Reading · Bear's Bulletins 📨

That is precisely why I’m sharing this CBS Sunday Morning piece—“Hail and Farewell: A tribute to those we lost in 2025”—because, to hammer home the point bear-style, nothing scrubs the nonsense off your priorities like a quiet roll call of the people who didn’t make it to next year.

📽️ Watch it here:

We spend most of our days acting like time is a subscription we can cancel later. Like we’ll “circle back” to the stuff that matters—health, love, calling, courage, craft, reconciliation, that one dream we keep negotiating with.

Then a year ends, the list of names gets read aloud, and the mind does something rare:

It stops bargaining.

Reminiscing about someone’s passing isn’t “morbid.” It’s crystal clarity. It forces a private audit:

What status games am I still playing… and why?
What achievements are still “someday”… because I’m hiding?
What relationships am I under-investing in… because I assume they’ll be there?
What am I postponing that future-me can’t actually guarantee?

A tribute like this reframes time the way a near-miss does. It compresses the timeline. It turns the volume down on the loudest distractions and turns it up on the few things that actually follow you to the end.

And that’s why I’m sharing it on December 30—right near the edge of the calendar—when people are already tempted to make big promises to “Next Year Me.” The point isn’t to feel guilty.

The point is to feel awake.

If you’re new around here: I’ve written a bunch on this theme—Time & Death—in prior Bulletins.

When you watch, notice what hits you. Not the famous names—the pattern: the ones who took their shot, the ones who made something, the ones who stood for something, the ones who loved loudly.

The tribute becomes a mirror. And mirrors don’t insult you… they just tell the truth.

“We will die. Someday or at any moment. Once we get ok with that, we can start living.” - Sean McCool
Eulogies are an interesting window into how to live. They talk about the shots someone took… not the ones they missed. Who they were… not what they signaled.
”You get one life. Make it count”. — Shane Parrish
“Having a billion dollars is great, but having a billion seconds is priceless…”
Jon Boorman (worth rereading slowly):
“When you’re young, you have so much time but never enough money… but at the end there’s only one you’ll want more of…”
Jody Sachse (a friend with the kind of perspective you don’t buy at Costco):
“We live and die in each moment… You never step in the same river twice.”
This Is How Short Life Really Is (YouTube link)

Showtime’s Time of Death (intimate, unflinching):
It follows terminally ill people facing mortality and is framed as a reminder of how finite our time is. Link.

If you watch the tribute at the top of this bulletin, reply (or comment) with one line:

👉 What did it make you want to do… while you still can?

Hail and Farewell (and the rude gift of clarity)

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