I kept receiving signs that encouraged me to accept the early retirement offer. So far, I had mentioned symbols of gold, frogs, and clowns. But there was another one whose meaning only became clear later. It was fire.

I saw several fire trucks parked without sirens and kept wondering why they were showing up so often. In the office, behind the desk I usually used, there was a whiteboard with a campfire drawing. Below it, someone had added a meme, a cartoon dog sitting in a room full of flames, saying, “This is fine.”

What was the message of the fire? I wondered whether it had something to do with passion, but nothing quite clicked.

Then, as I started reading more about early retirement, I came across the FIRE community. Here, fire is an acronym for Financial Independence, Retire Early, a movement focused on saving and investing to achieve early retirement. In mid-March 2024, it struck me that perhaps all those fire trucks and that campfire drawing had been pointing to exactly this.

Just a few days later, on March 17, 2024, there was another fire-related incident.

It was a quiet Sunday morning after breakfast. We were all at home, and I was reading an online discussion about whether early retirement actually feels good. People shared how young they had retired and how grateful they were to travel before health issues set in. They wrote about relaxed days and freedom. Best decision ever.

Then a woman described how she had stopped paid work to become a writer.

Shortly after I finished reading her post, the smoke detector in our house went off.

The noise was piercing. We ran through the house trying to figure out which of the eight detectors was screaming and why. There was no smoke, no fire, no obvious cause. We just wanted it to stop.

My older son stretched himself up and lightly touched the smoke detector on the first floor. Instantly, the alarm went silent.

I filed the incident under unexplained events and sat there wondering about the message. Fire alarm. FIRE. Maybe this, too, was pointing toward early retirement. And perhaps, because it happened right after I read about the woman who became a writer, it was not only about stopping paid work but also about starting to write more. More specifically, it pointed to spending time editing the book about my spiritual journey and shaping it into a publishable form. I felt hesitation. Would I be able to meet this challenge?

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This post is part of a blog series about my transition into early retirement. You can find the table of contents, with links to each chapter, here.