Recently, someone I knew—let’s say a friend of a friend—lost his battle with cancer. I had the privilege of meeting him in person about two months ago. Through our mutual friend we’d exchanged a few calls and texts before that. I didn’t know him well, but we shared a connection only people in this fight can understand.
A Teammate Lost
I can’t speak for everyone dealing with cancer. But I know for me, every time I see someone lose the battle—whether I knew them well or not, or at all—I feel like I’ve lost a teammate. When I heard the news that Toby Keith passed in February of 2024, it hit me differently. I remember seeing tributes everywhere to his music, his career, his impact as a celebrity. My feelings were far from that. I didn’t see a star lost to the world. I saw another human being taken by a disease that doesn’t discriminate.
It was a reminder that the enemy marches on, silently claiming victims with no emotion, no remorse, and seemingly no end.
It’s also a reminder of what could be. It stirs questions about how much control I really have in this fight. It tempts my thoughts with all the wrong “what ifs.”
But ultimately, it reminds me of this: I am still alive. And while I am alive, my job is to live.
Drifting Off Course
Early this year, I lost almost an entire month to illness and hospitalization. Even after I got better, it took me time to get moving again. Yes, there were bright spots—going to Rodeo Houston for the first time in nine years, climbing to the top of Enchanted Rock just six days after a chemo treatment, adopting a puppy. Those moments mattered. They were life-giving.
But during that stretch, I wasn’t advancing my cause. I wasn’t producing blogs. I wasn’t moving my coaching business forward. I was being, I was doing, but I wasn’t aligned with my Why. For context, your Why is the core purpose that drives you—the answer to why you get up in the morning and keep going. My Why is simple: to help people find the strength they already carry, to offer a hand when they need one, and inspire them to keep going. Writing, coaching, and building that message into something tangible is what living with purpose looks like for me.
And yet, from March through June, I let energy drains pull me further off course. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a hard worker. Fifty- to sixty-hour work weeks were the rule for me, not the exception. But the problem was, I was on a treadmill—always moving, but never getting anywhere that mattered.
There were other issues, too. Income tasks had to be a priority. There is no income while you’re in the building stages of businesses revolving around my Why. So what I wanted to do and what I had to do simply didn’t align. At the same time, I was trying to live life and enjoy time with my wife. And I struggle a lot with enjoying leisure activities when there is work left undone. I was conflicted on every side.
All of that left me asking a bigger question: What does it mean to live? And what does it mean to live with purpose? Because they aren’t the same thing.
Living vs. Living With Purpose
Here’s how I see the difference:
- Living can mean filling days with activity, even good activity. Living with purpose means those activities connect back to your Why.
- Living can distract. Living with purpose aligns.
- Living can be consuming. Living with purpose creates and contributes.
- Living can chase comfort. Living with purpose stretches you to grow.
- Living gives you fleeting moments. Living with purpose compounds into momentum and meaning.
For me, living was keeping busy. Living with purpose is creating — writing, coaching, sharing my story.
Real Live Isn’t a Movie
We have seen movies like Eat, Pray, Love or The Pursuit of Happyness and we get it. The message is clear: live with purpose, take risks, don’t waste your days. But how many of us actually take that message and run with it? I’ll admit, even two and a half years after being told I have a disease that is trying to kill me (and honestly, what better motivation could there be?), I still struggle with it.
The truth is, real life doesn’t work like a movie. You don’t just have one breakthrough moment and suddenly everything is different. For me, it’s more about being mindful of the joys of life and of my purpose, and then trying to do little things here and there to honor that. If I can turn little things here and there into little things every day, then maybe those little things start to grow into bigger things. And if I can keep stacking them, over time I end up living with purpose more often than not.
Living as Defiance
Is that easy to do when you’re fighting for your life? I don’t think it’s easy to do even when everything else is going great. But I can’t discount the importance of it. Living intentionally—with purpose—is the biggest act of defiance you can throw at anything trying to knock you down. It’s your giant middle finger to the disease, the bully, or anything trying to drain your soul. It’s something you do have control over. It’s a choice.
The Choice To Live
And it doesn’t need to be anything big. It can be getting some work done while stuck in the hospital. It can be showering healthcare workers with kindness to make up for the difficult people they so often deal with. It can be taking your dog for a walk and letting them smell every blade of grass, every fire hydrant, every light pole. It can be taking the time to figure out what your Why is and then doing one thing each day that aligns with it. It’s about what you define as living.
The bottom line is this: you do have a choice. You can choose to be the victim and let the disease—or whatever it is that’s trying to hold you back—take control. Or you can choose to take the wheel and live with purpose. Because when you are fighting for your life, the most important thing to remember is that as long as you’re here, you have not been defeated. You are still alive. So live.
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