One Wild and Precious Life
MONTHLY NEWSLETTER | August 2026
This past weekend, I flew to Ottawa for the celebration of life of a dear friend. He was only a few years older than me.
I keep circling back to that. A few years. Not a lifetime. Not “someday, eventually.” A few years.
There's something about a loss like this that pulls you out of the calendar you're living in and drops you into a different kind of time — the kind where you stop counting the years left and start feeling them.
I've noticed the same pull showing up in my coaching lately, and not because of anything I said. More and more of the leaders I work with — accomplished, capable, still very much in motion — are arriving at a particular kind of question. Not a career question. A life question.
What do I actually want to do with however many years I have left?
It sometimes shows up dressed as a crisis. But often it arrives quietly — in the pause after a milestone birthday, in a retirement conversation that came sooner than expected, in an ordinary Sunday evening that suddenly feels heavier than it should.
THE QUESTIONS WE POSTPONE
Many of us treat these questions as a someday project. Something we'll get to once the current stretch of work eases, once the team is more settled, once we retire. Once. Once. Once.
But someday isn't a plan. It's a place we keep moving further away from ourselves.
Here is what my clients keep discovering, and what this trip reminded me of again: this kind of reflection isn't morbid, and it isn't a step back from ambition. It's one of the most strategic things a senior leader can do — to get honest, early and often, about what you actually want your remaining years to hold.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF AUDIT
We're trained to monitor and audit almost everything in our professional lives: our performance, our strategy, our budgets. We rarely apply that same rigor to our own life.
So this month, I'm not offering a framework or a five-step plan. I'm offering an invitation — to sit, even briefly, with a few honest questions. The kind worth asking long before a celebration of life makes you ask them anyway:
If your time in this current chapter were genuinely limited, what would you stop tolerating?
What have you been telling yourself you'll get to “someday”?
Whose expectations are you still living for, and is that still who you want to be answering to?
If this chapter closed tomorrow, what would you wish you had said, tried, or let go of?
None of these need a perfect answer today. They just need room to be asked.
This is, in many ways, the work I get to do alongside my clients — not handing them answers, but holding space long enough for their own answers to surface. If any of this is stirring something in you, I'd be glad to talk.
I'll leave you, with a poet's words. This one from Mary Oliver, whose closing line many of you may already carry with you — and which feels worth revisiting all the same…
“Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
