Four Friends, Thirty Five Years, and a Question Most People Avoid

When they started golfing together, they would play two rounds a day for three straight days. Thirty five years later, they get together once a year and plan to golf twice. The drop is not a story about golf. It is a story about what changes when work ends, the calendar empties, and you discover that nobody handed you a plan for what comes next.

In the latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast, Dave Rodriguez and Dimitri Snowden sit down with three men in their 70s: Steve Hudson, Gary Mayes, and Bob Thomas. They spent a combined 160 years caring for people, and they are now living the very season they once counseled others toward. The question on the table is simple and uncomfortable: is there real vitality in retirement, or is it just a long, slow downshift?

Their answer is yes, there is vitality, but it does not arrive on its own. This post is inspired by our latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast. Watch the full conversation here.

The Transition Nobody Warns You About

The hardest shift, the guests agree, is not financial or physical. It is the change Bob Thomas describes as going from life coming at you to having to go find it. For decades, work supplied the structure: a calendar, a paycheck every two weeks, a clear next hill to climb. Remove that, and the days do not automatically fill with meaning. They can just as easily get sucked up and wasted.

“Healthy retirement takes more intentionality than any other phase in life.” — Steve Hudson

Five Insights From Three Men Who Are Living It

1. Intentionality has to replace structure. Steve Hudson points out that normal life is full of invisible scaffolding that gives you rhythm. When it disappears, you have to build new rhythms on purpose, or the season drifts. The freedom is real, but it is only good if you direct it.
2. Plan with a loose grip. These are lifelong strategic planners, yet all of them describe a shrinking horizon. Steve once planned 20 years out, then five, and now mostly one. Gary Mayes still keeps a 20 year vision but holds it loosely, because frailty is more real and little things can wipe you out. The structure stays, the timeline shortens.
3. There is no hack, only reps. Dimitri Snowden asks the question everyone wants answered: what is the shortcut? The honest answer is that there is not one. The move is to build muscle memory now, in whatever dimension of health you care about, because the earlier you start, the more you carry forward. Gary frames it through the power of one day, the building block all of life is made from.
4. Everybody has a last day. Bob Thomas shares a sobering season: three close friends died within 10 days, and a week later he received a chronic diagnosis. His pastor handed him a single sentence that reframed everything. He began asking what he wants to be true on his last day, then working backward to what deserves attention today.
5. Do not do it alone. Dave Rodriguez cites the Harvard Study of the Good Life, the longest study ever conducted on human happiness, which lands on relationships as the key to thriving as we age. These four have proven it across 35 years built on intention, safety, and vulnerability, with plenty of mocking in between.

How to Apply This Before You Turn 70

You do not have to wait for retirement to start. Here is how to begin now.

1. Build a daily dashboard. Take the six dimensions of health, Vocational, Physical, Financial, Mental and Emotional, Relational, and Behavioral, and choose one or two words under each that you are going after. Turn them into daily choices.
2. Find your guys, or your people. Map a mentoring constellation: who has gone before you, who you are investing in, and who your co mentors are. Then commit to a rhythm and protect it.
3. Start the physical reps today. Whatever your age, the earlier you begin, the better the muscle memory you bring into your later decades.
4. Ask the why question on purpose. Do not let the how and the what crowd out the question of what your life is actually for.

Three Myths Worth Retiring

Myth: retirement is the reward where you finally relax. Relaxation without intention does not produce vitality, it produces drift. The men describe feeling stir crazy and guilty until they built new rhythms.

Myth: there is a secret or a hack. The repeated answer is balance and reps over time. Chasing joy matters as much as caring for your body, and neglecting your soul leaves you just as crippled as neglecting your health.

Myth: you can chase each health area in isolation. Steve notes that culture pursues physical, financial, and vocational health separately, with no combined approach. Vitality is holistic, which is the whole point of the six dimensions.

