Reverse-Engineering Life's Meaning

It's difficult to directly answer questions like "why am I here," "what is the meaning of my life," or "what's my purpose." It may even be impossible.

However, I believe we can attempt to reverse-engineer our sense of meaning or perhaps trick ourselves into revealing what we find meaningful. Here's how I've been approaching it lately.

Meaning, it seems, is an exercise in making sense of the world around us and, by extension, our place in it.

Instead of tackling the big question head-on (i.e., what's the meaning of my life), we can examine what we find salient and relevant about the world around us and work backward to determine what the "meaning" might be.

Here's what I mean. The italicized text below represents my inner monologue when contemplating the question, "What is the world out there outside of my mind and body? What is the world out there?"

The world out there is full of people, first and foremost. It teems with friends I haven't made yet, individuals with stories and unique contributions. Everyone has a talent and something special about them, I just know it. The world out there is full of untapped potential.

The world out there also contains uncharted territory. There is natural beauty everywhere on this planet. It is so varied and colorful, with countless plants, animals, rocks, mountains, rivers, and landscapes. The world out there is wild. Beyond that, we don't even know the mysteries of our own oceans and planet, let alone our solar system or the rest of the universe. The world out there is a vast galaxy filled with natural beauty and wonder.

But the world out there has its share of senseless human suffering, often due to our own mistakes and the systems we strive to perfect. There is rampant gun violence, hunger, homelessness, anger, and disease—all preventable. The world out there is a mess, but the silver lining is that not all of that senseless suffering is outside our control. We can make it better if we do better.

The world out there also has an abundance of goodness. Many people strive to be part of something greater than themselves. They help their neighbors, practice kindness, teach children to play the piano, visit the homebound, tell the truth, do the right thing, seek to understand other cultures, learn new languages, and strive to be respectful and inclusive. The world out there is full of parks, festivals, parties, and places where people play, eat, and share together. The world out there is generous.

The world out there is also close. My world is people like Robyn, Riley, Robert, Myles, and Emmett, as well as our parents, siblings, family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and kind strangers. The world out there is our neighborhood, our backyard, our church, our school, and our local pub. It's the people on our Christmas card list and those we encounter around town for friendly conversations. The world out there includes the individuals I pray for during one or two rounds of a rosary. It doesn't have to be big and grand; it's the people I can hug, kiss, cook a meal for, or call just to say "hey."

So, the exercise is simple:

1. Find a place to write (pen, paper, computer, etc.).

2. Set a 15-minute timer.

3. Start with the phrase "The world out there is..." and keep writing. If you get stuck, begin a new paragraph with "The world out there is..." and continue.

After completing this exercise and taking stock of my own answers, I begin to see patterns in my responses that resonate with my day-to-day life. Meaning, for me, involves helping unleash the untapped potential in others, exploring the natural world, dreaming about the universe, fostering goodness and virtue, and being a person of good character. Meaning, for me, also entails honoring and cherishing my closest relationships, both the ones that are close in proximity and deep in their intimacy.

It seems that meaning is not generated in what we think of as our "brain." Our brain manages our body's energy budget, makes decisions, predicts the future, and solves problems. That’s our brain’s work.

Meaning, I believe, is created in our mind. When I think of the mind, I envision it as the function we perform when we absorb the seemingly infinite information about the external world through all five senses and attempt to make sense of it.

Meaning, it appears, is not an abstract thing we have to create. We don't "make" meaning. Instead, we discern meaning from what we find relevant and salient in the world around us. Out of the countless details about the external world, we hone in on certain aspects. The meaning is what bubbles to the top of our minds. We don't have to make meaning; we can just notice it.

This exercise has shown me that we can reverse-engineer our way into discovering meaning. If we can bring to the surface what we believe about the external world, it becomes clear what holds significance for us.

For example, if you find that "the world is full of cities and people, which leads to innovations in business, art, and culture," it's an easy leap to conclude that part of your meaning or purpose likely involves experiencing or improving cities and their cultural engines. If you discover that "the world is full of teachings about God and has a history of religious worship," it's a straightforward leap to deduce that part of your meaning or purpose likely relates to your faith and religious practice.

Being mindful of what we notice about the world is our back door into these abstract and challenging questions about "meaning" or "purpose."

What's difficult about this, I think, is the sheer volume of noise out there. Also, if we accept this perspective on meaning, we must acknowledge that meaning is not static and enduring—if it's discerned by our worldview, then changes in our perspective may also change or even manipulate our notions of meaning.

Many people try to tell us about the world outside of us. This includes companies through their commercials, authors, politicians, artists, philosophers, scientists, and priests—anyone who shares an opinion. Even I do this—if you're reading this, I am also guilty of adding to the noise that shapes your perspective of the external world.

Making sense of our lives is crucial for feeling sane and alive. It would be easy to average out what others around us say about the world out there, but if meaning truly is a discernment of what we notice about the external world, just listening to everyone else would effectively outsource the meaning in our lives to other people.

I don't think we should do that. After all, we live in a country where we have the freedom to speak, think, and make sense of the world for ourselves—what a terrible freedom to waste. Instead, we should be selective about who we pay attention to and listen to our own minds, noticing what they're trying to tell us. We shouldn't outsource meaning; we should notice it for ourselves.

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

Overcoming Ivy League rejection, finally

I was rejected by the Ivy League on three separate occasions. Twice while applying for undergraduate studies and once for grad school. The best I could manage was getting on the waitlist of one public policy school.

The Ivies were not my dream or my “league”, per se, but the league everyone, it seemed, wanted me to be in. Everyone around me implicitly signaled that Ivy League admission was the symbol of being elite and on a trajectory of success and respect. I don’t think I could've had an independent thought about the matter because the aura of the Ivy League was so insidious and pervasively woven into my psyche while I was growing up. Everyone else put their faith in the Ivy League, so I did too.

Ever since, it has been the source of whatever inferiority complex I have. I believe I am dumber than other people because I didn’t get into an Ivy League school. I thought I had to catch up, prove myself, and show everyone that I’m elite, too.

In a way, the Ivy League mythology is probably true. Extremely talented and capable people gain admission into Ivy League schools. And if I had too, I assume my career would’ve been easier and simpler. My “network” would have probably been more powerful and able to open stubborn doors. More people would’ve probably been knocking on my door, instead of the other way around.

And perhaps more importantly, I would’ve believed in myself more. It would’ve been a self-fulfilling cycle. If I had been admitted to the Ivy League, I would’ve believed that I was somebody. And because I believed that, I would’ve spent all that time I was insecure and engaging in negative self-talk actually being somebody. All the times I told myself stories about how I was too down-to-earth to go to the Ivy League, I could’ve been making a contribution.

