It was my 71st birthday today.
We woke up slowly, made coffee and Yim gave me a cute birthday card and three books I have been wanting to read.
Then I went on a 12 km run followed by forty-five minutes of stretching and some core work while Yim taught Zumba at Blue Shores. A typical Saturday morning for us. We showered and enjoyed a nice lunch together. It was a beautiful day and I went on a bike ride, while Yim made a carrot cake for dessert tonight after our dinner out with Kat and Kim at Bent Tacos.
Before leaving for dinner, I got an hour of gardening in, then we hung out and talked. Cody and Nat called. Dorothy, Mark and family emailed from Vancouver Island. Tom and all his family called and sang me Happy Birthday. It was a simple contented day.
And that’s how I hope to keep living.
I’ve been trying to find a word that describes the direction our lives have been taking. “Wellness” comes closest—not wellness as something you buy or pursue as a trend, but wellness as the result of intentionally shaping our days around the things that genuinely make life better.
We are in the seventh year of our plant-based diet and there’s no going back. We’ve learned how to eat well and both love it. I’ve learned to cook quite well and enjoy shopping for fresh ingredients daily, something I had never anticipated.
Our travels to Costa Rica earlier this year helped reinforce the entire concept. I particularly enjoyed the vibe of Nosara, where wellness is the norm. It felt comfortable to me. While there, we maintained our commitment to fitness and enjoyed attending Pilates classes together almost daily. I visited a gym twice weekly and we found Zumba classes at a very cool outdoors dance studio for Yim. That fit us well. After daily classes, we went grocery shopping, came home, made lunch and spent the afternoons outside in nature. That pretty much fills my definition of wellness.
Here are the areas of life which I now consider when thinking about our lives:
Physical Wellness – Maintaining a healthy body through exercise, nutrition, sleep, hydration, and avoiding harmful habits.
This is about energy, strength, and resilience now. We both want our bodies to be as physically able as possible as we age, so a significant portion of our lives are dedicated to physical wellness.
Nutrition is central to that. After seven years of eating plant-based, we’ve learned what works for us. I spent a year tracking our meals so we understand the balance of protein, fibre and carbohydrates we need, and now cook almost instinctively.
Environmental Wellness – Living in harmony with our natural surroundings and creating spaces that support our health.
Our home in Collingwood has become its own little ecosystem now, and includes plum and apple trees, blueberries, strawberries, concord grapes as well as our raised garden beds and a lush surrounding property. Each year, on my bike rides, I identify wildflowers which grow along the trails and try and incorporate them into our gardens.
Further, my time in the gardens provides me plenty of Vitamin D3 exposure as well as a range of movement – squats, hinges, pushes, pulls and carries – without ever calling it exercise.
That’s a key part of my life now.
Emotional/Mental Wellness – Cultivating a positive mindset, which includes mindfulness and self-awareness.
I’ve always been pretty positive about life. My hope is that having completely retired now, that time spent anticipating emails or always having a low level of awareness that something always needed to be done or looked at online should provide me more space in my mind to focus on our lives. It’s time for me to have that space available for free thinking.
I’ve also stopped watching television and rarely use Facebook anymore. The people closest to us know how to reach us, and I no longer feel the need to keep up with everyone’s daily lives. There’s far less noise in my head now, and I value that.
Intellectual Wellness – Staying curious about life and challenging myself to learn new things keeps my brain active.
Most of my life was spent understanding and solving problems. Now, with a larger sense of freedom than I have ever had before, I plan on continuing to explore my interests, only now, I intend to be careful with what I allow to consume my attention. For the next year or more, I intend to allow whatever I am naturally drawn toward to become a part of my life. To see how things interest me and if they hold my interest. And that’s a pretty cool place to be for me.
I hope it will create more alignment.
Simplicity as Wellness – Aligning with your values.
Over the past seven years, I have continued to declutter our lives and that has proven to be healthy for me. Every item you own asks for something—your time, your space, your energy, so the more you accumulate, the more you divide your focus. Having less allows me mental relief.
Not everything has to be held on to to recall the memory it may have been acquired for.
Minimalism, or decluttering, is about peace of mind. And it’s not only physical stuff. I’ve let go of the ‘career’ I had also now. It’s who I was, not who I am. When I clear clutter, mentally or physically, it creates space in my brain for me, which results in greater clarity. There’s not so much bouncing around in there.
Simplicity brings clarity.
Financial Wellness – Managing resources to reduce stress and increase security.
This is something that has come naturally to me, particularly after Yim and I met. As we’ve grown older, creating financial stability has become another way of caring for the life we’ve built together. I’m one of those people who finds topics like tax mitigation interesting and can happily spend a few hours working through projections. I’ve been actively investing for 48 years and completed a financial advisor’s certification 20 years ago—something that even people who know me well are often surprised to learn.
Financial wellness has become the easiest of these dimensions for me to inhabit.
Social Wellness – Building and maintaining strong, supportive relationships and contributing to a community.
During the summers, I use my bike daily to provide myself some fresh air and exercise but also to do our groceries and that allows me the opportunity to meet many of the people that work in our town and get to know them just a little bit and I like that a lot. I also have several close friends but I find there’s something really comforting in saying hello to the person who stocks our vegetables as I shop for our groceries.
And of course, summers in Collingwood mean we are close to Yim’s children, her brothers and our friends, with whom we spend a lot of time. There’s a close group and those relationships shift and evolve as the years go by, each year adding another layer as we hear about each others day-to-day lives and spend evenings at dinners or concerts together. I feel like I pay better attention now to the people I care about and I like that.
Looking back over my birthday, I realized there wasn’t a single extraordinary event. There was exercise, gardening, cooking, friends, family, books, good food and time outdoors. None of it was remarkable on its own but together, they added up to a day that felt deeply satisfying.
More and more, that’s the life I’m trying to build—not one filled with excitement, but one filled with enough of the right things that contentment becomes the natural result.
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