Most of life is a random Tuesday

People ask me about cancer. What I learned. If it changed how I see life.

I usually don’t know where to start.

There are a hundred answers. Fear, gratitude, relationships, health, uncertainty. How fast everything can change.

But the one I return to, the one I live closest to now: I don’t want to waste my time doing work I don’t love.

When you think you’re at the end, there isn’t necessarily some profound moment of clarity. No aha moment. No sudden realization where everything finally makes sense.

It’s just you, your thoughts, your memories, and what you did with your time.

I remember lying in bed, upset that I hadn’t spent more of my life doing what I loved.

Before my diagnosis, I worked several jobs to pay the bills. Most of my days went to work I didn’t love because I thought that was the only option. I thought if I didn’t make a certain amount of money, I was failing. That I needed a certain job, a certain income, a certain life for people to see me a certain way.

Somewhere along the way, I started valuing money over my own happiness.

When you’re in it, that trade can make total sense. But when you’re facing death and thinking about what actually matters, you see it differently.

I’ve thought a lot about how much of my life goes to work.

Not just the hours I’m there, but everything around them. The commute. The tired evenings. The Sunday spent thinking about Monday.

If work is going to take up that much of my life, it’s worth asking whether I’m giving that time to something I actually care about.

We spend our time earning money, then spend that money trying to buy our time back.

The vacation. The weekend away. The dinner out. The few days when our time finally feels like our own.

Then Monday comes and we start trading our time again.

Money matters. Bills are real. I’m not telling anyone to quit their job tomorrow.

But I’d rather make less and wake up excited about what I’m building than make more doing something that takes the wind out of me.

I don’t want to pretend that choice has been easy. There are days when the uncertainty scares me. Days when I wonder whether I should take the safer path.

Knowing how you want to live and actually living that way are two very different things.

But I keep coming back to something simple:

Most of life isn’t vacation. It’s not Saturday night with friends or the trip you’ve been counting down to.

Most of life is a random Tuesday.

You wake up. You go to work. You come home. You eat dinner. You go to sleep.

Then you do it again.

Those ordinary days aren’t the space between your life.

They are your life.

Before I got sick, I overlooked a lot of mine. I was always waiting for something else.

I know I won’t love every second. I don’t expect to.

But I don’t want to spend Monday through Friday waiting for Saturday.

I want to wake up fired up for my Tuesdays.

— Kiel