I know the exact pressure it takes to crack a rib during CPR. But last Tuesday, I learned a patient’s silence can break a doctor’s soul. His name was David Chen, but on my screen, he was "Male, 82, Congestive Heart Failure, Room 402." I spent seven minutes with him that morning. Seven minutes to check his vitals, listen to the fluid in his lungs, adjust his diuretics, and type 24 required data points into his Electronic Health Record. He tried to tell me something, gesturing toward a faded photo on his nightstand. I nodded, said "we'll talk later," and moved on. There was no billing code for "talk later."

Mr. Chen died that afternoon. As a nurse quietly cleared his belongings, she handed me the photo. It was him as a young man, beaming, his arm around a woman, standing before a small grocery store with "CHEN'S MARKET" painted on the window.

The realization hit me like a physical blow.

I knew his ejection fraction and his creatinine levels. I knew his insurance provider and his allergy to penicillin. But I didn't know his wife's name or that he had built a life from nothing with his own two hands. I hadn’t treated David Chen. I had managed the decline of a failing organ system. And in the sterile efficiency of it all, I had lost a piece of myself.

The next day, I bought a small, black Moleskine notebook. It felt like an act of rebellion.My first patient was Eleanor Gable, a frail woman lost in a sea of white bedsheets, diagnosed with pneumonia. I did my exam, updated her chart, and just as I was about to leave, I paused. I turned back from the door."Mrs. Gable," I said, my voice feeling strange. "Tell me one thing about yourself that’s not in this file."

Her tired eyes widened in surprise. A faint smile touched her lips. "I was a second-grade teacher," she whispered. "The best sound in the world... is the silence that comes just after a child finally reads a sentence on their own."I wrote it down in my notebook. Eleanor Gable: Taught children how to read.I kept doing it. My little black book began to fill with ghosts of lives lived.

Frank Miller: Drove a yellow cab in New York for 40 years.

Maria Flores: Her mole recipe won the state fair in Texas, three years running.

Sam Jones: Proposed to his wife on the Kiss Cam at a Dodgers game.

Something began to change. The burnout, that heavy, gray cloak I’d been wearing for years, started to feel a little lighter. Before entering a room, I’d glance at my notebook. I wasn’t walking in to see the "acute pancreatitis in 207." I was walking in to see Frank, who probably had a million stories about the city. My patients felt it too. They'd sit up a little straighter. A light would flicker back in their eyes.

They felt seen.

The real test came with Leo. He was 22, angry, and refusing dialysis for a condition he’d brought on himself. He was a "difficult patient," a label that in hospital-speak means "we've given up." The team was frustrated.I walked into his room and sat down, leaving my tablet outside. We sat in silence for a full minute. I didn't look at his monitors. I looked at the intricate drawings covering his arms.

"Who's your artist?" I asked.

He scoffed. "Did 'em myself."

"They're good," I said. "This one... it looks like a blueprint."

For the first time, his gaze lost its hard edge. "Wanted to be an architect," he muttered, "before... all this."

We talked for twenty minutes about buildings, about lines, about creating something permanent. We didn't mention his kidneys once. When I stood up to leave, he said, so quietly I almost missed it, "Okay. We can try the dialysis tomorrow."

Later that night, I opened my Moleskine. I wrote: Leo Vance: Designs cities on paper. The system I work in is designed to document disease with thousands of data points. It logs every cough, every pill, every lab value. It tells the story of how a body breaks down. My little black book tells a different story. It tells the story of why a life mattered. We are taught to practice medicine with data, but we heal with humanity. And in a world drowning in information, a single sentence that says, "I see you," isn't just a kind gesture.It’s the most powerful medicine we have.

The story reminds me of what Captain Mike Abrashoff said after taking control of his first Navy command as captain of the USS Benfold. He spent weeks interviewing each and every one of his 310 sailors. Here is a paragraph from the book:

I started with very basic questions: their names; where they were from; their marital status. Did they have children? If so, what were their names? (In time, I came to know not only my crew’s names, but those of their spouses as well.) Then I asked about Benfold: What did they like most? Least? What would they change if they could? I tried to establish a personal relationship with each crew member. I wanted to link our goals, so that they would see my priority of improving Benfold as an opportunity for them to apply their talents and give their jobs a real purpose. My interviews included more detailed questions: Did they have special memories from high school? How about from their hometowns? I asked if they had goals for their time in the Navy; what about for the future? I always asked them why they had joined the Navy. Until this point, I never knew why people signed up. I learned by listening that 50 percent enlisted because their families could not afford to send them to college, and 30 percent joined to get away from bad situations at home—drugs, gangs, and other violence, for example. Some of their stories broke my heart.

After finishing all of the interviews Abrashoff said:

"Something happened in me as a result of those interviews. I came to respect my crew enormously. No longer were they nameless bodies at which I barked orders. I realized that they were just like me: They had hopes, dreams, loved ones, and they wanted to believe that what they were doing was important. And they wanted to be treated with respect."

The story also reminds me of a man I met on the streets of West Hills, Los Angeles.

After knee surgery two years ago (man, time passes so quickly 😵‍💫), I bought an electric buggy so I could take Juno, our Italian Mastiff, for walks. The buggy tops out at 5.5 mph — a solid trot for a big dog. I'd cruise the sidewalks with Juno on leash, periodically doling out freeze-dried liver treats to keep her dopamine juices flowing.

We packed the Buggy up and brought it to Los Angeles with us.

On one of my afternoon Buggy rides with Juno I looked up and saw a tall older Black man with long yellow-white dreadlocks coming down the sidewalk, trotting at Juno's pace. Bright orange-rimmed sunglasses. Not athletic wear — just regular pants. He was out for a run, but in no hurry. More of a trot like Juno.

I pulled over and stopped to let him pass, and as he trotted by I looked up at him and said, "Hi there, how you doin?" He gave me a big smile and said, "I could complain, but what's the point."

That moment was the start of a little relationship we developed. We started crossing paths more often while I was out on the buggy, and we started to stop briefly to say hello. Turns out his name is Randy, he is in his 70s, and he has an effusive and warm personality. Plus, I respect him a great deal — he's in his 70s and out running (trotting) on a regular basis.

I started to look forward to seeing Randy on my buggy rides. I got curious about Randy's story and the river of his life that delivered him fortuitously to the shore of my life, unbidden. He became a bright spot in my day, a small joyful part of my afternoon.

There's a term for what the doctor did when he turned back from Eleanor Gable's door. What Abrashoff did when he sat down with 310 sailors. What I do when I pull the buggy over to say hello to Randy.

Awakening cues.

I came across this concept in Daniel Coyle's new book Flourish. Awakening cues are "moments of receptive stillness that create meaning by illuminating connection." They happen when we pause, let go of our agenda, and step into the mystery of another person.

The doctor could have kept walking. I could have nodded and kept cruising past Randy. Abrashoff could have relied on org charts and performance reviews.

But something made all of us stop.

And here's the paradox Coyle describes: The more we surrender control, the more fully we connect.

The doctor surrendered his tight schedule of "seven minutes per patient." I surrendered my buggy ride agenda (which was really just "get Juno exercised and get back to work"). Abrashoff surrendered the captain's traditional distance and authority. We surrender the relentless burden of optimization to dip into being human with our fellow humans.

