About These Posts

Each day I add a new journal entry to my social media feeds. Here, I take that day’s entry and expand it through the lens of my Good Life Creed, which you can read about in my book Going Alone (available for free on my website). These dissections aim to connect ordinary reflections with the enduring objectives and principles of the Creed.

Journal Entry (10/19/25)

Another weakness has crept in this past year—since returning to Japan—a growing sense of confusion and disorientation when I drive. The timing suggests the reason: I’m back behind the wheel in a different country, on the opposite side of the road, surrounded by signs I can’t read and courtesies I only half remember. Still, I can’t help but wonder why this feels harder now. When I first began driving here at thirty-eight—already long at home on American roads—I adapted quickly. The difference this time, I suspect, isn’t Japan. It’s me.

Though my body and mind remain steady as I enter my seventh decade, I know this steadiness is a polite illusion. I wear my health like an aging but well-tended car: the oil’s changed, the paint still shines, but the engine has seen long years of use. I can feel the wear in small ways—a slower response, a moment’s confusion, a twinge of hesitation that once wasn’t there.

For men born in the mid-1960s, statistics suggest good health lasts on average until the mid-sixties, when the body begins to turn its quiet corner toward decline. I take no alarm in this. Instead, I see it as a memento mori of sorts—a sober reminder of life’s natural limits, and of how precious the remaining miles are. So when I lose my bearings behind the wheel, or feel a flicker of unease in traffic, I try to remember what’s really happening: not the failure of my faculties, but the simple unfolding of nature’s course.

The best I can do now is drive with care, stay alert, and make peace with the long, inevitable road that carries every one of us home.

Dissection

This reflection faces aging not as tragedy but as truth—a calm acknowledgment of nature’s gradual claim on all living things. There’s humility here: the willingness to recognize decline without dramatizing it. The metaphor of the car becomes both intimate and universal—our minds and bodies as the vehicles that carry us until the journey’s end.

#Temperance

The spirit of moderation and composure. You meet aging’s small trials with steadiness, without bitterness or self-pity.

#Well (Life Will Not Go Well)

A realistic acceptance that life’s machinery falters in time. Trouble and imperfection are not interruptions—they are the natural road itself.

#Limits

Awareness of what is within your control, and peace with what isn’t. To acknowledge boundaries is to live in harmony with the truth of being mortal.

Takeaway

To age with grace is not to resist the slow turn of decline but to steer gently through it, eyes open and heart calm, knowing that the road—however long or winding—has always led here.

➡️ https://www.goingalone.org/thegoodlife

#RetiringInJapan 🇯🇵 #GoingAlone 🌵 #TheGoodLife ☀️