I’ll probably teach another couple of years to qualify for my pension, but I find myself thinking more and more about what’s next.

For years, I’ve said that if I work in retirement, I want to work somewhere people want to be. Not someplace where everyone is counting the minutes until they can leave. A ski resort. A swimming pool. A health club. Somewhere associated with enjoyment.

A recent possibility occurred to me after my wife and I took a cooking class. I can’t teach a cooking class. At least not unless the class is “How to Burn Toast and Misread Recipes.” But I could absolutely be one of the helpers.

At our recent class, two younger employees were assisting the instructor. One spent most of the time washing dishes and cleaning equipment. The other did prep work, set out ingredients for each station, and generally made sure everything was where it needed to be before the students arrived.

And I found myself thinking, “I’d enjoy doing that.” In fact, during a break in class, I actually asked if they wanted help cleaning up.

I think I’d like it, not because it pays well. It doesn’t. Not because it would advance my career. At sixty years old, I’m probably done worrying about career advancement.

I think I’d enjoy it simply because I’d enjoy doing it well.

I was a short-order cook all through college and spent my senior year of high school working as a prep cook at a chain restaurant. At the time, I’m sure I complained about the job. Most teenagers complain about their jobs. Looking back, though, there was something satisfying about it.

The actual food prep wasn’t always exciting. There was an endless supply of tuna salad to make and popcorn shrimp to prep. Not exactly culinary artistry. But I worked with a great older coworker. Older, of course, meant nineteen or twenty. We’d listen to WXRT while working in the prep area and just get the job done.

What appeals to me now isn’t even the cooking.

It’s the preparation.

The mise en place.

The organization.

The cleaning.

I’d enjoy making sure every baking sheet was spotless. Every knife returned to the proper place. Every station stocked perfectly. I’d take pride in making sure each table had exactly the ingredients they needed so they could have a great experience.

There’s something almost zen about that.

Maybe that’s one of the advantages of getting older. When you’re young, every job has to be leading somewhere. You need advancement, status, money, a better title, a bigger future.  Or it’s time-filler/money while you wait to do the real thing.

Now I find myself attracted to jobs that are worthwhile for their own sake.

No ladder to climb.

No promotion to chase.

Just showing up, doing useful work, helping people have a good experience, and going home satisfied.

Maybe I’ll look into it when we get back from our three weeks in Utah.

Of course, there is one potential problem. The cooking school is attached to a kitchen store. If employees get a discount, there’s a very real possibility that my entire paycheck would immediately be spent on cast iron pans, bread knives, Dutch ovens, proofing baskets, and kitchen gadgets I absolutely do not need.

Retirement may not be as financially secure as I’ve been led to believe.

I seem to always be on the other side of whatever everyone else believes.

Someone says they love Bruce Springsteen, and I know immediately I don’t. A colleague gives a kid a pep talk at report card pickup, and I can’t help thinking it’s pointless. The staffroom buzzes about some new show everyone’s streaming, and I’d rather scrub grout than watch it. Immigration, government, pop culture, education—name a topic, and I’m probably the dissenting vote.

It’s not rebellion. I don’t walk around with an “Oppositional Defiant” warning label. It’s just that the more everyone seems to agree on something, the more I instinctively don’t. I start looking for what they’re missing. When people gush about Springsteen’s “authentic working-class poetry,” I hear someone cosplaying as blue-collar between tour buses. When colleagues deliver pep talks about “turning things around next quarter,” I see kids nodding politely before going right back to sleep in class. It’s not cynicism so much as pattern recognition.

I’ve realized this reflex comes from two places.

First, I’ve spent most of my adult life in jobs that reward skepticism—law and teaching. Both demand you look for weak spots, inconsistencies, and performative nonsense. After enough years of that, it seeps into everything. I don’t hear what people say as much as what they’re trying to accomplish by saying it.

Second, I just have a low tolerance for groupthink. When something becomes the consensus, I get itchy. It’s like watching a crowd rush toward the same door—I instinctively look for the fire exit in the back. Maybe that’s about autonomy. Maybe it’s about distrust. Maybe I just like the quiet space where everyone else isn’t.  Heck, I can’t even be punk (my musical preference) because I think that’s all groupthink.

The truth is, I don’t question slogans or start debates. I keep my mouth shut. I nod, smile when appropriate, and wait for the conversation to end. I don’t feel angry—just disconnected. I’ve never really found “my people.” Not in law, not in teaching, not in politics, not in music. There’s always a mismatch somewhere. Everyone else seems to sync up to the same rhythm, and I’m just offbeat.

Some days, that feels like independence. Most days, it just feels like being alone in a crowded room.

Yesterday morning, I attended a breakfast that I wasn’t all that excited about. You know the kind—obligatory small talk, bland coffee, the whole routine. But near the end, I wound up next to a 55-year-old Greek guy, and that changed the day.

He told me his story. He had gone through a brutal stretch in life, the kind that pushed him to the edge—literally. He stood on train tracks, ready to give up. At the last moment, he changed his mind. And since then, he has lived differently. Now he’s full of life, taking opportunities, finding joy in the small moments, determined not to waste what he almost threw away.

I’ve never been on those tracks. But I’ll admit—I tend to be a glum person. Talking with him lifted me.

This morning, life balanced things out with a gut punch. My wife brought terrible news. A close colleague of hers—someone I’ve also known for years—lost a child, unexpectedly and tragically. College-aged. Bright future. And gone.

There aren’t words for that kind of grief. I can imagine the pain, but I know I can’t actually touch it. The way I’ve come to think about these deaths is as “death from mental illness.” It doesn’t soften the blow, but it frames it. Just as cancer can take a child, mental illness can too.

I feel awful for their family. I also think that I was meant to learn something from these two encounters, which happened back-to-back.

It isn’t about me—this is their pain, their story—but there’s a message here.  Oddly, this was reinforced by a spam text message that said, “May you have a happy new day.”

Every day is a gift. Someday, death will come for me, or for someone I love. Maybe today. Maybe in thirty years. But until that day, I owe it to myself—and to the people around me—to treat every new day as joy.

This morning I swam with my wife. We went to a local coffee shop. Now I’ll read and do some work. Ordinary things, but I’m trying to be present in every second. To build stronger relationships. To be the kind of person who helps others feel better about life. To look for contentment instead of wallowing in what’s missing or wrong.

It’s great to be alive!

After some challenging (first-world-problems) years, I’m going to try to get back into decent shape.  Over the past year, I have been swimming regularly, but my running and biking have declined.  I’m going to work up a “get back to base” plan, and then I’ll build up for a bit until I’m ready for triathlon/marathon training.

In addition to that goal, I’m scaling back on being online.  Starting September 1st, I’ve stopped reading blogs, rarely go to X, don’t check news feeds, and generally cut out doom scrolling.  I still check Instagram because that’s usually not negative.

This place will return to training, cross-training (including skiing, hiking, and fishing, although fishing is not really considered training), and getting back into a flow state.  Along the way, I’ll share some random thoughts, things I like, and so on.

But as before, absolutely no politics.  There is enough of that elsewhere if you want to find it.