The Life We Keep Postponing

“If I could do this all again, I would do something different.”

He said it across a dinner table, looking directly at me, while the two partners who wanted me to join their commercial real estate firm tried to steer him somewhere else.

I was in my late twenties and studying for my commercial real estate licence. The people at the table had been explaining what success in the industry required: arriving at the office at seven in the morning and leaving around six in the evening, Monday through Friday, followed by another half day on Saturday.

As I listened, I felt sick—not because I believed there was something wrong with their lives, and not because I thought I would fail. I could imagine succeeding. I could see myself becoming good at the work, making money, earning respect, and building a life that looked impressive from the outside. I could also imagine giving most of my waking hours to something I did not hate but had never truly wanted.

The man speaking to me was not one of the two partners, but he was a senior member of the firm and had travelled much farther down the road they were inviting me to take. As the drinks continued, he joked about what the work had cost his relationship with his wife. The others joked with him. There was no argument or dramatic confrontation—just a strange, jovial discomfort as the two partners tried to make what he had revealed easier to hold.

He was not telling me his whole life had been a mistake. He was urging me to consider more than the career. He wanted me to consider the life the career would require.

For a moment, I saw a possible future contained inside my present choices. That dinner did not tell me what to do. It brought me into contact with something I could no longer completely unknow.

We often know more than we are willing to live.

We know the conversation that keeps asking to be had. We know when a habit is costing us more than we admit. We know when we are present in a relationship and when we are merely preserving it. We know what we keep promising ourselves we will begin when life becomes less complicated.

The problem is not always that we cannot see the truth. Sometimes we can see it clearly enough. We are simply not prepared to accept what living it might require.

Truth rarely arrives as perfect certainty. More often, it appears as a quiet discomfort we learn to explain away: a tension in the body, a recurring thought, a question that returns after every distraction has passed. A choice can make perfect sense in theory while still asking us to live against something we know.

Acting on what we know may threaten comfort, identity, belonging, or security, so we postpone. We tell ourselves we will begin when the timing is better, when there is more money, when we feel confident, or when we know how it will turn out.

These explanations are not always lies. Timing matters. Money matters. Responsibilities matter. Sometimes the most honest choice is to remain where we are while we build a responsible plan and continue to honour the commitments our lives already contain.

But sometimes prudence becomes a hiding place. A temporary compromise quietly becomes a way of life. We keep moving the conditions for beginning farther into the future while reassuring ourselves that we have not abandoned what matters—we are only waiting for the right time.

Years can pass this way. Decades, even.

We are not waiting to live. We are spending our lives while we wait.

The Life I Could Defend

The real-estate dinner was not the first time I had chosen what seemed defensible over what genuinely drew me.

I began university in Interdisciplinary Design Studies. Something about creating felt natural to me, but I did not stay with it. I moved into business school because it seemed like the smarter decision. It was practical, offered a clearer path to making money, and gave me a choice I could explain to other people—and perhaps more importantly, to myself.

After graduating, I remember asking a revealing question: What do business people do?

I found my way into sales. I was capable of the work. I liked many of the people, and there were parts of the job I enjoyed. That made the truth harder to face. The work was not terrible, but I was not deeply interested in what I was selling.

I was learning an uncomfortable distinction: being good at something does not necessarily mean it is yours to spend your life doing.

Around the time of the real-estate dinner, I was working with a coach who believed I had a natural capacity for coaching and suggested I take it seriously. The possibility connected with something older in me.

Service had always been one of the clearest ways I recognized myself. I worked as a firefighter through college, and I had often found myself listening closely to people, asking questions, and helping them name something they already sensed. I came alive when someone trusted me with something real and I could offer presence, perspective, or practical support.

Coaching gave that instinct a form. I completed roughly one hundred hours of professional training and went on to coach for more than 750 hours. I built a real practice around work I genuinely loved: helping people see what was true, understand what was keeping them stuck, and begin creating lives that reflected what mattered to them.

The coaching itself was never the problem. What I had not yet built was a reliable way to keep creating clients when they were no longer arriving through the relationships and opportunities closest to me—especially when the rest of my life began to come apart.

