I’m not scared of failing. I’m scared of living a life that didn’t matter.
I’ve fallen down a lot. I’ve come up short more times than I can count. I’m still here. That stuff doesn’t scare me. Here’s what does. One day I’ll stand before God, and I’ll know I played it safe when I was supposed to live all the way.
That’s my fear. Not the big, loud kind of failure that everybody sees. The quiet kind. The kind you don’t even notice happening to you.
For forty years I’ve worked like something was chasing me. There was no big plan. Half the time there was no real reason. I just kept going. Build the next thing. Open the next place. Write the next story. One day my mom asked me when I was going to retire. I told her the truth. “Mom, I’m never going to retire.” Funny she asked, as she taught school until she was 80.
I’ve always had this fear. I just didn’t have a name for it. Then a few years ago I was listening to a podcast. Someone asked the guest what scared him the most. He didn’t say dying. He didn’t say failing. He said, “an unlived life.” I sat there and it hit me. That was it. That was the thing I’d been running from for forty years. Now I had a name for it.
The unlived life haunts me because it’s built one small compromise at a time, one day at a time, until one day becomes a lifetime.
Used right, your days build a good life. Used wrong, those same days build an empty one. Same hours. Same chances. The only question is whether you use them or save them. And you can’t save a life for later. This isn’t a rehearsal for some other life that kicks in one day. This is it. Right now. You only get back what you put in. I almost didn’t live long enough to learn that. By the grace of God and not much else, I did, and I’ve spent every year since trying to put more in than I take out.
An unlived life starts small. You say no to a trip. No to a table full of people you don’t know. No to the stranger across the room who could have been your friend for the next thirty years, if you had just walked over and said hello. Every “no” feels smart at the time. Safe. Sensible. But say enough of them and you’ve built a wall around yourself. Pretty soon your world becomes six square miles and ten meals you could cook in your sleep.
Traveling is the opposite. Traveling is one big “yes.”
Yes to the early alarm. Yes to the cramped airplane seat. Yes to a language you can’t speak, a town you can’t find on a map, and food you can’t even say out loud.
I once watched a group of grown men and women from Mississippi go totally quiet in Sicily. They were eating pasta alla Norma. A woman had been cooking it by hand since before the sun came up. No menu. No English. Just her, some wine her son made, and four hours we will never forget. You don’t get that on a regular Tuesday back home. A normal Tuesday lets you go through the motions. Italy doesn’t let you.
A new place makes you pay attention. Both eyes open. That kind of attention is the first thing an unlived life takes away from you. And it’s the first thing a good trip gives back.
One good week on a trip gives you more memories than three whole months at home. On the last night of a trip, I’ve watched people tell me about one single afternoon, little by little. The light on the hills. The warm bread. The old man who they struck up a conversation with. But those same people can’t remember one thing they did the entire month before they left.
That’s not by accident. An unlived life feels thin and empty. A full life feels deep.
There was a woman on a trip this past spring who almost didn’t come. She talked herself out of it three times. The money. The timing. The dog. The same excuses we all keep ready. But she came anyway. On the last night, she told me it was the first thing she had done just for herself in over ten years. Then she cried. I may have too. That wasn’t just a vacation. That was a person getting her own life back.
I write all this as the most blessed man I know, not from up on some horse looking down. I get to do this for a living, and I haven’t taken one day of it for granted. Everything I have came to me the same way my sobriety did. Not through merit. Through grace. And not everybody can buy a ticket to Italy. I couldn’t until I was 50 years old. There were years where I was counting-change-in-the-sofa-cushions broke just trying to keep the lights on and make payroll. So, if a plane isn’t in your cards right now, hear the part that matters.
This was never really about a trip.
Every “yes” I say out there is me looking fear in the eye and saying no to it. Not today. Not this year. Not while I still have my health, my passport, and people who want to come along.
When my next birthday rolls around I’ll turn what most people consider retirement age. I don’t know how many more trips I have left. Nobody does. But I’d rather wear myself out crossing oceans and sitting at long tables with new friends than play it safe and slowly shrink. I’ve tried safe. Safe almost killed me. Safe is the slow road to an unlived life, and I already gave that road too many of my years.
So, I keep going. I don’t want to leave gifts buried, words unsaid, work undone. I don’t want comfort to choke out calling. I want to wring everything out of this life while I still have breath.
The real loss isn’t losing. It’s never living the life I was meant to live.
I’m not here to take it easy. I’m here to go all the way.
And every spring and fall, that other guy, the one who would have stayed home and said no and let his world shrink down to a few miles and ten tired meals, gets a little smaller behind me.
I know that guy well. For a lot of years, he was me.
I’m not going to let him take the wheel again.
Onward.
