A Slice of Pie

It's less than a week before Thanksgiving. Mmmmm, Thanksgiving. A day to be thankful for everything we have. A day of a culinary feast! A day of roasted turkey, stuffing, honey-glazed yam, green bean casserole, cranberry jellies, and that famous dessert, pumpkin pie! I think pumpkin pie is the most food I'm looking forward in celebrating Thanksgiving. A slice of pumpkin pie with a whipped cream on top.... yummmmmm!

Our life can be dissected like pumpkin pies too. Some slices here, some slices there. There are so many moving part in our life that sometimes makes our life seems like a blur. But if we really think deep about this, each part of life it's like a chapter in a book, it has its own story, with its own people inside it. Just the same like a slice of pie.

Let's divide our lives into 3 huge slices of pie. Assuming we live to be a hundred, here's some mental picture of what our life could be. (Of course I know that some of us may not make it to a hundred, and there are some that will live over a hundred. This is just an average stats, a ceteris paribus).

1st slice : Age 0 - 33 years old: The learning period.
These are the most busiest years of our lives. We grow up from being a baby, toddler, child, pre-teen, teenager, young adult, into adulthood during the first pie of our lives. From learning how to talk and walk, to learning basic math and language, to learning how to drive a car and how to be successful in school.

Finish with school? Then the learning continues on how to survive on your first 7 days in your first job (or business, or any professional endeavor of your choosing). In these times, some of us got married, have children, and raising little kids into a wonderful human being. This is also the period that we are so eager to grab new experiences by travelling to anywhere, going to this new restaurants and those new bars, and have no fears in facing the uncertainty of the future. YOLO, right?

This is the most exciting part of our lives, where we create lots of photos and memories. This is where we're very vocal of what we want to do in life, and let no one determine the course of our actions. This is also the period where we face our first failures in life, and start wondering if we are still on the right path. But this is also the time where we learn to bounce back every time life knock us down.

2nd slice: Age 34 - 66 years old: The accumulation period.
These are the time when we accumulate everything. The possession time. From money, designer clothes (and bags for women!), jewelry, to big ticket items like TV, cars, and even houses. Some of us may already started the accumulation process when we were in the previous part of life. Some us don't stop the learning process. We continue to accumulate the education we want, either formally (master degree, doctorate degree, and so on) or non formally (learning what's the new make up trend, or how to be confident in public speaking).

This is also one of the most exciting period in our lives, because we could now see our hard work starting to pay off. We probably already finish paying some student loans or old credit card "mistakes" that we did in our twenty's. We see our children grow up into a mini version of ourselves. We are in the stage of being comfortable in life.

While this may true to some people, unfortunately this is also the time period that stress might seep in and start conquering our lives. More money sometimes means more problems. Couples might getting into a disagreement about how to handle their finances, which could lead to resentment and grudges, and eventually leading them to divorce. Or maybe it's not money itself. Maybe it's the time problem. Wife start to blaming husband who prefer to spend time more with his friends watching football elsewhere rather than their home. Husband keep blaming wife for shopping without his permission. The feeling of betrayal keeps accumulated and creates more and bigger tension, leading to a death of marriage.

Some might experience something completely different. This is maybe the time when that company that you work for seventeen years, starts showing a sign of struggle, and later on have no way to keep the door open. Layoff happens. Some of us are forced to start job hunting again, knowing that mortgage need to be paid each month, and other responsibilities that start taking a comfortable nest in our shoulders. These could be the time period when we realize that life is not what we thought it was.

We longing for the olden days of our youth when we don't have to do this adulting things, instead we just focused on our studies, and game time after school. We daydream of our retirement days, eventhough that still another twenty years to go. Some of us who have teenage children start thinking ahead of their ongoing study in universities, and wondering where the money come from. Of course not everyone is unprepared. Some of us did a very good job setting up a college education plan when they still in diapers!

This is the time period, where diligence pays. If we smart and plan our life ahead in the first slice of pie period, we start seeing some results in this second slice of pie.  And if this is the time when we realize that we're getting behind at some stuff, this is also the time to correct our course and start planning some serious life roadmap for the last pie of life. This could be our wake-up call period.

But not everything is doom and gloom. Some of us will have the most successful time in our career or business than in any other period of our time. Some of us will make it to the top. Our business is booming, and we will amass so much wealth that we won't know what to do with it! Just kidding, I'm sure we will know what to do with it. This could be the glory days of our lives. And because of this success, some of us already entering early retirement and leaving the workforce for good.

This is the time to accumulate wealth, knowledge, and start building our life in shape.

3rd slice: Age 67 - 100 years old: The preservation period.
The last piece of the pie is usually the best. It's the final slice. Majority of folks in these group are retired and enjoying their ultimate vacation. It's like vacation every day, y'all! Just imagine this. Don't need to wake up to an alarm clock every Monday to Friday. No need to dress up every morning to go to work. And the best thing of all, no need to go to work at all! Work is done, school is done. Freedom!

The 3rd slice of pie means we have both things that we didn't have before: time and money. We have all the time in the world to do what we want to do (or to not do anything at all, perhaps?). And hopefully at this time, we already have a huge savings and retirement funds to ensure our quality of life is still at least the same of our previous lives, if not better.

Some of us going to enjoy the fruit of our labor for the rest of our lives, from this moment on. But unfortunately, some of us have life happens to us, like battling illness and sickness, and have to endure the health struggle. Or sometimes tragedy struck our families, crippling us into a moment of despair and hopelessness.

But those moments could happen in any other period of time, not necessarily this one.

Bottom line is, this is the period of time when we normally don't have too much demands in our life, and can just take it easy. Just relax, slow down, and enjoy our golden days. Till death do us part.

And that's our life, in 3 big slices of pies! :)