18 Michigan Summers

18 Michigan summers. That’s all the childhood we get with each kid before they fly.

For us that equates to a span of about 25 years of golden days across our oldest son and our youngest nephew (so far). We’ve got 18 left, including this one that’s already half lived.

18 more summers of boats and tubing. Of ice cream and s’mores. 18 more summers of backyard tennis and soccer. Of charcuterie picnics on the riverfront. 18 more summers of “cousin time” and a rotation of board games when the warm summer rain is falling and thundering up north. 18 more summers of late mornings preceded by 18 last days of school. 18 more summers of fishing with their uncle off the back of their Granddad’s boat. Of sandals, swimming, golf, and playing tennis at Palmer Park on a whim. 18 more summers snacking on fresh, seasonal fruit in the cool of their Dadi’s basement and munching on their Mimi’s “disappearing” guacamole. 18 more Michigan summers of campfires, hikes, and watching the lightning bugs glow up our little patch of grass in the big city.

We will have more summers than these, God willing, and those will be special in other ways. They just won’t be the golden summers of bona fide childhood.

These summers don’t feel fleeting, which is strange. The rest of our life is urgent, driven by a schedule that constantly nibbles away our time. But this is not. Michigan summers pass quickly, but a full childhood of them unfolds over a long time, in big gulps. It can’t be managed with a calendar and checklists. There is no app for this.

All we can do is savor these times. We can fill ourselves up on those gulps of sunshine and trees and splashes of the lake, holding onto them as long as we can before Labor Day marks the onset of fall. We cannot stop it, but we can linger and soak it all in.

Maybe this is why we have our long Michigan goodbyes — one more chat, an extra hug, before we part from family and friends we already can’t imagine leaving. We linger in the warmth of summer sunshine because we know it ends too quickly. We hold onto those gulps as long as we can, because we know we must.

The truth of our precious 18 summers cannot be changed. This is a truth of life in our lake-plentiful state. But we feel blessed to have them. And if they must be finite, at least we know how to appreciate and savor them.

We are in the car, driving home from our longstanding tradition — a week with family up north over the Fourth of July. My mind is renewed and my heart is full. And it’s hitting me that all we have left is 17 and a half summers. And for Robert, our oldest, less than ten.

That thought could easily sadden me. 17 and a half is not a lot of anything, not when it’s the measure of a childhood. But I don’t keep count out of anxiety. I keep count as a way to linger — to savor these summers before our kids fly out into the world.

a simple man’s wish

For what does a man wish, for the people who illuminate him? For the people whose light makes him lighter?

For you, I wish for tears…

…of joy, obviously, because joy isn’t fully known without tears.

…of awe, because to experience beauty and wonder is one of the few things that makes the suffering of this world feel like an even trade.

…of sadness; an old friend once told me that tears are what heal the soul. It’s true.

…over spilled milk, because we must learn the important lesson that it’s not worth crying over.

…of grief; to know that suffocating void means you also know how expansive and glorious love really is.

…of seeing a child play; the laughter and glee of children is one of the few ways to preview what heaven looks like, sounds like.

…of laughter, because you cannot make it — it is literally impossible — without humor and levity.

…of heartbreak, because only after heartbreak do you understand the blessing of being bonded to — and enmeshed in love with — another soul.

…and finally, I wish you tears of gratitude for all the other tears you have shed that have gotten you here.

To be grateful for the suffering and the joy, even when you lie awake with a stomach full of overwhelm and regret, to be able to pray this prayer though you are silently weeping — “Thank you, God, for I am loved” — means that you have been fully alive.

If I had a trillion dollars

Let’s say you had an allowance of $100 million per day.

To put it in context: $100 million buys a mega-mansion in New York, a fully outfitted private jet, or 400 Bentleys — every day. To spend one trillion dollars at that rate, you’d have to keep going for 27 years and four months. A private jet a day for 27 years.

I can’t fathom that much money. I cannot imagine the freedom or the shackles.

And what would I even do with it? I don’t even need one Bentley, let alone the nearly four million a trillion dollars would afford me. There haven’t even been half a million Bentleys produced, ever.

I heard that the wealthiest person in early 19th century America died from an infection that simple antibiotics would cure today. That’s the real wealth we all share — over time, humanity develops public goods that raise quality of life for everyone.

I love that Barenaked Ladies song, If I Had a Million Dollars. I wonder what I’d do with a trillion. I have no damn clue.

I’d hope that enough would be far less than $100 million a day, because it is now. I like my life. And we’re lucky to have enough and live in a time where entertainment is cheap and people with Down Syndrome aren’t condemned to institutionalization.

Still, I hope that I’d live modestly and use the surplus money to find the next antibiotics, the next sanitation, the next discovery we can’t predict — whatever it is that makes a future generation look back and wonder how we ever lived without it. Something that reduces gun violence, or increases survival rates for terminal disease, or makes energy cheaper and cleaner.

The best use of the money would be throwing it at something I could never predict, and probably never see the fruits of in my lifetime. Which is basically burning it — spending on something with no guaranteed return. I wouldn’t try to “invest” it in anything, because that implies a certain return and is not nearly ambitious enough.

I’d have to waste it, on something that might advance humanity or might be a total flop. All this assuming I could find those people that are creative enough to be worth wasting huge amounts of money on. Which is a weird problem to have.

I just don’t really understand mega wealth, I suppose. Do people that wealthy feel good about it? We aren’t mega wealthy. And yet, I think about money all the time as it is and it’s awful — I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a trillion dollars warping every relationship, every room I walk into. I’ve seen that prism destroy happy families, for far less than a trillion. And yet, that would still be a helluva lot better than having to choose between groceries and medicine.

There’s no winning when money is the thing you’re thinking about. Too little and you worry about it. Too much and it still consumes your thoughts. The songs that capture this paradox best aren’t the ones about getting rich — they’re C.R.E.A.M. and Mo Money Mo Problems. The trap is the same at both ends.

The real key for me has been wanting less. Keeping expenses low enough that what we have feels like enough. And thinking about love and life instead of ruminating about work and money.

