“Can’t make it today; in the hospital” was the text I received in late January 2026.
It came from my best friend, a friendship spanning more than a quarter of a century. It wasn’t a complete surprise. My friend has been battling a chronic disease for a long time, so I took it in my stride. I went for a swim.
About an hour later, a lengthy voicemail from a mutual friend appeared on my phone.
I’ll spare you the details, but it turned out my friend was now on an operating table fighting for their life.
Needless to say, that shook my world.
The surgery was successful, and eight months later we are back to normal: me receiving a bucket load of black threes whenever we play Canasta and the two of us complaining about how Jack Bauer somehow never needs a toilet break during the 24 hours he spends saving the world.
Then came another sentence.
“I am retiring in six weeks.”
That was how my psychologist of 15 years dropped that little bombshell on me.
During those 15 years we tackled a possible future kidney donation, managing a decade-long carer role, being the end-of-life carer for my wife, and eventually the corporate burnout that fried my nervous system.
My immediate response was, “So what does continuity of care look like?”
“What do you mean?” came the reply.
Well, that got the nervous system nicely supercharged.
Then there was the 2026 World Cup final.
Spain defeated Argentina 1–0 after extra time. I was still on a high from the utterly ridiculous England–France match the day before, but what stuck with me afterwards was watching Argentina deal with coming second in the world.
Second.
We use that word strangely.
Ben Shelton: runner-up at the US Open.
Aryna Sabalenka: runner-up at the US Open.
Argentina: runner-up at the World Cup.
All extraordinary achievements, yet almost immediately the conversation turns to what they didn’t do. The points they lost. The opportunities they missed. Why they weren’t first.
Three completely unrelated events over six months got tangled together in my head and started me thinking:
Why is being second not respected in the same way as being first?
And, eventually, I came to a slightly ridiculous conclusion.
I think being second might actually be more important.
Stay with me before we start checking my medication dosages.
Because I’m not really talking about silver medals.
I’m talking about the person standing beside you.
Second is the witness.
And a witness provides something first place can never provide on its own: context.
My best friend has been in my life for more than 25 years. My psychologist has been there for 15.
Both had front-row seats to the hardest and most destructive decade of my life.
They knew me before it.
They saw me inside it.
And, importantly, they can see me coming out the other side of it.
That matters more than I realised.
When your nervous system has spent years modifying itself around danger, grief, responsibility and survival, your own assessment of how you are travelling isn’t always the most reliable instrument in the cockpit.
Some days I can look at my life and think I have failed spectacularly.
I couldn’t save my wife.
My corporate career ended in burnout.
The version of life I thought I was supposed to have disappeared somewhere along the way.
But then somebody who actually witnessed that journey says, “You’re doing well.”
That lands differently.
They aren’t reading the brochure.
They saw the wreckage.
They know what “doing well” is being measured against.
That is the extraordinary value of second.
First experiences the event.
Second witnesses it.
First knows how something felt from the inside.
Second remembers what it looked like from the outside.
And sometimes we need both versions before we can see the whole picture.
I think that was partly why those two events unsettled me so much.
When my friend was suddenly fighting for their life, I wasn’t only frightened of losing someone I loved. Somewhere underneath that fear was the possibility of losing one of the few people who remembers whole versions of me that no longer exist.
And when my psychologist announced his retirement, something similar happened.
Who holds that history now?
Who remembers the man contemplating kidney donation? The carer? The husband sitting beside a dying wife? The corporate manager desperately trying to keep functioning while his nervous system was screaming that the aircraft was no longer airworthy?
Who can look at the bloke wandering along the beach at sunrise with a coffee, playing disc golf twice a week, pottering around his garden, considering volunteering at an aviation museum and say:
“I know where you came from.”
That is witness.
And perhaps that is also why our obsession with first place gets things so wrong.
First place is usually individual.
It asks: What did I achieve?
Second introduces relationship.
Who was beside me?
Who saw it?
Who challenged me?
Who remembers?
Who can remind me of the distance travelled when I temporarily forget?
Maybe recovery isn’t about becoming number one.
Maybe life isn’t either.
Perhaps it is about collecting enough good people in the second chair that when your instruments start giving you questionable readings, someone who knows your flight history can quietly lean across and say:
“No. Look again. You’re actually doing okay.”
I still like winning.
Let’s not get carried away.
And I am reasonably confident my best friend will continue weaponising black threes against me at Canasta.
But I think I understand second place differently now.
The world celebrates the person holding the trophy.
Increasingly, I’m grateful for the people standing beside them.
Because first may get the photograph.
But second often holds the story.
And sometimes, when you’re trying to find your way home, the person who remembers your story is far more valuable than the person who finished first.
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