The Takeaway

You do not have to do all 30 days. Pick one practice. Maybe it is grayscale on your phone. Maybe it is putting the phone in another room during dinner. Maybe it is one walk, one book, one hour of solitude. Behavioral health is not built in dramatic resets. It is built in the daily, boring choice to put the screen down and be present to your actual life.

If you are ready to take the longer view, our team at Destiny Works coaches people through The Calling Quilt™, the framework that ties behavioral health to your vocational, physical, financial, mental and emotional, and relational health. Real change happens when all six dimensions move together.

Your Next Step

Vitality after 70 is not luck, and it is not the absence of hardship. It is the result of decades of small, intentional choices: building rhythms, tending relationships, and living each day as if it counts, because it does. The good news is that the habits that carry these men now are available to you today.

Watch the full episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast, and if you want a guided path through purpose and whole life well being, explore The Calling Quilt™ coaching at https://www.destiny-works.com/the-vitality-journey/.

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Full Transcript

Dave: Are you prepared for retirement? Now I’m not just talking about being financially prepared. I’m talking about every aspect of your health. Will you have vitality in your retirement years? Let’s talk about it. Welcome back to The Vitality Journey Podcast.

Dave: Here to help us get to the bottom of vitality in retirement are three of my most valued friends in the world: Steve Hudson, Gary Mayes, and Bob Thomas. I’m going to let them introduce themselves, but here is how we became long lasting friends. You guys can jump in if I get this wrong. About 35 years ago, all four of us were serving in churches in the same denomination. At one point, all of us were in student ministries working with students, and we connected through the national conference of our denomination. Somewhere in there, somebody said, we enjoy being together, what if we get together and play golf? Isn’t that how it started?

Dave: Each of you had helped me at different events, and I thought, I like these guys, let me get them on the same team for the next one. Then we started saying, let’s come in a day early or stay a day late from the rest of the group, golf, and just enjoy each other. And 35 years later, not every year but just about every year, we’ve gathered somewhere in the United States. What we try to get is all the free things we can: free places, points and rewards, or wherever Bob can get us the most from the casino. Bob knows the guy.

Dave: Here is a definer for why we’re talking about retirement. When we first started, we would meet for four days, and on three of those days we would play two rounds a day. Now we’re getting together for our annual trip in about three weeks, and I think we’ll golf twice. So cue the discussion of retirement and vitality. But before we do, guys, introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Steve: I’m Steve Hudson. I think I’m the oldest of all of us. I turn 74 in just a couple of months, and I’ve been fully retired going on three years now. Married to my wife Joan, we celebrate 54 years of marriage this August, living in Minnesota and loving where life is right now.

Gary: I’m Gary Mayes. I live just outside Phoenix, I’ve been here about 10 years. Both of our adult children moved to the area and came to us and said, would you relocate to live nearby? We’re here for the duration. I never really thought about that, and it is the greatest surprise of retirement. Nobody taught me and nobody helped me navigate the transition from active work and life and ministry to retirement. It’s been a fascinating couple of years. I still do some mentoring and coaching and writing, but one of my big surprises is that I started chasing a longtime hobby of photography. I realized this is a chance to do art and watch it nurture places in my soul that have been neglected for a long time. That’s what I’m doing, and pretending that I know what I’m doing.

Dave: You look great doing it. Bob.

Bob: Bob Thomas. I was a pastor for 40 years and spent the last eight years working. I live in Granite Bay, California, turning 70 in two months, 47 years married, six grandkids. I hang out on the front lawn at my daughter’s house waiting to get invited in to play with the grandkids. That’s my life.

Dimitri: How amazing is that? You touched on it: how do you transition? I’m 45, and I am just trying to get to Friday. I don’t even know what day it is. I have three children, from 13 down to seven, and we’re expecting one on the way. I have so many questions for you guys. How do you keep your quality of life together as a man? How do you move through roles? How do you redefine yourself? In your marriages, I want to be like you guys when I grow up. My wife and I have been together about 17 years, but your marriages have been longer than I’ve been alive. I’m looking at legends right here.