Which is how yesterday went. I still had to work most of Saturday — which sucks. But despite that we made it to the dog park and the soccer field. We watched the World Cup and listened to good music while doing chores. I took our three oldest grocery shopping and we stopped for smoothies on the way home, just because it was sunny and refreshing. We ended the night watching A Goofy Movie on the couch because it was Father’s Day.

I want to be able to afford days like that.

Faith But No Expectations

I wrote a short story once about heaven.

I thought then that God might be the unassuming owner of an ice cream shop that we simply find ourselves at. We’d be peaceful, discovering only later that this wonderful, charming place was heaven — and that the gentle man serving us a sundae was indeed God.

Maybe that’s what it’ll be. But probably not.

As I’ve aged, I’ve had this pulling thought, a vision perhaps, that my first foray into heaven will be more like a community meeting. Lord Jesus and Lord Ganesha sitting together at a table, old friends, checking my name off a sign-in sheet. They’ll give me a name tag. I’ll wander into the gymnasium and see my father and Nakul, and then I’ll look for you. From there, the afterlife will unfold.

The vast majority of the time I spend in the universe will be as dead. I will live maybe 80 or 90 years — a few more if I’m lucky — and then billions of years dead. There may be no “time” in the afterlife, but if there is, I will be dead for much longer than I am alive.

And for all my fantasies about the afterlife, they could be too elaborate. There may be no embodied part of it, where others appear as bodies. There could be no seeing, no talking, no hugging. It could just be my soul — bodiless and faceless — moving amongst other souls, commingling with each other and with God, finding peace and unity. It could just be essences of all of us, finding our way in a spiritual plane where we have no sense other than an intuition of one soul knowing another.

These are just fantasies, a way to cope with the fear of death, and for me, the fear of an eternal loneliness. I don’t know what the afterlife will be like, or if there even is one. But I have faith in it.

I believe things that seem to contradict. I have faith in the promise of the resurrection, but the theology of reincarnation also makes sense to me. I feel both in my bones. In many ways, I don’t care much about the specifics. I have faith but no expectations.

My biggest hope, if God grants us an afterlife in unity with him, is you. My wife, my sons, my family, my friends. My greatest hope for heaven is that you are there. I want my soul to dance and embrace yours in this timeless spiritual plane. I don’t know how my own soul can find peace without you.

But how will I know it’s you? If I have no body and neither do you. If I have no sight, how will I know? I may not be able to speak, or hear you. My soul has no eyes, no mouth. My soul must be able to simply sense you. Energy recognizing energy, love recognizing love, immaterial recognizing immaterial. My soul must be able to know you.

For it would be a fate worse than death perhaps, to be a soul in heaven that cannot sense you. That cannot know you.

To prepare for death, I’ve come to believe, is not just to accept it. It is not just to prepare for the thing itself. It’s also to prepare for what comes after. A main enterprise of this life will be to prepare my soul — and for you to prepare yours — so that our souls can sense each other. That they can recognize each other without sight, without sound, without form. My soul needs to learn how to recognize you, so that in heaven, if there is no ice cream shop, no assembly in a gymnasium, I can come to meet you. So that I can be known to you. With you until the absolute end.

That too seems like a good way to live, even if there is no afterlife. Why not aspire to have my soul sense the unique soul of someone else — or a dog, or a flower? A soul is a lovely thing to know, in whichever living creature it comes from. Why not try to cultivate a sense of soul? To feel that our soul recognizes another, and that soul recognizes us, is the pretext for joy, peace, and love. Is that not what we should reach for?

To be wealthy, powerful, famous — even feared — is ghoulishly overrated. There is no peace in that, only the anxiety of losing it. Living to create a sense of soul not only helps us find peace after death, but in life. The delicate prize of a precious life is to be able to know the essence of others and be known — one soul to another.

A Tuesday Afternoon, Someday

As I turn 39, I realize I have had it wrong most of my life.

As a young person, I wondered: how will I measure my life? Will I measure up? Will my life be meaningful? Will it be important?

And then I realized that was a one-way ticket to a hamster wheel that goes nowhere. So my new question became: how do I enjoy the life I have? It was all about experiences — getting the nectar out of every moment.

And then I met Robyn. And my dad died, out of nowhere. And we had four kids.

And now I think: how does one cherish life — particularly our own, and the lives of those near us? How do we cherish that which is sacred?

I will be working on this for a while, I think — just learning to cherish life, our lives and life itself. But the next evolution will hopefully come. Where I no longer need questions to anchor on. When I need no blog post to share what I’ve grown into thinking. Where I just cherish life because it’s a Tuesday afternoon and a person is in front of me. Or it’s a Saturday morning and there is a plant to tend to in the garden.

When I am able to just be someone who thinks not of worth and worthiness, not of sensation and experience, not even of holiness — I will have arrived. When I just am, without thinking, without needing to ask a question: that will be perhaps the final stage of growth for a soul like mine.

I could have always known that asking questions like “what makes a life worth something” was a fool’s errand. What I didn’t anticipate was that the real evolution of this path was asking no questions at all — that it was just living, radiating gratitude, cherishing by simply being an open-hearted soul.

What is family? What is holiness?

There is a T.S. Eliot quote our pastor shared at a homily recently that stuck with me.

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

There are a lot of ways to define what a family is. One is this: family are the people to whom you do not need to prove that you are important.

This touches on a fear that undergirds how I show up as a father. I fear losing a son to suicide—that they’ll feel their life is unimportant. The pressures of being kid today, that are beyond what I ever carried, rattle me. I want them to know that they matter to me, that I love and value their mere existence, without condition, without pretense.

To embrace someone as important, without requiring them to prove or justify it, takes a kind of moral strength. It’s easier—though not trivial—to love your spouse and children this way. But what about friends? Neighbors and colleagues? Strangers? Enemies? What about those who try to violently hurt, exploit, and abuse us? What about them?

To value and love them is harder. To embrace them in a way where they do not have to prove and justify their importance? I think that’s a way of defining another elusive concept: holiness. To embrace, wholly, those people who are not already part of your community, and that may even try to destroy it? To see the value and human dignity in them? Without condition or pretense?

