Later Is Not Guaranteed

This time last year, my stepfather Derek was diagnosed with lung cancer.Six weeks later, he was dead.A couple of days after his diagnosis, I sat with him in the lounge room. Just the two of us. The shock was still fresh, but somewhere inside both of us, I think we already knew the truth. He didn’t have much time. The cancer had moved quickly.I asked him if there was anything on his bucket list. Anything we could still make happen.There were two things he spoke about. Two things he longed for.The first was that he had always wanted to go to Japan.I honestly don’t know why he never did it. He had the time. He had the money.But life slips by like that sometimes. We think there will always be another year, another season, another opportunity. Unfortunately, by that point he was already too unwell for travel, and it simply wasn’t possible anymore.The second thing hit me even harder.He told me he was devastated that he had never written his book. His life’s work. His magnum opus. He cried as he told me this. And my heart ached and I cried too.He had spent close to fifty years studying, practicing, teaching, and pioneering Traditional Chinese Medicine. He lectured at multiple tertiary institutions. He ran a clinic for decades. My mother is also a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, now retired, so I grew up around this world.Derek had an extraordinary mind. But more than that, he had the kind of wisdom that only comes from decades of lived experience. The kind you cannot learn from a textbook.I remember him talking about some of the work he’d been doing around Parkinson’s disease. One patient had arrived at the clinic in a wheelchair and, from memory, six months later no longer needed it. He was also exploring work around autism and gut health. He was deeply curious right until the end. Always learning. Always connecting dots.And yet there he was, sitting across from me, crying because he had run out of time to put his knowledge into the world in the way he had always intended to.“I’ve run out of time now,” he said.There was something absolutely heartbreaking about witnessing that moment.Because this wasn’t about ego. It wasn’t about fame or status or needing recognition. It was the grief of someone who knew they still had something inside them they were meant to express. Something they had carried for decades. Something that mattered.And suddenly there was no more time.Cancer took hold quickly after that conversation, and six weeks later he was gone.It is a profound privilege to sit beside someone near the end of their life. It changes you. It strips away so much noise and nonsense and illusion about what really matters.It reminds you how fragile this whole thing is.How temporary.How precious.And how dangerous it is to keep telling yourself “later.”Later is not guaranteed.I think so many of us ignore the quiet yearning inside ourselves because life gets busy. We become responsible. Practical. Sensible.We convince ourselves there will be more time once the kids are older, once work settles down, once we feel more confident, once we know enough, once everything is finally in place.But sometimes life has other plans.And I don’t think this is really about legacy in the traditional sense. That idea of leaving something behind after you die has always felt a little too external, a little too masculine, if I’m honest. You won’t be here to experience the legacy anyway.I think it’s about something much more personal than that.It’s about living fully expressed while you are actually alive.It’s about asking:* Who am I here to be?* What am I here to create?* What is inside me that wants to be lived, spoken, written, shared, experienced?Because the real tragedy isn’t failure.The real tragedy is leaving this world still carrying the unwritten book.The unlived life.The unspoken truth.One of the things I know about myself is that I can see potential in people very clearly. Sometimes more clearly than they can see it themselves. I can often feel the life inside someone that is trying to emerge. And when people feel truly witnessed like that, something shifts in them.When it comes to purpose, creativity, self-expression, and the soul’s yearning… potential matters, the yearning matters.This experience is a reminder not to waste your life obsessing over things that do not truly matter.Don’t spend years numbing yourself, shrinking yourself, distracting yourself, waiting for permission.There is something your soul came here to experience.To express.To create.And at some point, you have to stop assuming there will always be more time.LoveAyesha xoxPS If you need help creating your body of work to put out in the world, or need clarity on your mission and message, you may like to work with me.If this space resonates with you and you’d like to go a little deeper, you’re warmly invited to join the Fully Expressed Collective. Get full access to Fully Expressed with Ayesha Hilton at fullyexpressedwithayesha.substack.com/subscribe