Dave: There’s the new name. We are the legends. Thanks, Dimitri. So let me throw out a general question from your perspective: is there vitality in retirement?

Gary: Absolutely. More than that. I think it takes intentionality.

Steve: That’s the same word I was going to use. Healthy retirement takes more intentionality than any other phase in life. I had no clue how much normal life had structure to it, structure I lived around that gave me rhythms. Now you have to create new ones, and they can be really fun. But if you don’t do that, your life just gets sucked up, and it’s a waste. It’s a big deal.

Dimitri: Do you feel mourning or loss in that awareness as you transition, or is it just that Monday looks different now?

Gary: I would use different words. I felt stir crazy and I felt guilty. I’d get up in the morning and my work motor would kick in, and I’d look around and putter and feel like I needed to be doing something. It took a long time to actually change my transmission a little bit. I felt guilty about not producing during the week. My own goals and my own rhythms became important, but it took a while to figure that out.

Steve: The calendar changes, like you’re saying. All four of us had a version of a nine to five, Monday through Friday. In retirement most of that goes away, and that’s where you wrestle with it. Am I just going to putter in the yard today? Playing with grandkids is fun, but you can’t do that around the clock. So what does this new season look like? Can I still have what you identify on your podcast as energy and passion and purpose? Yes, you can. But you have to be intentional about it.

Bob: There’s a sense of re engaging some old muscles that you have to embrace. The biggest mistake is probably that we under prepare for what the transition will be like. You can still get better in ways, and embracing that beats treating everything as a downshift. The hardest part for me was the change from life coming at me to me having to go find it. It was a profound change that caught me off guard.

Dave: Let’s keep going down that road. What are the unique challenges to wellness and vitality at the ages you are now, challenges you didn’t face in your earlier lives?

Steve: One of your health factors is always financial, and that’s a challenge. I’ve been retired going on three years, doing a lot of the same things now as a volunteer. My calling and my passion didn’t end when I stopped getting my last paycheck, so how do I keep living that out? But financially, you go from a paycheck every two weeks with great regularity that you can plan on, to looking at social security and thinking that doesn’t go very far nowadays. A couple of times a year I sit with my financial guy and ask the same question: with what we have, are we still good? The little counter goes up and tells you a percentage, and you’re still wondering. Then there’s the cost of healthcare. All four of us have had some health things in the last few years. My mom just died four months ago at 94, and my dad is almost 102, living independently. I keep thinking, are my finances going to hang with me through this new season?

Dave: Let’s break the unique challenges down a little more. On this podcast we talk about six factors, and you’ve touched on a lot of them. Tick off physical health. What do you have to do differently now physically?

Bob: Before we do, let me offer something. When we get to this stage of life we have to create structure for ourselves that’s almost completely flexible. We approach planning differently. The time horizon is shorter. We’re not making five, ten, or fifteen year goals the same way, knowing that a couple of years from now we’ll adjust, whether financially or physically. That caught me off guard. I can’t plan very far out.

Dave: That’s interesting, because the one thing all four of us share is that we’re strategic planners. Our whole lives we’ve been thinking ahead: what’s the next hill, what’s the next decision. So you’re saying that fundamentally changes the whole strategic approach to life.

Steve: When we get together, we do talk about what’s on the horizon for each of us and what it means, and we help each other through transitions. I still do an annual planning retreat. In the old days it was 20 years out, then 10, then five. In the last few years before retirement it became, what’s this year and the next three. Now when I do my annual planning, it’s just what’s this next year as best I can determine. The timelines have shrunk, but the structures for me still remain the same.

