To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.     

Henri Bergson

Transitions. I am in one now.  The boxes are packed, the plane ticket is purchased. After nine year living as an expat in South Africa and Ecuador, I am on my way “home” to the USA.  When people ask why, I answer simply that “It is time”.  That answer encompasses an important life transition, the one from active, healthy vitality to that time described as “between 65 and death”.

I am not dead yet, or even very weary; I still want to do something.  The question is, what should that something be.

I recently read a memoir by Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air.  Kalanithi died of lung cancer in 2015 at the age of 36 just as he was completing 10 years of training as a neurosurgeon.  The question he confronts near the end of the book is: what he should do to make life meaningful in the unknown time he has left.

As a neurosurgeon Kalanithi has confronted this question on behalf of others: “Before operation on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what make his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonably to let that life end.”

As his own diagnoses confronts him with the question of his own mortality, Kalanithi struggles to clarify what is most important to him.

As a healthy and strong, but no longer young woman, I too must confront what make life worth living now that I have completed several life goals including: living overseas, learning another language and publishing a book.

As I seek to set a new, inspiring goal, pragmatism tells me my days are numbered but, like Kalanithi, I don’t know that number.  Still I need to decide what is most important for me to do with the unknown time I have left.

I have some ideas and, once I land back in the country of my birth, I will explore those ideas using many of the tools in Vision to Decision: A Self-Coaching Guide to Starting A New Business. I will be using my own book to start another business. Though this time I may worry less about profit and more about service to my community.

What about you?  You who are still young, what is the work you are called to do with your small business?  Does that work make your life worth living?

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash