it is actually the beginning of an experiment?

What happens if I try this?

What happens if I learn that?

What happens if I say yes to an invitation I would once have turned down?

What happens if I take the trip?

What happens if I join the choir?

What happens if I volunteer?

What happens if I write?

What happens if I simply walk through the park and see where the path takes me?

There is something wonderfully freeing about those questions.

They don't require certainty.

They require curiosity.

And curiosity is one of the great gifts of growing older.

We know enough now to understand that things rarely go exactly according to plan.

We have already survived disappointments.

We've changed jobs.

Moved homes.

Raised families.

Lost people we loved.

Started over.

Made mistakes.

Recovered.

Adapted.

Laughed at ourselves.

Perhaps even more importantly, we have learned that we don't know nearly as much as we once thought we did.

That may not be a weakness.

It may be wisdom.

Remember the forest.

Every time I walk through one, I notice something I have never noticed before.

The forest hasn't necessarily changed.

I have.

I have slowed down.

I am looking differently.

Perhaps retirement offers us the same opportunity.

We can look at our lives differently.

The job we once thought defined us becomes one chapter.

The house we worked so hard to pay for becomes a place from which we launch new adventures.

The skills we developed at work become tools we can use somewhere else.

The friendships we made become deeper because we finally have time to enjoy them.

The dreams we postponed begin knocking again.

And some of those dreams may surprise us.

Maybe you don't want to climb Mount Everest.

Maybe your adventure is taking a bus trip with a group of people you barely know.

Maybe it is learning to paint.

Maybe it is reading all the books you never had time to read.

Maybe it is volunteering at the community centre.

Maybe it is travelling to see someone you love.

Maybe it is sitting on a bench in the sunshine with a coffee and realizing that you don't have to be anywhere else.

We have a tendency to think adventures have to be enormous.

They don't.

An adventure is simply an experience in which you don't know exactly what will happen next.

That can happen at 65.

It can happen at 75.

It can happen at 85.

You are never too old for the next bend in the trail.

And please don't forget the most important piece.

Smile.

Laugh.

Especially at yourself.

There is tremendous freedom in not taking yourself quite so seriously.

You will forget someone's name.

You will walk into a room and forget why you went there.

You will put your glasses down and spend ten minutes looking for them.

You may even discover that the glasses are on your head.

Laugh.

You've earned it.

Growing older does not require us to become solemn experts on life.

We are still allowed to be surprised.

Still allowed to make mistakes.

Still allowed to be silly.

Still allowed to dance badly.

Still allowed to fall in love with a song.

Still allowed to marvel at a sunset.

Still allowed to wonder what is around the next corner.

That brings us back to where this series began.

We spend so much time trying to define music, poetry, love, life and happiness.

Perhaps we eventually discover that none of them can be captured.

They have to be experienced.

Retirement is much the same.

You cannot completely plan it.

You cannot know everything it will bring.

You cannot put the best moments in a bottle and save them for later.

You can only step into the experience.

Look around.

Listen.

Notice.

Laugh.

Love.

And keep walking.

When you first start thinking about retirement, it is natural to feel vulnerable.

You may feel that you have so much to lose.

But may I remind you of something?

Never again, at any other point in this journey, will you have so much to gain.

There are new people to meet.

New places to see.

New things to learn.

Old dreams to revisit.

New dreams to discover.

And perhaps most wonderfully of all, there is a version of yourself you haven't met yet.

So don't stand at the edge of the forest worrying about everything you left behind.

Take a breath.

Step onto the trail.

Look up.

Smile.

The path is waiting.

And who knows?

There may be something wonderful just around the next bend.

The Next Bend: Remembering Those Who Walked Before Us

On Remembrance Day, we pause.

We pause to remember the women and men who served.

Some went to war and never came home.

Some came home carrying wounds that could be seen.

Others came home carrying wounds that could not.

Some served for a few years.

Others made the military a lifetime of service.

And some are serving today, still wearing the uniform, still prepared to go wherever duty calls.

My father was one of those who served.

He fought in the Second World War.

I was not with him when he went to war, of course. I know part of hisstory but he never talked aabout his times  even  though my brothers and I had questions that were asked over the years.

But sometimes I find myself wondering what it must have been like to be young, to leave home, and to step onto a path without knowing where it would lead.

That is something we can all understand.

Life is full of bends in the trail.

But for those who went to war, the next bend could have meant almost anything.

A battle.

A wound.

A friend lost.

A telegram sent home.

Or, if they were fortunate, a journey home.

My father eventually came home.

Others did not.

That is why Remembrance Day matters.

It is not simply about remembering a war.

It is about remembering people.

People who had parents.

Brothers and sisters.

Husbands and wives.

Children waiting at home.

People who had favourite songs and favourite foods.

People who had plans.

People who had ordinary dreams.

They may have imagined returning home, getting a job, falling in love, raising a family, travelling, growing old.

They had a next bend in their trail too.

Some never reached it.

Others did, but were changed forever by what they had experienced along the way.