Gary: Let me jump on that. There are two things I think about. I hate this, but I have to acknowledge that frailty is much more of a reality. Little things wipe you out, and I still want to believe I’m an invincible 18 year old. That’s just not the case. I still think and plan, I can’t turn that motor off, so I have a 20 year vision and the things I want out of my life. And yet I have to live with the fact that at any given moment my ability to live those out can be taken out of my hands. Things are more fragile, I have to be more flexible, and my grip on my plans has to be loose. That’s just the way life is.

Dimitri: Springboarding off the fragility of life and the body itself: I’m 45. Rewind yourself back to 45. What would you do differently to make your today stronger? Or is this just the inevitable decline over time? What’s the hack, guys? Is there a hack?

Steve: The physical side of my life has always been more natural for me, partly because of what it does for me emotionally across the board. I’m better off when I’m exercising. What I’d remind listeners is that the earlier you begin, the better the muscle memory you carry forward. There’s no better time to start than today, wherever you’re at. Don’t ask me about my eating habits, though.

Bob: The frailty part is real. The older you get, the more frail you become. The body isn’t meant to last forever, even if our shelf life runs into the hundreds. Things fall apart. My big complaint when we golf will be the arthritis in my knee. That’s not going away. It’s permanent now.

Gary: You’re asking what the hack is, and Bob touched on it. That’s what you guys are doing with vitality and the six factors. One construct I developed years ago I call intentional living, and another thing I’ve paid attention to for over 30 years is a few short principles on finishing well. So to the 47 year old, figure out how you’re constructed, how you’re approaching life, and then keep doing your reps on that. Build your muscle memory, and that will help you when you get to be our age.

Steve: That’s intentional. There’s the hack. To be intentional, starting now, whatever your age is.

Gary: Gary, you wrote something a long time ago on the power of a day, and it impacted me, because all of life is built by that building block of one day. Steve, you use a phrase a lot, taking that ultimate destiny and turning it into something measured in time today. That’s been part of the backdrop for a practice I’ve had. I keep a daily dashboard I measure myself against. I’m one of the listeners of your podcast, so I laid your six areas over my dashboard to see what I wasn’t paying attention to, and found it really helpful. I’ve got a couple of words under each area I’m going after, and then turning that into actual daily choices and actions is where the battle is won or lost.

Bob: I don’t think there’s a secret. I look for things like that too. I want the hack, the secret, the one that overrides all the others. But there’s a bigger balance at work. What you’re doing to chase joy is as important as what you’re doing to pay attention to the physical health of your body. If you neglect your body, everything goes down. But if you neglect the wellbeing of your soul, you’re just as crippled. The power of one day has been a big deal for me. I went through a season last year where in 10 days, three really close friends died, all at different stages of life. We went to three funerals in 10 days, people who mattered, in different parts of the country. A week after that, I got diagnosed with a chronic thing. I was sitting with my pastor, and he used this phrase: everybody has a last day. I’ve taken that and asked, what do I want to be true on my last day? I don’t get to choose when that day is. For some people, with mental decline, the last active day comes before the physical last day. But at some point you have a last day, and whatever I want to be true on that day is what I ought to be paying attention to and investing in today.

Dave: That’s phenomenal. This is why I like these guys.

Dave: We’ll get back to the conversation in a moment. I wanted to announce a new offering from Destiny Works. I’m launching the Pastors Journey, a six month mentoring program in which I meet with pastors monthly and walk them through both The Calling Quilt™ and our Vitality Journey coaching offerings. It’s designed to help pastors be clear about their calling and far more able to serve their congregations with vitality. Check out our website or email me at dave@destiny-works.com for more info. Now let’s get back to the conversation.

Dimitri: Everybody has a last day. The compression of time has extruded a higher value in each moment. Every slice, every moment is that much more valuable, because it’s finite.

Dave: Let me touch on a related subject. I want to talk about relationships, especially male friendships. I quote this a lot on the podcast: the Harvard Study of the Good Life, the longest study on human happiness ever done. They boiled everything down to what makes you happy as you get older, and it comes down to one thing: relationships. So let me get personal with the four of us. What do you suppose has kept us getting together these past 35 years?

