One Question

Nearly ten years ago, I sat across from a close friend at an Italian restaurant in Toronto. The pasta was rich, the kind that settles heavy in the stomach and makes the world slow down. It was December, and the conversation had that quality of year-end honesty, where the usual boundaries soften and the real questions surface.

He asked me something I hadn't expected. "What's the one decision in your life that you're not making, right now?" Not what I should do, or what I wanted to do, but what I already knew and was avoiding knowing.

The answer came immediately. Too immediately, really. I was CEO of my tech company at the time, and there was someone senior on my team I needed to let go. I'd known it for months, maybe longer. The knowing sat in my chest like something solid and undeniable, but I kept walking around it, pretending it wasn't there.

That's what fear does. It doesn't make the truth disappear. It just makes me very good at not looking directly at it.

I can't remember what my friend said his decision was. I've tried to recall it over the years, but that part is gone. What stayed was the question itself, lodged somewhere inside me like a bookmark I never returned to.

A few nights ago, my partner and I hosted a friend over for Christmas dinner at our apartment in Lisbon. We made pasta, again that same heavy, comforting kind. The conversation drifted naturally into deeper water, the way it does when people feel safe enough to stop performing.

I heard myself ask it. The question from a decade ago, the one I'd somehow never asked myself since. "What's the one decision I'm not making, right now?"

And just like before, the answer was instant. Focus. One word, but it contained multitudes. I have projects scattered across my life like clothes I've tried on and left draped over chairs. Experiments, interests, possibilities. All of them real, all of them pulling at my attention.

But I haven't picked one. I haven't fully committed. There's something safer about keeping everything in motion, about maintaining optionality. If I never fully choose, I never fully fail.

Every decision to do something fully is also a decision not to do a dozen other things. And I've been avoiding that math.

We talked for hours, the three of us. Each person at the table had their own answer waiting, as if the question had simply given it permission to finally speak honestly. The things we're not deciding are never really secrets from ourselves. They're just truths we've agreed not to look at directly.

The next day, I was on the phone with another friend and found myself asking her the same question. Two things came up for her immediately, and as she talked through them, she remembered a different version of the same question.

She described it like this: imagine my life right now is a movie or a game show, and there's an audience watching. What would they be shouting at the screen? What would be so obvious to them that they could see was not obvious to me?

I love that reframing. It makes the question lighter, more playful, but no less penetrating. The audience can see what I cannot because they're not inside my fear. They're not tangled up in all the reasons and justifications and careful logic that keeps me stuck.

Both versions of the question get at the same thing. They're asking about the gap between knowing and acknowledging. Between the truth that lives in the body and the truth I'm willing to speak out loud.

Most of the time, when I think about fear, I think about fear of the unknown. The uncertain future, the unpredictable outcome, the what-if that spirals into anxiety. But sitting with this question again after so many years, I realize how much of my fear is actually fear of the known.

I know what I need to focus on. I know which project calls to me most strongly, which one would require my full attention and commitment. I'm not afraid I won't figure it out. I'm afraid I already have.

There's something about December that makes these questions feel necessary. Maybe it's the natural endpoint of a calendar year, or maybe it's the darkness outside that makes interior spaces feel more honest. Either way, the season seems to demand a different kind of conversation.

When my friend asked me that question ten years ago, he wasn't trying to fix me or give me advice. He was creating space for me to hear what I already knew. The question wasn't an intervention. It was an invitation to stop pretending.

That's what made asking it again, after all this time, feel so important. Not because I needed someone else's wisdom, but because I needed to practice the kind of honesty that only comes from vulnerability. The kind that admits I'm scared, that I've been avoiding something, that I don't have it all figured out.

The decisions I'm not making live in a particular kind of silence. They're not absent, exactly. They're more like a persistent hum I've learned to tune out, background noise I've decided to call normal.

But asking the question turns the volume back up. It makes the hum impossible to ignore. And once I've named it out loud, in front of people I trust, there's no unknowing it again.

I don't know yet what I'll do with the answer this time. Whether I'll choose focus, commit fully, let the other possibilities fall away. The question doesn't come with a timeline or an action plan. It just comes with clarity, which is both a gift and a burden.

What I do know is that the question itself is the practice. Asking it of myself, asking it of people I care about, creating space for those multi-hour conversations that go late into the evening. That's how I want to close out the year. Not with resolutions or goals, but with honesty.

The decisions I'm not making will still be there tomorrow. But at least now I've looked at them directly. At least now I've said their names out loud.

And that's the one question.