The biggest trap of all this was not whether or not I got into an Ivy League school, but that I spent so much time in my life thinking about it, questioning what I was, and wondering what might’ve been. What a waste of time and energy.

What I realize now is that life and career are instances of product-market fit. Being able to make an impactful contribution is not just a matter of being talented but a matter of applying one's talents in the most impactful way. That is what I envy so much about Ivy Leaguers; nobody seems to tell them what they should do and what they should be. They seem like they have more mental freedom to just go in the direction they want, without too much questioning.

Even me, going to a relatively elite public university twice, people signal to me what I should be and what I should do all the time. They think they can fit me into the mold they want me to be. They think they can force me into their narrative. That’s what it feels like anyway.

Maybe none of this is true. Maybe nothing would’ve been different had I gotten into Harvard, Columbia, or any other Ivy League school. But putting this all on paper is proving to me that the mythology of the Ivy League has been in my head, rent-free, for a long time. I’ve been waiting for someone to validate my intellect, talent, and capability for so long.

—

The West Wing is probably my favorite television show of all time. I was turned onto it by Lee, who was one of my managers and role models when I was a consultant at Deloitte.

The funny part is that Lee was Canadian, and I figured if someone who wasn’t even born in the US was undeterred in his enthusiasm for a show dramatizing the American presidency, I would probably like it too.

One of my favorite moments of the show is the scene where the Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, talks with the President and outlines a new strategy for the administration: “Let Bartlet be Bartlet.”

I think that's the lesson here: all of us need to find that moment when we find our footing. We should stop trying to be someone we're not. We need to accept that we should focus on being who we are, instead of obsessing over Ivy League admission, promotions, or awards.

I think we all need that moment when we realize we can embrace our individuality, whether it's "Let Tambe be Tambe," "Let Paul be Paul," "Let Detroit be Detroit," "Let Smith be Smith," or any other iteration that our identity requires.

This whole time, I've been depending on the Ivy League to give me permission to be myself. This whole time, I've been dangling my feet out, hoping for my choices to be validated by someone else.

The greatest lesson in all this has nothing to do with the Ivy League. The lesson here is that we need to create this moment where we grant ourselves permission to be ourselves.

In my case, the turning point came when a role model at work told me about his circuitous path and how he embraced it, reminding himself that sometimes "you've got to bet on yourself."

Maybe we can't will ourselves, completely on our own, to grant self-permission for self-authorship. It's okay and expected to need help, support, and encouragement. But I don't think we need an institution to "pick" us, either. I never needed the Ivy League to "Let Tambe be Tambe," though maybe that would've sped up the process. All I needed, and all that I think any of us need, is someone to remind us that the choice to grant ourselves permission is one that we're allowed to make.

The path is ours to walk if we're willing to claim it as our own.

Photo by Tim Alex on Unsplash

Light only spreads exponentially

We start with nothing.

And that in a way gives us a beginning. Nothing is from where we all start.

What we need first then, to spread light, is a candle. We need substance. We need our bodies. We need education. We need love. We need food, a home, and a place to work. We need all these things, which are a vessel to sustain light. For some, this candle is a birthright or a gift. Some of us must make our own.

Next, we light the candle. We figure out something which illuminates. We do something which illuminates. Maybe, too, our candle is lit by others and we are illuminated with a light that has been passed on to us. We somehow find a way to bring light into the world and there we are, with candle lit.

But this is not how light spreads. One candle, alone, does not illuminate a whole world of dark places, or even a whole city, or neighborhood, or even one room necessarily. To light up the world we must spread our light.

So we light our candle or let ourselves be lit, then we light two others. That makes three. But this is not enough, either, because three lit candles that will all wax and wane for a moment and then extinguish at the end of a life is surely not enough to illuminate a room, a neighborhood, or a world.

So what then? 

The algorithm to spread light is simple, I think. It’s a compounding algorithm. We light our candle, then we light two others. But then, those two must light two others. And then those four light two others each. This is how light spreads, two by two by two. Light only spreads exponentially.

So what this means is that as parents, to really spread the light we cannot stop at being good parents, or teaching our kids how to be parents - we teach our kids to be teachers of parenting and be teachers of parenting ourselves. We cannot stop at being good people managers, or by mentoring the next generation of leaders, we must teach our mentees to make more mentors.

We can’t just make the light. We can’t just spread the light. We must teach others how to spread light. This is the algorithm for spreading light: light, spread, and teach how to spread.

—

We end with nothing.

What remains of us is what we leave behind. So a key question becomes, what should we try to leave behind?

First, I think we should leave behind something good. Something positive that benefits others and leaves the world better for us being there. Human life is a special thing, even after accounting for all the suffering it possesses. Why not leave something behind which honors this human life, this earth, and brings light to dark places?

It seems to me, that if we leave behind something positive and good we ought to leave something that endures, too. Leaving behind something enduring, that illuminates and gives light for a longer time, is better than something that fades quickly.

I don’t know if nothing lasts forever, or maybe some things last forever after all. But given the choice, why not strive for something closer to forever? But what endures, then? What lasts closer to forever?

Even if I were the wealthiest man alive, and passed down the largest inheritance - it would maybe last a few generations. All my photographs, too, will eventually become irrelevant. Our home will eventually change hands, and will be rebuilt or razed.  My blog posts, hardly relevant to begin with will be forgotten. Anything that can be consumed, it seems, will eventually fade.

The chance we have then is to leave behind something that can regenerate itself?.

Kindness, for example, regenerates itself. Because when we are kind, it makes others kinder, and that in turn makes even more others kinder. Kindness regenerates. Knowledge is similar. When we create and share knowledge, it inspires the creation of new knowledge, leaving behind a larger body of knowledge from which to create. Knowledge also regenerates.

Good institutions are designed to regenerate. Think of the world’s leading companies and the most enduring governments.

The ones that last are built upon a premise of looking outward, seeing the new needs and having a genuine concern for a noble purpose. Those institutions then take the challenges of a changing world, channel them inward, and then regenerate themselves into something new. The moment that the most established of the world’s most high-profile institutions - like the world’s religions traditions, liberalism, Apple Computer, the US Constitution, or even Taylor Swift - stop regenerating themselves, they’ll begin to fade away like all the rest.

—

So the absolute, most essential question I could answer related to spreading the light is - what can I leave behind that’s positive and might actually last? If when I leave this world, I am only what I leave behind - what can I leave behind that regenerates and endures?

I don’t believe that careers and promotions are regenerative. The enduring impact of my position or title will start fading when I retire and end completely when I die. Nobody will care about my LinkedIn profile after I’m out of the game.

