Currents and Crossings [Narrated]

Navigating What Was, What Is, and What’s Next

Flashback Friday usually takes me into memory — to childhood kitchens, village stories, or moments that still echo decades later. But memory also lives in the present, in the choices we make and the futures we shape. A conversation this week reminded me that the crossings between past, present, and future aren’t separate. They flow together.

Introduction

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with a dear friend actively thinking about retirement, and wondering how to shape what comes next. She has been reaching out to people she trusts, asking how they’ve navigated not only retirement but reinvention — how they’ve stepped into the next chapter without losing themselves in the process.

Our conversation reminded me of something I’ve come to see clearly: there is no single way to retire well. Some people treat it as an ending. Others drift into it and hope to find their footing along the way. For me, it has been neither. What I’ve discovered is not a formula, but a framework — a set of streams that give my life meaning and rhythm, with crossings that mark the shifts between what was, what is, and what’s next.

These streams are not prescriptive. They’re simply the ones that have emerged for me: Writing, Co-Creation, Community, Health, and Spiritual Practice — all held together by Presence. Yours may look entirely different. But the process of identifying what steadies you, what enlivens you, and what calls you forward — that is universal.

This is what I want to share here. Not as instructions, but as an invitation. Think of it as a model to reflect against, a way of noticing your own streams and the connective tissue that ties them together.

Writing

Writing has become the backbone of my days. Most mornings I rise early and write from seven until noon. It isn’t just habit — it’s structure, rhythm, and a way of paying attention.

Over time, I’ve stopped calling myself someone who “dabbles in writing” and started naming it plainly: I am a writer. That shift wasn’t about external validation. It was about identity, about claiming the work as central rather than peripheral — and in doing so, inviting others to see me differently too, not as someone circling the edges, but as someone standing firmly in their craft. At this stage of life, that clarity feels like its own reward.

I set myself goals — publishing essays to my Substack, shaping books for self-publication — but more than output, it’s about showing up daily. Writing is how I metabolize experience. It’s how I make sense of memory, relationship, and the unsaid.

For me, writing is both discipline and expression — the practice of turning reflection into language and giving shape to what I carry inside. For you, it might be painting, gardening, or teaching. What matters is not the medium, but the practice: a way of making meaning visible and steadying yourself in the process.

Co-Creation

The happiest times of my life have always been bound up in co-creation — working alongside someone equally committed, thoughtful, and willing to swim against the tide. That alignment is rare, but when it happens, it’s electric. It’s not about compromise so much as collision, the kind where disagreement sharpens the idea until something better emerges.

Today, that spirit shows up in my work with my friend Kathy, building Toolsie. On paper, it’s about building an “AI-Powered Toolbox Designed to Make Work and Life Easier.” In reality, the tools are almost a byproduct. The real gift is the chance to create with someone I love and trust, to sharpen and soften each other’s ideas, to end conversations in disagreement and still feel stronger for it.

At this stage of life, that alignment feels like the true reward: creating not for survival or status, but for the joy of building something together — work that feels less about legacy and more about living fully now.

What I’ve learned is that co-creation satisfies something essential in me: the need to test ideas in dialogue, to stretch beyond what I would create alone, to experience the thrill of building something bigger than either of us could manage individually. At its heart, co-creation is about connection — the kind that sharpens you and still leaves you whole.

For you, co-creation might mean launching a business, making art with a friend, or tending a shared cause. The form matters less than the energy — the joy of building something together that couldn’t exist alone.

Community & Connection

Community has always mattered to me, but in this stage of life it has taken on new depth. For years, I thought my role was simply to show up as an “elder” — someone who could share experience, offer guidance, or hold perspective when others needed it. That’s part of it, yes, but I’ve come to see that community is not a mantle I wear. It’s a living exchange.

What I value now is active participation — not just mentoring, but listening, learning, and creating alongside others. I seek out circles where curiosity is alive, where disagreement can coexist with respect, and where presence matters more than performance. In those spaces, I’m not just an elder. I’m a participant, a learner, a co-creator of something larger than myself.

