It never ceases to amaze me that every book printed in English—no matter how thick, no matter many pages or how many words– can be reduced to this common denominator: just twenty-six letters, albeit arranged and rearranged, used multiple times, over and over again.

Amazing, isn’t it, that the letters we learned to read and write, letters we likely first learned to sing from the A-B-C (“alphabet”) Song, the basics we learned from our mothers or other teachers, equipped us, ultimately, to unlock even the most complicated written ideas!

One word of particular interest to me right now, forty-four days till retirement, is the seven letter word retired.

What caught my attention in looking at that printed word–with new eyes, no doubt–is a word of interest within that word.

Have you noticed, too, that embedded in the word retired is the word tired, which I do believe, describes how many of us feel on the cusp of retirement?

In fact, as tired as I have been at the end of any given workday or any given workweek throughout my long employment life of multiple careers, “tired” never had the same meaning as it did leading to my retirement decision.

Perhaps it was the cumulative effect. Perhaps I reached a tipping point, a critical mass, of sorts; whatever it was, I finally understood what a colleague meant when she explained her retirement decision in two words, “I’m tired.”

I’m that tired, too.

If you have known the “tired” that produced the decision to become retired, what had become most tiresome?