Last year, time stopped behaving the way I thought it would.
It didn’t stop for everyone as the world kept moving; emails were sent, meetings were attended, life continued in its structured, usual rhythm. But underneath it all, something fundamental had shifted for me. The quiet assumption that there would always be more time, more time for memories, to become, to experience, no longer felt certain.
Saturday 31 May…When my mother passed away, it wasn’t just grief that followed. It was a confrontation. Not loud or chaotic, but persistent. A kind of awareness that sat just beneath the surface of everything: that life is finite in a way we intellectually understand, but rarely feel.
And once you feel it, it’s difficult to go back.
This was not the first time I felt it because just 2 years before that I lost my dad. But I then hung onto my mom.. I was aware our time was finite but that hope never leaves until it’s completely lost.
At first, nothing outwardly changed. I returned to work. I continued performing, delivering, progressing. From the outside, everything looked exactly as it had before. But internally, there was a growing tension: a sense that I was moving forward, but not necessarily in the direction I truly wanted.
Comfort, which once felt earned, started to feel questionable. Predictability, which once felt like stability, began to feel limiting.
There was no single moment of clarity. No dramatic decision point. Just a gradual, undeniable shift in what held weight and what no longer did. Things that once seemed important began to feel smaller. And things I had postponed, or quietly dismissed, started to feel more urgent (like my health and interests).
I realised that I didn’t want a life that slowly narrows. One that becomes efficient, structured, and perceived as successful, but constrained. I didn’t want to wait for circumstances to force me to grow. Or worse, to look back and realise I had stayed within the edges of what was comfortable, rather than testing what was possible.
That shift, I felt for the first time when my dad passed away. It was subtle at first, now it’s increasingly difficult to ignore. This want for more.
This is what led me to make a decision. To choose something deliberately challenging.
Climbing Kilimanjaro is not a natural extension of my life. It doesn’t fit neatly into my routine or my profession. It doesn’t serve a clear, practical purpose. And that is precisely the point.
It is an intentional disruption. A willing disruption… not like the two experienced prior.
This is a way for me to step outside of environments where I know how to operate, where I am competent and in control, and into one where I am not. A space where progress is slower, discomfort is constant, and the outcome is not guaranteed.
Because there is something clarifying about difficulty.
It strips away excess. It exposes your habits, your thinking, your limits (and whether those limits are real or self-imposed).
This climb is not about the mountain.
It is about responding to that shift, the one that came from confronting mortality, from realising that time is not something to be assumed. It is about choosing to engage more deliberately with life, rather than moving through it by default.
It is about building the discipline to seek challenge, rather than waiting for it. To stretch outside one’s comfort zone and known path.
And perhaps most importantly, it is about refusing to live a life that quietly shrinks.
