My friend Lee retired at sixty-one, fled the tech industry, and landed in Santa Fe like a man stepping out of a chrysalis. The move gave him what he said his spirit had been begging for: a clean reinvention. These days he volunteers as a rescue worker at the local ski resort—hauling people out of trouble, useful again, awake in his body.
My own retirement is eighteen months away, and I feel the same hunger for reinvention—but without the romance of relocation. My wife and kids aren’t uprooting, and neither am I. So if I’m going to change, the terrain has to be internal. I don’t need a new zip code; I need a new relationship with myself.
Some of this craving is spiritual. Some of it is brutally practical. For the past five months I’ve been rehabbing a torn rotator cuff marinated in arthritis. I tried to negotiate with my kettlebell workouts—adjusting angles, trimming volume, pretending moderation would save me. It half-worked. What didn’t improve was the resentment. In fact, it metastasized.
I know exactly how I got here. I overdid kettlebells—four days in a row, again and again—until my shoulder finally filed a formal complaint. Now the bells feel less like tools and more like accusations. I still want to train five or six days a week, but the thought of picking them up fills me with a low-grade fury. When resentment becomes chronic, it’s information. Ignoring it is how you end up injured and stubbornly proud about it.
What I keep circling back to is yoga—specifically my mid-2000s era, when power yoga was my religion. Back when Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee videos taught me that yoga could be punishing, sweaty, and deeply satisfying. One hour. Total exhaustion. Muscles lit up, ego humbled, mind quiet. I want that again—not just the shape of it, but the mental state. I want to get lean. I want a diet that actually complements the practice: simple, semi-vegan, enjoyable. Yoga four days a week. The exercise bike on the others. Nothing heroic. Nothing destructive.
Of course, underneath all of this is the same old human wish: character. I want a yoga lifestyle that reflects self-possession, self-discipline, and self-confidence—the real currencies of happiness. Not indulgence. Not macho theater. If I’m going to retire in the Southern California suburbs, fine. But I can’t be the retired guy slowly maiming himself in the garage, clinging to an identity that no longer serves him.
Yoga never hurt me. Not once. It always left me clearer, calmer, and stronger in ways that mattered. As a lifetime weightlifter, I’m realizing I need to let go of the Bro-Coding and Bro-Signaling that once fed my pride. What is a real man, anyway? It isn’t someone chasing pump and punishment while overeating and limping through life. It’s someone fit, injury-free, and genuinely disciplined.
Lee rescues skiers. I admire that. But before I can rescue anyone—before I can reinvent anything—I have to rescue myself first.
Cinemorphosis 
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