Why Five Years?
My father passed away at forty-four. More than others, it makes me think about mortality.
It makes me think that we have more time than we imagine, and less than we want.
He had four ten-years. I have already lived past that.
My first few were given to me — education, growing up, the early years of building. The middle ones were spent building out — career, family, security.
At some point the building is done. My children have their own lives. My career has given more than I asked of it. My financial plan is in place.
And there are still a few good five-year chapters left.
Not many. But enough.
It’s enough for me to rekindle a dream, build a meaningful project from scratch, finish a book that has been in me for decades.
For you, it may be enough to learn the instrument you always wanted to learn. To start a business that means something to you. To travel to the cities that have been calling you.
Or, like me, to say yes to an improbable inspiration that finds you.
The five most splendid years are not behind you.
They are the ones you choose — intentionally, joyfully, with the full weight of everything you have lived and learned — to make it splendid.
Splendid living begins not with a plan but with a yes. Your yes.
Why Not Two, or Ten?
Each of us is given on average sixteen five-year chapters across our lifetime.
At a certain point — especially as retirement approaches or begins — only a few of those chapters remain.
The question is not how many are left.
The question is what you will do with the ones that are.
Two years is not enough
Two years is enough time to start something. It is not enough time to become something.
A language takes longer than two years to speak with confidence. A skill takes longer than two years to develop into mastery. A creative project — a book, a body of paintings, a garden, a community — takes longer than two years to reach the point where it has fully arrived.
Two years is a sprint. Splendid living is not. It is the unhurried bliss of going somewhere you have always meant to go and arriving with enough time to stay.
Ten years is too open
Ten years sounds abundant. But abundance without a horizon is not motivating — it is paralyzing.
A decade from now feels so far away that it becomes easy to begin next year instead of this year.
Ten years is long enough to believe we have time to waste. We don’t.
Five years is a chapter
Five years is long enough to accomplish something genuinely blissful, yet short enough to feel urgent.
The combination of those two qualities — blissful and urgent — is what produces the particular energy that splendid living requires.
Five years is long enough to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Long enough to look back on and say — that was a chapter. That was a time. That mattered.
The question is never the number
The question is always what you will do with the five years in front of you.
Because those five years are happening whether you choose them or not. The only choice is whether they happen to you or whether you happen to them.
And five years is exactly enough time to discover what saying yes produces.
[ Start the Clock ]