And in those small acts of stopping — opening the door to something we couldn't predict or control — meaning shows up.

Eleanor Gable became a person who taught children to read. Randy became a bright spot in my day. Those 310 sailors became people with hopes, dreams, and stories that broke their captain's heart.

The awakening cue isn't the outcome of the conversation. It's the pause itself. The decision to stop and sense a reverberation. To ask, "What is the world showing me now?"

We live in a world that worships efficiency, data, and forward motion. The hospital's Electronic Health Record demands 24 data points. The Navy has org charts and command structures. My afternoon has a to-do list waiting.

I came across this quote from Ryan Levesque that hit the nail on the head about this stuff:

"The best things in life don't scale."

They require us to stop. To pull over. To turn back from the door. To ask questions.

And to risk the beautiful uncertainty of what might happen next.

But the real juice in this experience for me was coming back full circle to the University of Minnesota, where my whole career and life existed at one time.

In 2012, after a three‑month stint at Hazelden for prescription or narcotic addiction (which many of you already know about), I found myself at home in one of the most profound states of life disorientation I could ever imagine.

Three months before, I'd been ordered to leave work. I went through narcotic withdrawal - one of the most hellish experiences of my life - followed by 3 months of trying to learn a new way of seeing and being in the world during my stay at Hazelden.

When I landed back home, I could still hardly walk because I needed a hip replaced, I was emotionally and physically a wreck, and I was scared to death that my family could fall apart from the mess. There was a job waiting for me, but I had been stripped of my position as program director of the general surgery program and as head of the Division of Thoracic Surgery, a division I had worked twenty years to build.

But it was way more than the loss of the titles and my positions that was so difficult. I genuinely loved working with so many of the great people in the operating rooms, the wards, and my surgical colleagues in the department, so much so that I often thought of them as my second family.

So it was no easy decision to decide to leave my career and become a househusband. It was painful as hell.

I walked outside, called the chair, and told him I had decided not to return. He wished me luck, and we hung up.

I was outside in front of our house when I made the call. When I pushed the red end call button, I stopped dead in my tracks and had to breathe to keep myself from vomiting on the sidewalk. My identity and my other "family" were gone in a flash.

So why am I telling you this story?

Because after that phone call, I no longer existed for the University. I rose from the ashes over time — retooled, learned, started speaking and writing — but the institution had moved on. That's what institutions do. And it taught me the hard truth of impermanence and dealing with the change and loss we all experience in life.

So that is why not only giving a talk to the medical students meant so much, but it meant even more because it landed, which meant it was of such value to them. Which gets me to the real story behind the hidden legacy: the Four Seasons Approach.

During the talk, I told the story of how I transformed my thoracic surgical service into a Four Seasons Hotel-like boutique service well before my world fell apart. Let me explain.

Our family went to Sharm el-Sheikh for a dive vacation in the Red Sea, one of the world's greatest dive sites. We were incredibly fortunate to stay at the Four Seasons, one of the world's greatest luxury hotel chains (they were affordable to us back then!). I was walking along the path to the dock to go scuba diving when I approached another path that intersected with mine, and I spotted an employee walking on that path toward the intersection. I hesitated to let them pass, but he stopped dead in his tracks, gave me a smile radiant with sunshine, and waited for me to pass. The thing about this, compared to other luxury hotels I have stayed in? The smile in other luxury hotels so often feels obsequious. The smiles and everything at the Four Seasons feel authentic.

For whatever reason, this blew my mind so much that I had the idea of figuring out how they did it and applying it to my thoracic surgical service. Why? Because the level of attention to that kind of detail at our hospital (and frankly, most hospitals) is abysmal. And this drove me nuts since we could often get friendlier service at a Starbucks, and that is despite the fact that you are sick or in pain!

So I did the Michael Maddaus thing and actually went to the corporate office in Toronto when I was there for a surgical meeting and tried to pound my way through to talk to someone about how they did it. They, in essence, told me to fuck off as they did not share their secrets with any yahoo off the streets.

But as my wife Lea said, "nothing ever stops you," so I started calling and eventually got a wonderful woman on the phone who was willing to listen to what I wanted to do, and she finally agreed to give me the three principles upon which they operate:

1. "Get the Standards Right" - a book of over 350 specific behaviors and ways of dealing with guests, like the experience I had with the intersection.
2. "What About Me?" - understand who the guest is, why they are traveling, whether their stay is for work or pleasure, and whether they have any special needs.
3. "Wow Me If You Can" - Nuff said.

This was a game-changer for my thoracic surgical service. I constructed four areas to focus on, and here are the processes for each that I created:

1. Rounds: We all gathered together outside the patient's door, and instead of everyone filtering in sporadically and chaotically, we entered together in unison with our group energy directed to the patient. One resident or APP would man the computer, get set up with the x-rays and EMR, and then turn their eyes and attention back to the patient. All other residents would stand facing the patient, with all pagers set to vibrate at the start of rounds. No one was allowed to exit the room except in an emergency. I would sit on the edge of the bed next to the patient, and the chief or other resident would give a summary, and then we would give the patient as much time as needed to hear them and answer questions.
2. Same setup for clinic. We entered in unison with all pagers on vibrate. I then introduced myself and all the residents and APPs in the room. If family members were present, I would personally go down the line, shake everyone's hand, look them in the eyes, and introduce myself. I sat in the chair in front of the computer and, after setting up the x-rays and EMR, turned my body and eyes to the patient while all other eyes were focused on the patient and the family.
3. During the day, when patients had a significant test or investigation, I would have the resident give the patient the preliminary result (unless it would require a major discussion involving me) so they would not sit there wondering and getting anxious.
4. I randomly interviewed patients and their family members about how well each resident did in providing service and caring, and gave the residents their feedback.

This Four Seasons program led to massive word of mouth, which facilitated the growth of our clinical practice at a hospital that was shunned by many in the community due to the perception of the hospital having poor service and because of the complexity, frequent lack of coordination, and seamless care at academic hospitals at that time.

Well, after I finished the talk, a massive number of clapping hands, each with the name of the person clapping, floated from top to bottom. The chat filled up with incredible feedback. They want to make it a permanent part of the curriculum. All great stuff.

But for me, personally, the real joy and meaning came from a medical student who stayed on with the course director after all the other students had signed off. Turns out he has just finished his PhD in physiology and is going into vascular surgery, and his mentor is none other than:

Derrick was a resident in the program when I was the program director, and he is now on faculty at the University. Derrick is a level 10 human being and surgeon. A total class act. And he has a fabulous sense of humor.

The medical student who Derrick is mentoring stayed on Zoom to tell me a story about Derrick that happened when he was on Derrick's service.

Turns out Derrick uses the Four Seasons patient experience approach I cobbled together, and he told the medical student about it and how I sparked its development.

Now that FELT FUCKING FANTASTIC. Twenty years later, and a small slice of what I did and created lives on in the lives of a surgeon and the residents and medical students he encounters, and it benefits the patients and their families.

For me that is better than a plaque or my name on the door of a conference room or a retirement party. It is a hidden legacy.

Twenty years later, Derrick Green is running his service with this approach. Teaching it. Telling residents and students where it came from. And those residents will carry it into their own practices, and their trainees after them.

