The Warm Tofu Saturday — Finding Joy in Retirement’s Small Moments

Content Pillar: Joyful Living
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It was a cloudy Saturday morning in Vung Tau. Joyful living in retirement, I’m learning, rarely looks the way I expected — and this morning was a perfect example of that.

Cool, with that particular saltiness in the air that tells you the sea is close before you’ve seen it. Hau and I headed out early to Back Beach with Rieu — our poodle. His full name is Bun Rieu, after the Vietnamese crab noodle soup. Which tells you something about how we make decisions in our house.

He knew where we were going before we did.

What a crowded beach taught me about being present

Back Beach was already busy. Holiday weekend, out-of-towners everywhere — families, children who’d been awake since five, umbrellas going up across the sand. That particular buzz of people who’ve been looking forward to something and have finally arrived at it.

We had had a week. I won’t go into it. You probably know the kind — the kind where small things pile up and by Thursday you can feel it sitting on your chest. Nothing dramatic. Just weight.

I’ve come to notice that weight more clearly in retirement than I ever did before. When I was working, I pushed through. There was always the next thing, the next meeting, the next problem to solve, and the body’s complaints got filed somewhere in a drawer marked *later*. Retirement opened that drawer. And now I find I can’t quite ignore what’s inside it.

Which means — and this surprised me — I’ve had to get better at knowing what actually helps.

We took our shoes off at the edge of the sand. I always do on a beach. There’s something about bare feet on natural ground, something the body quietly appreciates. Whether that’s what the earthing people are right about, or just the simple physics of cool sand between the toes, I’ve stopped needing to know. Some things don’t need an explanation. They just need to be done.

Rieu hit the water without breaking stride. Hau and I watched him dart between people’s legs across the wet sand — small, white, absolutely certain this whole beach belonged to him personally. There was something quietly delightful about watching a creature so completely at home in a moment. No past, no future, just this particular stretch of wet sand on this particular Saturday morning.

I find myself studying Rieu more than I used to. Not in a sentimental way. More in the way you study someone who is naturally good at something you’re still learning. He doesn’t decide to be present. He just is. The rest of us have to work at it.

We kept an eye on him the way you do with a small dog on a crowded beach — that half-attention that looks casual but isn’t. He darted. We tracked. The sea did what it always does — rolled in and rolled back, entirely unbothered by any of us.

The kind of joy that arrives without announcement

I’ve been thinking lately about what joy actually requires.

Not the big-occasion kind — that’s straightforward enough. Birthdays, reunions, the long-anticipated trip finally taken. That kind of joy has a clear address. You know where to find it.

It’s the other kind I’m interested in. The kind that shows up on an unremarkable morning. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but arrives quietly and only makes itself known when you’re already inside it. The kind that you might miss entirely if you’re moving too fast or looking too hard in the wrong direction.

I spent most of my working life moving too fast. Efficient, purposeful, forward-facing — all the things that served me well in a manufacturing context. And then retirement arrived and I discovered that efficiency is a poor tool for noticing. You can’t rush your way to a moment. It just dissolves.

I’m still learning how to slow down enough. Some days I manage it. Other days I catch myself planning the next thing while the current thing is still happening — mentally composing the afternoon while the morning is still unfolding in front of me, perfectly good and entirely unattended.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in being physically present but mentally elsewhere. I know that feeling. I spent years cultivating it without realising it was a loss.

But the days when I actually arrive — when I put down the future and pick up the present — those are the days that feel most like living. Not the productive days, necessarily. Not the days when I got the most done. The days when I was actually there for what was happening.

[INTERNAL LINK: /free-guide] — *If slowing down and noticing more is something you’re working on, I put together a short guide on finding joy in retirement’s small moments. It’s free.*

The warm bowl and the familiar uncle

On the way back along the waterfront we stopped at an uncle’s stall.

We see him often enough that no words were needed. Just the nod. A small, easy thing — the kind of wordless recognition between people who share a neighbourhood, a rhythm, a habit. I don’t take those small recognitions for granted anymore. They are their own kind of connection.

Two warm bowls of curd tofu, silken and just sweet enough. We stood right at the water’s edge to eat them. The air there always feels different — cleaner, the kind that makes you breathe a little deeper without noticing you’re doing it.

Warm bowl in both hands. Salt in the air. Rieu still darting somewhere between us and the sea.

I thought: this is it. This is the thing.

Not a thought I said aloud. Just a quiet internal noting, the kind you make when something lands. This exact combination — the particular temperature of the bowl, the particular quality of the light, Hau beside me, Rieu somewhere in front — this was what I had needed without knowing how to ask for it.

That’s the texture of joyful living, I think, in this season. It rarely arrives in the form you planned. It arrives in the form of a cloudy Saturday before the heat comes through, and a familiar uncle who hands you a bowl without needing to ask.

The week loosened its grip somewhere in there. I only noticed after. The way you notice when a headache lifts — not at the moment it goes, but a few minutes later when you realise your shoulders have dropped.

That particular relief — the retroactive noticing — has taught me something. Joy doesn’t usually announce its arrival. It just settles, quietly, and you find yourself on the other side of whatever was weighing on you without quite knowing when you crossed.

I used to think you had to pursue happiness. That it was a destination with a clear route. I’m less sure about that now. I think — I’m still figuring this out — that what you actually do is put yourself in the conditions for it to show up. You go to the beach. You take your shoes off. You stand at the water’s edge with a warm bowl and the person you love and a ridiculous, delighted dog.

And then you let the rest of it do what it does.

Then Hau said she was getting too hot. And honestly, it was — the cloud burning off, the sun finding its way through, the morning beginning to tip toward the heavy warmth of the day.

We hadn’t been there long. Not as long as I’d have liked. Rieu wasn’t ready either, visibly so — that low-level protest of a dog who has not finished investigating.

But that was that.

We finished the tofu, called Rieu away from whatever he was investigating (he took a moment to register the suggestion), and turned for home.

A perfect morning would have lasted longer. A perfect morning would have been cooler, and longer, and perhaps with no urgency waiting on the other side of it. But we don’t get perfect mornings. We get real ones.

And we got the important parts. The bare feet on the sand. The warm bowl. The familiar uncle. The dog who was — without question, without complication — completely happy.

Why the small moments matter most

I’ve been writing this down because I want to remember it. Not just the morning, but what it points to.

Because there will be more weeks like the one that preceded it. More Thursdays with weight on the chest. More quiet accumulations of small frustrations that don’t rise to the level of a proper complaint but still, quietly, drain things.

And when those weeks come, I want to remember that the remedy isn’t grand. It isn’t a trip, or a plan, or an intervention. Sometimes it’s just: put on the shoes you’re about to take off. Go to the beach. Find the uncle with the tofu.

Notice what’s in front of you.

Sometimes that is enough. I’d even say — sometimes that is everything.

*What’s your version of the warm tofu Saturday? I find myself curious about the small things that restore other people — the specific, unremarkable moments that somehow hold a whole week together. If something comes to mind, I’d genuinely love to hear it in the comments.*