That’s holiness.

—

With all this, I wonder.

How much of injustice, of violence, perhaps of senseless suffering even, disappears. Just disappears, if those who yearn to be seen and valued feel important. Without condition and without pretense.

How much of that disappears with holiness?

I Do Not Want An Identity

I do not want identity. I do not want to be a brand.

I do not want you to know I went to school in Ann Arbor because I’m wearing the hat. I hope you believe I appreciate diverse perspectives and am committed to a better world because of how I treat you.

I do not want to wear a cross around my neck — as big as Flava Flav’s clock — for you to know I’m Catholic. I hope that because of how I care for others, and if I show up humbly and peacefully, that you would have reached that conclusion on your own.

I do not want you to have to see the idol of Lord Ganesha in our cabinet to know I was raised Hindu and have it enmeshed in my blood and bones. I hope that if I am truthful, dutiful, and righteous in thought and action, you would have just assumed as much.

I do not want to drape a flag over my shoulders or tattoo it on my arm for you to know I am American. I hope you will grasp that from my work ethic, my leadership, my creativity, and my respect for your life and freedom — that you can just tell: that man is a yank.

I do not want a bumper sticker or license plate to reveal that I am a Michigander and Detroiter. I hope that grit, amiability, and a community orientation ooze out of me so naturally it seems obvious.

I do not need these reminders. I do not want to need these symbols. I do not want an identity outside of the driver’s license in my pocket. I do not want a self-aggrandizing logo on a t-shirt to signal what I’m all about. I do not want these shortcuts — these shorthand descriptions of a life — to speak for me.

I want my actions, my professions, my sacrifices, and my works to speak for themselves.

We Don’t Have To Become What We Hated

Do you like your life — for the right reasons?

I see the challenges in the world. We all do. And sure, we can point fingers at Boomers — their indulgence, their punting of moral responsibility, their short-termism. I’ve done it plenty.

But I don’t want to hide behind that anymore. Blaming them dissolves my own responsibility. And as I enter middle age, I don’t have time for it. I could be closer to the end of my life than its beginning.

Which brings me to the question I keep coming back to: do you like your life — for the right reasons?

That question cuts through all the fluff. And it sets up the one that matters most: if not, what’s next?

So much of my inner world has been distorted by bad questions. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “What gives your life meaning?” These questions sneak in a bias — that vocation is what matters most, that who we are is singular and fixed. It isn’t.

If you’re around my age, life is probably starting to feel stable. Kids might be out of diapers, or close. Work is in a groove, even when it grinds. We’ve survived the crucible years or are damn close.

That stability is good. But then what?

Do we just get comfortable and greedy and do the exact same things we’ve spent years criticizing Boomers for?

No.

We work on what’s next instead of falling into comfort and self-absorption. We have to re-anchor right when things stabilize — that’s exactly when we’re at risk of losing sight. Because the goal, at least for me, is to bend my life toward the highest human act: caring for others. We’re finally strong enough. Finally stable enough to do it.

The next few years — as millennials pivot into middle age — are generation-defining. I feel that personally. This sets up our penultimate act, the last stretch where we actually have the vigor to leave the world better than we found it.

Comfort is tempting. But it’s a trap.

If we mail it in during middle age, we won’t just be selfish. We’ll be hypocrites. We’ll have criticized Boomers for exactly what we became. That’s worse.

How we transition into middle age will define us — individually and collectively. Will we live up to our highest ideals, or leave the mess we inherited exactly as we found it?

What’s next isn’t far away. It’s now or never.

So — do you like your life? For the right reasons?

If we do, we already know what comes next. And the world needs us to go do it.

Races Worth Finishing

Our cousin, Tom, just finished the Cocodona 250 — a 250-mile ultramarathon that runs through the mountains and desert of Arizona.

Tracking his progress throughout the week and seeing him cross the finish line early Saturday morning on a YouTube livestream was absolutely incredible. Like an instant chills-and-tears kind of moment. Because it is, after all, a grueling race. Competitors have to go with little sleep for several days to finish, slogging through the terrain of the course nearly around the clock. A runner even died, sadly, on the course this year.

The winner was truly elite, finishing the course in about 56 hours — a record. But in races like this, for most of the competitors, being the winner isn’t the thing that matters. For difficult races like these, the victory is maybe to hit a new personal best, but most of all just to finish. Victory is simply to finish.

And the way so many people come together to get these athletes across the finish line is astounding. There are the race organizers and an army of volunteers. There are support crews and pacers. Then there are friends and family there in person cheering the racers along the route, hugging them at the finish. So many people come together to get a few hundred athletes to go a few hundred miles from one end of the Arizona desert to the other.

Mind you, this is not a transactional thing. Whether it’s an ultra, the Olympics, or even just a local marathon, people care deeply about helping these athletes finish the race. To me, this is humanity at its best — when a community comes together to help someone do what they set out to do, to help them finish the race. This archetype of a race, where the goal is finishing rather than winning, is a special type of journey to be part of — whether as a racer, the crew, or a cheerleader.

These races are also beyond athletics. We are part of them. We can be part of them without having to be or know elite athletes.

It is the race where the village is getting a child to read, graduate, or finish college. It is a community of faith walking together and helping each other lay down their arms and find peace. It is the web of friends and often strangers who pull together to get a family that is grieving tragedy back onto their feet, or to get a friend past a cancer diagnosis and into remission.

It was in the Apollo and Artemis missions to send people to the moon and return them safely back. It is helping our elders age and die with dignity. It is in the long arc of a true artist’s journey, where they toil and sacrifice to make something that tells a truth that hasn’t been told. It is in the journey of someone injured in the line of duty learning to walk again, or someone brokenhearted learning to love again. It’s the journey of couples struggling with infertility finding a way to start a family, finding one, or at least finding acceptance for what they cannot change. This is every journey of recovery from addiction. It is every race that starts with failure and ends with becoming whole.