Turns out there is science behind this hidden legacy stuff.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that a single act of generosity cascades up to three degrees of separation — reaching people the original actor has never met. Each generous act was ultimately tripled as it rippled outward through the network. In medical education, researchers call this the "hidden curriculum" — the reality that what trainees learn from watching how an attending is with patients is stickier and more durable than anything taught in a lecture hall.

Within any team or organization, this means our behaviors are contagious. They spread from person to person — even to people who never met the one who started it. Up to three degrees of separation and beyond.

The converse is true too: shitty behavior infects others around us, and spreads like an infection.

I didn't know any of that when I was sitting on the edge of a patient's bed or shaking a family member's hand. I wasn't thinking about legacy. I was thinking about doing the work in front of me as well as I possibly could.

And that's the point.

Your hidden legacy isn't something you plan. It's not something you engineer or brand or put your name on. It's the way you show up — day after day, in the small moments no one is tracking — that gets absorbed by the people around you and carried forward into lives you'll never see.

You can't engineer a hidden legacy. But you can choose how you show up — at work, and at home. The legacy will take care of itself.

The ancient Greek statesman Pericles said: "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others."

You have a hidden legacy too. What do you think it might be?

In a fluke encounter, I came across a fascinating book entitled Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klass, and this quote from the encapsulates the essence of the book:

"The tapestry of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you’ll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry.

Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Below are three great stories taken directly from the book (in italics) to highlight the power of this "magical thread."

Story 1.

"On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan, and checked into room number 56 at the nearby Miyako Hotel. Once settled, they strolled through the former imperial capital, soaking up the city’s autumnal explosion of color, as the Japanese maples turned crimson and the ginkgo trees burst into a golden shade of yellow, their trunks rising above a bed of lush green moss. They visited Kyoto’s pristine gardens, tucked into the mudstone hills that frame the city. They marveled at its historic temples, the rich heritage of a bygone shogunate embedded in each timber. Six days later, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson packed up, paid their bill, and left.

Nineteen years later, far from the Japanese maples, in the sagebrush-dotted hills of New Mexico, an unlikely group of physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y. It was May 10, 1945, three days after the Nazis had surrendered. The focus now shifted to the Pacific, where a bloody war of attrition seemed to have no end in sight. However, in this remote outpost of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: a new weapon of unimaginable destruction that they called the Gadget (the first nuclear bomb).

No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone at Site Y sensed they were getting close. In preparation, thirteen men were asked to join the Target Committee, an elite group that would decide how to introduce the Gadget to the world. Which city should be destroyed? They agreed targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they agreed on a target. The first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Kyoto was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was also an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history—and that the war had already been lost. The Target Committee agreed: Kyoto must be destroyed.

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. All they needed to do was wait for the bomb to be ready.

On August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima, dropped from the Enola Gay. As many as 140,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. Three days later, on August 9, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki—a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing bombing target—destroyed? Remarkably, the lives of roughly two hundred thousand people teetered between life and death because of a tourist couple and a cloud.

By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. As a man without a uniform, Stimson felt it was his job to develop strategic goals, not to micromanage generals on how best to achieve them. But that all changed when the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction.

Stimson sprang into action. In a meeting with the head of the Manhattan Project, Stimson put his foot down: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” In a discussion with the commander of the U.S. armed forces, Stimson insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. It ticked all the boxes, the generals insisted. It needed to be bombed. Why, they wondered, was Stimson hell-bent on protecting a nerve center of the Japanese war machine?

The generals didn’t know about the Miyako Hotel, the majestic Japanese maples, or the golden ginkgo trees.

Stimson, unwavering, went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented. Kyoto was taken out of consideration."

A chance tourist visit to Kyoto by a couple 19 years earlier who became smitten with the city and the Hotel Miyako ended up sparing the people of Kyoto but killing 80,000 others in Nagasaki.

Story 2.

On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.

The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.

When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.

That's right, the great-grandfather of the author of this book, Paul, was the guy who found his wife and kids dead. No murders, no Paul, no book, no newsletter post about the book being written in this moment.

Story 3.

In the summer of 2022, a routine tragedy took place off the coast of Greece. A tourist named Ivan from North Macedonia was swept out to sea. His friends rushed to alert the coast guard, but the searches came up empty. Ivan was declared lost at sea, presumed dead. Then, eighteen hours later, Ivan was found. Miraculously, he was alive. It seemed impossible. But just before he slipped below the waves to drown, Ivan had spotted a small soccer ball, floating on the surface in the distance. He swam over to it with his last ounce of strength. He clung to it through the night and was rescued. The ball saved his life.

When Ivan’s tale of survival made the Greek news, a mother of two boys reacted with shock. She recognized the ball Ivan was holding. Her two boys were playing with that exact ball ten days earlier when one of them accidentally kicked it into the sea. The ball had bobbed across the waves for eighty miles, until it converged with a drowning swimmer at precisely the right moment. The boys had thought little of the lost ball. They shrugged and bought a new one. Only later did they realize that without their accidental kick, Ivan would now be dead.

We forever surf on the ripples of others. Off the coast of Greece, Ivan experienced that truth quite literally.

Which brings me to the title of this piece: Fortuitous Concatenations. Fortuitous means happening by chance, coincidence, or accidentally. Concatenation means a series of things that depend on each other as if linked together. So Fortuitous Concatenations are a series of linked chance happenings.

Fortuitous Concatenation is a phrase I came up with when I was contemplating the improbability of my having surfaced from such a trying past as a juvenile delinquent to become so "successful" as a thoracic surgeon. As a young man I happened to walk by a furniture store that needed a delivery driver. I happened to get the job. I happened to deliver furniture to a pediatric surgeon named Stacy Roback, who happened to see something in me and take me under his wing. I happened to be just hanging out with him one Saturday, and he, off the cuff, suggested that I take a vocational interest test to see what career I should pursue, and I happened to find the idea motivating and took it, and it happened to tell me that my strongest bet was to be a physician, and on and on and on.

It is all just happening. Now I don't believe in some power engineering all of these happenings, and I am fine with people who attribute these happenings to God or a divine force, since who am I to deny the existence of such things?

Whether you believe in an engineered situation or the notion of all of this just happening in a random but deeply interconnected way, it's all a crazy ass miracle (or crazy ass happening!) that gives me pause and fills me with gratitude nearly every day, and not just on Thanksgiving, because the quote from Lewis Thomas is true.

I am walking around on planet earth because of a flash of a moment in time when the one egg in my mother's ovary that was "half of me" met up with the one sperm from my father on that one day they fooled around. If they had delayed their festivities by even seconds, I would likely not be here.

To carry this even further, imagine all of the events and things that have happened in the world and to others by virtue of that moment between my mother and father. My kids, the patients I have taken care of and operated on, the residents I have trained and influenced. The reverberations are incredible.

Here is a weird thought from Richard Dawkins:

We are lucky because we get to die, since our mere existence is a result of innumerable small, contingent details (Fortuitous Concatenations), ad infinitum.

Now that is something to be grateful for.

Now I can go to the pearly gates confident in believing what my wife Lea said to me recently: "Your slate is clear," meaning my connection with my kids is free of our past and any resentments. Not sure this will help me at the Pearly Gates, but as Doris Day sang: "Que será, será, whatever will be will be."