Reconnection has been just as important. This past year, I’ve re-knit ties with old friends and deepened family relationships, returning to conversations that feel like continuations rather than restarts. What has struck me most is how relationships can pause for decades and then resume as though no time has passed — crossings in the stream of life that remind me the bond was strong enough to hold through the silence.

Most profoundly, I’ve reconnected with Roz, my ex-wife and the mother of my child. We met at eighteen, on our very first day of college. Those years together — from teenage fumbling into the weight of midlife — were formative in ways I couldn’t have grasped at the time. For many years after our divorce, our contact was sparse and mostly functional, orbiting around our child. Nearly three decades later, we’ve found our way back — not as partners in marriage, but as something rarer: friends who know each other’s past selves as well as their present ones.

With Roz, I don’t need to explain my history — she lived it with me. She remembers the boy I was, the man I tried to be, and the father I became. Our conversations now carry a kind of shorthand, a trust that doesn’t need rehearsal. There is comfort in being seen not only as who I am today, but as the sum of all the versions I’ve been. What we share now isn’t nostalgia, but presence: the ability to sit together, with all that has been, and simply be.

That, to me, is the heart of community: spaces where you can be fully known. Sometimes those spaces are built anew; sometimes they are rediscovered after years apart. For you, community may look different. It could be neighbors, chosen family, or circles that keep you rooted. The question is: where are the spaces that nourish you, and how will you keep returning to them?

Health & Longevity

In 2016, I had a health scare that shook me awake. My PSA levels had spiked dramatically, and for a time it looked as though I might have fast-growing prostate cancer. Those were tense weeks — the kind that etch themselves into your body. Blood tests, scans, biopsies; the cold sterility of waiting rooms, the way every phone call from the doctor made my chest tighten. I remember rehearsing conversations in my head, imagining how I would tell my family, wondering how much time I might have left. The waiting was heavy — the kind of days when every conversation and every silence seemed to carry more weight.

In the end, the diagnosis was not cancer but benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH — an enlarged prostate, uncomfortable but not life-threatening. Relief came, but so did perspective. It wasn’t the sort of crisis where everything turns upside down overnight. Instead, it was subtler: the dawning awareness that I was no longer invincible, and that if I wanted to extend not just my years but the quality of them, I had work to do. That realization set in motion a loop I now live by: reflection followed by improvement, over and over again.

At first, the changes were modest. I paid more attention to what I ate, how I slept, how often I exercised. But over time, the loop took hold. Each reflection sparked a small adjustment, and each adjustment built momentum. Slowly, health became not something I tended to when it failed, but something I practiced daily.

Now I think in decades rather than weeks, asking not only “How long can I live?” but “How well can I live?” My goal isn’t simply to reach 120; it’s to get there strong, clear-headed, and engaged.

That commitment shows up in structure and practice. I’ve invested deeply in chiropractic care, undoing years of subtle misalignments that had gone unchecked. I train with a personal trainer three times a week, building strength and resilience in ways I never did when I was younger. I track my workouts, diet, and recovery with the same precision I bring to my writing, because I’ve learned that what gets measured gets improved.

The intellectual framework came from reading Outlive by Peter Attia, a book that offered not just science but a philosophy: that aging is far more malleable than we believe, and that mainstream medicine too often intervenes too late. Attia’s idea of the “Centenarian Decathlon” — training now for the physical, cognitive, and emotional demands of later decades — gave me a map.

But the practice is mine. It lives in the small, daily choices: the decision to go to the gym when I’d rather stay at my desk, and to treat recovery and rest as practices in their own right. It hasn’t been about hacks or shortcuts, but about presence — listening closely to my body, noticing its signals, and honoring the reflection → improvement loop that first took hold in 2016.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that health is not a sprint, not even a marathon. It’s a lifelong practice of paying attention and adjusting, one breath, one workout, one choice at a time.

For you, the choices will be different — diet, movement, sleep, recovery. Maybe your wake-up call will look different too — a diagnosis, a fall, or simply the moment your body says no. But the principle remains the same: healthspan is not given; it’s built.