When we talk about sacrifice, I sometimes think we make the word too abstract.

Sacrifice is not an idea.

It is personal.

It has a name.

A face.

A family.

A story.

It is the young person who left home.

The mother who waited.

The father who worried.

The child who grew up without a parent.

The friend who never came back.

The veteran who carried memories for the rest of a lifetime.

And it is the person who serves today.

One of my nephews is in the armed services.

When I think about him, Remembrance Day becomes even more personal.

The uniforms may have changed.

The technology certainly has.

The world is different from the one my father knew.

But one thing has not changed.

Someone is still willing to step forward and serve.

Someone is still leaving home.

Someone is still accepting uncertainty so that others can live their ordinary lives.

And that brings me back to the idea of the next bend in the trail.

We spend a lot of time in our lives worrying about what is around the next corner.

Especially as we grow older.

Retirement can feel like that.

We leave behind the familiar path and wonder what comes next.

Will we be happy?

Will we have purpose?

Will we have enough to do?

Will we find new friends?

Will we still matter?

Those are real questions.

But Remembrance Day gives us another way to think about the unknown.

The people we remember did not know what was around their next bend either.

They walked anyway.

They stepped forward without guarantees.

They hoped.

They trusted.

They endured.

And because they did, generations after them were given the opportunity to walk their own trails.

That doesn't mean we should romanticize war.

There is nothing romantic about death, injury, grief or the terrible cost paid by families.

Remembrance is not about celebrating suffering.

It is about recognizing sacrifice and refusing to forget the people who made it.

Perhaps that is why the forest remains such a powerful image for me.

When I walk among the trees, I see the old trees and the young ones growing beneath them.

The new growth exists because something came before it.

The forest is constantly becoming.

One generation gives way to another.

The old becomes part of the new.

And so it is with us.

We are walking trails that others helped clear.

We are enjoying freedoms and opportunities that previous generations helped protect.

We did not create the whole trail ourselves.

We inherited part of it.

And now it is our turn to decide what we do with the next part.

Perhaps that is the quiet responsibility of remembrance.

We remember the people who walked before us.

We acknowledge what they gave.

And then we continue the journey.

Not by forgetting them.

By carrying their memory with us.

So, this Remembrance Day, when you hear the music, when you see the poppies, when the silence comes, think of a person rather than simply a number.

Someone's father.

Someone's mother.

Someone's brother.

Someone's sister.

Someone's child.

Someone's friend.

Someone who once stood at a bend in the trail and stepped forward.

And then think about the trail you are walking.

Whatever your age, there is still another bend ahead.

There are people you haven't met.

Places you haven't seen.

Conversations you haven't had.

Laughter, you haven't shared.

Perhaps even adventures you haven't imagined.

We cannot know what is waiting around the corner.

Neither could those we remember.

But they walked forward.

So can we.

And perhaps the best way we can honour them is not simply to remember where they went.

It is to make good use of the road they helped make possible.

To live fully.

To love deeply.

To laugh often.

To care for one another.

And, when the trail turns again, to keep walking.

Lest we forget.

Retirement: The Beginning of the Adventure

When you first start thinking about retirement, it can feel a little like standing at the edge of a forest you have never explored.

Behind you is the familiar path.

You know where it goes.

You know when to get up, where you need to be, what people expect from you and, perhaps most importantly, who you are in the eyes of the world.

Then suddenly the path changes.

Retirement arrives.

And there you are, standing at the edge of something new.

It is only natural to feel vulnerable.

You may wonder what you are leaving behind.

Your paycheque.

Your title.

Your routine.

The people you worked with.

The feeling that you were needed in a particular way.

Perhaps you even wonder what you will talk about when someone asks, "What do you do?"

Those are real questions.

But there is another question we don't ask often enough.

"What might I gain?"

Because here is the remarkable thing about retirement:

Never again, at any other point in this particular journey, will you have so much to gain.

Think about that for a moment.

For much of your working life, your choices were shaped by responsibility.

You had bills to pay.

Children to raise.

Jobs to keep.

Meetings to attend.

Places you had to be.

People who needed you.

Your calendar was often somebody else's calendar.

Retirement doesn't erase responsibility, but it can give you something you may not have had for decades.

Choice.

You can decide what matters now.

You can discover interests you never had time to explore.

You can spend a Tuesday morning reading a book without feeling guilty.

You can take a walk simply because the weather is beautiful.

You can volunteer.

Learn something.

Travel.

Write.

Golf.

Dance.

Join a group.

Call an old friend.

Make a new one.

Or do absolutely nothing for an hour and discover that the world continues to turn.

That last one can take some practice.

We have spent so many years measuring our value by what we accomplish that simply being present can feel strangely uncomfortable.

But perhaps retirement asks us to learn a different way of measuring a life.

Not by productivity.

By participation.

Not by how much we accomplish.

By how much we experience.

Not by the size of our bank account.

By the richness of our relationships.

Not by how busy we are.