It is a race that Robyn and I are running to finish with a marriage that is beautiful, loving, and sacred. This is why lots of us cry at weddings. We are there to witness the beginning of a race that we want someone we love to finish. And it is a race with each child in our life that we care for. Some set out to change the world. Some set out to be good people or to create a family of their own. Some set out for exploration and adventure. And for those kids with the deepest needs and the brightest light, they set out to live the fullest, healthiest, most independent life they can. They too are on a journey where the goal, the triumph even, is simply to finish a complete life as a complete person.

This is the point in drafting where I take a break because I’m weeping. Maybe you are too. And why do I weep? Why do we weep about these journeys of finishing?

Because these are the races that matter. The lion’s share of all the love, joy, living, dying, growth, lightness, and beauty happen on these types of journeys. These are the stories that, if we are part of them — whether we are the racer or the crew or just there to cheer — help us feel like we were ever truly alive. That we were here for something. We need something more than just to “win” to have honored something so small, but so sacred, as a life.

It is a blessing to be here for these journeys, to be part of these races, whether closely or from afar.

Congratulations to the finishers. To those who finished the Cocodona 250, and those who tried but couldn’t. Most of all to our brother, Tom.

But a toast, too, to those who came to a starting line, whether as a racer or to support someone who was. To everyone who saw a difficult journey ahead and decided to be part of it — not to win it, not for applause, but because it was a race worth finishing.

Thank you for your courage and your spirit. Thank you for letting me be part of your journey, and for being part of mine. And thank you most of all for starting something that makes a sacred, human life come alive.

What I Learned In Ten Years of Marriage

Staying happily married comes down to one behavior.

In times of suffering, or joy, or even in the mundane—do I turn toward my partner, or away from them?

In the past ten years married to Robyn, this is what I’ve learned. It all comes down to a simple thing that happens dozens of times a day. Turning toward builds intimacy and nurtures love. Turning away builds resentment and undermines connection.

The key question then is this: how do I turn toward my partner, consistently?

The first “how” is uncompressed, emotionally available time.

In other words—time together that isn’t rushed.

To turn toward requires being in the same place long enough to actually confide about a struggle or savor a joy. And not just that—we have to be there. There’s no space for turning toward if we’re silently preoccupied with work or the kids or chores.

There are many obvious examples of this—going on dates, therapy, and more. But I don’t think it always requires talking.

Turning toward can happen while just being in the same room, even silently—as long as the time is uncompressed and both partners are emotionally available. Maybe that’s reading next to each other. Maybe it’s holding hands while walking the dog. Maybe it’s just sitting on the couch at the end of the day without rushing to the next thing.

The second “how” is building the mentality, the systems, and the trust to deal with conflict.

Unresolved conflict is a killer, obviously. But it’s also more nuanced than that, and there are many habits to stack beyond just “good communication.”

I think it starts with a mentality of gratitude and generosity.

You have to genuinely assume that your partner is doing more, suffering more, and trying harder beneath the surface than what you can see. You have to assume good intent even when you feel wronged. You have to train your mind—and sometimes force your heart—to find reasons to appreciate them.

That posture matters because it moderates our natural inclination toward defensiveness in moments of conflict. It’s why we start our temperature checks with gratitude.

Resolving conflict also requires self-discipline.

It’s not just Robyn’s job to bring her issues to the table. More often, it’s on me to be the type of person who creates a safe enough space—one of genuine care and understanding—so that when she is emotionally vulnerable and needs to talk about something hard, she trusts that I will love her in that moment.

I have to be healthy and stable enough to make a space sacred enough for her to share her heart and soul.

And the roles flip.

When I’m in that vulnerable place, Robyn has to do the same. When we both give more, listen more, and take on more than what we perceive to be our fair share, our marriage wins.

There are so many skills and practices that support our ability to manage conflict.

We swear by a weekly temperature check. But it’s also getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising. It’s listening well and using “I” statements. It’s having good role models—friends and family who set me straight when I’m angry or off base. It’s journaling, prayer, or other forms of discernment and expression that turn down my own anxieties.

Managing conflict comes down to having the mentality, systems, and skills to actually resolve it—and both partners giving more than 50% in that effort.

Unresolved conflict turns you away from your partner. So we have to resolve it, and we have to stack every habit we can to make that more likely.

The third “how” is having a vision for the future.

Building a life and a way of living that we both want is an incredibly strong force for turning toward each other.

Something Robyn and I talk about a lot—and even do reflection exercises on—is:

What do we want our life to be like in five years? Ten years? When we’re retired? When we’re old and gray?

How are we doing? Are we building the life we imagined? What does it feel like?

Down to the details—what do we want our life together to be, and are we actually living it?

Having a shared dream is a powerful relationship magnet. It builds energy and excitement. It also ensures that we’re both moving toward a place we actually want to go.

And that dream has real, practical consequences.

When you see it clearly, it shapes decisions—big and small—and those decisions compound.

We chose a smaller house in a diverse, friendly neighborhood, even though finding a good school has been harder and more expensive. We’ve traded more time with family for fewer cultural experiences and life in the city. We’ve gone on fewer dates out and chosen less luxury so we can hopefully retire a little earlier.

We’ve made our kids share a room so they spend more time together, and so we feel freer hosting guests. We overseed the grass so it can stand up to the backyard soccer our boys love to play.

Seeing the dream clearly shapes these big and seemingly insignificant decisions. And those decisions, over time, reinforce the dream we’re trying to build.

It becomes a virtuous cycle.

We talk about it. We get excited about it. It turns us in toward each other. We make decisions, and the dream becomes more real. And so we’re drawn in even further.

A clear, compelling dream also helps us make sense of sacrifice.

I could probably have made more money if we had moved to a coast after business school, or if I hadn’t gone into public service. Robyn could have worked full-time after we had kids instead of being in a flexible work schedule. We would almost certainly be less tired if we had a smaller family.

We could spend less time at soccer fields. We could skip church more often. We could have chosen “easier” paths in a hundred different ways.

But that’s not our dream.

We make these sacrifices, and they are more palatable—more meaningful—because we can see how they fit into the life we are trying to build.

There are moments, in the middle of the chaos, when we can look at each other and say: this is the dream.

And that acknowledgment creates a bond. It helps us appreciate what each of us is carrying—individually and together. The dream binds us and turns us toward each other.