Here is the article reproduced verbatim in italics, along with a PDF of the article. The bold highlights are mine because they absolutely reflect my lived experience: steady, available, undemanding presence, wait without pushing.

After losing custody of my son, I fought to prove my love to him. That was a mistake.

By Kate Gilgan

Nov. 21, 2025

I don’t remember the court date. I don’t remember the notices in the mail, the missed phone calls, the messages from lawyers or much about the week before. What I do remember is the sheriff standing in the doorway and my sweet son watching from the bottom step of the staircase behind me.

The real wound isn’t what happened that day. It’s everything I cannot remember.

Who forgets the day they lost custody of their child? What kind of mother forgets that? A drunk one.

My son was 6 when I missed the hearing that, in my absence, ended with custody being awarded to his father. That morning, I hadn’t even known I was supposed to be in court. I was too far gone in the drinking by then — in denial, in crisis, in deep — to register the significance of what I had missed.

We were at our home in Kamloops, British Columbia, when the sheriff arrived — me, hungover and foggy; my son, still in pajamas at 2 p.m., watching a movie. The man stood in the doorway holding official documents that confirmed what I hadn’t yet understood: I had already lost him.

I didn’t argue. What was there to say?

The sheriff handed me the order. I was no longer legally allowed to keep my son. And just like that, he was leaving. I knew I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t try. I stood frozen, too late, too ashamed, too undone, while my son looked back at me — confused, scared, silent.

He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew something had broken. And I was the one who had let it break.

The custody ruling deemed me unfit. But that look on my son’s face — it showed something far worse — the moment a child begins to understand that his mother isn’t protecting him. Not from the system. Not from herself. That is the moment I wish I could forget but never will.

I didn’t fight for him then. I couldn’t. I wasn’t even standing on solid ground. But I would later. For years.

Alcoholism had lived in the background of both sides of my family, but I’d always thought I was insulated. I was college-educated, competent, ambitious. I was the snack parent at soccer games. I made homemade muffins. I read “Franklin the Turtle” books at bedtime.

I didn’t know I had this slippery, unmerciful disorder living inside me, and that the emotional turmoil of my marriage’s demise would release it.

At first, it was a glass of wine at bedtime. Then two. Three. Then bottle after bottle. Soon frequent blackouts, waking up not knowing how badly I had failed the day before.

By the time my son was 9, I was sober, barely. I had a few months of recovery behind me and a flicker of hope in front. I was living in a rented basement suite, broke and trying to claw my way through a legal process I didn’t fully understand.

We had supervised visits every other weekend in neutral living rooms with wornout furniture, at parks with forlorn green spaces that seemed to mimic the vast divide he and I shared and at playgrounds too cheerful for what we were carrying.

He would walk in like a stranger, polite, guarded, scanning for clues about who I had become. He didn’t remember the mother who baked muffins or read “Franklin the Turtle.” He remembered the chaos, the missed dinners, the mornings I wasn’t quite there.

Later, when we no longer needed a supervisor present, something I once claimed as a legal victory, the visits still felt stiff, fragile. Our first hour was always cautious, the second more relaxed. But by hour three or four, his anxiety would return, an unease about letting his guard down too much. We couldn’t laugh too hard or get too close. We spent so much time trying to remember who we were to each other that we barely got to simply exist together.

By then I was fully sober but trying too hard. I smiled too big. Overexplained. Looked at him like I was begging him to see how much I loved him. But love that comes with an apology in every glance is a heavy thing to hand a child.

The real unraveling came quietly, in slow motion.

He grew more distant. His smile faded quickly. Every affectionate moment seemed to cost him something when we parted. And eventually, the cost got too high.

He stopped answering my calls. Stopped smiling. Stopped looking back. And I couldn’t steer him away from his own self-protective impulses.

I had placed all my hope in the courts. Like so many parents, I believed that if I told the truth and followed the rules, the system would help make it right.

But family court isn’t built for repair. It names winners and losers. And when one parent wins, the child always loses something.

I thought the fight was how I proved I loved him. But fighting didn’t bring him back. It only pushed him further away.

And then, one day when he was 12, he said it: “I don’t love you. I never want to see you again.”

Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.

That’s when I stopped fighting.

I didn’t give up. I shifted.

I stopped thinking love was something I had to prove with court documents and supervised visits and legal bills. I stopped chasing every possible way to make him see I had changed. I started focusing on actually changing.

I stayed sober.

I stayed steady.

I stayed available.

I learned not to fill the silence with explanations or apologies. I stopped trying to fix things and started showing up in quiet, invisible ways. And over time, the texture of our contact began to shift.

We still had the occasional visit, the birthday phone call, the expected check-ins that had always felt slightly choreographed. But now, something else started to surface. Subtly. Slowly.

After graduating from high school, he ventured out into the world for the first time, and maybe that allowed him to change how he saw me, and to realize he had carried a longing. A quiet ache that had never gone away.

And somehow, he began to recognize the thing I had been offering in that crucial shift: my undemanding presence. My gentle persistence. My willingness to wait, without pushing.

Then one day, he called. Not for a holiday or obligation. He called just to talk.

Then he called again, to tell me something small about his day. Something no one had asked him to share. But he offered it freely.

And I knew, in that moment, I had become someone he could trust again.

Not because I had fought harder. But because I had stopped fighting.

By then, both our lives had changed. I was remarried. I had two younger children, his half-siblings, who had known his name since they were old enough to speak, had asked about him often and saw him maybe once a year as they all grew up, apart. When they would ask about him, I would answer gently, without an agenda.

And when he did come back, it wasn’t to reclaim something lost or to pretend nothing had broken. He didn’t return to a house or a schedule or a version of me preserved in memory. He returned to the mother I had become, one who had carried the truth of our story and did not try to rewrite it. He came back not to begin again but to begin anew — as two people shaped by distance, grief and love that had endured underneath it all. We didn’t start over. We started forward, with what was left and what we were willing to build.

That was four years ago.

Love, especially maternal love, is rarely found in court documents or weekend visitation schedules. It’s found in the quiet choice to stay steady, to heal without needing to be seen, to love without demanding love in return.

The legal system can draw boundaries, but it cannot rebuild trust. It cannot parent. It cannot undo estrangement. It cannot hold a child’s heartbreak the way a mother must eventually learn to — patiently, silently, over time.

That work is ours.

And what I learned is this: You don’t win a child back by proving you’re right. You earn your way back by becoming someone safe and steady who they might want to return to when the noise finally quiets.

He didn’t come back because I won. He came back because I made room, and kept it warm, until he was ready.

Kate Gilgan is a writer in Glenavon, Saskatchewan.

Is AI rotting your brain? Maybe. But it might depend on how you’re using it.

A few months ago, MIT released a study that produced some pretty alarming headlines—“AI’s great brain-rot experiment,” for example. This week, I finally got around to actually reading this scientific paper, and while it is indeed concerning, there is a very important nuance that escaped the headlines.

Let me start by describing what the researchers had people do in the first part of the study, and what they found:

Students wrote timed essays based on different SAT-style prompts, like “Does true loyalty require unconditional support?” or “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” But the students were split up into three different essay-writing groups, each with different conditions.

