Day 1636
Successful Weekend of Actualizing With the Boys
For years, the group chat has been full of plans that sounded great until real life got in the way. Work, kids, travel, schedules, responsibilities, and the inevitable “next time.” We had talked about getting everyone together more times than I could count, but this weekend we finally stopped talking about it and made it happen.
More than anything, I’m grateful. Grateful everyone showed up. Grateful that plans we had been kicking around for years finally had a date and a place attached to them. There is something deeply satisfying about watching an idea become a calendar invite, then watching that calendar invite turn into memories you can actually point to in photos. We golfed, went shooting, played football, got out on the river, went to the Jaguars game, ate absurd amounts of food, laughed constantly, and somehow packed what felt like a month’s worth of memories into a few days.
Shooting was especially awesome. At one point there was brass hanging in the air in a photo, frozen in that tiny fraction of a second after the gun fired and you go to reload it. I kept thinking there was something fitting about that image. So much of life disappears almost as quickly as it happens. You only get those moments if you actually show up and put yourself in the position to experience them. Talking about getting the boys together is easy. Standing there together, laughing in the rain with spent brass on the ground, is something else entirely.
We also got a little two-hand touch football in, and I would be doing history a disservice if I failed to document that Q and I beat Tom and Kuba. That victory is now permanently stored in the archives. I do not care what revisionist accounts emerge in the coming years. The scoreboard in my mind is final.
Then there was the boat ride on the St. Johns with downtown Jacksonville behind us, the packed stadium concourse, the teal everywhere, and that stupidly simple joy of standing shoulder to shoulder with your friends while an entire city is buzzing around you. At another point we were out on a track under a blue sky, shirts off, football in hand, exhausted in the best possible way. It was the kind of tiredness that feels earned because you spent the day actually living instead of sitting around wishing you had done something.
I’ve been writing a lot lately about actualizing, about turning ideas into reality, staying adaptable when plans change, and refusing to let every inconvenience spike your cortisol. Those ideas can sound abstract when they live on a page. This weekend made them real. Some of our plans changed. We got rained out early while shooting and the rain killed some of what we thought we would do afterward. It did not matter. We adjusted, kept moving, and had an incredible weekend anyway.
Get Chep’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That is what actualizing looks like to me. It is not some grand philosophy or personal brand. It is putting your friends on the calendar and protecting the time. It is showing up even when showing up requires effort. It is choosing the round of golf, the range, the football game, the boat ride, the stadium, the ridiculous dinner, and the long conversations over another message saying, “We definitely need to do this sometime.” As a result I legit laughed harder than I ever have before multiple times.
God is good.
Friendship is a form of wealth that will never appear on a balance sheet. There are things money can buy and there are things it simply cannot replace. Having people you have known for years still willing to make the effort, travel, carve out the time, laugh at the same stupid jokes, compete like children, and create new memories together is one of those things. I came out of this weekend feeling richer than I went into it. Thank you to the boys for making it real! :D
9/13/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
