There Is Always More Time. Till There's Not.
I got a call last week that a dear friend had passed away.
He was four years younger than me. Which is the kind of detail that lands differently when you are at this stage of life — not as a statistic but as a haunting reminder that “Man plans and God laughs”.
Our friendship wasn’t always perfect. It had its moments like all real friendships do. But he was always a perfect friend. The kind that picks up where you left off without any of the overhead that most relationships accumulate over time. Unconditional. Visible. Present. Always there when it mattered.
And I had been back to Memphis more than once in recent years without picking up the phone or dropping by.
Not because of anything between us. Not because of distance or difficulty or any of the reasons people give when they explain why relationships fade. Just because I assumed there would be more time.
That the next trip would be the one.
That he would be there when I finally made the space for it.
He wasn’t.
The assumption that costs more than any other.
I have spent thirty-five years diagnosing the gap between what organizations intend to do and what they actually deliver. The structural misalignment between intent and execution. The places where what people say matters and what they actually invest their time in are two different things.
I have written about it in organizations. I have rarely written about it in lives.
But the pattern is the same.
We carry a version of our priorities in our heads — the relationships that matter most, the moments we intend to be present for, the people we mean to reach out to — and we manage against a different set of priorities in practice. The meeting that runs long. The deadline that cannot move. The trip that gets cut short. The call that gets pushed to next week.
Not because the relationships do not matter. They do. But because the assumption underneath every deferral is the same one I made every time I passed through Memphis without calling.
There is always more time. There is not always more time.
What we trade without knowing we are trading it.
The spouse who puts the next project in front of the weekend away is not choosing work over family. They are choosing the assumption that the weekend away can happen later over the knowledge that it is available now.
The parent who misses the game, the play, the ordinary Tuesday evening that turns out to be the last one of its kind — they are not absent because they do not care. They are absent because they have calculated, without doing the math explicitly, that the thing in front of them is urgent and the thing they are missing will still be there.
Sometimes it will.
Often enough, it will not.
And the specific cruelty of this particular trade is that you rarely know you made it at the moment you make it. You know it later. In the call you receive. In the chair that is suddenly empty. In the city you pass through again and realize there is no longer anyone there to call.
The regret is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It settles in quietly and stays.
What actually matters.
A life well lived is not a perfect life. It is a life where the people who matter most actually know it — not from what you intended, not from what you would have done if things had been different, but from what you actually showed up for.
The gap between meaning well and doing well is the most human gap there is. Most of us live somewhere in the middle of it — genuinely caring about the people we love and consistently finding reasons why the expression of that care can wait until later.
Later is the most expensive word in the language. My friend made that visible to me in a way nothing else could have.
The one question worth asking today.
Who in your life is receiving the assumption that there will be more time — when what they actually deserve is the time that is available right now?
One call. One afternoon. One ordinary moment made deliberate rather than deferred.
The people who matter most are not asking for everything. They are asking for presence. For the evidence, however small, that they are not perpetually next on the list.
My friend never asked for anything from me that I was not capable of giving. I just kept deciding there was time to give it later. There was not.
I hope you have better luck with that calculation than I did.
But I would not count on it.
Make the time.
George,
Relax and enjoy your cabin by the lake
May you rest in peace, my dear friend.
1966 - 2026