The Day I Realized Retirement Was Only Ten Years Away

There are moments when time does not announce itself loudly.

It does not arrive through birthdays.

It does not arrive through grey hair.

It does not arrive through a doctor’s appointment or a formal milestone.

Sometimes, it appears in the middle of an ordinary conversation with a customer in the shop.

Over the past few months, this has happened more than once. While chatting with customers, the topic of age would come up naturally. I would mention my age casually, without much reflection, and then something unexpected would surface in my mind:

In about ten years, I could start collecting retirement benefits.

Ten years.

The number itself is not frightening. In fact, ten years still sounds reasonably long. Long enough to write another book, plant more flowers, learn new skills, make new mistakes, and perhaps take a few more chances that I have been postponing without realizing it.

And yet, something in that number feels different when it becomes personal.

For most of my life, retirement belonged to another generation. It was something older people talked about, something distant and abstract, something safely placed beyond the edges of daily life.

Suddenly, it has moved into my own horizon.

Yesterday, my wife Annie visited one of our canvas printing suppliers. The representative’s name is Peter. We have worked with him for more than ten years, but almost entirely through emails and phone calls.

For over a decade, Peter existed mostly as a voice, a signature at the bottom of messages, and an occasional phone call. A professional presence without a physical face.

Yesterday, Annie finally met him in person.

When she came back, she told me something that stayed with me.

“I noticed how much older he looked compared to when we first started working together,” she said.

Then she paused.

“And I wondered… in his eyes, do I look older in exactly the same way?”

That question did not feel rhetorical. It felt like a mirror being quietly turned in both directions at once.

Because it is true.

We notice aging in others much more easily than we notice it in ourselves.

We see a supplier’s hair turning grey.

We see a customer walking a little slower than before.

We see children becoming adults without ever being able to locate the exact moment it happens.

But our own transformation does not arrive in visible events. It happens in small, almost invisible increments, too subtle to register day by day.

And then one day, we realize that twenty years have quietly disappeared without ever announcing their departure.

Perhaps this is why photography fascinates me so much.

A photograph does not simply capture a moment. It preserves a version of ourselves that we can no longer fully access, yet still instinctively recognize.

Sometimes customers come into my shop with old passport photos taken many years ago. They place the old image beside the new one and laugh.

“Was that really me?”

Yes.

It was.

And somehow, it still is.

The young person in that photograph has not disappeared. He has simply accumulated experiences, responsibilities, disappointments, small victories, and countless ordinary Tuesdays that never felt significant at the time.

The same person remains underneath.

Peter is still Peter.

Annie is still Annie.

And despite the passing of time, I am still the same person who arrived in Canada carrying more uncertainty than plans.

The calendar insists otherwise, of course.

Ten years until retirement.

The phrase sounds almost official when written down like that.

Yet in daily life, retirement does not feel like an ending. It feels more like a distant marker on a road that continues without asking permission, without slowing down for interpretation.

And this is where something begins to shift in how I see photographs.

Because perhaps there is something strange about the expression “old photograph.”

We say it so naturally.

“This is an old photo.”

But when we look more carefully, we begin to notice something slightly paradoxical.

The photograph may be old in time, but the world inside it was still very young.

In that image, our skin was still smooth.

Our parents were still breathing the same air we breathe today.

The old plex building behind us was still standing firmly at the corner of the street, not yet marked by demolition notices or memory.

The child at our feet had only just learned how to stand, unaware of all the falling that life would later require.

Even the family dog was still waiting by the door every evening, as if time itself had no intention of moving forward.

Nothing inside the photograph considered itself old.

The people in the picture were simply living an ordinary day, unaware that years later, this moment would be labeled “an old photograph.”

Perhaps the photograph did not grow old at all.

Perhaps we did.

And that may be one of the quietest miracles of photography.

It allows us to enter a moment before loss arrived, before change accumulated, before time revealed what it had been carrying all along.

Seen this way, the “old photograph” is not really about age.

It is about distance.

The distance between who we were then, and who we are now looking back.