The Part of Life We Often Miss

We spend a great deal of our lives thinking about what comes next. It starts early. At school, we think about university. At university, we think about finding a job. Once we start working, there is another position to reach, another business to build or another target to meet. Along the way come the other things we work towards: a home, a family, financial security and, eventually, retirement. There is nothing wrong with any of this. I have always believed in having ambition and working hard. It gives us direction and pushes us to find out what we are capable of. But as I have grown older, I have also become more conscious of what happens when we spend too much of our time looking ahead. We can become so occupied with building a good life that we forget to pay attention to the life we are already living.

When I look back, many of the moments I remember most clearly are not the ones I would have considered important at the time. They are often quite ordinary: a long dinner with family, a conversation with an old friend, working late with colleagues, or a trip where things went wrong and everyone ended up laughing about it afterwards. Nobody stops in the middle of these moments and tells you that one day you will miss them. You are simply getting on with your life, which is why time can be so difficult to appreciate when we are younger. It feels abundant. There will always be another dinner, another holiday, another chance to visit someone or make the phone call. Putting something off for a few months, or even a year, does not seem particularly significant because we assume the opportunity will still be there when we are ready for it.

Over time, that assumption starts to change. Children grow up, parents get older, friends move away, and people become busy with families and responsibilities of their own. The group of people who once found it easy to sit around the same table suddenly needs three months of planning to have dinner together. Nothing dramatic has necessarily happened; life has simply moved on. There are periods of our lives that end in this quiet way, and we often do not notice until they are already behind us. The years when your children want to spend every weekend with you, the years when your parents are healthy enough to travel, or the years when a group of old friends still lives in the same city can feel completely normal while we are living through them. Only later do we understand that they were temporary.

This has made me think differently about how we measure the value of our time. In business, we are used to measuring things. We look at results, growth, returns and progress because they tell us whether our effort is producing something. Life is harder to measure in those terms. There is no obvious return from spending an extra hour at dinner with your parents. Calling an old friend does not move you closer to a professional goal, and taking a day off to be with your children may even feel inconvenient when there is work waiting. These things are easy to push aside because there is usually something more urgent to do. Yet urgency can be misleading. Work will continue to arrive, there will always be another email to answer, another meeting to attend and another problem that seems to require immediate attention. Very few of these things are truly irreplaceable. Time with people is.

None of this means we should stop planning for the future or become less ambitious. I still believe strongly in both. We have responsibilities, and part of living well is preparing for what lies ahead. At the same time, it is worth remembering why we are working so hard in the first place. For most of us, success is not really about having more for the sake of having more. We want to create security, freedom and opportunities for ourselves and for the people we care about. If we become so consumed by that process that we have little time left for those people, then somewhere along the way the means have overtaken the reason for doing it.

As I get older, I find myself placing more value on simple decisions: staying at dinner a little longer, making the call when someone crosses my mind, visiting family when I have the chance, taking the trip with the children while they still want to come, or listening to an old story even when I already know how it ends. None of these things looks particularly important on a calendar, and that is exactly why they are so easy to overlook. We tend to imagine that the important parts of life will be obvious—the graduation, the wedding, the promotion, the major birthday—and of course those occasions matter. But they occupy only a handful of days. Most of life happens between them, over breakfast, in the car, around a dinner table, on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, or during a conversation that began with nothing important to say.

There will always be something else to work towards, and I would not want to live without that sense of purpose. The mistake is thinking that life begins once we have reached the next milestone. We reach it, enjoy it for a while and soon find ourselves looking towards another one. Meanwhile, the ordinary parts of life continue around us, quietly becoming memories. Every now and then, it is worth paying attention to what is already here, because one day some of the things that feel completely ordinary today will be the things we would give the most to experience again.