I've had a lot of close calls in twenty years of military service and twenty more years of life after it. But none of them had me sprinting down a pier with my heart in my throat quite like this one.

We were docked for the day, and the excursion sounded simple enough on paper: a scenic train ride, the kind of thing you put on the itinerary because the photos looked incredible. What the brochure didn't spell out — or maybe I just didn't read closely enough, because I never do — was that getting to the train meant a bus ride that crossed the border into Canada.

I didn't think twice about it until we were already loading up. That's when it hit me. My passport was still in the safe, back in our cabin, on a ship that was about to be several miles away from where I needed it to be.

Here's the thing about being fifty-plus and thinking you can still move like you're twenty: sometimes you're right. I bolted back up the gangway, got the passport, and started doing math I didn't like the answer to. Bus departure time. Border crossing. Train schedule. Return trip. All of it stacked against a ship that doesn't wait for stragglers, because ships never do.

We made the bus. We made the border. We made the train, and it was every bit as beautiful as promised — mountains doing what mountains do, water doing what water does, and me trying to enjoy it while running a countdown clock in the back of my mind the entire time.

Then it was the trip back. Same math, reversed, and now with less margin for error. I watched the ship come into view from the bus window and started counting the minutes we had left before "final boarding" stopped being a suggestion and started being a fact of life — as in, the ship leaves, and you don't.

We stepped onto that gangway with two minutes to spare.

Two minutes. Not two hours. Not even twenty. Two.

I've thought about that margin a lot since. Two minutes is nothing in the ordinary run of a day — you'd lose that much time deciding what to have for lunch. But standing on a foreign pier watching a cruise ship that holds your family, your luggage, and the rest of your vacation, two minutes is the entire distance between a great story and a genuinely bad week.

That's sort of the whole idea behind Why Not Now, if I'm honest with myself. Most of the things worth doing come with a margin like that — narrower than we'd like, tighter than feels comfortable, no guarantee it works out. You can wait for a wider window that may never show up, or you can run for the one you've got.

I've spent twenty years since retiring from the Air Force learning that lesson over and over, in bigger ways than a train excursion. Careers don't wait for the perfect moment. Neither do trips, or relationships, or the chance to finally do the thing you've been meaning to do since you were eighteen years old stationed somewhere you swore you'd go back and actually see someday.

We made it with two minutes to spare. But we made it because we ran, not because we had time to spare.

Why not now?