Some of the students were afforded only their brains, while others were allowed to search Google (with the AI disabled), and still others could use ChatGPT (but not Google). Every student wrote three essays—across three separate sessions—with a different essay prompt each time. While they were working, researchers recorded the electrical activity of their brains, basically to see how strongly different brain areas were talking to one another. The researchers also interviewed the students after each essay, asking them to recount information from what they wrote. Finally, both an AI judge and real-life teachers graded the essays.

There was bad news for the ChatGPT group, and also worse news for the ChatGPT group. The bad news was that their essays were more similar to one another—even using common phrasing and examples—and they were worse than those of the brain-only group, according to judges (who were unaware which group produced a given essay). But these are students, so who cares how good their essays are if they’re learning, right?

The worse news for team ChatGPT was that the students in that group—unlike those in the other two groups—couldn’t produce a single accurate quote from their own writing when interviewed by the researchers. And as for the measurements of brain activity, the “brain-only” group showed the strongest connectivity between brain regions, followed by the Google-search group, with the ChatGPT group bringing up the rear—precisely what you’d expect if the heavy cognitive lifting was outsourced to the tool.

So that’s not good. Fancy neurological measurements aside, the fact that the essay writers using ChatGPT could not remember the work they had just completed seems like a pretty good indication that they were not learning.

For students, in most cases the point of essay writing is not to write the most polished essay in the history of humanity, but to learn how to organize their thinking, synthesize ideas, and communicate effectively. The point is the act of writing, not the final product.

In cognitive psychology, there is something known as “desirable difficulties.” These are obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and sometimes more frustrating in the short-term, but deeper in the long-term. One example of a desirable difficulty involves what is known as the “generation effect.” Simply: forcing yourself to come up with an answer to something before having one given to you primes your brain for subsequent learning. (Chapter four of Range—”Learning, Fast and Slow”—is all about desirable difficulties.) It would seem that, for these essay-writers, ChatGPT was the precise opposite of a desirable difficulty. It allowed the essay writers to give answers before doing their own thinking. Let’s call it an “undesirable ease.” (Please submit better coinage in the comments below!)

All that said, there is hope embedded lower down in this paper.

After the three initial essay sessions, a subset of the students returned for a fourth round. This time, the students who had been using ChatGPT were told they now had to write without any tools at all. And the students who had previously been writing with just their own brains were allowed to use ChatGPT.

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The returning students were asked to pick from essay prompts they’d seen before and to write another timed essay. To reiterate: this wasn’t a brand-new topic; it was one they had written about previously. The question was: What happens if you add AI after people have already done some unaided thinking, versus taking it away from people who’ve been leaning on it from the start?

The results split in a really revealing way. The former “brain-only” students actually did quite well with ChatGPT. Their new essays, on topics they’d already wrestled with on their own, were judged mostly above average across all the groups. Their content was better structured than in their earlier, brain-only essays, and they used ChatGPT more for information seeking rather than for spitting out answers to copy.

The measures of brain activity also showed more connectivity between brain regions among the students who went brain→ChatGPT compared to the students who went ChatGPT→brain. The brain-first group also remembered what they had written, unlike the ChatGPT-first group. The group that started with ChatGPT before turning to their own brains struggled to recount what they’d written previously, and wrote about a less diverse set of ideas and less unique phrasing even when AI was taken away. It was as if they were stuck in the furrow AI had plowed for them, even when it went away.

The authors of the study argue that early, heavy reliance on the AI seemed to have encouraged “shallow encoding”: The work got done, but it didn’t get deeply integrated into memory. They also use the term “cognitive debt”: If you repeatedly lean on ChatGPT upfront, you defer effort now but pay later, with weaker critical thinking, poorer recall, and more superficial engagement with ideas.

I think it’s worth noting that this was one study—and a “preprint” at that, which means it hasn’t gone through peer review yet. But it generated a boatload of news articles, so I think it’s worth commenting upon. I think it also fits conceptually with other work on undesirable ease in learning and how that impacts the brain. More on that in another post soon. For now, my takeaway is clear: brain first, ChatGPT only after.

Here is the original article.

Consistency

Positivity

Vulnerability.

Or, put more operationally: make time to be together, share enjoyment, and have honest emotional exchanges.

Remember, you need to make it psychologically safe for the other person to want to be vulnerable. Avoid judging, advising, or one-upping.

As I wrote yesterday: if you are feeling disconnected from someone, and want to improve the connection, make the time, find things to talk about or to do that you will enjoy together, and talk about shit that matters.

I hope you all have a great weekend!

The truth of John Wooden's quote is true not just for building a winning basketball team, but for nearly everything in life, including our relationships. By noticing the little things about a loved one, not the little things we don't like or that we think are wrong, but the little things we like or that strike us, because the accretion of little things noticed over time will build a mountain of connection and trust.

But, you have to do the noticing, of the little things, again and again. It's like dollar cost averaging. A little deposit regularly builds relationship wealth.

Here is Sahil's post reproduced entirely:

You're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.

In 2021, that simple statement, which later became the opening line of my book, changed my life.

My wife and I were living in California at the time, 3,000 miles away from our parents. I had been there for 12 years––a college baseball scholarship had brought me out West, and then a lucrative job opportunity had kept me there.

In a lot of ways, that felt fine.

Growing up, if you're fortunate enough to have healthy parents, your default assumption is that they're immortal. Obviously, you know they're not, but the idea of mortality becomes a conceptual or intellectual one, not a visceral reality you've really contemplated.

As you get older, you realize: The answers you seek in life are found in the questions you avoid.

When I was confronted with that simple math––of the number of moments I had remaining with my parents––it forced me to confront one of those questions I had been avoiding.

What were my real priorities? And were my actions aligned with those priorities?

You see, there are two types of priorities in life:

1. The priorities we say we have; and
2. The priorities our actions show we have.

And often there's a big gap between the two. I know. I was living it.

Your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap. But you can't close it until you acknowledge that it exists in the first place.

I saw the gap and knew that if something didn't change, we were going to end up with a life we never wanted.

So, within 45 days, my wife and I took a dramatic action. We uprooted our life in California and moved back East with the goal of living within driving distance of both sets of parents and my sister, who were all in Boston.

My wife's job agreed to move her to the NYC office––and with my decision to take a leap of faith into pursuing writing and entrepreneurship, the suburbs outside the city seemed like a good interim landing spot.

It wasn't perfect––around three hours from Boston––but we made it work.

We were blessed with our son, Roman, in 2022. My wife took a step back from her career to focus on being a mom. My new path was bringing me energy and opportunities I never imagined. And we were spending time with our parents multiple times per month, albeit with someone driving a long way to do so.

For the first time in over a decade, life felt like it was in flow.

But somewhere along the way, that changed...

When you're young, you grow accustomed to focusing on the big things in life. The celebrations. The birthdays. The weddings. The events. The weekend escapes.

One way I think about this youthful mindset is that the meaning you derive from any given activity is effectively proportional to the scale of your investment in it.

I noticed that every single time we were seeing our families, it had, by virtue of the long drive investment required, been for something big. We couldn't casually get together on a Tuesday evening for a walk, so we got together for the birthdays, the long weekends, the anniversaries, and the holidays instead.

And we slowly, silently, slipped into a life focused on the big.

Author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote:

 "Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things."

