6 Steps to a Comfortable Retirement

Here are 6 simple and powerful steps to a comfortable retirement! Read on to learn how to make the best savings possible, so you can retire blissfully and live the life you want. These steps have been proven to work for thousands of people who…

Wait.

Pause those retirement-related thoughts for a while and let me ask you a different question:

“Did you live the past 20 minutes of your life the way you wanted to?”

Why 20 minutes? (vs. 6 months or 10 years)

Life is a collection of breaths and minutes. If you think of life as a glass full of water, each minute is like a drop of water. If you start to take out the drops one after the other, it will be a matter of time before the glass empties itself.

So, why not focus on each drop rather than the whole glass? You have more control over a drop, than you do over the entire glass. You also reap the benefits of a well-lived drop much sooner than those of a well-lived glass.

Often, a lot of life is focused on trying to plan the distant future — usually related to retirement — and next thing we know, 50% of the past year gets spent trying to prepare & plan the next 10 years….and this pattern can repeat every year.

So, rather than thinking about what you could’ve done better in the past 2 years or what you should do in the next 8 months, let’s indulge in the past 20 minutes.

This doesn’t mean that you never spend introspective time thinking about your life so far, or you don’t plan at all about your years ahead; it’s simply an act of allocating some time to immerse yourself in the present moment and use the past 20 minutes to help enrich the next 20 ones.

I’ve been indulging in this practice for the past three months, and am grateful for all the gifts it has brought to my mind and body.

Curious why this would help? This practice:

1. Reduces cravings

It lowers cravings, aligning you closer with the 3rd noble truth. How? You realize that there’s a lot less to crave in the next 20 minutes, than if you’re thinking mostly about the next 6 months. When you decide how you want to live the next 1,200 seconds, you realize that there’s not a lot to run after, and that brings ease and freedom to your mind.

As a bonus, you’re also gradually changing your mindset (not just the next 20 minutes): you’re starting to rewire your neural pathways to inculcate the habit of lowering cravings, a trait that will help you along your life’s journey.

2. Makes it easier to implement changes

Retrospecting over the past 20 minutes is much simpler than looking back years or months ago. Because it’s a shorter time period, you have a clearer and better idea of what you did ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ (I put those words in quotes because there’s no scientifically verified suggestion of how to live your life).

Also, you have the next 20 minutes right in front of you, waiting to apply any changes you want to make (or take in whatever ‘right’ you did in the past 20 minutes, and stretch it along for the next 20 ones).

3. Boosts mindfulness skills

Because you’re focusing on the past 20 minutes, your mind’s range of flight is much narrower and that helps develop your mindfulness skills: rather than running around weeks and months back and forth, you’re focused on minutes. You have a better idea of what your body and mind did and felt in the past few minutes, giving you a clear and enlarged vision of what life is.

How to get started

To start with, set a couple of daily reminders on your phone. You can call them ‘1,200 precious seconds of my Life’. When the phone beeps, briefly pause what you’re doing and think about the past 20 minutes:

→ What did you do?

You might’ve been cooking a meal and that involved several aspects: getting the food out from the fridge, walking to the stove, washing and cutting the veggies, maybe reading a recipe on the phone, having a sip of water.

→ What feelings/emotions came to your mind?

Excitement about the new recipe, gratitude for all the food you have in your kitchen, uncertainty and worry about how many clients would join your new business’ first zoom meeting on the upcoming weekend, annoyance that you forgot to buy ginger from the grocery store yesterday.

→ How did you handle those feelings/emotions?

You feel good that you were excited about the new recipe and that you were grateful for the food you’re blessed with. Pat yourself for harboring those feelings!

You acknowledge that feeling uncertain about your business is a thought associated with the future; a better way to handle it would be to say out loud ‘I won’t spend these precious minutes ruminating about the future. I will address those thoughts when I’m working on those tasks later, not now’.

You notice that feeling annoyed about not buying ginger, is a thought from the past. There’s nothing you can do about it now, other than compassionately reminding yourself that you did the best you could.

What you can do in the next 20 minutes:

You resume cooking, and a few minutes later, your mind knocks again on the door of worry about the zoom meeting. You smile, say out loud the affirmation and focus instead on the act of stirring the veggies in the frying pan and thinking about how lovely the kale smells — an experience you’d likely have missed out on if your mind were let into the room of worry about the business meeting.

And for these 4 learnings — two regarding the present moment, one about the future and one from the past — you pat yourself again, for taking the time to retrospect about them and for making the changes you desired and deserved in the next 20 minutes.

With time and practice, you can — and will — extend this to more than 20 minutes, and do it more than twice a day. It will become an ingrained trait of your personality, rather than a to-do task.

You will get to a point where you can mindfully look at your life a year ago and carry forward your learnings and pleasures to the next 5 (10, 15, 20…) years.

And thus builds your precious Life, breath by breath, minute by minute.