By whether we are awake to the life happening around us.

This brings me back to the forest.

A forest does not retire.

It doesn't stop being useful because it reaches a certain age.

The old trees provide shelter.

The fallen trees become homes.

Seeds become new trees.

Everything remains part of the larger story.

We are like that.

Retirement is not the moment when we stop contributing.

It is a change in how we contribute.

Perhaps you will have more time to listen to someone who needs to talk.

Perhaps you will volunteer.

Perhaps you will help a grandchild discover something.

Perhaps you will teach what you know.

Perhaps you will finally write the book that has been sitting in your head for thirty years.

Perhaps you will discover that you are much more than the job you once held.

And there will be surprises.

There always are.

Some will be wonderful.

Some won't.

You may discover talents you didn't know you possessed.

You may discover limitations you didn't expect.

You may lose some things.

You may gain others.

That is life.

We cannot walk into a forest and demand that every tree, path and view remain exactly as we imagined.

We have to be curious.

We have to look around.

We have to notice.

We have to keep moving.

And occasionally, we have to laugh at ourselves.

Especially when we take the wrong path.

I have taken enough wrong turns in life to know that they are not always disasters.

Sometimes they lead somewhere interesting.

Perhaps retirement should be approached the same way.

Don't expect to have everything figured out on day one.

You don't need a ten-year master plan.

You need enough curiosity to take the next step.

You are not walking toward the end of the trail.

You are walking into a part of the forest you have never seen before.

And that should make you a little nervous.

But it should also make you smile.

Because the greatest adventure of your life may not be behind you.

It may be waiting just around the next bend.

Happiness Is Not a Place We Arrive

For most of my life, I have heard people talk about happiness as though it were a destination.

One day, they say, I will be happy.

When I retire.

When I have enough money.

When I lose some weight.

When my health improves.

When the children are settled.

When I travel.

When I finally have time.

There always seems to be something between us and happiness.

So we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

The problem is that happiness doesn't seem to live where we think it does.

I have spent enough time walking through forests to understand that the forest doesn't have a destination.

A tree doesn't wake up in the morning thinking, "If I can just become a bigger tree, I'll finally be happy."

It simply grows.

It reaches.

It responds to sunlight and rain.

It bends in the wind.

It loses branches.

It grows new ones.

It lives.

Perhaps we could learn something from that.

We often think happiness means getting everything we want.

But the older I get, the less convincing that idea becomes.

Some of the happiest moments in my life have been surprisingly ordinary.

A good conversation.

A walk.

A cup of coffee.

A laugh shared with someone I love.

A book I couldn't put down.

A song that suddenly took me somewhere I hadn't been for years.

A morning when nothing particularly important happened and yet everything felt right.

Happiness often arrives quietly.

It doesn't always knock on the door.

Sometimes it slips in through a crack.

The trouble is, we are often too busy looking for the big version of happiness to notice the small version sitting beside us.

We want the extraordinary.

Life keeps offering us the ordinary.

And sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary enough.

There is another lesson the forest teaches.

Nothing stays the same.

The beautiful summer afternoon becomes autumn.

The leaves fall.

Winter arrives.

Then spring.

If happiness depended on everything remaining pleasant, we would spend much of our lives unhappy.

But perhaps happiness is not the absence of difficulty.

Perhaps it is the ability to remain open to life while difficulty is present.

That doesn't mean pretending everything is fine.

It isn't.

Life can be painful.

People we love become ill.

Friends die.

Plans collapse.

Our bodies betray us.

Dreams change.

There are days when happiness is simply not available.

And we don't need to manufacture it.

But even in difficult seasons, there can be moments of grace.

A kind word.

A beautiful sky.

A friend who shows up.

A song.

A memory.

A laugh that catches us by surprise.

The trick may be learning to notice them.

I have come to believe that happiness has less to do with possession and more to do with participation.

You don't have to own the forest to enjoy walking through it.

You don't have to own a song to be moved by it.

You don't have to possess a moment to be grateful for it.

And you don't have to understand life completely to love being alive.

That last one may be the hardest.

We want answers.

We want certainty.

We want to know where everything is going.

But perhaps the essence of happiness begins when we accept that we don't know.

There I am again, walking through the forest, looking for some grand answer.

And eventually I realize I have missed the point.

The answer isn't waiting somewhere ahead.

It is happening around me.

The trees.

The wind.

The light.

The sound of my own footsteps.

The person I love.

The life I have been given.

For a moment, I stop trying to understand it.

I simply stand there.

And I get it.

Of course, the moment I get it, I want to keep it.

I want to put it in a bottle.

I want to take it home.

I want to make sure tomorrow feels exactly like today.

But I can't.

The wind moves.

The light changes.

The moment passes.

And I let it go.

Maybe that is happiness.

Not holding on to life.

But being awake enough to experience it while it is here.

We are all part of the same great unfolding mystery.

We always have been.

And perhaps the happiest thing we can do is stop standing outside it, waiting for life to begin.

Step inside.

It already has.