Blog - Gary Stine

Person sitting by a window reflecting when life isn’t enough and something deeper is missing.

Life Transitions

What Happens When the Life You Built isn’t Enough?

Most of us don’t realize the moment when life isn’t enough—it just begins as a quiet feeling something is missing. What happens when the life you built isn’t enough? For many people—especially later in life—that question doesn’t arrive gently. It shows up as a persistent dissatisfaction, or a deeper, harder-to-name unhappiness. What I’ve come to see is that this feeling often comes from a single, invisible source: living on the surface of our own lives, without even realizing it. It’s not that they’ve decided to live on the surface, or even know that’s where they’re living, they just aren’t familiar with the different purposes of the early part of life,

Older man walking alone on a quiet beach at sunrise, reflecting on retirement and the next chapter of life.

Life Transitions

Why Retirement Brings Up So Much Worry.

Over the years, I’ve coached a number of clients as they approached retirement. In almost every case there’s a period when the person about to retire freaks out a bit. Isn’t it ironic that there’s so much anxiety around retirement, a time of life we’ve been taught to look forward to? I’ve become convinced the primary reason for this freak-out has to do with just how much our identities (who we believe we are, and who we’d like others to believe we are) are shaped by what we do. For a majority of us, our sense of worthiness is inextricably tied to our profession. This sense of identity is essentially

Frustrated man driving while a woman yells from the backseat, representing overthinking and the noisy backseat driver in the mind.

Emotional Ease

The Backseat Driver That’s Always With You

Nobody likes a backseat driver barking directions and corrections. It’s annoying — and it steals the focus we need to drive safely. Most of us don’t realize we have an internal backseat driver demanding our attention a good deal of the time we’re awake. The Hidden Cost of Overthinking The backseat driver I’m referring to is your own mind, on overdrive. Just to be clear, overdrive — or overthinking — may be the state you often find yourself in, but it’s not your natural state. It’s a product of how we’ve been taught to use our minds, or more correctly, how we’ve been taught to misuse our minds. Why Overthinking

A sunlit forest path along a calm lake at sunrise, symbolizing peace, reflection, and the quiet acceptance of loss.

Graceful Aging

My Friend Tim Died Today-Reflection on Love and Loss

Reflection on Love and Loss My friend Tim died today, and though I’m easily moved, I’m surprised at how hard it seems to be hitting me. I keep bursting into tears. I know enough to let the tears flow. Tears have a logic of their own—one that I don’t need to understand. I simply obey, and let the tears fly where they may. I count on their cleansing effect. Tim was ten years older than I am. Eighty-four is a pretty good run, I guess. I knew he had esophageal cancer and was very sick, but I suppose I expected him to pull out of it. I had more years

Calm sunrise over a still lake with gentle reflections, symbolizing the shift from calm to crazy.

Emotional Ease

Toggling from Calm to Crazy

How We Toggle from Calm to Crazy I’m fascinated by how quickly we humans can toggle from calm to crazy — and back again. We’re calm one minute, and crazy the next. We can toggle back to calm as well, though it happens less often. Even though it can happen quickly, once we get our crazy on, we often struggle to allow ourselves to return to calm. Strangely, allowing is really all we have to do when we want to move from crazy back to calm. The difference between calm and crazy is much less than you might believe. The simplest way to say it is this: when we’re calm,

Love & Presence

An Old Friend I’ve Never Met

Online Friend The video platform Zoom, which probably saved the world from a much-worse-than-it-was economic meltdown, has brought a strange and wonderful phenomenon to life. This may have happened to you. You “meet” someone via Zoom and get to know them through repeated contact. It doesn’t take long before you feel like you’ve spent enough meaningful time with them to know them well. Many friendships have developed this way, and they’re every bit as real as friendships that come to life face-to-face. A number of times, there has been an opportunity to meet in person someone I’ve gotten to know very well on Zoom. The first time this happened, I

Linden tree blossoms on a summer day, reflecting a shift from low moods to quiet presence and well-being.

Emotional Ease

I Wish I Felt Well Enough to Enjoy This Beautiful Day

“I wish I felt well enough to enjoy this beautiful day.” — That was my first low-mood thought of the morning… ten minutes after a strong thunder shower swept the sky clear of anything but blue. The humidity was gone, the temperature was in the high seventies and there was a cool, fresh breeze. And here I was, somehow thinking my physical condition wasn’t up to the task of enjoying the day. The second after this thought crossed my mind, I saw it for what it was: low-mood thinking brought about by several acute sources of physical pain. There is an enormous advantage to understanding that low moods can only

Peaceful morning light in Gary Stine’s backyard symbolizing clarity and identity after retirement.

Graceful Aging

Identity After Retirement: More Than What You Did

“This is the morning view from my own front yard — a place that reminds me daily that we are more than what we’ve done.” Without having looked for it, I seem to have drawn clients who are either nearing retirement or have recently retired. As much as people look forward to retirement, when it comes, it can be bewildering. It’s pretty common for people to be so identified with what they did for a living, when their work comes to an end, so does their sense of identity. It’s a feeling of, “If I’m not doing my work, who can I possibly be?” It’s remarkably easy to mistake surface

Middle-aged man sitting alone on a bench facing a foggy blue lake

Love & Presence

Patience is a Form of Surrender

For the last four-plus months, life has placed me in a master class about patience. I’ve had to admit my expectation about how long, debilitating, and painful knee replacement surgery recovery was going to be had nothing to do with the reality I’ve been experiencing. And I’ve had to repeatedly readjust my expectations. When is the pain and discomfort going to slack off? When will I be able to walk without a limp? When will I be able to… fill in the blank. The answer I’ve had to become comfortable with is, “not yet. Not just yet.” The Trap of Expectations This morning, I finally remembered something I was so

Reflections on Aging, Clarity, and Living Well