Steve: It started with shared interest. We had a lot of commonality in the ministry work we were involved in. But then we enjoyed each other’s company, and we realized none of us took any one of us too seriously. We were always open to harassing each other. You don’t always have friends like that. Back in that era we heard as pastors that you couldn’t have close friends inside your church, because getting transparent could come back to bite you. So we realized we needed those kinds of friendships, and we’d watched people ahead of us who didn’t have them. We thought, we don’t want to keep doing this into our 40s, 50s, and 60s without those friendships. What started as common interests and enjoying each other morphed into being there to process the different junctures in our marriages, our ministries, our jobs, and our health. And there’s never been any judgment. No topic is off limits, and whatever you say isn’t held against you. That is rare.

Gary: Just as a backdrop, we’ve never lived in the same area. It’s always a plane flight to be together. It’s not as if circumstances made it easy. I didn’t grow up understanding what it takes to build a good friendship. I had in the moment friends, then they were gone and I didn’t look back. When you start to taste what it’s like to share your own struggles and hardships with someone who not only doesn’t judge but actually moves toward you in those moments, that changes things. The power of our failures happens when they stay ours alone. So many times I’ve shared the messiness of my life with these guys, then gone home to live in that messiness, but knowing I’m not alone in it. Someone else knows, and someone else has met it with grace and love. That’s as near the core as I can get to why I push past everything that would cause me to not stay connected.

Gary: You asked us to think ahead about this, Dave, and I wrestled with it. There’s a secret sauce, but I’m not sure any of us were smart enough to create the recipe. We stumbled into it. So I’ll add two words. One is the safety Steve and Bob talked about. There’s a deep mutual respect. I couldn’t be more impressed with these three guys, and there’s nothing they could do that would make me unimpressed. That lives among us. We mock and we love and it’s truly safe, and you just can’t buy that. The other thing is that really early we chose a rhythm. We come in on a Sunday and go home on a Thursday, once a year. There’s power in committing to a rhythm. We chose to do it when we didn’t need to, because we knew it would pay off later, and we chose to do it when we needed to and would rather have hidden. Having a predictable rhythm means we put our energy into being together, not into recreating the space every time.

Dimitri: So in summary, what I hear is intention, safety, and vulnerability. And a lot of mocking.

Gary: If we were smart, we would have said those three things. And add one more: expect to not want to do it sometimes.

Steve: As we’ve gotten older, that’s where the intentionality still has to happen. We used to play 36, 36, 36, and on the morning we left we’d try to get another 18 in. Now it’s two 18s for the whole trip. There’s a rhythm, but within it we adjust as our bodies adjust and as we look at what financially works, because it’s a plane flight. We’ve also had to ask, what happens when one of us can’t golf anymore? Do we still get together, and what does that look like? In the last few years we’ve had more and more of those discussions as we change and age.

Dave: There’s going to be a last day to jump, a last day to walk, a last day to hold a cup. So how do we move around that? I grieve it. We’ve brought it up the last couple of years: what happens when one of us is gone. We’ve talked about that realistically. You realize we met in our 30s, and now we’re in our 70s.

Dimitri: You’ve known each other longer than I’ve been alive. That’s extraordinary.

Dave: We as a group have been a sermon illustration many times in my preaching, because I feel so strongly that this dynamic has maintained a sense of sanity in my life. I tell younger people, find your guys, embed yourself in the relationship, and stay with it. From your perspective, do you see other people doing this? I don’t see a lot of it.

Bob: The statistics say that having even one relationship like this is astounding. Not astounding, but it’s rare, and it’s sad. It’s easy to understand how we get there, though.

Dave: I want to probe your knowledge and your heart as pastors. We spent cumulatively about 160 years caring for people. When you look at people today, do you see vitality? What do you see from your gut as a pastor?

