"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  3:17 AM. I know the exact time because I stared at it every single night for ten years. Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Every night. My eyes would snap open at 3:17, my heart already pounding, my brain already running through tomorrow's board meeting or next quarter's revenue forecast. I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, calculating numbers that didn't need calculating at three in the morning. During my years as a corporate executive, I slept four to five hours a night and called it discipline. My colleagues bragged about sleeping less. "I only need four hours," one senior VP used to say, like sleep deprivation was a competitive sport. We were all competing to see who could destroy themselves fastest. I was winning. Then I retired at 57. No more 6 AM conference calls. No more hoesik (회식) running until midnight. No more quarterly reports. And I still couldn't sleep. That's when I realized: the problem wasn't my schedule. The problem was that t...

I was a professional baseball player who became a corporate executive and retired at fifty-five. For two years after retirement, I searched for what to do next. At fifty-seven, I opened a health supplement store — not because I had a grand business plan, but because I needed a reason to leave the house and because my own health journey had taught me things worth sharing. Now, at fifty-nine, I am writing this from the other side of that silence.   The morning after I retired, I woke up at 5:47 AM. Not because I set an alarm. Because my body did not know I was done. Thirty years of waking before six had carved a groove in me so deep that even freedom could not fill it. I lay in bed for eleven minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the  familiar buzz of my phone on the nightstand. The Monday morning flood of messages. The KakaoTalk group chats lighting up one after another. The emails marked urgent that were never actually urgent but felt like they were. The calendar notifi...