Spiritual Practice

If health and longevity anchor me in the physical, then spiritual practice steadies me in the unseen. I didn’t grow up with the language of “spirituality,” and for much of my life I would have resisted the idea outright. It would have sounded foreign, or worse, indulgent. But the last decade has shifted me. Bit by bit, I’ve opened myself to practices that are less about answers and more about presence.

On relocating to St Petersburg, I started experimenting widely. Guided meditations helped me settle when my thoughts were racing. Breathwork cracked something open in me — not every session, but often enough that I learned to trust my breath as more than oxygen, as a pathway. Sound baths shook loose what words couldn’t reach. Ecstatic dance reminded me of the freedom of moving without choreography, without judgment. Kirtan surprised me with its power to bypass thought and go straight to the heart. Cold plunges tested my endurance; yoga and yoga nidra taught me the balance of discipline and surrender.

Each modality unlocked something. Some stayed with me; others fell away. Over time, I’ve settled into a simpler core: breathwork, journaling, meditation, and yoga nidra. These are no longer experiments. They’re woven into my daily rhythm, small rituals that create stillness in the midst of movement. They don’t take me out of life; they bring me more fully into it. What stayed were the practices that taught me to pause — to let breath and silence carry weight when words ran out.

What I’ve come to see is that spiritual practice is less about transcendence than about grounding. It isn’t about escape or rising above the messiness of being human. It’s about meeting that messiness with clarity, gentleness, and presence. Through these practices, I’ve learned to sit with grief, to hold discomfort without rushing to fix it, and to recognize the currents of connection that run through my life.

This isn’t the “woo-woo” side of things, though I’ve brushed against that at times. It’s something quieter, more integrated. Spiritual practice doesn’t live off to the side as an optional extra. It runs like a current through everything else: my writing, my health, my relationships, my work. It teaches me to stay. To breathe. To notice. To allow.

And in that noticing, I’ve discovered a strength that doesn’t come from muscle or willpower. It comes from surrender — not giving up, but giving in. A willingness to be part of something larger, even if I don’t always have the words to name it.

For you, the path may be entirely different — prayer, music, time in nature. The practice is less important than the presence it cultivates, and the way it threads through every other stream.

Presence

If there’s one thread running through everything — writing, co-creation, community, health, and spiritual practice — it is presence. Without it, each stream risks becoming just another task to complete, another item on a list. With it, they come alive.

Presence is not something I measure or track. It’s something I practice. It’s in the choice to put the phone down during a conversation. It’s in the quiet of a morning walk when I notice the light shifting across the water. It’s in the discipline of a breath held, then released, before responding to someone in distress.

For me, presence has been hard-won. For much of my life, I equated usefulness with fixing things. If someone brought me a problem, I rushed to solutions — sometimes to help them, sometimes just to soothe my own discomfort. What I’ve learned is that being truly present doesn’t demand a fix. It asks me to listen, to stay, to allow silence to do its work.

A young friend once shared something painful, and I felt the old urge to fill the space with answers. Instead, I paused. I asked what she needed. She told me she only wanted to be heard. That moment shifted me: sometimes the gift is simply staying.

Whatever your streams may be, presence is what allows them to matter — the practice of noticing the streams you’re in and standing steady at each crossing.

Conclusion

Retirement is often framed as an ending — the closing of a chapter, the winding down of what came before. For me, it has been the opposite. It has been a rebalancing, a chance to bring together the parts of myself that matter most and let them shape the decades ahead.

I don’t see my model as prescriptive. It’s not a checklist to follow or a formula to copy. It’s simply the structure I’ve discovered through reflection and practice: writing, co-creation, community, health, and spiritual grounding, all connected by presence.

This is less about retirement and more about alignment — choosing not to drift wherever the current pulls, but to navigate deliberately, with curiosity and attention, through the crossings ahead. My hope is not that anyone adopts my structure wholesale, but that it sparks questions: What would your streams be? Where do you find presence? What holds you steady when everything else shifts?

I don’t pretend to have the answers. What I have is a practice: to notice, to reflect, to improve, and to keep showing up. If there is a manifesto here, it’s not about how to retire, but about how to live — one breath, one conversation, one act of presence at a time.