—

Turning toward each other is not trivial. Marriage is hard.

In a world of constant rushing, shifting expectations around family and gender roles, distraction, and self-promotion, it can feel like the deck is stacked against it. Even if you choose the right partner, even if you are mature enough to be married—it is still really hard.

Maybe that’s part of why so many marriages fail.

And at the same time—we all can do this.

We can have healthy, thriving marriages. We can learn to turn toward each other. We can help each other learn a better way to live and to be married people.

I’ve been blessed to learn a lot in our first ten years of marriage—through joy, and through real hardship. We’ve been shaped by mentors, and by a community that has loved and nurtured our marriage deeply.

We are lucky.

Lucky to have each other. And lucky to be surrounded by many couples who model what a loving, generous, and committed relationship looks like.

My hope in writing this is to solidify what I’ve learned so far—and, in some small way, to take the love and wisdom that so many people have poured into us and pay it forward.

As Our Stakes Rise

As we age, our stakes rise.

We have more people and communities we are responsible for. We have more influence over the people who look to us for leadership and care. We have more players to coach and develop. We have more mouths to feed.

Then comes a breaking point—we all have one. The point at which we feel we can’t carry any more. And yet, if we reach this point, it’s often because we’ve proven ourselves trustworthy enough to carry heavy responsibilities. So more come.

As we pass this breaking point, the temptation is to become more transactional in our affairs. To close our hearts. We try to conserve and retreat. We try to be more efficient in our interactions so we can save what we have left.

It’s like Bilbo Baggins says—we feel like too little butter scraped over too much bread. And so we lock ourselves down and keep as much as we can at arm’s length.

But this is precisely the temptation we can’t succumb to. People need more from us as our stakes rise, not less.

They need us to open our hearts more, not less. Our patience, our courage, our care are needed in fuller measure. Those we serve—our family, our friends, our neighbors, even kind strangers—need our spirit more deeply, not less.

As we age, our stakes rise. And so the demands on our spirit increase.

As I’ve aged, I’ve needed a spiritual practice more, because the demands on my spirit have felt enormous. The choice, at times, has been to shrink—or to meet the moment by leaning into faith to nourish and strengthen my spirit.

I wrote Character by Choice: Letters on Goodness, Fatherhood, and Becoming Better on Purpose in a deliberately secular way. For my sons, I wanted to argue for choosing goodness over power without simply saying, “this is what God’s word teaches.” If faith didn’t call them, I wanted the argument to stand on its own.

But the more I wrote, the more I felt called to the divine, and to communities of faith and spirituality. The deeper I went, the more I realized I couldn’t strengthen my spirit alone.

If you’re someone who takes responsibility for the needs of others, my point here isn’t to proselytize or pull you toward the traditions that have shaped me—Hinduism and Christianity.

My point is this: we need strength of spirit.

As our stakes rise, we don’t just need better leadership or managerial skills. We don’t just need better tools or mental models. We need strong, durable spirits—strong enough for others to lean on, and strong enough to keep our hearts and arms open even when the temptation is to become transactional.

How we do that—whether through God and religious traditions or through secular means—does not matter as much as the fact that we do it, that we strengthen our spirit.

Leadership books do not talk about the soul. Spirit isn’t in most lists of critical leadership and managerial skills. But if we choose to take responsibility and lead, we need a spiritual practice too.

As our stakes rise, and we pass our breaking point, the people depending on us need our spirit to meet the moment.

“What shall I make?”

When I was a younger man, I had this little phrase that I kept close to my heart. I didn’t say it often, but I would come back to it when I felt lost in the sea of adult life—drudgery, hustle, responsibility.

“Make things beautiful and make beautiful things.”

It was a way of remembering who I was. The version of me that felt like an artist, who had big dreams, a little bit of flair, and a soul he let other people see freely and shake hands with.

Surprisingly, AI is helping bring that version of me back to life. At first, I let it create for me, and I didn’t like it. It felt hollow. It had no soul, and it wasn’t any fun. So I stopped letting it do that.

But now I use it differently. It helps me create more, and spend less time on the parts that aren’t that fun. It clears space instead of taking over.

And in a world where we suddenly have these power tools—tools to imagine, design, refine, build, and share, cheaply and almost delightfully—the biggest question shifts. It’s no longer “can I make this?” but “what shall I make?”

There’s so much I would love to make beautiful, or just make more beautiful, and more of it feels within reach than ever. My own watch straps. New variations of pizza dough. Another book. Choreography. A family cookbook. A trellis for the tomatoes in the backyard.

Tools aren’t really the constraint anymore. The limit now is more human than that—our imagination, our point of view, our ability to notice something and say, that’s worth making.

That’s why the humanities and the arts feel more valuable than ever to me. Not instead of STEM, but alongside it. We need to understand the world, the tools, and what’s worth doing with them.

If we can stay curious, be empathetic, and keep teaching ourselves, we can create a lot. But only if we have some sense of what is beautiful—or at least, if we’re willing to wrestle with that question.

That’s also why I think, perhaps paradoxically, that AI and robots might actually make us more human. Because the alternative to leaning into our humanity isn’t scarcity and poverty. It’s something worse—a kind of boredom that comes from having endless possibility, but no idea what to do with it.

Wouldn’t it be something if AI and robots ended up being the greatest catalyst for beauty humanity has ever known? It might be optimistic. But I think it’s possible.

But have to choose it. We could do a lot of destructive stuff with all of this, or we could commit to making things beautiful, and making beautiful things. And if we’re serious about that, then it becomes pretty important—for us, and for our kids—to wrestle with a deeper question: what is beautiful? Not in a shallow way, but in a way that is personal, soulful, and human.

To care for someone is an honor

We had four kids home sick over a week, and I stayed back with Emmett, whose fever breached 104 degrees. The first step in taking care of a child, of course, is to take off our armor. My heart has to be ready to care.

The armor exists because of the drudgery of the world, not because of my kids—but they have to deal with it just the same.