But what will last is a coaching tree of ethical and effective managers if I’m able to create one. What will last is the knowledge of unmet customer needs, if I’m able to bake that understanding into the DNA of companies and institutions. If I can build teams that don’t depend on fear, control, and hierarchy  - and those teams actually succeed - they’ll regenerate and create more teams of their own. Those things regenerate, not my career in and of itself.

Simply having a happy marriage and happy children won’t regenerate either. What might last is if we can make such an impression on those around us and share all our secrets for a happy life, so that it starts a chain reaction which regenerates the families and marriages of others, that might endureHaving a wonderful marriage and happy children would be terrific, but those two achievements on their own won’t endure. What will endure is figuring out the secret sauce and then open sourcing the recipe.

When I talk to older people - whether friends or family - their concerns are different than mine. They seem less concerned with what they have and more concerned with what they can give back. As their time winds down, so does their ego. They start to look beyond their own lives.

What’s gut wrenching is when those people can’t prove to themselves that they’ve spread light. Or when they believe they haven’t prepared those that follow to spread light. Or worst of all, when they believe they’ve run out of time. Because spreading light and preparing others to spread light takes time. To see that realization is to witness agony.

—

What the hell have I been doing? For these past three decades, what have I been solving for? Have I been solving for building the world’s biggest candle? Have I been solving for lighting my own candle? Or have I been solving for spreading the light?

If I was solving for spreading the light, I think I would be acting so much differently than I am now.

I wouldn’t care as much about a career trajectory or a “dream job”, I’d just be walking the path of greatest different and would be spending much more time building up others to succeed and teach others.

I too, would be thinking about how to help others outside the four walls of our home, or at least really being generous with time and energy for the people who live near us or who are closest to us. I wouldn’t be waiting for the perfect cause to support or the perfect kid to mentor. I’d just be going for it and creating more builders of others.

And, I certainly wouldn’t be spending as much time pouting about all the others who behave badly toward me or be putting up a facade of politeness. If I was really solving for spreading the light, every conversation I had would be open, honest, sincere, and showing genuine concern for others. It’d be all heart and no polish.

If I were solving for spreading the light, I think I would be acting much differently. God willing, I have time to be different.

Photo by Rebecca Peterson-Hall on Unsplash

The Waiting Place

It’s not the lung stuff that has knocked me out ill as an adult, it’s the stomach bugs. And this one was a gut punch like I haven’t had in half a decade.

I had lost water in both directions, still unable to eat or drink more than a little without twitching and convulsing sleeplessly with abdominal pain. Even with full blankets, socks, pajamas, and hours of adorning a second comforter I just couldn’t get warm.

“This one’s a nasty one,” I thought.

The kids were going about their “home day” downstairs, and Robyn was bridging both worlds to check on my condition. I was upstairs, just laying there. I was drifting in and out of semi-conscious daydreams and actual dreams. And damn, I was probably thinking too much about work, too.

But more than anything, I was alone. It was just me, with the bedroom door closed, laying witness to the bug battle being waged in my upper abdomen.

This is the first time I’ve been home sick with the kids around, that I can remember, at least. The other times, must’ve been while they were at daycare, I guess.

It wasn’t different than a typical day, their comings and goings seeming like what I would expect. There were bumps and kicks. The clinking of dishes in the sink, accumulating because I wasn’t doing them. The half-hearted tears of sibling friction. Riley, of course, barked as the mail carrier made their daily rounds. A neighbor in his seventies or eighties stopped by with children’s books, in hopes that they’d find new life with our sons. I heard celebrations, I think, after a victor emerged after a game of Uno.

In our home, these sounds are businesses as usual. Except, today, I wasn’t downstairs in the thick of it. I was at a distance, hearing muddled and softened versions of it all. It was as if all the scenes were familiar, photographically familiar, but somehow fuzzy and uncharacteristically muddled.

And as I lay there, I wanted to rise. I wanted to get up, shuffle downstairs and just be there with them, even if I was relegated to the couch. I wanted to hold them, to kiss them on the crown of their heads. My fingers longed to be interlaced with Robyn’s.

All of a sudden I missed them all, desperately and with panic, like I was in the desert and being present for their afternoon snack was the oasis I needed to even just survive. I was only a floor above them, but all of a sudden, without any warning I felt like I was a whole world away.

And I wondered, in my half lucid mind, what if this is what it was like. What if this is what it was like when we moved from this world into the next world away?

Could it be that the next stage our soul goes to after we die is the equivalent of “being a floor away”? To a place where we can catch glimpses of the life happening without us? Where we hear the yelps of victory and the melody dishes clanking? Where we hear, but never see, muffled and fuzzy glimpses of home?

If the first stage of the afterlife is being the equivalent of a floor, but really a world, away, it would be a place of love and gratefulness, but also of the deepest sadness. If that were the afterlife, I thought, I would wait there. I’d wait, on the floor, back and ear to the door all day, hoping to hear just a little bit more, for a little bit longer.

I would hope to hear laughter and pray that someone could wipe the tears I could not wipe myself. I would eat when they ate. I would sleep when they’d slept. I would wait up for them, meditating and thinking, while they were out of the house, scratching a couple verses if there was a notebook at hand.

If waiting is all I could do, I thought, I would wait.

But if this place, this room of waiting, were the first stage of the afterlife, I thought further, how long would I wait?

Because surely, if whatever God there was created this waiting place, this good but anxious waiting place, he would create something more and better for us too. Surely, no God benevolent enough to create this purgatory of waiting would be so cruel to make it without a heaven that follows.

That’s where that heaven would be, right on the other side of the waiting room door. If this waiting place were purgatory, unity with God would be right on the other side of the door…

But no, if this were purgatory and I had made it here, surely Robyn would follow. I would wait here, I would wait here for her. Like Yudhisthira refused Indra, I would not cross the threshold without her.

One day, I would wake up, and she would be here in this waiting room with me. We’d take a few days or weeks, to see to it that our sons were on their way to being settled. And then we’d open the door, and we’d cross the threshold together.

As I thought about this possibility of a waiting place, frenetically, and with feverish mind, I started to weep - losing a few drops more of saline that I could scarcely afford to lose. I missed my family, even after just a few hours, and I wept.

I thought of them, a world away downstairs, and tried to feel the halo of their love in the air. And then I went to sleep.

When I woke, my toes, surprisingly, were warm again. From my core to my knees, I was warm again. The pain in my stomach had subsided. I tested out a few crackers and a few larger gulps of the electrolyte mix Robyn had brought me hours earlier. Sure enough, I was able to stomach both.

And then, I remembered that this was just a minor stomach bug, from which I would recover. This room, our bedroom, was not a purgatory of waiting. I was not in a waiting place.

I was here, right now. I was alive, right now. My wife, and my children, and our pup - my family - they were here right now.

