After today, there are only a couple of Mondays left in this year, and it feels like time has been moving as fast as the Millennium Falcon jumping to hyperspace. One moment you’re planning, the next you’re wondering how the calendar flipped so quickly. Somewhere along the way, the days began to blur, and now we’re standing at the edge of another year asking ourselves where the time went.

Linkin Park warned us years ago in In the End that time is a valuable thing, that we watch it fly by as the pendulum swings, watch it count down to the end of the day while the clock quietly ticks life away. Time does not pause for clarity or convenience. It keeps moving, whether we’re ready or not.

I’m writing this with COVID slowing my body but sharpening my thoughts, counting minutes in a way that feels unusually sacred. Waiting for my oldest daughter to tell me whether her contractions are strong enough or whether her water has broken, whether today is the day she becomes a mother. Her first baby. A daughter. Three generations colliding in a single moment of awareness, and suddenly time feels like vapor.

You look at your child and wonder how they can possibly be old enough to raise another human. You feel pride and fear sitting side by side. You replay years in your mind and quietly ask yourself whether you did everything you could, within your own limitations, to set them up for success. And then, almost immediately, comes the realization that you cannot live their life for them. You are no longer the director. You are, in many ways, a spectator.

That awareness is sobering.

We’ve all seen stories recently that remind us how fragile the parent-child relationship can be once adulthood takes over. Tragedies that force us to confront the truth we rarely want to say out loud: there comes a point when the training wheels are long gone, and no matter how much you love your child, you cannot always catch them when they fall. Love does not equal control. Guidance does not guarantee outcomes.

Strangely enough, the same truth applies to business.

The thing you built. The idea you nurtured. The project you stayed up late thinking about, tweaking, worrying over like a newborn. Your business has seasons too. Infancy, growth, rebellion, independence. There are moments when you can guide it closely, and others when you must step back and let it reveal what it is becoming.

As we approach the close of another year, and look toward the second half of the 2020s, this is the moment for reflection. Not resolution in the shallow sense, but honest assessment. What worked? What didn’t? What drained you more than it gave back? What did you cling to out of fear instead of purpose?

This applies personally and professionally.

You cannot move forward well without taking inventory. Of habits. Of systems. Of expectations. Of the stories you keep telling yourself about who you are and what is possible next. Reflection is not nostalgia. It is reconnaissance.

From there, a roadmap begins to form.

Not a rigid plan that ignores life’s unpredictability, but a guiding framework. One that respects the season you’re in. One that acknowledges what you can control and releases what you cannot. A roadmap for your business that serves your life, and a roadmap for your life that leaves room for meaning, rest, and connection.

Manic Mondays don’t have to rule you. They can become markers instead, reminders that time is moving and that attention is currency. Where you place it matters.

Time will keep flying. The clock will keep ticking. Children will grow up and create lives of their own. Businesses will evolve or demand change. And all we can do, really, is decide how intentionally we show up in the moments we’re given.

Because in the end, time waits for no one. But wisdom teaches us how to walk with it, instead of chasing it breathlessly from behind.