The first layer of the armor is anger, which keeps my kids in line when I just can’t—or just won’t. The armor is the exasperation on my face that keeps questions at bay, so I don’t have to weep during a Teams call about the status of IT projects. The armor is my cursing—at everything I can’t control—which injects a dose of illusion into the reality of how hard life is. The armor is the sarcasm that lets me talk back without admitting how sad something one of my sons said to me actually made me feel.

I had forgotten how much I was wearing, honestly.

But there was Emmett—eyes as red as his burning cheeks. He told me, so softly, with a quivering lower lip, in a mix of suffering and despondency, “I don’t feel very well, Papa.”

And the armor took itself off. It just evaporated from my chest and shoulders. I sat with him. Rubbed his legs. Even now, half a week later, I am crying as I write this—both because I remember his suffering, and because I remember the honor it is to care for someone.

—

In Hindi, there is a concept called seva. SAY-vah. Emphasis on the first syllable. The translation of “caring for someone” doesn’t quite capture the depth of what it means.

Seva is a giving of care, but it is also a giving of oneself. It is not done at arm’s length. You are there, enmeshed with someone as you care for them—as if giving them some of your care, your love, even a bit of your life force to spark theirs into healing. It is not just physical and emotional comfort, but spiritual as well.

I used to think my parents were giving me a chore when they asked me to do seva—for my mom or dad, my aunt, or my grandmother. I thought it was a task they were delegating because they had to wash a dish or cook a meal.

I know now that was precisely wrong. They were asking me to do seva—and doing seva for me when I was sick—to show me the way.

Seva is what we are here to do. It is an act that fulfills the human aspiration to grow our spirits. We do not do seva because it will be reciprocated, or even because it helps someone heal, though it does. We do it because it is the way of the light.

And that is why the tears came, as I rubbed Emmett’s legs and comforted his fever—with medicine, yes, but also with my unarmored, fully open heart.

To care for someone is an honor, and I felt its light.

To care for—and to do seva for—my child is one of the highest forms of that honor. To join ourselves to the way of the light is a gift. Seva is not a chore. It is what we were made to do.

I want to remember this.

When the armor feels most necessary. When time feels most compressed. When I feel like I have nothing left to give.

I want to remember the feeling in my chest as I cry these tears—how light it feels, how freeing.

I want to remember: when my child, my wife, my family and friends—or even a stranger who needs seva but cannot ask for it—is in front of me, I am here to care for you. To do your seva.

I want to remember that my heart can be open. That the armor can fall away. That seva is not just a chore, or even a duty—it is a gift.

And it is my honor.

The Boy Full of Joy

World Down Syndrome Day is celebrated on March 21 every year. This is symbolic: Down syndrome is the name we give when a person has a triplication of their 21st chromosome—hence the date, 3/21.

I knew none of this a year ago. Because one year ago, we had no diagnosis. We just had a sleepy kid with low muscle tone, who was born bravely and in a hurry.

He had three older brothers who adored him from the minute he was born, just down the stairs from their room. We gave him a name—Griffin—and with no diagnosis, no other “name” was needed.

Learning that there was a World Down Syndrome Day was fun and gooey at first, and then it felt like a moment of drowning.

I am finally beginning to let myself think about how hard Griffin’s life will be. He will spend more time in doctors’ offices than the rest of our family combined, and he may have already. He will face discrimination and be overlooked—by companies, schools, governments, and maybe even by some in the Church.

I don’t even know what language I’m comfortable using, but he does have “special needs,” and plenty of people who don’t know his light and inner grace firsthand will think treating him fairly is just too much work.

And, most darkly, there is the question of his lifespan. The thought—a cold, real, possibility—that I will outlive Griffin is demolishing. Knowing that despite medical advances that happen during his life, Robyn and I may have to bury our son—that our big three may have to bury their little brother someday—is enough to break a man where he stands.

Writing and reflecting is perhaps the only way I know how to put myself back together, so that’s what I have done.

I have not been able to stop thinking about two very difficult questions:

What makes a good life? Who deserves one?

What makes these questions difficult is not the answers, but the sacrifices the answers require.

A good life is pretty simple. It does not take being a multimillionaire.

It’s a place to call home. To be free and have agency in what happens to us. To love and be loved. To be able to learn and create. To care for one another and be cared for. To feel relatively sure you have a meal coming, and medicine when you need it. To be able to sit under a tree and pray. To have friends.

We all intuitively know this. We already know what makes a good life.

Before Griffin’s diagnosis, I believed that everyone deserved at least this. And that belief implies sacrifice. For everyone to have this, it know it takes paying taxes. It takes volunteering and looking after your neighbor or the other kids on the block, for no reward. It takes giving away your knowledge for free. It takes participating in civic life. It takes apologizing for mistakes and learning to be kind even when you’re having a bad day.

These, and more, are really hard sacrifices. And I have believed in making them and have tried to do so, however fallibly.

But now, for Griffing, I depend on everyone else to believe this too. Because he does have “special needs,” and I can’t fulfill them all—even if I were the wealthiest man in the world. It is a feeling of nakedness I would never have anticipated, but I have no choice but to place myself and Griffin in the care of others. I need others for him to have a good life.

Now, I can’t just believe that everyone deserves a good life. I can’t just be a small beacon that nudges the culture towards these sacrifices, without much consequences if nobody else cares.

Now, I have consequences. For Griffin to have a good life, others have to believe he does, too.

Now, my son’s life depends on others also believing in this vision of what a good life is, and that everyone deserves it—even if their needs are more “special” than someone else’s.

What I now depend on—other people’s generous and righteous beliefs—is what I probably have the least control over in the world.

When I was young, my dreams were so vivid and noble.

I wanted people to get along. I wanted to throw parties where other kids at my high school didn’t have to drink. I wanted to help people make their nonprofits effective. I wanted people who were excluded and misunderstood to be included. I wanted to write plays and stage them for free in public parks. I wanted to invent something that fixed something nobody else saw. To make it so that work didn’t have to suck, and to make government agencies super effective and virtuous. I wanted to comfort friends when they were sad and stand firmly beside them to witness their joy.

These were my dreams. deep down, they still are.