I long to be with them, for the business as usual days the most, maybe. I want to be with them for the daily grind, with all its struggles, joys, illnesses, and small mercies. Being with them is a form of heaven for me, and it’s right here, right now. A heaven, I thought, is just on the other side of that door.

Photo by runnyrem on Unsplash

Artists Must Wander

There are, roughly speaking, three types of bands. Any of the three is a legitimate way to make a living as a musician, but they’re different and require different skills and mindsets.

To be successful at any, we must choose and know what we’re signing up for. The biggest mistake we can make and the surest way to be average is to not choose.

The job of a tribute band is to be as close to the original as possible. At a tribute band’s show, the audience very explicitly doesn’t want anything new. The whole craft of being a tribute band is mimicking, with intense fidelity, what has come before. To be good at this, we have to listen, with unrelenting meticulousness, the artist we are paying tribute to. The key question for a tribute band is, “does it sound like the original?”

The job of a cover band is to play hit after hit, across artists and genres. Cover bands take the songs people like and play the hell out of ‘em. To do this requires great musicianship and an ability to find the balance between preserving the original and putting just enough of a twist on it to make it feel new and exciting. Cover bands have to be good at listening not to the original artists, but to the audience in front of them. Their key question for a cover band is, “does it sound like something the audience wants to hear?”

And then there are those bands who want to be artists. The job of this last group is to be new, to be original, and to bring a new point of view - catching lighting in a bottle, if you will. To be an artist, an original artist, is an entirely different proposition than being a tribute band or a cover band.

To be an original artists requires wandering around lost, often for significant periods of time. An original artist has to find the songs that only they can write and only they can sing. Original artists cannot listen, too much, to what’s come before them. Instead, an original artist needs to listen to their own voice and to the rhythms and melodies out in the world that nobody else is hearing yet. The key question for an original artist is, “What does my voice sound like?”

I think we underestimate, still, how much our culture indoctrinates us to avoid wandering. We have curriculum and an education system. We have college majors with specific requirements. We have board exams and certification tests. We have career plans and linear project plans. In the corporate world, we have competitive benchmarking and the application of “best practices.” We’re told, ‘Don’t recreate the wheel.”

All these things, in aggregate, seem to just scream sometimes, ‘Wandering is bad! Bad boys wander! Those who wander are lost!”

To be original artists, we have to unlearn this indoctrination and replace it with a new belief, “Not all those who wander are lost. On the contrary, if being an original artist is what we choose to be - wandering, to where it is quiet enough to hear our own voice for the first time, is the surest way forward.”

Photo Credit: Unsplash @yvettedewit

The linchpin to goodness: listening to love

This post is an excerpt from Choosing Goodness - a series of letters to my sons, that is both a memoir and a book of everyday philosophy. To find out more about this project, click here.

—

In my reflection, the linchpin of goodness is courageous action on the hard stuff, and the linchpin of courageous action is love.  

Love, my sons, is what everything we’re discussing comes down to, and not in a soft, lofty, squishy, and non-specific way. For the purpose of goodness, love is tangible and tactical. Love is the brass tacks of the whole enterprise.

As I’ve thought about love, and where it comes from, the most important practice I can think of is listening. And I don’t mean just listening with your ears and your intellect. I mean the most comprehensive listening possible - with your heart, and your whole body and spirit.

There’s absolutely no chance in the world of loving someone if you know nothing about them. At it’s root, love is knowing something of another person’s story. And when we hear that story, we find something to love about them. Something about their essence and what makes them unique and special. Something of the grace that God himself has place within them to shine forth. You have to understand the truth, at least a little to start, of who someone is to love them.

There’s no chance of this knowing of someone and finding something about them to love – with that deep unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love – unless your heart is open to listening. Knowing and loving someone cannot occur without listening.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @christinhumephoto

Listening is what puts us on the journey to love, because once we start to understand the compelling story, gifts, and grace that everyone has, we are drawn to them – just a little bit more than we were. And then we learn more of their grace, and we’re drawn in a little closer. And then a little closer.

Listening is like gravity, drawing us in closer. As we listen, we start to recognize the light in them that’s as important or more important than our own needs. We start to value who they are, and feel a genuine sense of care and concern for their well being. They become “same human beings.” And without even realizing it, there comes to be love there.

Listening, perhaps, is not a sufficient condition to love, but it is the first necessary condition to love. 

When it comes to figuring out how to love, therefore, there is no bigger question than how to open up our whole body and heart and listen. The more and better we can listen, the more its gravity draws us in closer to love.

We can start with the basics. There are tips and practices I suggest to help with the mechanical aspects of listening. Before we learn to listen with our whole body and heart, we can try to listen with just our ears.

There are plenty of resources to help you with it, like these articles from NPR, Harvard Business Review, or TED. Some of the basics techniques are things like, “be quiet”, “confirm your understanding with questions”, or “reserve judgement”; a simple Google search will help you find many other tactics you can use to help with the mechanics of listening.

I don’t have much to add to the body of knowledge on the mechanics of listening and active listening. You can read about and practice those skills on your own. What I’ve found, however, is that to really listen in such a way that it leads to a bond of love, it’s a practice requiring more than just the mechanical. Listening that creates gravity between you and someone else takes opening your heart, which is a much different enterprise than what is thought of commonly as “listening.”

Again we turn to the how. How can we open our hearts?

Creating Unexpected Joy

As 2022 began, I set out on an experiment to create an intentional reflection practice to build courage.

The most important thing I learned was a simple, data-backed conclusion: I only predict what the hardest moment of my day will be about 5% of the time. This is astounding to me. I am far worse at predicting how my own day will turn out than meteorologists are at predicting the weather.

Part of that is because by envisioning the day ahead I am prepared to deal with one situation and find it less hard than it would otherwise have been. But still, almost every day I logged an entry this year, something unpredictable happened.

Any last hope I was clinging to about how much certainty I had in my own life has vanished in a flurry of nervous laughter. But as I struggled this week to understand what this jarring finding meant, I realized that the inverse is also true: just as I cannot predict the hardest part of my day, I cannot predict what good things will happen in the day ahead, either. Just as I am faced with unexpected suffering, I also stumble into unexpected joy.

The real important question then boils down to this: how do I minimize unexpected suffering and increase unexpected joy?

Again, I looked back at the data from my notebook. What were some of the patterns behind what I thought I should do differently during the hardest moments of my days?

Some of the basics were so simple they were almost boring. During the year, the ways I identified to better handle the hardest parts of the day boiled down to these: get enough rest, eat nutritious feed, create time to plan and think, create boundaries (especially with work), resolve conflict with other people calmly and immediately, and perhaps most importantly - assuming positive intent by meeting the person in front of me where they are and remember that we’re both the same human beings.