I think the first time I really noticed it was this spring. My parents decided to drop by our house on their way home from a weekend visiting their dear friends in the area.

It was one of those perfect spring evenings. The smell. The sounds. Everything.

I had cooked dinner for all of us. Laughter and conversation flowed.

When dinner ended, I found myself sitting alone, sipping a glass of wine, watching as my son chased my parents around the backyard.

The joy on his face only surpassed by the beaming smiles on theirs.

In that moment, I had a realization:

This was it. It wasn't big or glamorous.

It was a little thing that meant everything. 

A few weeks later, we drove to Boston for my wife's grandmother's funeral. After the service, we loaded ourselves back into the car for the three hour drive home.

There's something about death that brings extraordinary clarity to life. In that moment, my wife and I locked eyes and uttered the same striking thought:

We should move to Boston.

To be there for the big, but more importantly, for the little.

I want to be able to go for a walk with my dad to get his thoughts on a challenge I'm facing. I want to be able to take my sister out for a coffee. I want to be able to grab lunch on a Tuesday with my mom, just because. I want to be able to see my son play dinosaurs with all of his grandparents on a Wednesday morning.

None of that is big. But that's ok. Because the real texture of life, the real meaning of life, is found in the little.

We live in an era where authenticity is at an all time low. Many of the people we see talking about a thing don't actually live by it. I refuse to be a part of that trend. If I'm going to talk about it, I'm going to be about it. I want you to be able to trust that I live by the words I write and speak.

So, this week, just a few short months later, we did it. We packed our life into two moving trucks, sold our house, and hit the road for the drive to Boston, one last time.

After 20 years of being spread out across the country––of being forced into a focus on the big––my entire family is going to live in the same area again.

A new adventure. A whole new world. Little things that become big things.

I'll end with a quick story...

A few weeks ago, I drove my son to run an errand at the grocery store before heading to my in-laws' house for dinner.

He asked where we were going. I said, "Home."

He looked at me, confused, "Why do you call it home? That's not home, that's Mimi's house."

My response:

"Home is wherever there are people you love."

He smiled, satisfied, and just said, "Oh!"

So, here's the truth:

We're moving home. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Sorry the audio on this clip of Will Ferrell is not great - a screen recording from instagram.

I hope your weekend is a joyful one!

My wife Lea and I have been in Italy for the last two weeks. We have been to Italy many times in the past and our usual trip involves Florence or the country area around Florence. We love the history and beauty of Tuscany.

This time we decided to see parts of northern Italy and we drove from Florence to Piemonte, then to Monselice, and on to Mantova and Bologna. We were tourists poking around and it was a spectacular trip, especially the smaller city of Mantova (cannot recommend visiting Mantova highly enough).

Bologna was a huge surprise to us. The centro (the old part of the city in the center) is an incredibly busy and active place teaming with young people. We could not believe the number of people everywhere and how alive the place felt. In addition the architecture of the centro is so unique with all the streets lined with "portici" which are walkways like this that cover 38km of the center:

The other stunning thing about Bologna and the portici is the graffiti. It is everywhere, and honestly the amount of it was disappointing to us. However, the reason I am telling you about the portici of Bologna and its relentless graffiti is because I came across the above quote written on one of the columns:

I was struck by the quote and snapped the photo, and today I looked up the origin of the quote - the line comes from the character Mitya Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel The Brothers Karamazov who utters it in a moment of despair mixed with hope. The phrase embodies the experience of Dostoevsky in Russia during that era: immersed in the shadows of Russian existential gloom, yet in dark times, brightness doesn’t vanish—it’s revealed.

I have experienced this on many occasions in my life when in the moment things can seem so dark and oppressive, yet the darkness has a way of clearing out the mental closet so you can finally see what is in there that is most important to you.

When I went to Hazelden my life closet was overflowing with years of accumulated activities and junk that needed clearing out so I could see what was most valuable and meaningful to me. For me, it took getting to a dark, dark night so I could actually start to see the stars in my existence and what was most important to me.

If you find yourself in a dark space, try to look up from the forest of your life and find the stars in your life and universe. Not easy, but so worth the effort.

How?

Having learned the remarkable power of gratitude in my life and the clear and powerful physiology behind its power, I have (since waking up in 2012) practiced being grateful by doing my best to keep my perspective in the right lane and by doing my best (some days better than others) to have a daily gratitude practice.

The power of Kenyon's phrase "it might have been otherwise" is beautifully highlighted in her poem by recounting the simple, ordinary pleasures of her life that could have been otherwise.

OTHERWISE
by Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

The phrase "it might have been otherwise" has transformed my moment to moment practice of gratitude in two ways:

First, by calling to mind the phrase "it might have been otherwise" during those ordinary but precious moments of our lives, it serves as a brief forcing function that brings our mind into a moment of presence and gratitude for the ordinary moments we all experience, but so often get lost in the torrent of our relentless busyness.

Second, if I start to whine or complain about some inconvenience or issue, it once again serves as a forcing function to immediately relieve me of my self-pity. For example, some of you may recall my bout of surgery on my knee a bit over a year ago. A preoperative nerve block damaged the nerve, leaving the bottom of my left foot dead numb, the medial aspect of my left calf weak and smaller than the right, and my toes prone to spontaneous bouts of spasms.

This can be very frustrating, and occasionally I feel irritated and sorry for myself as it has impaired my previous lifestyle.

But whenever I start to enter the trance of self-absorption and self-pity, I now spontaneously think of "it could have been otherwise," because it could have been otherwise! I can still walk my girl Juno as far as I want, I can go to the gym and struggle through a leg workout, and I don't have a knee replacement.

The phrase "it could have been otherwise" serves as a powerful psychocatalytic knockout punch to the poor me always lurking in the background of our minds.

It is reprinted verbatim below.

Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you these are dark, unsettling, apocalyptic times. Almost everyone in my British and American social circles seems rattled by the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the ensuing crackdown on expression in the US, and/or by the resurgence of nativism and anti-migrant feeling in the UK, all of it unfolding on top of ongoing horrors in Gaza, climate instability, and the possibility that artificial intelligence might kill us all.

There’s an unmoored sense of anxiety, a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis – the feeling that there’s little to be done about any of this, yet that it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else instead. Even people with a talent for shutting out the headlines seem troubled by a sense of reality crowding in on them, or maybe pulling the rug from beneath them, making it harder than ever to pursue the projects and relationships that add up to a rich and absorbing life.

I trust you won’t be shocked to learn that I don’t have a conclusive answer for dealing with any of this. But there’s an image I find surprisingly liberating – actively useful and perspective-shifting, I mean, not merely consoling – that’s worth unpacking here. It’s the idea of seeing the actions you take from hour to hour, through the day, as a matter of threading beads onto a string, as if you were making a necklace.

This comes from Paul Loomans, a Zen monk who mentions it in his excellent book Time Surfing (which I’ve praised here before, and which was recently re-released in English as I’ve Got Time). “If you look at the day’s activities as a string of beads,” Loomans writes, “you will see it’s made up of all different kinds: large, weighty beads and small, carefully painted ones; eye-catching multicoloured ones and unassuming, softly coloured ones.” Your morning shower is a bead; so is a client meeting, or writing a couple of paragraphs; so is playing with your kids or making dinner. And “when viewed from the broad perspective of time, all beads are equally important. They’re all pieces of our lives.”

