A Life Worth Replaying

Two people, days apart. The same lesson from both ends of a life.

The Room

Yesterday I sat at my desk and played a song called “Always By My Side.”

It was Mark’s. He wrote it for his wife, a thank you for staying through all of it, the thick and the thin of a long life together. He brought it to a few of us mentors to help him get it finished, and I was one of them. But what I had with Mark went past the music.

I played his song so many times.

We lost Mark this week. And the song just kept going, his voice coming through the monitors like he was right there in the room, even though he wasn’t, and he never could be again. And that’s the part that really took me out. Not the sadness exactly, the strangeness of it. A man sits in a chair and makes something true with his own hands, and then he’s gone, and the thing he made is still here, filling the room with him in it.

A song is a strange way to grieve somebody. It’s a goodbye and it’s proof, both playing through the same speakers at the same time.

I didn’t go back to it for a lesson in those moments. There was just me and the desk and a finished piece that outlived the person who made it. Then it ended.

And somewhere in all that quiet, a question I couldn’t put down. I started wondering if Mark, given the chance, would live the whole thing over again. Not the song. The life. All of it, every choice, on repeat. I didn’t have an answer for him. I’m not sure he’d want one. But the question sat down next to me, and it hasn’t gotten up since.

The Word We All Use

Almost all of us are living on a quiet assumption we never say out loud. That there’s time.

The song can wait. The album can wait. The move, the business, the call to the person you love, the whole life you keep meaning to start, all of it can wait, because tomorrow’s coming and so is the one after that. We don’t say it like that. We just live like it’s true.

“Later” is the most dangerous word we use day to day. It assumes a tomorrow nobody actually gets handed. You’re spending something you were never promised, and you’re spending it like there’s an endless supply. Every “I’ll get to it” is a quiet bet that the road keeps going. Most of the time you win that bet, which is exactly why you keep making it, right up until the day you no longer can.

The strange thing is we all already know this. We know we’re going to die the same way we know the sun is going to come back around tomorrow. True, and completely weightless. A fact you can hold in your head your whole life without it ever once changing how you spend a Monday.

That’s the real gap. Not between knowing and not knowing, because everybody knows that there is an end. But the gap is between knowing you’re going to die someday and letting it touch anything you do today. Most of us stand in that gap for years.

Two People, Same Lesson

I met Dustin at the mine.

We were both new hires, both at the bottom, both stuck with the work nobody else wanted to do. Something happens when you suffer next to a person long enough. You don’t really become friends, you get welded together. We’d spend whole shifts cleaning out train cars and come out the other side covered head to toe in perlite, white with the dust, looking like two ghosts who’d lost a bet.

Dustin was younger than me. A hunter, a wilderness guide, the kind of guy who could talk for an hour about being out in the woods and you’d hang on all of it because he was a natural storyteller. Funny as hell. The type who’d give you the shirt off his back and not think twice. He used to come to me for advice, which always got me, because in a lot of ways he had more of it figured out than I did.

He was 26. He had a two-year-old son. And he was finally pulling his life together, really turning the corner, the kind of turn you root for in a person, when his time got taken.

That little boy isn’t going to remember his dad’s voice. He’s too young. He’s going to know his father through what got left behind. The stories, the photos, the people who tell him who Dustin was and who he was trying to become. The whole picture of his dad gets built out of leftovers. That’s the part I can’t put down.

Then there’s Mark.

Mark was my student for three years. Early 60s. He didn’t come to me to chase anything, no career, no audience. He came to finish songs. He wanted to leave his wife and his family something of himself, something with his own hands on it, before he ran out of time. He said it almost that plainly.

What he actually fought wasn’t talent. It was time, and the nerve to use his own singing voice and let people actually hear it. That fear is real for many people, and at his age, with everything else he could’ve been doing with his evenings, he chose to sit with it anyway.

His first year I pushed him into one of our group challenges I ran for mastering.com, three strangers thrown together to write and finish a song on a deadline. He was way outside his comfort zone. But he did it. And after that day, something opened up in him. He went from the guy hanging back, always doubting himself, to one of the most welcoming people in the whole room, always positive, always with a funny take, always a little against the grain, willing to give it a try.

I finally met him in person out in Vegas, after three years of only knowing each other through a screen, and there he was, a real person across the table. Surreal in the best way.

I’m really glad I got the opportunity to meet Mark in person that day and actually speak face to face and shake his hand.

So look at the two of them side by side. One 26, one 60. One right at the start of his life, one near the end. Time didn’t care about the difference. It didn’t care about the kid, the plans, the life left to live, the songs still left to write. It took them both anyways, and it left the exact same lesson on both ends.

What Finishing Leaves Behind

Here’s what keeps landing on me. Mark left two finished songs.

Not a giant catalog. Two. He had more in him, an EP he never got to finish, ideas that are just folders now, sitting there the way half-finished things sit. But two of them made it all the way out, and those two are the ones that are real. His wife can play them in a quiet house and hear him. The unfinished ones are silence.

That’s the whole point right there. The work you finish is the part that stays. The rest is just potential, and potential doesn’t outlive you.

Most of us aren’t building toward a finished thing, though. We’re building toward a someday. The someday list only gets longer. The half-done work piles up. And the reason is almost always the same one, dressed up to look respectable. “I’ll put it out when it’s perfect.” That’s not patience. That’s fear in a nicer coat. Perfect is the one excuse that never has to be etched in stone, because we could never bring ourselves to commit.

Everybody says live like you’re dying. Travel, say the thing, hug the people. That’s good advice. But almost nobody says finish like you’re dying, and that’s the one that leaves something behind for the people still here. Living like you’re dying is about the experiences you collect. Finishing like you’re dying is about what you hand to the ones who outlive you.

I don’t say any of that as a productivity thing. I’m not thinking about output this week. I’m thinking about the fact that a man I cared about turned some of what was inside him into something his family gets to keep forever, and that the finishing is the only reason it exists.

A Life Worth Replaying

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m fine. It only happened yesterday, and I’m still in it. I can’t sleep right, and when I do, it’s dreams that hand him back to me for a second and then take him again. Death does that strange thing where one moment a person is part of your world, and the next they just aren’t, and your mind can’t hold the shape of it, especially this soon. It also reminds me that everyone I love is walking the same direction. That’s a heavy thing to carry around on a Monday.

But it hasn’t only broken me. It’s sharpened something too. It pulled the lie out from under me, the same lie everybody tells themselves, that there’s plenty of time and the real living starts later. There isn’t, and it doesn’t. Mark didn’t get later. Dustin didn’t either.

So this week I haven’t been thinking about getting more done. I’ve been thinking about that question that sat down next to me at the desk. A life worth replaying. Not the highlight reel, not the big wins. The ordinary version of your life, the one you’re actually in right now. If you had to live it again, the regular Mondays and all, would you want to.

I don’t have that all figured out. I’m asking it as much as you are. But I’ll leave you with a smaller, gentler version of it, because the big one is a lot to hold this week.

What’s one moment from this year you’d want to replay? Just one. A day, an hour, a conversation you’d live again exactly the way it happened. Sit with that for a second.

Whatever comes up, that’s a piece of the life worth building more of. And the time to build more of it is now, while you still can.

That’s all any of this really comes down to.

Live a life worth replaying.