I keep returning to the same question, just from different angles. What’s the point of all this? How much of the life I’m living is truly mine? What does it cost to always be strong? And how much time do we spend maintaining what we once built?
At the end of all these questions, I was left with one that is perhaps the most important to me: what do I want to leave behind?
I’m not just thinking about work, projects, books, or anything else that will one day bear my name. More and more, I’m thinking about what remains with the people with whom we’ve shared our lives. The way we’ll be remembered by those who worked with us, those to whom we could have been harsh but weren’t, those we could have helped and did. And, perhaps most importantly, what the people we told we were doing all this for will remember about those years.
This is where my thinking has changed the most in recent years.
For a long time, I viewed the future as something that needed to be built. There was always one more task to complete, one more problem to solve, one more thing to do that would bring more security, more freedom, or simply a better life tomorrow. In that way of thinking, there was always a “tomorrow” that meant today could wait just a little longer.
But while we’re building tomorrow, today slips by. And it doesn’t come back.
Life probably consists of far fewer big decisions than we like to think. Most of it is made up of perfectly ordinary things. Mornings. Conversations we’ve had or put off. Lunches we made it to or missed. Calls we’ve answered. Evenings when we were truly present, and those when we were merely physically seated next to the people we love.
Perhaps that’s exactly why, these days, I ask myself less and less how much more I can do. I’m much more interested in whether what I’m doing is truly worth the time I devote to it.
I don’t want to stop working, creating, or building. I still have so much I want to accomplish. But I no longer want to treat every cost as acceptable simply because the goal is important.
Some things we can repeat. We can start a business again. We can earn money again. We can start a project from scratch. But we can’t get time back.
Maybe that’s why I no longer want to leave behind only what I’ve done. I want proof that, while I was doing all of this, I was truly there.
Because perhaps the real question has never been how much we can achieve in a single lifetime.
Perhaps what matters more is how much of that life we actually lived.
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