Why Five Years?
My father died at forty-four. It makes me think about mortality more than most people do.
It also makes me think we have more time than we imagine, and less than we want.
He had only four ten-years. I have already lived past that.
My first chapters were given to me — school, growing up, the early building. The middle ones went to building out: career, family, security.
At some point, the building is finished. My children have lives of their own. My career has given me more than I asked of it. The financial plan is in place.
And there are still a few good five-year chapters left.
Not many. Enough.
Enough to rekindle a dream, build a project from nothing, finish a book that had been sitting in me for decades.
For you, it may be enough to learn the instrument. To start the business that means something. To go to the cities that keep calling.
Or, like me, to say yes to an improbable inspiration that finds you first.
Your five most splendid years are not behind you. They are the ones you choose — deliberately, joyfully, with the full weight of everything you have lived — and then make splendid.
Splendid living begins not with a plan but with a yes. Your yes.
[ Say Your Yes ]
Why Not Two, or Ten?
We each get something like sixteen five-year chapters, if we are lucky. As retirement approaches, only a few remain — and the question stops being how many are left and becomes what you will do with them.
Two years is enough time to start something. It is not enough time to become something. A language, a craft, a book, a garden, a community — none of them arrive in two years. Two years is a sprint. Splendid living is the unhurried bliss of going somewhere you always meant to go and arriving with enough time to stay.
Ten years is too far away to feel real. A decade is long enough to believe you can begin next year instead of this one. We cannot afford that mindset.
Five years is a chapter. Long enough to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Long enough to look back on and say: that was a time, and it mattered. Short enough that you start now.
The question is never the number. The question is what you will do with the five years in front of you.
Those five years are happening either way. The only choice is whether they happen to you, or you happen to them.
And five years is exactly enough time to discover what saying yes produces.
[ SayYour Yes ]