The internet is chock full of advice for planning your new year. Some of it’s great. Some of it sucks. Before you get started with all that plotting and planning, I’d like to remind you of something, and it’s kind of a bummer.
Last week a former client and friend of mine died unexpectedly from heart-related issues. He had a heart-attack while out walking his dog and never regained consciousness. Luckily, I was able to sit with him in the ICU for a little bit just hours before he passed away.
I could spend several sentences describing the man and the outsized impact he had on thousands of young people with his company. But instead I want to write about these moments that we all experience in life that make us question our trajectory. Those moments that remind us that life is short and can end abruptly, well before we planned for it.
In addition to losing my friend, I turned 52 a few days ago so it’s no wonder that I’m compelled to wonder if I’m living the life I really want to live.
Death is inevitable. It’s coming for every single one of us and the knowledge and acceptance of this fact is what makes life so sweet. What can propel us to take action, make wise decisions, and to try and not “waste” much of this precious and finite time.
So it makes sense that as we enter a new year, we have an opportunity to reassess our direction in life. To ask the important questions of ourselves.
Before you start to think this is another one of those posts about optimizing your life in 2026, it isn’t. Maybe it’s just the opposite.
Mary Oliver wrote:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
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
Those last 2 lines can be found on coasters and crocheted onto pillows and taped to bathroom mirrors. But I’m more drawn to the line above it, “Tell me, what else should I have done?”
I genuinely love my work (most of the time). But I have a strong suspicion that in the moments before my death, I will inevitably wish I’d spent more time with loved ones, more time walking our dogs, more time fishing little creeks, more time in the mountains seeing what my body is capable of, and of course more time reading and writing books.
As I look at the upcoming year, I have several goals I plan to achieve. I have work I hope to do that can positively impact the lives of others, but I’m also planning on spending a lot of my year strolling through fields both literally and metaphorically.
As you design your 2026, I’d encourage you to start by grounding yourself in the knowing that life is impermanent. Memento Mori as the stoics say. We must die. Knowing that, what do you want to do differently?