It always makes me smile. The moment people learn I've officially entered what I like to call the Great Un-Working (retirement), they almost immediately ask the same question:
“So . . . What do you do now?"
Instead, I tell them: "I live life deliberately."
That's usually the point when I get a polite nod, followed by the unmistakable look of someone wondering whether I've simply found a more sophisticated way to say, “I’m becoming a bum.”
Apparently, "living deliberately" sounds suspiciously like unemployment, just better branding.
The truth is, what living deliberately looks like for me right now is taking time to synthesize a lifetime of experiences into these weekly reflections. It's slowing down long enough to ask what those experiences have taught me, while keeping the door wide open to the possibility that I still have much to learn.
Part of living deliberately is giving yourself the space to simply–Be.
That may sound unproductive, but I've noticed something curious. The world keeps spinning without my constant supervision. The emails wait. The weeds keep growing. The news cycle finds fresh reasons to panic. Somehow, life manages just fine.
And in that space, there is a particular kind of magic.
Yesterday, I was riding my bike along a quiet back road, feeling the warm July air tug at my jersey and listening to the steady rhythm of the chain and the soft hum of tires on sun-baked pavement. For a brief, shimmering moment, the heavy mantle of adulthood slipped away.
There were no passwords to remember. No meetings to prepare for. No phones to answer, no software updates demanding immediate attention. No one asking me to circle back on anything.
I was young again, just a kid exploring the edges of my neighborhood, convinced the world was impossibly vast and entirely mine to discover.
As children, we understood something that many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to relearn:
The joy is in the moving, not the arriving.
That ride reminded me of a passage from Ryan Holiday's recent book, Wisdom Takes Work, that stayed with me –
"If wisdom is not an end state but a process, then we will never actually arrive at full understanding. There will always be unresolved questions, since we are still in the middle of working things out."
For much of our lives, we tend to treat wisdom the way we treat our morning commute.
We want to get there.
Read the right books. Gain the right experiences. Attend the right conferences. Listen to the right podcasts. Surely, after enough effort, someone hands us a certificate that says, "Congratulations. You are now officially wise."
No such certificate ever arrives.
Holiday's point—and the lesson from that summer backroad—is that there isn't a finish line. The road simply keeps unfolding ahead of us.
When you're riding a bike and noticing the smell of freshly cut grass, the way late-afternoon sunlight filters through the trees, or the sudden coolness that greets you as you glide into a shaded hollow, you're practicing something deeper than observation.
You're practicing presence.
You're not trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. You're simply participating in the miracle of being alive.
Maybe that's what the work of wisdom really looks like.
It isn't climbing some towering peak of enlightened perfection. It's accepting that we are perpetually in the middle of the journey, still learning, still questioning, still discovering.
It turns out that doing less gives you more time to notice what you've been missing while you were busy doing more.
And once you realize that unresolved questions aren't evidence of failure but the very engine of a curious life, something remarkable happens.
The pressure comes off. You stop worrying so much about arriving and start appreciating the ride.
So when people ask what I do now, perhaps this is the better answer:
I pay attention. I ride bicycles. I write. I notice. I keep working on wisdom.
And if that doesn't sound especially productive, I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
I've spent enough years confusing "busy" with "meaningful".
These days, I'd rather keep pedaling, keep noticing, and let the summer wind remind me that the magic was never waiting at the end of the road.
It has been here all along—in the middle of the ride.
I’m Patrick Ball. Stay curious, ask better questions, and notice the ride.
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