Doing these basics works to minimize suffering because they lead to better decisions - both in resolving the suffering at hand and in creating fewer problems for our future selves.

Eating well, for example, makes me less groggy in dealing with a difficult child right now and makes me less likely to hear bad news from a cholesterol test I need to take 6 months from now. Creating time to think makes me get my most important chores done faster today and it helps us plan out routine maintenance on our house so we don’t end up with a furnace that fails “suddenly.”

Similarly, these basic practices help to create joy because they create the conditions for intense connection with others - whether other people, ideas, nature, or spiritual truths.

Creating boundaries, for example, helps me prevent conflict with colleagues on a new project and builds momentum for a meaningful working relationship. Resolving conflict with Robyn calmly and immediately builds trust between us and can become a catalyst to deepen our relationship rather than undermine it. And perhaps most powerfully, I’ve found this year that assuming positive intent creates a halo of safe space, and leads to the sort of deep talk and open-hearted compassion that builds deep bonds.

This was even the case with strangers - like the Michigan alum behind us in line at the Phoenix Airport rental car desk last Monday. After he awkwardly passed comment on Robyn nursing while standing in line, we assumed positive intent instead of malice. Turns out he was friendly and caring, and he ended up telling us a great story about catching a Yankees game at Fenway Park with his brothers after taking a trip to Boston on a whim. It was an unexpected delight on an otherwise terrible travel day with long waits, uncomfortable seats, and several bouts of nausea.

Moments of deep connection can happen at almost any time, with almost any person if the right conditions are present. So how do we do these basics, and create the conditions for unexpected joy to emerge?

All of these basics, it seems, start with a calm and peaceful mind.

It’s just not possible to meet someone where they are without a calm and peaceful mind. It’s just not possible to think and plan without a calm and peaceful mind. It’s just not possible to resolve conflict effectively without a calm and peaceful mind. It’s not even possible to eat or sleep properly - among the most basic human functions - without a calm and peaceful mind.

It seems as if all roads to unexpected joy run through having a calm and peaceful mind. Cultivating a calm and peaceful mind through meditation, deep breathing, gratitude, and prayer, therefore, is the practice I resolve to build this year.

—

Items needed: A quiet place, about 15 minutes, Mala (Rosary)

Photo Credit: Unsplash @towfiqu999999

Morning practice: Choose one word or short phrase that represents the day’s intention, this is the day’s mantra. Close eyes and enter a comfortable seated position. Take a deep inhale. Upon exhale think or repeat the mantra. Advance one bead in the rosary and repeat until one cycle of the rosary is complete.

Evening Practice: Complete day’s reflection activities. Close eyes and enter a comfortable seated position. Start with articulating gratitudes, advance one bead in the rosary for each gratitude expressed. Try to repeat for half the rosary.

Finish with prayer or some other expression of care and concern for others. Advance one bead for each prayer / thought for others expressed. Attempt to complete rosary with combined expressions of gratitudes and prayers - if beads remain, do one deep breath for each that remains until rosary complete.

Becoming giving beings

Children are selfish. By design. That’s what they’re supposed to do and their survival depends on it. From the moment they are born, they demand that we feed them, clothe them, protect them, love them, and bathe them.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @adroman

And so did I. Like every other person that has ever lived, I was a selfish child. Far into adolescence, I was selfish, even if it was slightly less so than the day I was born.

As we age, it seems as if life extracts the selfishness, little by little, from our bodies and minds. First through marriage, then through children. For those of us who believe, through faith also. Through the intensities of grief and joy the selfishness is stolen sneakily, by the experience of life itself - if we let it.

If I am lucky enough to live a full life, without sudden death, I don’t know, exactly, what it will be like to die. I know it’s coming someday, but say I am dying at 95 from the ailment of a having a body that has long since depreciated past its useful life - what will it be like? I meditate on what it might be so that I can be prepared.

If I am so lucky to not die a sudden death, I think it may actually be like the movies. That’s what I hope for, anyway.

When I meditate on what I will be thinking and feeling on my deathbed, I imagine being close to Robyn and our children. I think I will want to just sit with them, drinking water and eating rice with lentils. Simple food, that does not distract from the company.

As I visualize myself slowly chewing the tasteless rice, my deathbed meditation progress to its very last moments.

I am there. Robyn is there. Our sons are there, and even in my foggy mental state, and despite the excruciating pain of inhabiting a dying body, I can tell our sons are grown because the hair on their temples has started to grey - that is the mark of a grown man in our line.

And then, at the very end, I gaze at Robyn. I am there, trying to muster some last words before I go ahead. In that last moment I do not ask for more painkillers. I do not cry. I do not beg God for more time. I do not say to her, “tell me you love me.” In those last moments, I am determined not to take.

With the last breaths of oxygen I breathe, and the last beats of my heart, before my thoughts go dark, I will try to say, “I love you.”

I will try to give love, to her, until the literal end of my life. Until God takes me from her embrace. In that moment, when I am as vulnerable as the day I was born, I dream of giving whatever love remains. Just like that. Just like the movies.

In life, and death, there can be so much suffering. That’s part of the deal. But what a beautiful thing to be part of. It is wonderful to know that if we must suffer the fate of death that there’s at least a fighting chance that life will have transformed us from something selfish into something more gracious.

It is utterly remarkable to me that we can go from being newborns, designed to be selfish, into giving beings. What a beautiful and curious thing it is, that after the immense suffering of our lives, at the moment of imminent death, our singular focus, above even our own survival, can become, “I love you.”

Being that, a giving being, is what I hope to become.

We do not have monsters inside us

The first time I had the delusion, was probably around the time I started high school. I don’t remember what preceded it, I just remember thinking, “there’s something untamed and dark inside me.”

As I’ve aged, I’ve come to realized that I’m not the only man who has felt the grip of something inside them, small to be sure, but something that feels like evil.

For decades now, I’ve believed this about myself as a man: I have this tiny little seed, deep down, in my heart. That seed is a little root of evil and I must not let it grow. I know there is a monster within, and I must not let it out.

I don’t know from whence this deluision came. But it came.

The delusion reawakened when I started to seeing press about a new book, Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves, which is about the crisis among men we have in America. I haven’t read the book, yet, but here’s some context from Derek Thompson at The Ringer:

American men have a problem. They account for less than 40 percent of new college graduates but roughly 70 percent of drug overdose deaths and more than 80 percent of gun violence deaths. As the left has struggled to offer a positive vision of masculinity, male voters have abandoned the Democratic Party at historically high rates.

Or this from New York Times columnist David Brooks:

More men are leading haphazard and lonely lives. Roughly 15 percent of men say they have no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. One in five fathers doesn’t live with his children. In 2014, more young men were living with their parents than with a wife or partner. Apparently even many who are married are not ideal mates. Wives are twice as likely to initiate divorces as husbands.

