Fighting the Dying of the Light

I tried for another title but that is what it is.

Every July I come to Paris.

I’ve stopped trying to explain why.

People assume it’s the food. The architecture. The museums. The restaurants. They’re all right, but none of them are the reason. If you asked me what I did here for a month, I’d struggle to answer. I walk. I sit. I think. I eat lunch when lunch seems like a good idea. I have another coffee because nobody seems in a hurry to move me along. Somehow, by doing very little, I feel as though I’ve done something important.

It has taken me years to admit that.

When I was younger, every day had to justify itself. Progress was measurable. Revenue. Customers. Watches. Bottles in the cellar. New ideas. New projects. The feeling that life was expanding because the pile around me was getting bigger.

I’m not sure when that stopped being true.

Or perhaps it never was.

The funny thing about getting older isn’t that you become less ambitious. At least I haven’t. If anything, I’m more ambitious today than I’ve ever been. The difference is that I no longer confuse accumulation with progress.

The best things that have happened to me this year won’t fit in a suitcase.

That’s a comforting realization.

Around now, every year, something else begins to happen.

I start missing Toronto.

Not because Paris has lost its charm. If anything, the opposite. I know I’ll miss these streets almost immediately.

But my mind starts wandering home.

I wonder how everyone at the office is doing. I find myself sketching ideas for the company over breakfast. AI has this strange effect on me. The more I think about it, the more it feels less like another technology and more like the beginning of another industrial revolution. I don’t feel exhausted by it.

I feel invited.

That surprises me.

At fifty-four, I expected to spend more time preserving what I’d built.

Instead, I want to build faster than ever.

Maybe that’s what experience gives you. Not fewer dreams.

Better ones.

This year there is another reason I’m ready to go home.

Normally, after Paris, I’d head west.

Burning Man has become one of the punctuation marks in my life. A strange pilgrimage into the desert where, for a week, the ordinary rules stop applying.

This year I’m going east.

I’ll drive from Toronto to New Brunswick to drop off my firstborn child at university.

I don’t think I’ve fully grasped what that means yet.

You spend two decades trying to prepare someone for the world and then, one day, you realize the preparation is over.

Your job isn’t to keep holding on.

It’s to smile, hug them, and drive away.

There are few experiences I can imagine that are more profound.

I’m choosing that over the desert.

Not because it matters more universally.

Because it matters more to me.

Maybe that’s what Paris gives me.

Not answers.

Perspective.

Enough distance from my own life to see that I’m still exactly where I want to be.

I have a family I can’t wait to get back to.

A city that still feels like home.

A company whose best years, I genuinely believe, are still ahead of it.

And a technology that makes me feel twenty-five again.

There is an odd comfort in realizing that the light Dylan Thomas was talking about doesn’t only fade.

Sometimes it moves.

A little of it is now in my daughter as she begins her own journey.

A little of it is waiting for me back in Toronto.

And a little of it is still here, hanging from an old iron lamp in a quiet Paris courtyard, reminding me that growing older isn’t the same thing as growing dim.

If I’m honest...

I think I’m just getting started.