This past year I have written about protecting our time.
About creating margin, about saying no, about understanding that every yes is quietly a no to something else. I still believe every word of it, perhaps more today than ever. Time is our only truly finite resource, and we should spend it intentionally, guard it fiercely, and be willing to disappoint expectations that do not align with the lives we are trying to build.
Over the past few weeks, though, something has been quietly unraveling inside me. I have found myself asking a different question. When am I protecting my peace, and when am I only protecting myself from discomfort?
Over those same weeks, I lost two friends. Josh Baer was one. Dwayne McCoy was the other, a friend whose story has been woven into mine since childhood, through high school and into college. They were two very different men, and I knew them in two very different ways, yet both were gone far too soon.
Josh was only fifty.
Dwayne was fifty-one.
Those numbers no longer feel old.
They feel unfinished.
Like so many people, I have spent the last weeks reading the hundreds of stories shared about Josh. Every post tells a different story, and they all point to the same truth. He had an extraordinary ability to make people feel seen. He connected people, championed ideas, and introduced strangers who became partners and lifelong friends. He built community in a way few people ever do.
What most people probably did not know is that I admired him for something even deeper. Josh did not seek out every room because it came easily to him, and he was not naturally comfortable making himself the center of attention. In many ways, he wrestled with some of the same social anxieties I do.
For much of my career, people have assumed I am an extrovert, and I understand why. I have a great deal of energy. I genuinely love people. I love speaking, mentoring, building businesses, and sitting across the table from clients and friends talking about life.
Here is what surprises almost everyone.
I am an introvert. It is not that I dislike people. It is that I expend enormous energy walking into a room where I know no one. I rehearse conversations before they happen. I still carry the echoes of childhood voices telling me, You’re too loud. You talk too much.
Words like that have a way of following us into adulthood. They rarely silence us outright. More often, they simply make us hesitate.
Over the years, I have become very good at evaluating invitations. Is this worth my energy? Does this align with my priorities? Should I say no? Those questions have served me well, right up until now.
Watching Josh over the years, I came to realize something. He chose to show up anyway. He created dinners, introductions, communities, conversations, and opportunities. He gave away his presence as generously as other people give away advice.
The truth is that Josh had an enormous impact on my life.
I never told him.
That realization has been sitting with me ever since, and I am trying to let it teach me something.
How many people quietly shape our lives while we assume there will always be another lunch, another conversation, another chance to tell them what they meant to us?
There is not always another time.
Perhaps that is what grief does. It reminds us that life is fragile, and it shines a bright light on the choices we have been making while assuming we had more time.
Lately, when an invitation arrives or someone asks for my time, I have started asking myself a deeper question than whether I have the energy. I ask what this moment might be. What if this is the last time? What if this is the last chance to cheer from the stands, to share a dinner, to have the conversation, to encourage someone, to tell them that they mattered?
Here is the beautiful truth I keep returning to.
I have agency.
I get to choose.
No one else makes that decision for me. Agency includes the freedom to decline, and it includes something more- the responsibility to understand what every yes, and every no, might cost. I want to hold that responsibility with intention.
I have also been thinking a great deal about what it means to be a villager. We all want one. We all hope that when life gets hard, someone will show up, sit in the hospital room, attend the funeral, cheer in the stands, answer the phone, celebrate the milestone, and stay for the difficult conversation.
Villages do not simply appear.
They are built.
One decision to show up at a time.
Being a villager has never lived in the grand gesture. It lives in driving across town after a day of back-to-back meetings because someone you love is performing for ten minutes on a stage. It lives in staying inside a conversation longer than your schedule prefers because the person across from you deserves to feel heard. It lives in championing a young woman simply because someone once believed in you. It shows up at the funeral, in the hospital room, at the recital, and in finally learning the name of a neighbor you had only ever nodded to.
Being a villager means showing up as a leader when delegating the hard conversation would be easier, as a friend when your own week has already been long, as a family member when you are tired, and as a community member when no one would blame you for staying home. None of those moments will ever appear on an award application, improve quarterly earnings, or be remembered publicly. Together, though, they become the architecture of a meaningful life.
I have spent years writing about owning your space and claiming a seat at the table, and I still believe deeply in that. Lately I have come to understand that owning your space also means choosing to be fully present once you are there, at the tables that truly matter. We can spend decades in proximity to family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors while remaining emotionally absent from all of them.
Presence is a choice.
I do not think the answer is to say yes to everything. I still believe boundaries matter. I still believe rest is sacred. I still believe that saying no is often an act of wisdom. Even so, there are moments when courage quietly disguises itself as a calendar invitation- a funeral or a coffee, a recital or a difficult conversation, a phone call or an introduction, a chance to tell someone what they have meant to you while they are still here to hear it.
Those moments deserve our courage.
Josh never taught me this lesson by sitting me down to explain it. He taught me by living it, by showing up again and again for people, for ideas, for community, and for possibility.
Perhaps that is why his absence feels so enormous.
His presence always was.
So this is the question I’m carrying with me now, one I hope I’ll never stop asking: Am I preserving myself… or am I simply playing it safe?
Sometimes the answer will still be no, but increasingly, I hope it is a brave and wholehearted yes.
Because in the end, I don’t think people remember how efficiently we managed our calendars.
I think they remember who showed up.
And I know I will.