I’m aware this all might sound a bit mundane, so let me explain the three reasons I think it’s so powerful, at a moment in history like this one:

The first relates to how much of our anxiety arises from engaging with world events at the wrong level, so to speak, a phenomenon I’ve previously labelled “living inside the news.” For a variety of reasons, including how online media works, we tend to think of what we’re up against at the abstract level of social forces and global trends, “authoritarianism” or “the rise of racism” or “the Trump administration” and so on. But these aren’t things any one person can actually ever do anything about. (We sometimes fall into a similar trap in the personal realm: ideas like “the state of my relationship” or “starting a business” are likewise too abstract for concrete action.) The result is an antsy, frustrated and disembodied way of being that somehow never quite makes contact with reality.

By contrast, when you’re contemplating which bead to add next to your metaphorical string, you’re inevitably in the world of things that can genuinely be done, things that are in your gift to do. You might choose something directly connected to world events: volunteering your time, giving money, making your voice heard, or even something big, like planning a run for office. Or you might not — because the kids’ packed lunches need making; or because writing your novel is also important to you; or because you have a plan to meet a friend for coffee, and things like friends meeting for coffee is a fundamental component of how the world should be. The point is that whatever you do, you’ll be acting in the world you can affect, not the entirely conceptual one that leaves you only anxious and frustrated.

A second helpful aspect of the idea of threading beads, as Loomans explains, is that it conveys the sense that all the beads matter equally. This means that the one you’re threading right now can receive your full care and attention: for the time being, it’s the only thing that matters. That makes it easier not to be jostled by thoughts of all the other things you could or should be doing with any given portion of time. And it’s a reminder that the big, impressive beads aren’t any more constitutive of the necklace than the unassuming ones. Doing the laundry, fighting authoritarianism, getting creative work done, spending time with your children, taking a hot bath: it makes little sense to deem any of these definitively “more important” than any of the others. They can all belong in a life. It’s just that right now, you’re doing one of them; at some other time, you’ll be doing something else.

Which brings me to the final point: adding a bead to a string is something that can only happen here and now — so the image helps me let go of the future, and the anxiety that attends it. It can be striking to realise that anxiety, whether about the news or anything else, is never about what’s happening now, only about what it might result in later. (Terrible things are happening now too, of course, but they’re a cause for anger, sadness or helplessness, not anxiety.) Seen this way, worry is the activity of a mind repeatedly trying to obtain reassurance that the worst-case scenario won’t occur – but failing, over and over, for the simple reason that the future hasn’t happened yet, while we finite humans are confined to the present. It’s simply not within our power to feel certainty about what’s coming later.

What is within our power is to thread beads, one after the other, and gradually to develop the internal trust that we’ll be able to thread the beads that need adding in the future, too. (The opposite of anxiety, I’ve seen it said, isn’t calm, but trust in your capacity to handle what happens later on.) All you need to do, to paraphrase Carl Jung and also Anna from Frozen, is the next right thing. Indeed, when you think about it, that’s the only thing you ever could do: select the next bead and add it to the string, then choose and add the next, and the next, through apocalyptic times and happier ones, for as many years as you’re lucky to get to do it.

I find this thought calming – but not just calming. Energising and empowering, too. Often enough, amid the frazzledness and disorientation of contemporary existence, it makes me positively excited to go and select my next bead.

Tom was a sweet, wonderful, smart little goof of a kid, and he was one example of the process of my starting to learn how any surface judgments of another person based on appearances or how they talk or act can be so profoundly misleading.

Well, now that my heart was opened up by Tom at the Children's rehab center, I next had to open my brain to learn basic high school material like how to write and do math. After getting through the 0009 math course (how to add and divide fractions) and other beginners courses I started the science prerequisites for physical therapy. To my great surprise, I liked science, and I started to do reasonably well.

So I had a bit of momentum on my side, and one day, as I am sitting at the bus stop in the sun waiting to catch my bus home, I couldn't stop thinking about how cool it would be to be a doctor and how much money I would make. Out of nowhere I had this sudden surge of determination well up inside of me. The moment is burned into my brain's hard drive - I can see the grass I was sitting on, the kids around me waiting for the bus, the sun, Coffman Union across the street, and my brain spoke to me with a fervent maniacal tone of determination : "fuck it, I'm gonna go to medical school."

All of a sudden I'm staring at Mount Everest, but at least now I was at a base camp a bit closer to the summit. I kicked into high gear and committed my entire existence and every waking hour to the work required to get into medical school. Fortunately I had another person on my side to help carry me to the finish line: my first wife Linda.

I met Linda when she was a pharmacy student at the University. It was a chance encounter at Coffman Union where I met her in the large cafeteria where the students hung out. She was wild and wildly irreverent and a total free spirit, features that greatly appealed to me but that I had worked hard to get under control in myself. It was the perfect match at the time. She helped give me structure and direction and she was a daily antidote to my self-doubt and she helped keep a spark of my old self alive in the midst of my singular seriousness and determination to get into medical school.

Linda was a rock that kept me in the cave of work and commitment. She was there every step of the way and she took care of me when all I did was study and work, every day of every week. The only time off I would allow myself was Friday nights when we would go out to a burger joint called The Haberdashery for a hamburger, fries, and couple of drinks.

The science classes got serious, and I was seriously inadequately prepared for the rigors of things like calculus, physics, and organic chemistry. So I hired a private tutor, Dawn, who nurtured my poor overtaxed brain to intellectual health by gently and patiently holding my hand with problem after problem and guiding me away from the dark cloud of my relentless frustration and disappointment with myself. Every day I was haunted by my inadequacies, and by the end of nearly every day I had a stiff neck and a stress headache, relieved only by exercise.

But then one day it clicked. I was sitting in calculus class and not only did I suddenly get it, but I loved it. It was like I had discovered the music of the universe, and my infatuation was so powerful I even toyed with majoring in math, especially since my calculus teacher was dressed like a biker with a black leather jacket and chains and jeans.

I wrangled my quixotic tendencies to the ground of reality and stuck with my biology major and started to crush math and organic chemistry without the help of a tutor. I had crossed the great mental divide by hiring a private neuron coach (Dawn) to coach and spot me during my brain workouts until they were strong enough to do the heavy lifting on their own.🏋️‍♂️ My early anemic GPA of 2.5 skyrocketed to 3.5 due to the straight A's I was getting.

The next problem? I needed references from some kind of work or volunteer experience in medicine. There was a lounge in the basement of the Health Sciences tower called the Chip Lounge staffed by volunteer med students and others who were there to help prospective medical students navigate the application process. It was there I found a paper flier advertising a job doing patient chart research for Dr. James Ausman, an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota.

I filled out the application, took it to the 5th floor of the hospital, entered his office, and handed it to his secretary who, with one brief glance, dismissed me with a "sorry we had a ton of applicants and it's filled."

Dejected, I moseyed off with no prospects. I have no recollection of my thinking at the time, but once the dejected BS passed, I can only assume that I had that same surge of determination as I had at the bus stop, because I decided to go back and pressure him for a job.

