The People Who Choose to Be Here

I found a video the other day. I recorded it about thirteen years ago, standing in Frisco, Texas, the town I lived in at the time, talking into a camera for a series called That's How I See It. The subject was loyalty. I didn't ease into it. I opened by saying I wanted to talk about loyalty and "the fact that it doesn't exist anymore." I'd frame it differently today. But I recognized the guy making the case.

The video wandered through a world I wanted to believe in. People got a job and stayed there. They grew up in neighborhoods where the kids they knew stuck around long enough for their own kids to know each other. They used the detergent their mother used. They didn't jump every time something newer or shinier came along. My argument was simple: longevity has value, because you only reach the deeper layers of a person, a place, or a relationship by staying long enough to see them.

Then I told a story about a watch. My youngest daughter noticed I had changed watches. I hadn't even noticed it myself. The watch I put on had been a Christmas gift from someone who had since decided to end the relationship. There had been no falling out. Nothing bad had happened. The person simply decided to do something different, made the change, and never talked to me about it. Apparently it bothered me enough to build a good part of a video around it.

Here's the strange part. Watching the video thirteen years later, I couldn't remember who I was talking about. I tried to place the watch, the timing, the circumstances. Nothing came. Whoever it was mattered enough to me then. Losing them became evidence in a public argument about loyalty. Today I can't tell you their name.

My first instinct was to conclude the relationship couldn't have mattered much after all. I don't think that's right. It mattered when it mattered. The fact that I stopped carrying it doesn't erase what was real. What changed was their choice. They showed me, in their own way, keeping the relationship going wasn't important enough to them. Eventually I believed what they told me.

That's actually how I've always handled clients who leave. People ask why I don't chase them. Why not call? Why not make the case for reconsidering? My answer has stayed the same for years: they made their choice. I'm making mine about where my attention goes next.

That's not indifference. I don't think every decision to leave is a good one, and I don't erase what we built together just because it ended. It means I take someone's choice seriously enough to believe it. If a person decides another coach, another program, another direction is what they want, loyalty doesn't require me to chase them down the road and talk them out of it.

Attention is finite. So are time, energy, and care. Every hour spent trying to win someone back is an hour not given to the people still choosing to be here. That math has never made sense to me. The people in front of me made a choice too, and it deserves something in return.

One line in the old video stopped me cold. I said, "I don't give up on stuff. I've never give up on a person, and I don't claim to change now." I'd clean up the grammar today. I wouldn't touch the sentiment. I still don't want to be the kind of person who gives up on people easily. I still believe there's real value in staying long enough to get past the easy layers and into the kind of understanding that only comes with time.

What I understand better now: not giving up on someone and refusing to accept their decision are two different things. I can stay loyal to what a relationship was without demanding it remain what I want. I can believe it mattered and still recognize when the other person stopped building it. I can let someone leave without becoming the one who left.

Maybe that's why the forgotten person in the video doesn't bother me. I don't regret caring more in that moment than they apparently did. Given the choice again, I'd still rather be the one who valued the relationship until I had reason to see it differently. I don't want the possibility of someone leaving someday to talk me into holding back from the people who are here now.

And maybe that's the piece of my old argument I still believe most. The value really is in the layers, in what becomes possible when people keep showing up long enough for a relationship to turn into more than the sum of its moments. But layers require two people still building. Once one person stops showing up, there's no virtue in pretending the building continues, and I don't need to chase the people who go to prove I'm loyal.

Loyalty was never about how tightly I hold on to everyone who has ever mattered. It's about how fully I show up for the people who are still choosing to be here.