When my marriage ended, my personal life became unstable and the practice began to fall apart too. Returning to sales gave me income and professional structure, but the stable chapter I imagined never fully arrived. Years later, I went through another separation, this time from my daughter’s mother. Alongside that came two layoffs and the emotional and practical consequences of rebuilding again.

The problem was not that I returned to sales. The problem was the promise I attached to the decision.

I told myself I would return to the work I loved later—when I had recovered, when life was more settled, when I had built a sufficient financial buffer. There was truth inside those explanations. That is what made them persuasive. But a reasonable explanation can outlive its truth.

I kept waiting for life to settle enough for me to return to what I loved. It did not settle in the way I expected. Eventually, I had to confront the possibility that I was waiting for a kind of certainty life had never promised me.

The cost did not remain contained inside my work. I cannot separate it cleanly from the end of my relationships, the layoffs, or everything else happening in my life, but living divided from what I knew contributed to my depression and anxiety.

I became increasingly paralysed by fear. I thought constantly about the life I wanted while finding myself less and less able to move towards it. Each delay made the next action feel larger and more difficult. Each promise I failed to honour made the next one harder to believe.

The professional question was only the visible part. Beneath it, I was losing contact with myself. I had spent so long adapting to what seemed practical, expected, or safe that I no longer trusted myself to recognize what I genuinely wanted—or to protect it once I did.

I remained connected to the work I loved, but staying connected to it and building it were not the same thing. I told myself I would build something slowly alongside my job. I did not build it.

We do not always reject what matters. Sometimes we preserve it as an idea. Keeping it in the future allows us to feel loyal to it without accepting what it asks of us now.

As I write this, my most recent layoff happened less than two weeks ago. I am not writing from the other side of this decision. I do not yet know what the work will become or whether it will succeed in the form I currently imagine.

What I know is that I can no longer make the old promise sound convincing. “I’ll do it later” has survived too many laters.

Living truthfully does not mean pretending uncertainty does not exist. It means I am no longer willing to use uncertainty as proof that I should remain where I am.

What Self-Abandonment Costs

From the outside, a life can continue to function while the person living it becomes increasingly absent. We can meet our obligations, advance professionally, and provide for people we love while repeatedly placing what matters to us last.

Whereas failure gives us something definite to face, self-abandonment can happen gradually, without a single event dramatic enough to force us to recognize it. We surrender something in pieces: a conversation avoided, an instinct overridden, a promise deferred again, another year spent waiting for permission.

The loss can be quieter—and more devastating—than failure.

Failure can hurt us, humble us, and cost us something real. But it can also correct an illusion and reveal what a commitment requires—if we remain honest enough to let it change us.

Self-abandonment teaches a different lesson. It teaches us that discomfort will eventually overrule what we say we value, that our knowing carries no authority, and that the person making our next promise cannot be trusted. That person is us.

This loss of trust can become self-reinforcing. The more often we avoid what matters, the less evidence we have that we can rely on ourselves. The less we trust ourselves, the more dangerous an uncertain choice begins to feel. Fear produces further avoidance, and avoidance gives fear more reason to lead.

Regret is not only the pain of wishing an outcome had been different. Its deepest form may be realizing that we knew what mattered and repeatedly refused to give it a place in our lives.

By the time we understand the full cost, some choices may still be available and others may not. Relationships cannot always be recovered. Bodies change, children grow up, and opportunities close. This is not a reason to panic or make reckless decisions. It is a reason to stop pretending that avoidance preserves every option, because avoidance is also creating a future.

I have seen this in my relationship with alcohol. I drank heavily in my twenties. By my thirties, I was drinking much less, but when I went out, I would sometimes drink more than I intended.

I began to understand that I was not only using alcohol to manage social anxiety. I was also using it to dull the discomfort of living against what I knew. It offered temporary relief from a pain that my own choices were helping to create.

The consequences moved through the rest of my life. They influenced how I ate, how I slept, whether I exercised, and how I felt for days afterwards. Stopping drinking did not solve every problem; it ended one recurring negotiation with a pattern I could no longer honestly pretend not to see.