I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Many men have an obsolete ideal: Being a man means being the main breadwinner for your family. Then they can’t meet that ideal. Demoralization follows.

For more than a year, before this book was released, I’ve been grappling with some of its core themes. I might not call my own life a crisis, per se, but I struggle with being a man in America today.

I have been wanting to write about “masculinity” or “the American man” for some time, but have struggled to find the right frame and honestly the guts to do it.

A different version of this post could’ve been about how lonely, and isolated I feel and how hard it has been to maintain the ties I have with close, male, friends from high school, college, and my twenties. Or I could’ve written about the pressure of competition in the workplace and the way other protected groups are supported, but I and other males are not, though we also struggle.

I might’ve written about the confusion I feel - I am trying to operate in a fair and equal marriage with Robyn, but we have no blueprints to draw from because society today and what it means to be a man feels so different from the time I came of age. A different version of this post might’ve be political and angry, pushing back against the stigma I feel when I’m gathering with other men - for example, sometimes I feel like getting together in groups of men is something to be ashamed of because it’s assumed that groups of men will devolve into something chauvinistic or destructive and “boys will be boys” and masculinity is “toxic.”

[Let me be clear though: abusive, violent, exploitative, or criminal behavior is absolutely wrong. And the many stories that have been made public about men who behave this way is wrong. And I’d add, men shouldn’t let other men behave that way, toward anyone. I do not imply with any of the struggles I’ve referenced above that any person, man or women, is exempted from the standards of right conduct because they are struggling.]

What I do imply, is that the struggles that are talked about in public discourse about the crisis of men is real to me, personally. My life does not mirror every statistic or datapoint that’s published about it, but directionally I feel that same struggle of masculinity.

As I’ve searched for words to say something honest and relevant about masculinity, what I’ve kept coming back to is that delusion I’ve believed that there is an evil and dark part of me, even if it’s small and buried deep down, that exists because I am a man. The negative ground that all my struggles of masculity come from is the belief that there’s a monster inside me, and that the balance of my life hangs on not letting him out of the cage.

For me at least, this is the battleground where the struggle of my masculinity starts and ends. No policy change is going to solve this for me. No life hack is going to solve this for me. No adulation or expression of anger is going to solve this for me.

If I want to get over my struggle with my masculinity and difficulties I feel about being a man in America today, I have to dispel the belief that there’s a monster inside me. I have to prove that I am not evil inside and that belief is indeed a delusion. The obstacle is the way.

But how? How do I prove to myself that there’s not a monster, that I was born, inside me?

—

Our neighborhood is full of old houses, built mostly in the 1920s. And fundamentally, there are two ways to renovate an old house. You either paper over the problems, or you fix them and take the house all the way down to the foundation and the studs if you have to.

As it turns out, the only way you really make an old house sturdy is to take it down to the studs, and build from there. Papering over the issues in an old house - whether it’s old pipes, wiring, or mold - leads to huge, costly, problems later. The only way is to build a house is from good bones.

With that model in my head, I thought of this reflection, to hopefully prove to myself - once and for all - that I do not have the seeds of evil and darkness, sown into me because I was born a man.

The rest of this post is my self-reflection around three questions. I share it because I feel like I need to try out my own dog food and demonstrate that it can be helpful. But more than that, if you’re a man or someone who cares about a man, I share all this in hopes that if you also believe the delusion that you were born with a monster inside, that you change your mind.

For sure, every person is capable of terrible things. But we, as men, don’t have to believe the delusion that we were born with a monster inside us. We have to stop believing that. We can build our identity as men around the parts of us that are most good.

—

What are the broken, superficial parts of me that I can strip away to get down to the core of the man I am?

I can strip away the resentment I have about being raised with so much pressure to achieve. I can strip away the bizarre relationship I have with human sexuality because as an adolescent the culture around me only modeled two ways of being: reckless promiscuity or abstinence, even from touching. I can strip away the anger I have because as a south Asian man, I am expected to be a doctor, IT professional, and someone who never has opinions, something to say, or the capability to lead from the front. I can strip away the self-loathing I have about being a man - I can be supportive of womens’ rights and opportunities without hating myself. I can strip back all the times I tried to prove myself as a dominant male: choosing to play football in high school, doing bicep curls for vanity’s sake, binge drinking to fit in or avoid hard conversations, trying to get phone numbers at the bar, or talking about my accomplishments as a way of flexing - I do not need to be the stereotypical “alpha male” to be a man. I can strip away my need for perfection and control, without being soft or having low standards.

I can strip away all pressures to prove my strength based on how I express feelings: I do not have to exude strength by being emotional closed, nor do I need to exude strength by going out of my way to express emotion and posture as a modern, emotionally in-touch man - I can be myself and express feelings in a way that’s honest and feels like me. I can strip away the thirst I have for status, my job title and resume is what I do for a living, not my life. I can strip away the self-editing I do about my hobbies and preferences - I can like whatever I like, sports, cooking, writing, gardening, astronomy, the color yellow, the color blue, the color pink - all this stuff is just stuff not “guy stuff” or “girl stuff.” I can strip away the pressure I feel to be a breadwinner, Robyn and I share the responsibility of putting food on the table and keeping the lights on, we make decisions together and can chart our own path.

Once I strip away all the superficial parts of me, and get down to the studs, what’s left? What’s the strong foundation to build my identity, specifically as a man, from?

At my core, I am honest and I do right by people. At my core I am constructively impatient, I am not obsessed over results, but I care about making a better community for myself and others. At my core, I am curious and weird - that’s not good or bad, it’s just evidence that I have a thirst to explore no ideas and things to learn. At my core, I value families - both my own and the idea that families are part of the human experience. At my core, I care about talent - no matter what I achieve extrinsically I am determined to use my gifts and for others to use there, because if the human experience can have less suffering, why the hell wouldn’t we try? At my core, I believe in building power and giving it away and I am capable of walking away from power. At my core, I care most about being a better husband, father, and citizen.

Now that I’ve stripped down to the studs, what mantra am I going to say to replace my old negative thought of, “I was born with a monster inside me that I can’t let out of the cage?”

I was born into a difficult world, but with a good heart. I am capable of choosing the man I will become.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @bdilla810

Showing Up Is The First Choice

Listening is the key.

We can love, maybe anyone, after we listen to their story. We can understand and solve many challenges if we are curious enough to listen and learn and understand. Relationships of trust and respect are built upon listening, more than anything else, perhaps. Listening to and knowing our own hearts, strengths, and unrelenting desires is a non-negotiable aspect of finding our way.

And from a posture of listening comes the core foundation of inner strength: courage, persistence, and integrity. I really believe this deeply, and as I’ve aged I’ve come to see listening as the under-appreciated linchpin of character and morality.