Bob: I’ll use an analogy. I see us developing some muscles really well, but not cross training. We’re getting better at a narrowing skill set. So much of how we focus our lives has become about the how and the what, and not very much time goes to the why question. Why am I here? What is my life supposed to be about? Less time is spent there and more on how we need to function. At a broad level, we’re getting stronger in some areas while we get weaker in others. It’s in the why question that questions of faith and purpose and God live, and we’re spending less and less time there.

Steve: In our culture today, lots of people are going after these different health factors, but in isolation. Look at all the material on physical health. There’s been more on health in the last 20 years than in the rest of our lives combined. The same on financial, the same on vocational. All of that is happening because there are huge needs in all six of those health areas. But what I don’t see is a combined, comprehensive approach, which is what you’re after here, Dave, looking at the whole construct. We’re struggling in so many of those areas in our culture.

Bob: On the emotional health one, to be honest, it’s pretty ambiguous for me to know how I go after the emotion for myself. I don’t think it’s something we give much attention to.

Dimitri: You touched on it, Bob. There’s a strength of men that has been waning, or is now unavailable, due to environment or the economy or whatever reason. There’s a weakness plaguing men. How do we, the younger generation of men, resurrect that strength? Because intention requires strength. If you intend something, you have to put strength behind it to execute. What would you say to the younger generation? I’m right behind you guys. What do I need to do to cultivate this version of me 30 years from now? What strengths do I need to groom, and what kind of men do I need to attract?

Gary: My first response is, don’t do it alone. Period. That’s part of the fallacy of our day. I see tons of anxiety in people, and they’re running harder and faster trying to overcome it, not even sure what it is. In every case there’s an aloneness, and even when people are together, they don’t invite the people they’re with into that need. So don’t do it alone.

Dimitri: Dave told me something he observed in me: when I’m hurt, I hide. That’s probably most men. We don’t want to show that weakness, so I go to my corner, lick my wounds, and then when I turn and face you, everything’s fixed. I really appreciated him highlighting that. Sometimes when money isn’t right, it’s hard to get a hold of me. When I get a couple of dollars, it’s, hey, how you doing, just checking in. So how do I keep that strength when I don’t have it? How do I intend that bond in a way that lets him know I’m available, and lets him in so he can love on me and nurture me back?

Steve: The thing is, when we get together, we don’t have to be strong. We allow ourselves four days to not perform and not posture. We’re together, and there are tears and lots of laughter. Did I mention the mocking? But the fact is we don’t have to pull it all together. It’s one of the safest groups of people I’ve ever been with.

Bob: There’s absolute power in tasting what it’s like to be seen, be known, and still be loved. You talk about the strength you need. I don’t know a greater source than that, other than the Lord and His Spirit, that sense that somebody else is with me and for me and they know me.

Steve: I think a lot about finishing well, and have for over 30 years. One characteristic from a study on finishing well is that you have a network of meaningful relationships. So what would I tell the 45 year old Dimitri to get to where we are? I’d ask, who asks you the tough questions in your life? Who are you investing in? Who’s investing in you? Every year at my annual planning retreat I review what I call a mentoring constellation. At the top of the circle are those who have gone before me, and that doesn’t have to mean older, it means where I want to keep growing. At the bottom are those I can invest in. The sides are the co mentors, and that’s what these guys have been for me. The consistency has been a group of guys we just sharpen iron with.

Dave: Guys, thank you. What a rich conversation. I could keep going, but I have to get to the golf thing.

Bob: You have to be good to play with us, though. Actually, not very good.

Dave: By the way, I’m going golfing for the second time tomorrow, so I’m getting ready.

Bob: Don’t pull anything. I went out to hit some golf balls before my hand surgery with splints on the fingers of each hand, just to see if I could even do it.

Dave: That’s what we do. We’ve golfed with hips, legs, hands, all the things over the years. At any rate, thank you all so much for joining us.