But as I’ve aged, the weight of responsibility has left me groaning. Bills. Taxes. Feeling like selling books is the only thing that justifies the time I spend writing. Hustling. The cost of organic eggs. Raising good kids and being good at my job. You know, grown up stuff.

All these things burn up all the oxygen the dreams I had as a boy need to keep breathing. These dreams have been living in thin air for so long, I wonder how long they’ll last. And now, on World Down Syndrome Day, the weight of responsibility felt at its peak.

But that boy—full of joy and optimism, untethered by responsibilities, perfectly content drinking cheap beer—is who I still am. Under all the armor and rain jackets, I’m still that guy who has faith that his dreams and sacrifices will be met with an outstretched hand by compassionate and generous strangers.

I don’t need to become him again. When I take all the heavy rocks out of my backpack, I am him. I am still that boy full of joy.

That guy is who my sons are mirroring when people say, “they’re just like you.” That guy is who they need. That guy is who my neighbors need.

That essence of that guy is what Griffin got in not one, but maybe three or four full measures. Even when he is ill, joy pours out of him by the bucketful. He may have needs that only about 1 in 700 people have, but his gift is also that rare, at least.

That gift of joy—whether it comes from his extra chromosome or not—is the spark for me to be that boy full of joy again, who dreams of that a good life and believes that everyone deserves it. Griffin’s joy sustains my faith that other people believe it too.

With great responsibility

The phrase “with great power comes great responsibility” is real talk.

But it implicitly assumes that a person’s original inheritance—or at least their starting point—is power.

The corollary, “with great responsibility comes great power,” is also real talk. This version assumes that our original inheritance is responsibility, not power.

And what’s the lesson?

That we must be cautious of power. That it may corrupt us. That though we may be entrusted with responsibility, we must wield the power that comes with it intentionally and justly.

Most of us don’t fall into power like Peter Parker did in Spider-Man. Most of us have to earn responsibility first. Most of us aren’t born superheroes. Most of us gain responsibility as we become the parent, the boss, or the PTA president—and the weight of the power thrust upon us is surprising, and perhaps even invisible at first.

Most of us, who aren’t superheroes, gain responsibility without having wielded much power. We underestimate how hard and tricky that power is, if we’re even fully aware that it exists at all. I certainly have, every time.

Both lessons on power and responsibility are equally important. We need to teach both. We need to learn both. But for most of us, who have no choice but to start with responsibility, we need to heed the lesson that with great responsibility comes great power first.

It’s a trap!

Personal transformation can become a trap for virtue.

Here’s the paradox.

We often begin by trying to become better people. For me, that transformation came through grief, marriage, writing this book about character, and becoming a father.

Over time, I could feel the growth. I was proud of it. I could look in the mirror and like what I saw. It was terrific!

But that’s where the trap began.

Years later, the paradox revealed itself: the more I transformed toward virtue, the easier it became to applaud that virtue. I became fascinated by my own growth.

That’s the exact opposite of what should happen.

The point of transformation is not to admire ourselves. It is to turn outward, toward others.

Luckily, the antidote is easily administered: gratitude, prayer, service, and listening deeply. We can prevent relapse through intention and practice.

The hardest part is simply seeing the paradox. It took me years to recognize it — five, probably.

I share this idea in the hope that you might see it sooner than I did.

The Six Streams That Shape Human Life

Human beings are porous creatures. These six streams flow into us constantly.

Food.

Water.

Air.

Information.

Microbes.

Relationships.

The streams that shape human life are surprisingly easy to corrupt—and surprisingly hard to guard.

These streams shape our bodies, our minds, and the communities we build together. And unsurprisingly, each of them is vulnerable to corruption, because it’s easy to affect these flows without anyone noticing.

We ingest them largely automatically, without thinking. We trust that what we are offered is nourishing and healthy for us.

But temptation comes easily, and so do examples of corruption. Food additives can make things cheaper but affect our health. Algorithms feed us novel videos, but they can wreck our attention, our minds, and our sense of self. We can be in relationship with someone and absorb their love, but also harm that relationship when we fail to show up for them, or when we try to control them by withholding love.

We hardly notice in the moment when the big six are corrupted, and we trust that someone is watching. Surely someone is discerning whether these things are corrupted. Someone must be monitoring the air, the water, and the food. Surely someone isn’t letting the people we trust cut corners on ensuring information is truthful…right?

This is why societies build institutions around these streams. We create food safety systems, water utilities, environmental regulation, journalism, public health systems, and community norms because these inputs matter so deeply. These institutions exist to guard the flows that shape human life. But institutions cannot function on rules alone. They depend on people who are capable of noticing when something is wrong—people who can interpret signals, weigh trade-offs, and decide when the system is being bent or quietly corrupted.

And this reveals something about preventing corruption: we must be willing and able to discern.

This is not just a matter of transparency. Transparency is a precondition, but what difference does transparency make if we cannot make meaning of it? We have to be able to evaluate whether the inputs that shape individuals and society are corrupted or not.

Sometimes this discernment happens individually, and sometimes it must be collective. Any time we read a food label or look at an air quality report, we are discerning at the individual level.

But we also discern at the community level. Communities deliberate on questions like: Do we want this? and How will it affect us? Communities themselves are a kind of living organism. Just as our bodies must determine whether what flows into them is nourishing or harmful, communities must do the same.

To prevent corruption we don’t just need laws, and we don’t just need transparency—we need discernment.

When growth becomes an excuse

Riding someone else’s coattails is a form of corruption.

It’s a way to benefit from work I have not earned. And it’s tempting. It’s comfortable to let things ride for as long as I can, avoiding the difficult work of creativity, leadership, growth, and delivering the next valuable thing. It’s also a way to avoid the emotional toll of rejection, failure, or obscurity.

It’s even easier to ride our own coattails — to relive glory days, to navel-gaze at past successes and think, wow, look at how much I’ve grown.

When I do this, I let myself off the hook from looking ahead and continuing to grow, serve, and innovate. Surely I don’t have to create more for others or give more of myself. Surely I don’t need to treat others better — look at how much I’ve already given.

