How Many Thanksgivings Do You Have Left?

A simple question can change how you see your time.

🟢 I’ve been reading From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks, and he asks an interesting question: “How many Thanksgivings do you have left?” It isn’t meant to be morbid. It’s meant to be clarifying. If I follow the path my father walked, I have 29 left. That number has a way of quietly shifting your priorities.

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🧭 We plan our finances for retirement but little else.

Brooks recommends what he calls “allocating time well ahead of time.” Once a month, he sets aside an hour to imagine himself at the end of his life, surrounded by the people he loves, listening to what they’re saying about him. Then he comes back to the present and asks, what do I want to do this week to cultivate that future?

Sometimes the answer is simply leaving work on time and having dinner with his family. Small choices, significant direction.

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🌱 Imagining Your Perfect Day

One of the exercises I use in my coaching sessions, and explore more deeply in my book Designing Your Second Act, is this: imagine a perfect ordinary day in retirement. Not a vacation or something on your bucket list, just a deeply satisfying, unremarkable Tuesday.

Who is there? What do you do? How does your morning begin?

Mine starts with a cup of tea on my deck, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the birds and feeling genuinely grateful. Nothing glamorous, but exactly right.

That image becomes your compass. Once you know what you’re cultivating, you can start making small decisions each week that move you toward it Which relationships do you want to invest in now, before retirement arrives? What might need a little tending before you get there? The goal isn’t a packed calendar — it’s stepping into something you’ve been quietly building, rather than waking up one day wondering what comes next.

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✍️ A question for you:

If you imagined a perfect ordinary day in retirement, what would it look like?

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