Re-Tire for Another Ride
This Time, with The Top Down
Tak C. Poon, MD
January 15, 2025 4 min read
You must “re-tire” before or as soon as you retire. That is, prepare to install new wheels now for a different and joyous drive into the sunset. You don’t want to be stalled with worn-out flat tires after your retirement.
I didn’t have the wisdom to plan it during all 5 decades of my medical practice. I was lucky. As a preventive cardiologist, I happened to be passionate about coaching patients and coworkers to build a happy, healthy, hasslefree lifestyle with healing habits. (And they coached me back better.)
So, I ran a non-profit program without pay in my after-work hours for 2000-some patients and coworkers over 25 years and had rather gratifying results. The experience turned out to equip me with new tires for another very different joy ride after I ‘retired’ 7 years ago.
With the lessons and insights I gathered from my Cardiometabolic Program, I have published all the usable information online here for free to help my medical colleagues and the general public in this raging ‘cardio-metabolic-obesity’ pandemic.
Without doing a day’s “work” but putting in at least full time for 7 years, I have published hundreds of email newsletters, scores of blogs, dozens of videos and podcasts, a mobile app, and two e-books (one only for my kids), all non-monetized.
Sure, I had to learn new driving skills to traverse these new terrains. I did all of that virtually, and virtually for free. And, as long as I was learning, I never got bored. I only get younger, especially when working with younger people—and they’re almost all younger.
Using digital technologies, most of them free, it costs me less than any vacation I’d have taken each year, all the while giving me an unending luxury vacation. I’m still riding high on my Metacardio.org venture while pumping up my tires for the next drive.
Will anyone join me in developing an AI coach-bot that is validated, credible, personalizable, individualizable, scalable, and affordable to help any overweight, underactive, and ultra-stressed person build a happy, healthy, hassle-free lifestyle?
And who else can be in better stead than I to do so? I have much less face to lose and much more past to pose than ever. For I have seen and made many, many more mistakes than the youth. (I embellish them as “experience”.)
I am older, slower, moldier, and poorer. And yet, I feel younger, healthier, happier, and richer than ever before. Soon after I retired, COVID hit. The two years of austerity taught me, with real-world experience, that I had been gifted way more than I thought and way more than enough for a joyous and meaningful life in retirement.
Frankly, I am just an ordinary person with no more and no less gifts or talents than the rest. My mediocrity actually entitles me to share my humble experience with you all because if I can do it, anybody can, and probably better.
Years ago, for a retiring colleague’s retirement present, I let out the following neuro-flatulence (brain fart). That was the initial propellant for founding my lifestyle coaching program midway into my medical career.
Re-tire: For Some Other Rides
So, some retire
From a job, servant to a lifestyle, a body for hire.
For whatever the pay, the cost was higher.
Others retire
From a career, made a good living, even proprietor,
Yet cannot account to others who admire.
So few retire
From a life-long devotion, lived and loved as its doer, designer.
For them, recognition they do not require.
Finally done shifting
From loss to loss, and gain to gain,
From shame to shame, and fame to fame;
And then drifting
From pleasure to pleasure, and pain to pain,
From comfort to comfort, and game to game;
Eluded by meaning and resolve,
Questioning and aim.
So after, if not before, you get to retire,
May you re-fan, if not seek out, your own inner fire.
In any place, in any role you may choose to acquire,
Do it from that bliss, that desire.
To that center, that fire
Never be a liar,
a denier.
Toward that center, that fire
At your next breath may you aspire,
If not again, then as if never prior.
From that center, that fire
Not until your last heartbeat
Shall you retire.
On my “re-tired” new ride, I am living out the adage that the drive is the destination. This time with the top down and obeying no speed limits—upper or lower. As long as I harm no one, I am the chief, if not only, judge, jury, and award giver.
If I am very successful, I’ll proclaim it my calling. If I do okay, I’ll call it my passion. If it’s debatable, I’ll name it my hobby. Even if it’s a flop, I can still claim it as a pastime I’ve earned to enjoy. As long as my re-tired wheels aren’t flat, I can never fail unless I throw away my keys.
We mustn’t overlook that a retiree can be in the best position to render much-needed but under-met service, either to yourself or to others, to the public or to your loved ones.
We must capitalize on this well-earned privilege to listen deep and listen hard to find our unique heart song to compose and polish. And do it with abandon, with a vengeance even. Be it in private or in public, sing and dance it you must, as if for the first or the last time.
The art of life is to live in your own extraordinary way with ordinary means. Start now. It is never too late.
Image generated by ChatGPT.
None of the text is AI-generated, for I’m neither artificial nor intelligent.
Extraordinary Living by Ordinary Means 2025