Retirement. What does that mean exactly? Ten years ago, when I was 70, I began to think about my future since I was planning to stop my clinical activities within 4 years. I collected ideas about retiring by looking at my older friends who had already retired.

• Some of my friends were having a wonderful time fishing or hunting, playing the sports they liked, traveling in France or foreign countries around the world, reading books, and going to shows. Days and weeks were too short to succeed in doing everything. They looked very happy, explaining that they should have retired sooner to take better advantage of their life.

• At the opposite extreme, the others appeared completely lost. They had no daily program to follow, patients to counsel, nothing to do except look forward to the time for lunch, dinner, and bed.quickly becoming depressed.

• In the middle, the most successful ones had scheduled what should be done each day, mixing harmoniously some medical activities, entertainment, and sport.

I also developed a waiting list of travel projects which included skin diving in the warm oceans and skiing in the Rocky Mountains.

Meanwhile, my first activities were focused on teaching my method, either to groups of 20 trainees in the U.S. or to groups of three people in my villa-that I continue now. There are approximately 250 individuals throughout the world who practice my method, in America and Europe, Hong Kong, Korea, Philippines, South Africa, Australia, and Malaysia.

This network is now well-established, and a large part of my time is devoted to the constant correspondence, usually by fax, with my trainees. They sometimes ask me for advice for special cases; and in other cases, they send me information concerning some discovery that they made during their work. This part is very important to me because the experience of these 250 people, who have applied my method to several thousands cases, is very helpful to me. This information, coming from so many different people, is more instructive to me than that which I collected myself because they diminish the risk of relying too much on my own feeling and personal thoughts.

Besides these activities, I am working with people who are translating my French book, (Hearing Equals Behavior), into Portuguese, Spanish, German, and maybe Korean.

At the same time, I am following closely the research concerning everything about autism, especially the studies on dyslexia and depression. [Editor's note: there is indication that there is an increased prevalence of dyslexia and depression in families of autistic children.]

The conclusion is that "RETIRING" means the only vacation I could take until now is 10 days in 6 years with my wife! And, probably, I will take some time to shed tears for not getting to my "waiting list" of planned entertainment activities.

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