I've got no idea when I am going to retire. Whenever they pick me

In the square of plain speech, a white-suited elder lifts his voice and says, “I’ve got no idea when I am going to retire. Whenever they pick me up and take me to the funeral home, I guess.” Hear the country humor, but do not miss the iron inside it. He speaks of retirement as a clock he refuses to wind, a bell he won’t ring. Beneath the jest is a creed as old as toil: a person lives long not by merely counting years, but by keeping covenant with their purpose.

This saying is the banner of a worker-king who found his road late and walked it hard. Harland “Colonel” Sanders did not inherit an empire. He cooked, served, failed, began again, and in his sixties turned a roadside craft into a traveling standard. He franchised his recipe, sold the company in later years, yet kept laboring as its pilgrim and herald, moving from town to town in his linen armor, shaking hands, blessing kitchens, tasting the work. The suit was show; the work was vow. Thus his joke about the funeral home is not morbid—it is a pledge that his hands would not grow idle while breath remained.

The ancients would recognize this stance. In their villages, a mason’s calling did not end when his beard whitened; he simply laid stones with more wisdom and less waste. A scribe with dimming eyes trained apprentices and kept copying sacred lines by touch and memory. “Retirement” in that world was not a vanishing, but a transfiguration of labor into teaching, of strength into stewardship. The Colonel’s quip sits in that lineage: keep serving, but change the shape of service.

Consider a true story as a second witness. Grandma Moses, Anna Mary Robertson, began painting in her late seventies, after arthritis ended her farm chores and embroidery. By the time most fold their tents, she raised a new one and filled it with purpose—barns, winters, quilts of color. Her hands would not consent to be only hands of memory. Like the Colonel, she let the years sharpen rather than shrink her gift. Retirement, for her, was simply a new doorway through which the same faithful spirit walked.

There is wisdom here for our restless age. We speak of work–life balance as if work and life were enemies in need of a treaty. The elder’s jest reminds us that work, rightly chosen and rightly held, is a form of life—a hearth at which we warm others. The danger is not work itself, but worshipping the wrong work: labor that empties the soul and leaves no bread for the neighbor. The cure is not idleness; it is alignment—finding the task that keeps our heart lit and our conscience clean.

Let us also hear the discipline inside the joke: “no idea when I’ll retire” does not mean drifting without rest. Even the strongest oxen are unyoked at dusk. The Colonel’s travels were measured by routines, recipes, standards—habits that guard the flame from burning out. To work until the funeral home carries us is not to sprint forever; it is to cultivate stamina through order, gratitude, and shared load.

Take, then, these practices as traveling provisions. (1) Name your purpose in one clear sentence and test your work against it every season. (2) Trade the word retire for reassign—as your body changes, let your role change while your mission endures. (3) Keep a craft you can do at eighty: mentoring, writing, tending, mending. (4) Schedule true sabbath each week so your well refills. (5) When you succeed, turn outward—teach your recipe, bless another’s kitchen, and let your legacy be people, not only products. In this way you may laugh, as the Colonel laughed, at the question of retirement—not with scorn, but with serenity—because your days, however many, will be braided to purpose until the last carriage comes.