If listening is the key unlocking greater virtues, the key to listening is showing up. Only after showing up does listening even become possible. I know this without any empirical data.

I know this when I creep into my inbox, and Robert starts to inexplicably lash out at his brother. I know this when the energy in a work meeting changes based on the percentage of people who have their camera on vs. the percentage who are multi-tasking with their camera off. I know this when Robyn mentions that “Myles was asking for ya” at story time when I’m away on a business trip. I know this when I’ve glazed over half a chapter of my nightstand reading because I’m thinking about my to do list.

I know this when I’m rocking Emmett back to sleep, fuming about the slights I’ve perceived from the day, and he doesn’t settle into sleep on my shoulder until I’ve shifted my thinking to his breathing. I know this when I remember what it’s like to go on a date with Robyn and I’m finally hearing her again, not even realizing that I’ve forgotten how to listen.

And though I can wax about it’s importance, showing up is so hard. We can travel so cheaply, to get anywhere but here. We can be any place in the known universe with a smartphone. We can work from anywhere. We can retreat from the present challenge and justify just about anything under the auspices of “I deserve this” or “self-care”. We can disappear into our to do list, because it never ends anyway.

And there, too, is great distraction in struggle. There is hunger. There is disease. There is violence. There is The fear of missing out. There is uncertainty and mean spiritedness. There is the fear of not being enough or a life without meaning. These struggles are a barrier to showing up.

And most insidious of all, we can tell ourselves we can stop showing up if someone we love seems like they’ve stopped first. Tit for tat. it’s only fair. “He did it first” makes it okay, right?

Showing up is a choice. Rather, showing up is many little choices.

It’s the choice to get enough sleep. Or to put the phone away at dinner. It’s the choice to put a boundary on work hours. It’s the choice to meditate and do yoga to build concentration. It’s the choice to eat nutritious food and drink adequate water to prevent the body from distracting the present.

Showing up is the choice to make eye contact, and not scurry into our house to avoid talking with our neighbor. It’s the choice to hear out our proverbial weird uncle or aunt at Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the choice to not weasel out of a commitment when we get better plans. It’s the choice to breathe deeply instead of letting our attention run wild.

In a world of limitless choice, where we can be almost anywhere physically and digitally, showing up is a choice in itself.

I struggle with this. Most of the time, I act on autopilot and don’t actively choose to show up or not. It just happens or it doesn’t.

Like, literally yesterday I had an AirPod in my ear listening to the Michigan game while we had a family afternoon painting pumpkins and playing soccer, in Long Island, with family we flew across the country to see. In retrospect, why did I need to multitask for the sake of a football game? I was on autopilot.

And perhaps choosing whether or not to show up is not the greatest of all choices. That honor belongs to the choice of whether or not to become a better person. But even if it’s not the greatest choice, choosing to show up is our first moral choice. I must remember this, it is a choice. Showing up is a choice. It’s step one.

Before anything, I must stew on this deeply in my bones: will I choose to show up? And I must repeat the echo the answer in my head as a mantra: Yes, I can choose to show up. I can choose to show up. I can choose to show up.

Photo: Unsplash (@a_kehmeir).

Memories Are Only Shards

At around 2:30pm, when he emerges from the chamber of his midday nap, Myles is at “peak snuggle”. And this day he chose me. I was outlayed on a sofa, tucked into a corner at it’s “L”.

And then, in one single motion, he scooped on top of me, jigsawing in between my knees and sternum. This was a complete surprise, because this never happens. It’s mommy that invariable gets his peak snuggle, not me.

And I was excited-nervous like some get right before an opening kickoff and maybe even before a first date. I wanted to soak this one in, because in addition to this never happening, I’ve come to accept the difficult truth that our kids won’t be little forever.

We will only get 18 Christmases, Diwalis, and birthdays with each of them at home. We will only get 18 summers with them at home. Eventually, Myles’s sternum and knees will outgrow my own. It’s not just a thought of “oh my gawd, this never happens, I’ve gotta soak this in”, it’s a realization that there will be a time where they’re too big for this to ever happen again. Eventually, Myles, and all our children will outgrow the very idea of peak snuggle.

I know this is all fleeting, and so I was trying to just be there, so still, so as not to perturb Myles into realizing he could move on with his day. I tried to notice everything: the softness of his newly chestnut colored hair, which has lightened as the summer unfolded. I noticed the fuzzy nylon texture of his Michigan football jersey. I tried to cement the feel of his fingers as he tried to read my face like a map, as he reached up above his head, past my chin, and to my cheeks. I embraced the particular top-heavy way his two-and-a-half year old frame carried its weight at this specific moment of his life.

But hard as I tried, my efforts to remember were an exercise in grasping at straws. Memories have the shortest of all half lives.

Even 5 minutes later, as I desperately tried to encode my neurons with this moment, I couldn’t quite remember it as it actually happened. Even after just five minutes, I had only the fragments and feelings of something that now was fuzzy and choppy and bits and pieces. What remained was more like a dream than a memory.

All my memories, are this way. I’ve even experimented to test my mind’s resilience to remember, and everything still fades. Even for the most exhilarating moments of my life - like our marriage vows, the birth of our children, or my first time walking into Michigan Stadium - only the fragments remain. It’s excruciating but true that the only time the we ever experience reality is in the very moment we are in, and only if we’re fully there. After just seconds, the memory decays irreparably. All we are left with is a shard of what really happened.

This unfairly short half life of memory has softened my judgement about social media. After stripping away all the vanity, status signalining, and humble bragging, I think there is at least a sliver of desperation and humanity that’s left. At the end of the day, we just all want to remember. And because our minds are too feeble to remember unassisted, we take a photo and share it as a story.

In the past few weeks, as I’ve realized that I don’t truly have any clear, vivid, life-like memories. I’ve almost panicked about what to do. This is why we have to tell stories. Stories, just like photographs are a way to save a little shard of something beautiful. This is why I have to get sleep. The sleep keeps my eyes wide open and puts a leash on my mind so it doesn’t recklessly wander away from reality as it’s happening. And, most importantly, this is why I have to be with them.

We treasure our relationships and are so protective of them for a reason. If we find friends, family, or colleagues that we actually want to remember, we know intuitively that we ought to see them as much as we can. We know intuitively that if we see those treasured people often, maybe it’ll slow down the decay of our memories a little. Life is too short to throw away chances to be with the people we want, so desperately, to remember. This is why I have to be with them.

And just like that, Myles moved on with his day. He scooped off the sofa, just as quickly as he arrived. Peak snuggle was over. And my memory started to decay immediately, as I expected. But at least I do have this fragment of a feeling. And, thank God that even if I won’t be able to ever have full, real memories of this beautiful moment, I will at least have the shards of it.

