The Year I Stopped Planning

I don't do New Year's resolutions. Never saw the point in waiting for an arbitrary calendar flip to decide what matters. That's birthday work—February, when winter finally breaks and you can think clearly about what the next lap around the sun ought to look like.

But 2025 didn't care what I thought about planning.

January started with hope in the conventional sense. I was in a relationship with my best friend, Kim Barton. She'd already retired—was living the life most people dream about. Family, golf, friends, freedom. We were talking about me joining her in that. About what comes after decades of building other people's capacity on tennis courts. About domestic tranquility, whatever that means when you've spent 35 years operating at high intensity.

Then on January 9th, I had a stroke.

Not a massive one. Minor, they called it. But stroke is stroke—your brain stops working right for a minute, and mortality taps you on the shoulder to remind you it's standing right there. Kim sat by my side through the whole thing. Made sure I got the care I needed. That's what best friends do when the infrastructure fails.

The stroke became the nudge I apparently needed. Time to get serious about stepping off the court. Time to wrap my arms around what a more sedentary life might actually look like. Time to think about legacy in terms other than who won what tournament.

I was just beginning to see the shape of that future when everything changed.

March 4th, late afternoon. Kim was driving home from watching her grandchildren. A cap came loose from a pickup truck heading the opposite direction. Came through her windshield. Struck her in the head.

For four days I sat in a hospital and contemplated a different version of the future. One where I became a full-time caregiver for someone who could no longer care for herself. I made that commitment internally. Built the architecture in my head for what that would require. How I would restructure everything to make that work.

Then on March 8th, they removed life support. She passed quickly.

When the System Breaks

I've spent three decades teaching people how systems create capacity. How infrastructure connects what exists to where it's needed. How measurement reveals patterns invisible to subjective observation. How caring about the right things at the right time builds durable internal structures that hold up under pressure.

But no amount of systems thinking prepares you for the moment when the system is your own life and it just... stops making sense.

So I did what I've always done when confronted with things I don't understand: I started connecting dots backward.

I wrote what I called a memoir. Tried to trace the lineage—from my grandfather's quiet entrepreneurial resistance against systemic barriers, through my mother's work as the first METCO coordinator building bridges where educational systems failed, to my own decades translating between worlds that don't naturally speak the same language.

I wrote a book. Unpublished. Probably stays that way. But the writing wasn't about publication. It was about finding the through-line. About understanding what the hell any of this had been for.

And somewhere in that process of looking backward, I started to see forward again.

The Grampy Shift

My oldest daughter was due with her second child—a girl—early January 2026. Beginning of this week, I got the message: she's in labor, being admitted to the hospital.

I packed a bag. Drove from Austin to DFW.

Georgia Brooks Belyeu was born December 29th.

For the last couple nights, I've been the overnight caregiver at my daughter's apartment. My son-in-law spends time at the hospital with his wife and new daughter. I stay home with Ryder, their toddler son.

First time in the role of Grampy as primary adult. First time with the theoretical power to feed chocolate cake for breakfast. (I've resisted so far. Mostly because I know my daughter reads my essays.)

It's a strange inversion. Thirty-five years teaching other people's kids to organize their internal worlds under pressure. Now I'm the one sitting in the dark at 2 a.m. listening for sounds from Ryder's room, thinking about what gets transmitted across generations.

Not tennis. Not tactics. Not tournament strategies.

Something older. Something about how you show up when someone needs infrastructure and you're the only one available to build it.

What I'm Taking Into 2026

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. But I'm entering 2026 with something that feels like clarity:

Gratitude that I had the time with Kim I did. That she got to live that retirement life—golf and grandchildren and freedom—even if it was shorter than either of us imagined. That the extension of my own dash, bought by medical infrastructure I didn't build but benefit from, gave us those months together.

Hope, not in the greeting-card sense, but in the architectural sense. The recognition that systems can be rebuilt. That what looks like catastrophic failure from inside the moment often becomes the foundation for what comes next.

Excitement about being the patriarch of a growing family. About watching my daughters build their own versions of infrastructure. About seeing what Georgia and Ryder will inherit from all the quiet work that came before.

And a determination to use whatever time I have left to leave something behind that outlasts me.

Those plans to retire? Replaced.

Not with some dramatic pivot or reinvention. But with the recognition that the work I've spent three decades refining—helping people build the internal architecture to become who they're capable of being—can finally reach beyond the limits that have always constrained it. That matters more than comfort.

The work isn't done. Not even close.

And apparently, neither am I.

Duey Evans is a performance architect and recovering tennis coach who builds systematic approaches to human development. He writes at theperformancearchitect.com/blog and consults with families navigating the gap between potential and capacity.