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.