What is your last wish?

Second chances are a priceless gift. Do not find yourself on the other side of the line accompanied only by regret.

I said in my last article that I hadn’t written anything in a couple of weeks because I didn’t have anything new or meaningful to say worth your attention. I get my direction, guidance and insight when I meditate, so the inspiration and insights I put down to digital paper are not mine entirely. This article has for some reason an URGENT time stamp on it. I was compelled to get up at 3:33 am to start it.

I also don’t write and publish twice a week. I just don’t. This one is different. I have an overwhelming compulsion to document this. Again, this is directed energy that has demanded to be made physical. These words. Now.

I don’t care if you never read anything else I write ever again. But I do care if you read this. Please do.

Yesterday I led a meeting focused on change. For this team of cross-functional professionals, we are applying an Agile based approach to manage work flow and outcomes. It’s a standards based process that is well tested. And works.

However, there is resistance to the change we are driving. There is fear and engrained habits, many of them bad. Siloing of engagement, poor communication, stovepiping of work flows, ignoring problems. The current state for one of these participating teams isn’t good. Poor performance and pockets of negative toxicity. Other groups who are part of this initiative have adopted our new approaches and performance has soared., culture strong and vibrant. Yet, for one group and in particular one individual, things are stagnant. Why?

If you say to yourself, “I am fifty-something years old” or even “I am approaching 50 and it is what it is, I am not going to change.” Or, “I can’t change.” Then that is the result.

Can’t means won’t. And when you say can’t, you mean won’t.

You will grind out another few years or maybe a decade and a half perhaps, and you will remain in the same place. Frustrated, scared, isolated, pissed off. Or perhaps even feeling you’ve been cheated. Burdened.

Then one day, it is over. That day sneaks up on you. No matter what, you don’t see it coming.

You don’t plan for what happens next and you are not equipped to deal with it.

I am not talking about retirement. I am talking about realizing you are suddenly out of runway and there is no time left to do something of value, of purpose. Something worth the decade or two you spent doing whatever you’ve been doing. A job. Chasing a career. Being a parent. Being a good spouse.

One day you realize it has all slipped by. You feel a wave of panic and profound sadness wash over you when you realize with terrible clarity that you’ve squandered the gift you’d been given and never even realized it was happening to the extent it was. Until it is too late to do anything about it.

No, you are not dead, so you may spend the next 10, 20, 30 or more years trying to whitewash what you have wasted. You make some changes in the margin but the die has been cast. The time you have wasted is in the can. There is no changing that.

After I got hit in the hit and run, I woke up in a ditch on County Road 1120 East. My bike was lying some 20 feet away from me, deeper in the tall grass I later discovered. But at that point, I didn’t know as I was lying face down in a ditch. I knew with certainty that if I lay there I would die. Even though my head was foggy from the impact, I knew this with unwavering certainty. That message came from outside of me. I felt it. I knew it.

At that time, I didn’t realize that all my vitals had already flatlined for a couple of minutes while I was unconscious.

I didn’t know my second chance had already begun.

Instead, lying there face down, listening to blood seeing into a lung, what came over me was a Tsunami of regret. I use the word Tsunami purposely. It was a rushing wall of emotion which hit me hard, just like the truck had.

This had not been on my calendar. I didn’t plan to die that day. I didn’t want to die on May 28th, 2024 at 5:08 pm in a ditch, alone on County Road 1120 East in Boone County.

I had a race in a few days. I had dinner plans. My son had texted me from his new home in New York just before I left for this training ride. I had not yet responded to him. He was 24 and just getting started. We were going to see him in Vermont in two months. I did not have the chance to tell him I loved him one more time.

I have plans. I didn’t say goodbye to my wife. I owed my mom a call. My daughter, a senior in high school, had her final cross country event coming up.

I have plans. This can’t be happening. Not now.

I thought I had more time.

I have…I had plans.

I don’t want to die like this. Not here. Not now.

This can’t be happening. This is happening. Oh my God, I have no more control on what is happening.

Please give me another chance. I have more to do.

This isn’t really happening. This can’t be happening. Not now.

My friends this is exactly how it goes.

When that dividing line day comes for you, and it will certainly come, you will have the overwhelming realization that something material and fundamental has changed. You will have stepped over some visible or invisible line and find yourself on the other side.

If you are living stagnantly right now. As you read this, this is what will happen.

You will have the agonizing knowledge that you ignored the precious value of each and every day for however long you have been stagnant.

Those days that were given to you to do something meaningful with, whether big or small, it doesn’t matter, you have squandered.

You will come to the realization that you had always believed you had more time. The feeling you have is overwhelming and all consuming.

It is Regret.

But the die has been cast, those days, weeks, months, years have been spend. You always believed there was another day. Another chance. There was no urgency. Tomorrow you could change.

But each of those tomorrows peeled away as they always do. You cannot roll the clock back and you are left where you are, either surrounded by people you know or solo face down in a ditch.

Either way, you are profoundly alone at that moment of realization. And that is the line. You are surprised to find yourself on the other side of that line and know you no longer have any control over what’s been done or left undone within those tomorrows. As you find yourself in that moment, there is no control over what decisions you made. What you did and didn’t do. That die has been cast.

Lying there in that ditch for a moment I felt I had no control over my future and this is what I was feeling.

I was going to die there that day, accompanied only with this mountain of regret for all those new tomorrows that were now empty yesterdays. Regret for what I thought I had time to fix or change tomorrow but the clock was up.

There were no more tomorrows. I would leave this world with no other companion other than Regret.

Obviously, this is not how the story ended. That terrible thing was not the last chapter. Instead, it was the first.

I managed to stand up so I didn’t drown in my own blood. I climbed slowly to my feet with supreme effort, the world spinning around me like a top. The feeling of all the broken bones inside of me shifting as I moved. I knew with certainty there was terrible damage and I was probably going to die anyway, so why not at least try.

I had plans.

Don’t give up in these final moments.

No more regrettable actions. Even if this was the last one.

Fortunately, because I was now (mostly) standing, another cyclist who was riding by saw me. That saved me. This road was empty. He happened to be the only traffic on that road for some time other than the truck that hit me.

Had I remained lying down, he wouldn’t have seen me and maybe not even noticed my bike. Yet that didn’t happen. I took some action to change things, in the last minute of the last hour of the last day. Not wanting to die with regret changed the course of everything.

And, that one act of defiance against regret, taking some seemingly stupid and fruitless action led somewhere entirely unexpected. A second chance to plot a different course. To change, learn and grow. To value each day as the harbinger of some new experience and possibility.

To not remain stuck.

I am here. I am not dead. Yet. I was given a second chance for the express purpose of investing in each day differently than I had previously. I was given a second chance in order to write these words you are reading and perhaps changing the arc of your or someone else’s life.

So, are you done? Have you been passed by?

Do you say, “it is what it is.” or do you tell yourself it is too late to change.

What will you regret if you allow that to be true?

What will you have wasted?

For how long did you waste it?

Don’t find yourself on the other side of that line on anything living this way...A career, a marriage, raising children, maintaining a relationship with an aging parent, friendships, a bucket list item.

Because if you put off change a second longer, I guarantee that is what will happen. You will be standing on the other side of that line, accompanied only with Regret.

What’s done can’t be undone. Don’t find yourself left with no more tomorrows.

And trust me, I speak from experience, that is far worse than dying.