Time’s forward march is relentless. It doesn’t pause, negotiate, or wait for anyone. No matter who you are or what you do, the sun rises on schedule, again and again.
Most days, we’re too busy to notice. The routines of work and life create the illusion that things are stable—that what exists today will still be there tomorrow.
And then, on rare quiet mornings, we stop long enough to realize the truth: time only moves in one direction. Some things we assumed would always be there are already gone—and others will be someday too.
Sometimes these realizations arrive unexpectedly. A quiet evening. A familiar name. A search that doesn’t return what it once did. That’s what happened to me recently.
I had just passed a milestone birthday. It was a rare quiet Sunday evening. I decided to start listening to podcasts—ones I remembered from years ago. And that’s when it struck me: people I had come to appreciate are either no longer with us or have retired. The floodgates opened. Emotions charged forward. A panelist on my favorite podcast was nowhere to be heard on recent episodes. I searched. Then searched again.
The answers came quickly. Retired. No longer with us.
What about this person? What about that one? Each query carried the same quiet finality.
Eventually, the rush slowed. The questions stopped. A melancholy calm settled in. There was no undoing it now—an era I once lived inside had already passed, leaving me standing in its wake.
One-of-a-kind voices I had once valued now felt out of reach. Not just voices, but writing as well. Material I took for granted years ago now requires effort to rediscover—if it can be found at all.
Let there be no mistake: this was outstanding, deep work. These panelists and writers were gifted. Calm, thoughtful, and generous with their knowledge, they welcomed anyone willing to listen. Their voices—and their writing—mirrored that same open presence.
These panelists and authors inspired me to want to follow in their footsteps. I’ve always wanted to write to share knowledge and welcome people in—I convinced myself that I had no knowledge worth sharing.
There were voices who did this for me.
People like James E. Gray II of the Ruby Rogues podcast. His voice alone was enough to pull me into countless discussions surrounding the Ruby programming language.
Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul Randal are deeply respected Microsoft SQL Server experts who generously wrote articles and recorded videos that taught everyone from grizzled DBAs to those just learning what a database even was.
Jen Stirrup and Sean McCown of MidnightDBA are Microsoft SQL Server experts who recorded multiple video series, sharing their deep database knowledge with anyone interested in databases and their administration.
What I realized that evening wasn’t just that certain voices had grown quieter or stepped away. It was that a particular way of teaching had become rarer—a way rooted in patience, generosity, and the belief that no question was too small to ask. These weren’t just experts sharing facts; they were guides, modeling how to learn in public and how to bring others along without judgment.
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