By now I had changed my sartorial style to better fit with the sartorial ambience of the student body - t-shirts and jeans. To this day cannot believe I wore this to his office, but I did: jeans and a t-shirt. I asked his secretary if I could meet with Dr. Ausman, and after several rejections I returned one day to find him in his office, bent over, working at his desk. I looked right at him and with an insistent tone laced with a tiny bit of desperation asked him if I could talk to him for a minute.

He looked at me as if I were a Martian and waved me in and sat and stared at me waiting for me to spit out whatever it was I was there for. I explained the situation - I had applied for his job, it was taken, but I would be willing to do any kind of chart review or whatever for free if he would give me a chance.

Jim was, like most neurosurgeons, a TIDY and meticulous man. Bow tie, crisp tight haircut, suit, and well shined shoes. Me, I'm in a Taj Mahal t-shirt and jeans.

He told me there were no positions and thanks for asking. I left, but determined not to give up. I went back nearly every day to see if anything had changed, until he finally relented and took me under his wing and gave me a chart review to do - look up patients with metastatic melanoma to the brain.

The chart review was a whole-nother ball of wax for me to figure out. I had no medical lingo in my lexicon, so I bought a book on medical terminology. I sat for hours in a room in the bottom of the hospital in the bowels of the patient records room going over the charts of these horrifyingly misfortunate people who were dying of metastatic melanoma to the brain.

One day down in the chart dungeon my mind took over and it created a bone chilling TV series about this young man named Mike Maddaus who had this big mole on his back, and who, in the fortunate process of learning about people with melanoma started to actually feel the big, and previously silent, mole on his back start to tingle on its own. Mike was convinced of the accuracy of his perceptions and, with the same determination he displayed toward getting into medical school, immediately left the dungeon, headed straight upstairs to the 5th floor of the hospital to Dr. Ausman's office (thankfully he was there sitting at his desk) and barged in, insisted on talking to him, turned around with his back facing him, whence he pulled up his t-shirt and insisted on a mole examination.

"It's fine" he said.

So why am I telling you this story?

For two reasons. The first, and most incredible reason, is that Jim Ausman was able to see beyond the surface appearances I appeared with - the t-shirt, my tattoos, my almost certain challenges with syntax in my communication - and like Stacy, see something deeper in me.

Just like I did with Tom.

(And he overlooked what appeared to my potential for becoming a hypochondriac.)

The ability to stop and dismiss/discount/or question the endless immediate judgments our brains spit at us constantly as we wander through our days is a skill to be nurtured, for it impacts us in all walks of our lives. It would have been so easy (as nearly everyone did in the past with me) for Jim to dismiss me as a loser and lost young man with little hope or prospects in life.

He saw potential in me, and I believe with all of my heart, that we all have untapped potential, for something. So often it just takes another person to believe in us to ignite the spark, like Stacy and Linda and Jim did with me.

To believe means to have faith or confidence that something is true. It may or may not be based on a particular set of facts or information. We can all decide what we believe in, and based on my experience and the obvious mountain of evidence that we humans in general have a massive amount of potential, I choose, in general, to believe in the ability of others to realize their potential, especially if given the rocket booster power of another person believing in you.

The second reason I am telling you this story is to highlight the massive power of persistence, and not letting the fear of others judgments of you, or your own judgments of yourself, deter you. The comparisons my brain made of me to nearly everyone else could at times be crippling, and over and over I had to face that resistance and the voice in my head and do it despite all the mental B.S. going on.

For me, it always seemed to boil down to this simple rubric: if I don't do whatever I feel I need to do (for instance go back again and again to Ausman's office) then I know what the outcome will be. Or if I don't ask the answer is no. If I did act, then the worst that could happen is embarrassment, and one can train themselves to be resilient in the face of embarrassment just like anything else. To recap:

• If I don’t act or ask, the answer is no.
• If I do act or ask, the worst outcome is embarrassment.

There is a great scene in the beginning of the sensational documentary Dying Laughing where Kevin Hart, at the age of 21 and at the beginning of his career, finished a set at a comedy club and after, in the back with the owner, is told how he did:

So, believe in yourself, and others, no matter what, like Jim Ausman, Linda, Stacy Roback, and so many others have done with me.

But, as Questlove said: "The stuff that changes your life is usually buried under your deepest fears."

To write this book I enrolled in a book writing program and as part of the process we need to determine a few things about our Ideal Reader. To do this I have created a simple survey with 5 open-ended questions.

The book will write will be a memoir, but not the usual literary memoir. It will be a memoir with lessons learned along the way. So it would be fantastic to get your guidance as to what I should include in the book so the book can be of the most value to you, the potential reader.

The link to the survey is here, if you are willing. Important to note: the survey is completely anonymous.

Even if you don't want to do another damn survey (I don't blame you!) I sincerely thank all of you for being subscribed to my newsletter and for the kind words and feedback I have received along the way.

Michael

The picture made me long to go back and hug each of my children more when they were young, and it made me wonder just how many missed opportunities I passed up to hug them in the name of my mental urgency machine or the pace of my life that seemed to endlessly demand my attention.

This deep and profound longing for a desire to go back and hug them again and again triggered a memory of a quote from the famous Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh on hugging:

“When we hug, our hearts connect and we know that we are not separate beings. Hugging with mindfulness and concentration can bring reconciliation, healing, understanding, and much happiness.”

Apparently Thich Nhat Hanh wasn't always so enamored with hugs:

"In 1966, a friend took me to the Atlanta Airport. When we were saying good-bye she asked, “Is it all right to hug a Buddhist monk?” In my country, we’re not used to expressing ourselves that way, but I thought, “I’m a Zen teacher. It should be no problem for me to do that.” So I said, “Why not?” and she hugged me, but I was quite stiff. While on the plane, I decided that if I wanted to work with friends in the West, I would have to learn the culture of the West."

Thich did just that by developing "hugging meditation" which he notes is different than the usual American or western hug where you briefly wrap your arms around the other person, add in a pat on the back, and then release. Thich describes it this way:

"You have to really hug the person you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms, not just for the sake of appearances, patting him on the back to pretend you are there, but breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into that person and she will be nourished and bloom like a flower."

Thich developed this into an actual meditative practice that you can do with someone you care deeply about:

1. Pause and Be Present. Before hugging, stop for a moment. Become aware that you are about to hold another living being who is precious to you.

2. Take three Conscious Breaths Together. While hugging, breathe mindfully and in unison:

First Breath: Be fully present in the moment. “I am here, and you are here.”

Second Breath: Recognize the preciousness of the other person. “I see you, and you are alive in my arms.”

Third Breath: Appreciate your shared connection. “So wonderful that we are together.”

3. Hold with Awareness. Don’t hug mechanically—hold as if this is the only moment in the world. Feel the other person’s presence, warmth, and shared humanity.

4. Release with Gratitude. Slowly let go, carrying the awareness and love into your next steps. Smile gently as a way of sealing the practice.

I know from first hand experience that this is a powerful practice (especially with the synchrony and feeling of breathing together) that connects two people's souls for a brief moment of bliss (and I do mean bliss).

But here's the thing. You don't need to do a formal hugging meditation with the other person. You can change the hug from a brief docking of bodies by simply breaking the expectation of letting go quickly and lingering until you feel the other person relax and join the party.

Then, if you want, you can whisper in their ear "I love you with all my heart."