GNT #149: Right up until the bell

Welcome to Grow North Thursday - One idea each week to help you grow with purpose, earn sustainably, and design a life you love.

Forwarded this? ​Subscribe here.

read time: 2 minutes

I went to a funeral last week that felt different from most of the ones I’ve attended.

The room was full in a way that surprised me. Not just family and church members, but law enforcement, firefighters, community leaders, teachers, people who clearly knew each other through hard moments. You could tell by the way they nodded when certain stories were told. This wasn’t polite attendance. This was history.

What stood out wasn’t a long list of accomplishments, though there were plenty. It was how consistently people said the same thing, using different words. He showed up. He didn’t draw attention to it. He just kept showing up.

At one point someone said, “He served right up to the bell.”

That phrase has stayed with me more than anything else that day.

Not because it sounded poetic.
But because it was literal.

After the service, I kept thinking about how much he had done and how little he seemed to need credit for any of it. People talked about decades of showing up in places most of us avoid. Jails. Hospital rooms. Late nights. Early mornings. Situations where there is nothing to fix, only people to sit with.

None of it sounded like a strategic play. What I mean by that is there was no sense that he was building something, or curating a reputation, or working toward a version of himself he planned to become later. It sounded like a life lived in one direction for a very long time, without much deviation.

I realized how unusual that feels now.

Most of us live with some separation between who we are and who we intend to be. We have a mental category for “right now” and another one for “eventually.” Eventually, when things calm down. Eventually, when the kids are older. Eventually, when the business is steadier. Eventually, when there is more margin.

We tell ourselves that alignment is coming later.

For him, later never seemed to be the point. There was no waiting period. No future version where he would finally show up fully. The way he lived on ordinary days looked a lot like the way people remembered him on his last one.

I started wondering where I’ve been treating certain parts of my life as placeholders. Where I’ve been postponing things that matter because they feel inconvenient or inefficient or hard to justify on a calendar. Where I’ve been preparing for a season that I’m not actually guaranteed.

What would it look like to live in a way that didn’t rely so heavily on later to make things feel whole?

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

📩 If you’ve found value in this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. It’s the biggest way you can support my work, and I appreciate it so much.

For more short, grounded ideas throughout the week, you can follow me on LinkedIn.

If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here to get it each week. I never spam.