A few months ago, Chris Bertrand was asking the same question I hear every week.
“What’s next?”
After more than three decades in healthcare, he had done what so many of us spend our lives trying to do. He had built a successful career. He had served others. He and his wife had planned carefully and responsibly for the future. Retirement was no longer a distant idea. It was visible.
Like many people who find their way into Normal 40, he wasn’t trying to escape his life. He was beginning to wonder what else might still be possible within it.
Then a phone call changed everything.
Stage 4 colon cancer.
In an instant, the future he had carefully imagined disappeared and was replaced by a different set of questions. Questions none of us want to answer. Questions most of us quietly assume we will have more time to consider.
This week on the Normal 40 Podcast, Chris shares his story.
What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t the diagnosis itself. It was the clarity that followed. When something this significant enters your life, it has a way of stripping away the noise. The things that once felt urgent suddenly seem trivial. The things we postpone become impossible to ignore.
Chris talks openly about fear, uncertainty, treatment, family, and what it means to move forward when the future looks nothing like you expected it would. But underneath all of those topics is something deeper.
Perspective.
The diagnosis didn’t create new truths. It revealed old ones.
The people you love matter more than the things you own.
Time matters more than money.
The conversations you’ve been putting off are probably the ones worth having.
And the life you’re waiting to start was never promised tomorrow.
One of the themes we return to often inside Normal 40 is the idea of the Second Resume. The first resume is what the world sees: your title, accomplishments, credentials, promotions, and achievements. The second resume is built from something entirely different. It is shaped by hardship, setbacks, losses, failures, disappointments, and moments you never would have chosen for yourself.
Those experiences become the things that teach us who we really are.
Chris didn’t choose this chapter.
But he is choosing how he will live it.
Listening to him reminded me that some of the most powerful teachers aren’t the people who have everything figured out. They are the people who find themselves in circumstances they never wanted and still decide to show up with courage, honesty, and purpose.
Most of us believe we have more time.
More time to make the call.
More time to repair the relationship.
More time to prioritize our health.
More time to become the person we keep telling ourselves we want to become.
Maybe we do.
Maybe we don’t.
That’s why this conversation matters.
Not because it’s about cancer.
Because it’s about life.
And because every one of us is living on a clock we cannot see.
Listen to the episode and let’s be up to something.
—Lon