However tempting, riding our own coattails may be even more corrupt than riding those of others. We’re not only benefiting from something we haven’t earned; we’re lying to ourselves about it.

I’ve struggled with this lately. I’ve been trapped in reflection about the past decade of my life. I’ve grown, contributed, and sacrificed so much since my father died ten years ago.

But you can’t profit off the same album forever.

I still yell at my kids. I still do little about the needs of the poorest in my community. I still miss deadlines. I still try to replace faith with control. My cholesterol still hovers at the edge of elevated. I am still crabby with Robyn more often than she deserves.

The point is: I’m still unfinished.

I don’t have to be a perfectionist. But I also can’t justify staying as I am forever by pointing to how far I’ve come.

I’ve been in awe of my own growth — and rightly so. It truly has been a decade of transformation for our family.

But growth becomes corruption the moment it becomes an excuse. It’s time to move on.

The break is over.

I won’t ride my own coattails forever.

Fasting from harsh words

A excerpt from the Message of the Holy Father Leo XIV for Lent 2026, on the theme: “Listening and Fasting: Lent as a Time of Conversion”.

Our sons follow the same pattern as their father — which is also the pattern of paupers, billionaires, gangsters, and warring neighbors. How conflict escalates is predictable.

And the beef always starts with words.

With our sons, it starts with teasing. Then harsher teasing. Then a shove or a hip check. Then a hockey stick to the back — sometimes literally. And then it ends with tears, an ice pack, and resentment that must be slowed down and resolved.

It is the same pattern with many homicides. It starts with disrespect at a party. One thing leads to another. And eventually, someone is dead.

And perhaps the same with nations. It starts with jabs in the press. Then it escalates.

This is the pattern, so much of the time.

So of course, what the Holy Father shared makes sense: if we want a more peaceful and loving world, we begin by abstaining from harsh and hurtful language. And for those of us who are brothers and sisters in faith, we can make space for grace by fasting from that endlessly hungry gremlin — the words from which all beefs begin.

This is indeed a very practical form of abstinence — whether we approach it secularly, as members of an interfaith community who care about peace in a pluralistic society, or specifically as Christians seeking repentance and renewal during Lent.

No matter our posture, it makes sense to abstain from the thing that starts a wildfire.

—

And I need this fast myself, in a very guttural and deep way. To contemplate this as a fast is precisely the point. Because part of me needs to starve.

There is a part of me that is angry — frustrated by what I cannot control. It is the part that is deeply wounded and inflamed by small irritants. It is the part that is addicted to aggression and conflict, because the anger distracts me from the worries and doubts I would rather avoid. This all-consuming part of me is often unseen, but heard by my children when I am having a bad day.

I need to starve it of harsh words.

Because harsh words are what give an angry, fearful, selfish appendage its nourishment and oxygen. It feeds on vindictive and cutting language and asks for more the more it burns.

Harsh words and the anger that spurs them are not something I merely need to moderate. These are not like a bottle of wine, to be enjoyed over two or three days. These are things I need to abstain from — so that the appendage shrinks, withers, and perhaps one day fades.

I do not know if I can do this. My inner monologue feels rigid, and harsh words are deeply reinforced in our culture. It even feels expected that national leaders swear casually and publicly. Harsh words are one of the only forms of catharsis I know that are not drinking or some other youthful foolishness. And if I’m being honest, I’ve dropped a screaming “damn it!” In front of my sons twice since I started drafted this post over nothing - once over crispy crown potatoes, and once over a snow brush. I really do not know if I can do this.

And if I can? Who will I be if this appendage shrinks? I may not know myself from a stranger without this angry appendage that has been attached to me since coming of age?

Will I be delicate? Weak? Exploited? Bored? I do not know what this fast might make me into. If the appendage withers, will anything be left?

We never really know. This is how transformation works.

First, we suffer and sacrifice — through fasting, grieving, contemplation, exercise, or simply listening more deeply. This makes space for grace and other mysterious psychological forces to do their work.

Then we wait, not knowing who we will become on the other side.

That is the point.

All transformation requires an act of faith. Whether we understand it mystically or secularly, we cannot have renewal without trust in what lies beyond our sacrifices.

If we want a changed self — or a changed world — we must believe there is something worth becoming on the other side.

Be the Brakeman

I’ve known for a long time that solving my sons’ conflicts for them creates fragility. At some point, after all, I’ll be gone, and they’ll need to resolve conflict without me as their judge and jury.

For several years, I tried to facilitate their peacemaking in two ways: by prompting the “right” discussion, or by imposing my less-favored answer to the problem—nobody watches TV if you can’t agree.

Stepping in strongly was necessary for a time. They needed guidance on how to resolve conflict; they weren’t born with those skills. But if I kept playing broker of peace, I knew their relationship would stay fragile—dependent on my presence, my rulings, my leverage.

Now I’m better served—and so are they—if I play a different role: brakeman, not intermediary.

I can slow things down. I don’t have to direct the entire outcome. I don’t have to do all the talking. They already have some skills, because we’ve practiced.

My job now is to be the person who says, “Whoa. Let’s slow down.”

Just this weekend, a Valentine’s Day trade went badly. And for the first time, by accident really, I slowed it down instead of negotiating a truce. Over a few hours, with some help, they worked it out themselves.

This was growth all around, for them and for me

The real insight is simple: they can do more on their own, and they should—but first, someone has to slow the moment down long enough for thinking to happen. They can resolve much more independently if hearts aren’t already racing and there aren’t already tears and screaming.

Slow it down. Be the brakeman. That’s my new job. If I do that, everything else becomes easier for them, and they can keep practicing conflict resolution—with less and less supervision from me over time.

Eventually, they’ll be able to pump their own brakes. And then I can coach a more advanced skill: self-reflection, repair, and the ability to turn hard moments into opportunities to deepen trust.

This feels like the pattern of any good coach. You start with fundamentals. You teach them to mastery. Then you coach the same fundamentals one level deeper. The temptation is to get stagnant—to keep teaching yesterday’s lesson after your kids have already moved on.

But we can’t.

As they grow, we have to deepen our own mastery so we can deepen theirs. If we stop learning, they will too.