Our lives are not divided as neatly as we sometimes imagine. What we tolerate in one area can consume the energy, clarity, and self-trust required in another. No single decision aligns an entire life, but one honest change can create the conditions in which another becomes possible.

This is the deeper meaning of the first domino. It is not necessarily the largest problem or most dramatic decision in a person’s life. It is the place where honest recognition begins to affect behaviour. That movement begins with awareness—not only of what we are doing, but of what the pattern may be protecting.

Protection often speaks through fear. I have begun to think of fear as something like a frightened child: contempt will not help it, but neither will unquestioned obedience. Fear needs to be heard and understood, then led by something in us capable of considering the whole of our life. It can remain present without being placed in charge of everything.

This is where awareness must become choice. Choice does not mean control; we cannot control what has happened, what another person decides, or whether our work succeeds. It means looking honestly, within the limits of reality, at what remains ours to do. At some point, something in us has to become willing to take the lead.

There is a point when even further insight is not the next step. Action is. Intention may reveal a desire or clarify a value, but intention alone cannot create integrity. Integrity begins when what we know and value finds a place in the way we live.

Each honest action we take returns some authority to what we say we know. Each kept promise begins repairing the expectation that we will disappear from ourselves when discomfort arrives. When we fall short, we repair and choose again.

Self-trust does not require perfection. It requires an honest relationship with ourselves—one capable of surviving our failures. Over time, we learn not to leave ourselves immediately when life becomes difficult. That is self-trust.

What a Life Is For

Self-trust creates freedom—not freedom from every constraint, but the freedom to participate in life more intentionally.

This is not an argument for turning life into an endless project of self-improvement. People are not problems to be fixed. If improvement itself becomes the aim, we can spend a lifetime preparing to live without ever feeling permitted to arrive inside the life we already have.

The work is valuable because it makes fuller participation possible. We care for the body so we can inhabit it more fully. We tell the truth in relationships so love has a chance to meet the person who is actually there. We create because something within us wants to be given form. We become present with our families because love that is never given our attention remains largely an intention.

The aim is aliveness—not as a mood, but as the refusal to remain absent from our own life.

Recently, I imagined myself as an eighty-three-year-old grandfather looking back on the life I had lived. I thought about my daughter.

I want to provide for her and create security and opportunity in her life. Responsibility is part of the truth too. But another question appeared beside it: What do I want my daughter to learn from the way I live?

I want her to know that she can be responsible without abandoning herself, that security matters but is not the only thing a life is for, and that adulthood does not require her to silence everything that makes her feel alive.

I do not want to teach her, through the example of my life, that responsibility means quietly surrendering what matters most. I want her to see someone willing to take his own life seriously enough to participate in it.

The choice is not simply between being wealthy and sad or poor and fulfilled. Meaningful work still has to meet economic reality. The question is whether I can honour responsibility without using it to justify permanent self-abandonment.

For years, I imagined that one day the risk would disappear and the choice would become obvious. That day did not come.

What came instead was the recognition that I was already choosing. Every year of postponement was another year spent building one life while keeping another alive in imagination.

I am at the beginning of this work, not the end. I will make mistakes. Some of my ideas will meet reality and need to change. The form may evolve in ways I cannot anticipate.

Truth is not a destination we reach once and for all. It is a relationship we continue to practise. We see what is happening, choose what matters now, take an honest action, and allow reality to teach us. When we fall short, we repair and choose again.

Over time, our lives begin to reflect more of what we genuinely value—not perfectly, not permanently, but increasingly.

I cannot tell you what the first domino is in your life. It may not require you to leave your job, end a relationship, or reinvent yourself.

But there may already be a place where you have been explaining, minimizing, postponing, rationalizing, or promising yourself, “I’ll do it later.” There may be something you know—not with perfect certainty, but honestly enough that continuing to ignore it has begun to carry a greater cost than facing it.

Our time is not unlimited.

What do you already know that your life is asking you to take more seriously?

And what would it mean—not to solve everything, but to give that truth one honest place in how you live?

That is where the work begins.