57th Birthday - one year down retirement lane

" HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME ! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME ! HAPPY BIRTH TO ME, ME ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEEEEE." I always enjoy singing Happy Birthday to me. Going to 57, eh! Who cares? They say that if you don't mind, it doesn't matter. Anyway soon there will be no space for the candles.

A mug to remember the working years.

Time flies. Everyone says so. Actually the world is still rotating at the same speed ever since it existence , so who flies? We !!! Either you fly and soar, or stay put and rot. One thing you cannot recycle is wasted time. Those who make the worst use of their time are the same ones who complain that there is never enough time. Time like money, you can either spend, waste or invest it !

For a retiree, the days are long but the years are short. A year has whizzed by since I was given the Golden Handshake and driven home. As I always say, at 56, I still have pimples and not ready for retirement. But life on the left lane is pleasant. You get to enjoy the scenery and are never in a hurry to arrive. After a year of bliss, I will never trade it with anything in the world.

The better half has always been worried that I may weaken and fall sick. She cannot bear to see an over-tuned 5000 horse powered engine coming to a halt, fearing that it would degenerate. The engine has never been halted but is just running at idling speed. In this way, it lasts longer!


Of course, when you retire, you get out of the rat race and learn to be contented with less cheese. But what the heck! You don't need so much cheese in your late fifties, anyway.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness. Aristotle once said that "Happiness depends on ourselves." How true! People are just as happy as they make up their mind to be. I like what Burton Hills says about happiness. " It is not a destination. It is a method of life." Moreover, nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy. Foolish people seeks happiness in the distance but the wise grows it under their feet. And hold it in your own hands.

"May we never let the things we can't have, or don't have, or shouldn't have, spoil our enjoyment of the things we do have and can have. As we value our happiness, let us not forget it, for one of the great lessons in life is learning to be happy without the things we cannot have or should not have. ": Charles F. Kettering.

If there were a thing I regret for not having more is not money ( You cannot have enough of it anyway) but children. How I wish I could go for more picnics with them, fly more kites in the hot afternoon sun, play more badminton and tennis, watch more DVDs etc. They are our earthly possessions we can take with us to glory. Sometimes we are so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up. They grow up and out of the home very fast. Too soon you have to cope with the empty nest syndrome. And you know that they are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they are going. The greatest gift you can give to your children is to love their mother a lot and try not to understand her at all.


There is an important skill one has to master after retirement : how to live with a spouse who now has a full time job looking after the husband but at half pay! Afterall God created women beautiful and foolish: beautiful so that men would love them, foolish so that they would love the men.

Retired husbands are like wine - some turn into vinegar, but the best improve with age. Yours sincerely prays that he belongs to the latter.

For in the final analysis, after you have clocked out of your office for good, or putted the last hole on the most pircturesque and challenging course, or showed your last Ace at a gruelling card game , drunk the last glass for the road at a long drinking session, etc etc , and you come home, you leave behind everything but still have your best friend, your wife. That is why it is said that the wife is a gift bestowed upon man to reconcile him to the loss of paradise.