I've a bit of an issue with chocolate. More precisely, I'm a chocoholic. Love the damned stuff with a passion that is frankly disproportionate for a man of my age and alleged maturity.
That doesn't sit especially well with my lifestyle. I'm extremely sporty, in decent shape for a guy pushing towards the big 60, and broadly disciplined about what I put into my body. So chocolate and I have an arrangement: I want it constantly, and I allow myself just enough of it to keep the peace. Unwilling restraint, but restraint nonetheless.
Once a year, though, I up my game considerably. From Shrove Tuesday through to Easter Sunday, I go completely cold turkey. No chocolate. I participate in the Christian tradition of Lent with the grim dedication of a guy who has something to prove. I'm also a bit of a sadist, so I throw alcohol and potato chips into the forty day bonfire for good measure. Why be miserable by halves.
My friends think I'm slightly unhinged for doing so. My wife Suzie takes it largely in her stride, having long since concluded that I'm slightly bonkers as a baseline.
Every year, somewhere around day thirty when I'm eyeing up a Hershey bar with genuine lust, I remind myself why I actually do this. And it has very little to do with religion, willpower, or punishing myself for crimes against nutrition. It's a reminder of the single most underrated skill I've carried into retirement: the ability to voluntarily give up something you enjoy today in exchange for something better tomorrow.
I'm retired now, and the freedom it affords is real and wonderful. But it didn't arrive by accident. It was built, year by year, out of the same discipline I flex every February through March walking past the candy aisle with my jaw set and my eyes forward.
Deferred gratification. The conscious decision to say “not now” when every instinct says “why not”. The brain is not naturally wired to get excited about Future You when Present You is hungry and there's a perfectly good Snickers within arm's reach. But Lent trains exactly that muscle. Forty days of holding a line you've drawn yourself, with no enforcement beyond your own stubbornness, until the habit becomes part of who you are.
That's the deeper truth about retirement too. The people who thrive in it aren't just the ones who saved enough. They're the ones who spent years choosing the long term over the short term, and in doing so built a character that knows how to be patient, intentional, and genuinely satisfied with what they've earned.
Easter Sunday, when it comes, is genuinely wonderful, a pleasure entirely out of proportion to the thing itself. And that, I'd argue, is exactly what a well earned retirement feels like.
Now if you'll excuse me, there are just three days left to go and there's an extra large child's Easter Egg in the kitchen cupboard with my name on it and a six pack of Budweiser sitting in the fridge, chilling patiently like it knows its moment is coming. We'll be reunited soon. Suzie will have to deal with the aftermath of the sugar rush.
