There was a last time I tried to revive someone who came in dead. A last overnight shift… A last time I walked out of the emergency department at six in the morning, blinking into cold air, carrying the weight that only that kind of work puts in your chest. I didn’t know on the morning it happened that it was the last night shift. I was just tired. I went home and tried to sleep... And that chapter closed without ceremony.

I think about that a lot. Not with grief exactly, though grief is part of it, but with a quiet astonishment at how silently the lasts arrive. They do not announce themselves. They do not give you a moment to stop and say: pay attention, this is the last time. They simply happen. And then they are gone.

The Lasts We Never Marked

There is a probably a night somewhere in your past when you read a child to sleep for the last time. You put the book down, turned off the light, and walked out of the room. You probably thought about what you needed to do tomorrow. You did not think “this is the last time I will do this”. Because you didn’t know.

The same is true for the last time you carried them to bed- that particular weight of a sleeping child in your arms, head heavy on your shoulder, the absolute trust of it. There was a last time. You just didn't know you were in it.

There was a last powder day. A last run down a mountain before the knees or the schedule or the years made it impractical. A last time you played a pickup game, ran a certain trail, stayed up until two in the morning talking about something that felt important. A last time you sat across from a patient and did the thing you had trained for years to do.

Some of these are losses. Some are graduations. Some are simply the natural shedding that a life in motion requires. But almost none of them arrive with a label.

The Full Ledger

I want to be careful here, because this is not only a meditation on tender things. The lasts are not always beautiful.

There was also a last time you had a conflict with someone you worked with- a last hostile meeting, a last sleepless night of moral injury, a last moment of feeling trapped in a role or a system that was slowly grinding you down. Those lasts came too. And if you knew, in those moments, that they were the last, that you would not have that same experience again, you might have reacted differently.

The hard things end too. The unbearable seasons close. The suffering that feels permanent is also moving, also finite, also bounded by a last that is somewhere ahead of you even when you cannot see it.

Everything, the wonderful and the terrible, gets the same treatment from time. All of it ends.

What Finitude Actually Does

The philosopher and Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in notes to himself about the practice of holding each moment as if it might be the last of its kind. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a discipline of attention. A way of refusing to sleepwalk through the life that was actually happening.

The Buddhist traditions call something similar impermanence- the recognition that all things and feelings arise and pass away. What sounds like a counsel of sadness is, in practice, an invitation to presence. Because the moment you really understand that something will not always be here, you start really looking at it.

This is not about living in fear. It is about letting the awareness of finitude do what it does best: sharpen your attention to what is in front of you right now.

The child asking you to read one more page. The mountain under first light. The colleagues you genuinely love working with (that’s you, Berkey, Bischoff, Cook, Fobi, Janchar, Jones, Little, Mckenna, Stone). The work that is hard and meaningful at the same time. These are numbered. Not infinitely renewable. Each instance is one fewer remaining.

That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to be present.

· · ·

The Practice

In coaching, I often ask people to identify what they are taking for granted. Not abstractly- but specifically. What is present in your life right now that you are moving past too quickly, treating as background, expecting to always be there?

When you are in the middle of something that matters, even something ordinary, especially something ordinary, ask yourself: how many times do I have left to do this? Not to catastrophize. Not to clutch. But to arrive. To be in the experience instead of beside it, mentally already somewhere else.

Leading From This Awareness

Every conversation with a direct report you genuinely want to develop. Every chance to do work that is truly aligned with your values. Every season of your career where you have the platform, the relationships, and the credibility to make the kind of difference you came into leadership to make. These are finite. They are not given. They will not always be available.

Time and attention are the only non-renewable resources. Every other asset can be rebuilt, recovered, refinanced. Time, once spent, is simply gone. The leaders who feel that, really feel it, lead differently. With more urgency in the things that matter. With more willingness to let go of the things that don't.