Our stories are about light

In his 2019 memoir, A Dream About Lightning Bugs, musician Ben Folds reveals the meaning of the title a few pages into the manuscript. It was a dream he had as a kid, where he would be in the thick of summer and with awe be catching lightning bugs in a jar.

But for Folds, catching lightning bugs is more than just a whimsical childhood dream, it became a metaphor for the meaning of his life. In the first few chapters, Folds explains that he sees his purpose to catch lighting bugs, through his music, and share that momentary wondrous glow with others. That’s what he’s here for, to catch and share the light.

I heard this story about 15 minutes into a run, while listening to an audiobook of Folds’ memoir.

Damn, I thought while trodding up Livernois Avenue, metaphors about light are so powerful and universal. Why is that?

When really zooming out, what are our lives, really, other than a sequence of concentrating energy, reapplying it somehow, and embracing its dissolution? And what is light, but a transcendent and beautiful form of energy? So much of how we understand our own existence, too, can be thought of as a relationship between light and it’s absence. In a way, all our stories, our most important ones anyway, can be understood as a relationship with light.

As I kept running, Folds in my ear, I continued to think. Folds’ deal is lightning bugs, but why am I here?

I’m not here to be a lighthouse, I need to be with people in the trenches, not guiding from a distance. I’m not here to be a telescope, pondering into the heavens trying to decipher the secrets of the faintest sources of light. I’m not here to be commanding the spotlight to bring voice to the voiceless. I’m not here to be a firework, illuminating celebrations with color and magic.

Why am I here? What’s my dream about light?

We find ourselves often, in a dark, wet, cave. As Socrates might argue, perhaps that’s the state we are born into. If that’s true, I think I am here to make a fire, creating a light. I’m here to transfer that light onto a torch and find the others in the cave. I am here to take my torch and light the torches of others, give light away as fast as I obtain it. I am here to leave lanterns at waypoints as we go, making the once dark cave, brighter. And maybe I won’t survive long enough to find the way out of the cave. That’s okay.

My dream is not one about lightning bugs. My dream is one of making light, and sharing it with others so we can all go home someday.

I think this is a belief I’ve held for a long time, without consciously realizing it. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been writing this blog for almost 20 years, for no money, and resisting click-bait topics to gain an audience - even though sometimes I feel like I’m singing into a dark, empty cave. I can’t help but share the little bit of light I think I’m discovering with others. It’s what I’m here to do.

It’s so audacious, I think, to engage in this enterprise of “purpose”. Figuring out why we’re here? Trying to understand what our life is supposed to mean? It’s heavy, big stuff. I don’t really have it figured out, and I think anyone who claims they have a magic formula to figure it out is probably lying.

But this exercise, forcing myself to examine my life and turn it into a dream about light was useful. It worked. I don’t have all the answers, but I do feel clearer, about what my life is not, at least. If you’re similarly foolish and trying to figure out why you’re here, it’s an exercise I’d recommend to you, no matter who you are or what your backstory is.

Because, at the end of the day, all our stories are about light.

Don’t Work Saturdays

As a young twenty-something, I had a friend from work who told me one time that he went to great lengths to avoid working on Saturdays. It was some of the best advice I’ve ever received, and was provocative given that at the time both of us worked for a consultancy that required long hours and many of our colleagues bragged about how many hours they logged.

And what fortuitous advice to get from a peer at a such a formative time in my professional life. I started to avoid work on Saturdays and I still do. And thank God for that. Saturday mornings are a sacred time.

To some extent, I think I always knew this, or at least acted as if they were by accident.

If you grew up in the Midwest or went to college here, you know that our ritualistic observance and respect of Saturday mornings runs deep, and might as well be explained by “something in the water.” Because, after all, we have college football.

This observance and participation in the magic of saturday morning college football started when I was a pre-teen. I remember little of what happened when I was 10, except for the herculean Michigan team that won the National Championship. I still remember Charles Woodson, Brian Griese, and many of the key plays of that season. Every week I would get up, watch the pre-game show and then the game. That was that. No exceptions. Saturday mornings. That’s just what we do.

This continued, obviously, when I showed up for college in Ann Arbor and learned the true glory and glee of a collegian’s tailgate. When we lived in the fraternity house, we’d rally the brotherhood, and march down the street to a nearby sorority house - as if we were part of a parade - trays of Jell-O shots in hand. We’d then rouse the sorority sisters from sleep, with said Jell-O shots before continuing to the senior party house by the football stadium where the tailgate had already begun, and the streets had already started filling with sweatshirts and jerseys laden with maize and blue.

It’s absolutely magical, and for some borders on being a quasi-religious experience if you can believe that. Saturday mornings are a sacred time.

Buy Saturday morning magic extends far beyond football. There were the summers in Washington D.C., for example, where I interned every year of college. We lived in the George Washington University dorms, with about 50 other Michigan undergrads and the few others living down the halls from smaller schools that we’d adopted.

The morning would always start slow, and we’d have an invite for everyone to venture through our open door and brunch on some pancakes that my roommates and I had made, catching up about the latest stories made into zeitgeist by the The Washington Post, the pubs folks had visited the night before, the latest policy paper from a think tank making the rounds, or plans for sightseeing over the weekend.

As we’d wrap up shortly before noon, someone would inevitably bellow, with full throat and diaphragm through the dormitory corridors, “TTRRRRAAADDDERRRR JOOOOOOOOEEEESSS!”, which was our universally understood cry that someone was going grocery shopping and was looking for a friend to join them for round trip to and from the edge of Georgetown.

And that was that. That is just what we did, for no other reason than it being Saturday morning. Magical times.

I was reminded of the sacredness of Saturday mornings just yesterday. It was our first trip as a family of five to Eastern Market - Detroit’s largest farmer’s market, which is one of it’s crown jewels, rights of passage, and among the most illustrious and inclusive farmers markets in the country.

We strolled through shed-by-shed, perusing the day’s produce - me pushing the littler boys in the stroller and Robyn walking a few steps ahead with Bo, our 4-and-a-half year old. We grabbed a coffee, and worked our way back through the market’s sheds, stopping by a few farm stands that caught our eye for their fresh produce and attractive prices.

Then we stopped by the Art Park on our way a crepe stand for an early lunch, waiting patiently and with gentle smiles, because we were glad to just be there together. We didn’t care that it took a while, being slow was an opportunity, not an inconvenience.

This is what Saturday mornings are supposed to be like. If you ask me at least.

They’re not for moving fast, they’re for being uncharacteristically slow. They’re not for gearing up, they’re for gearing down. They’re not for hustling, or even for walking with a modicum of fierceness, they’re for ambling. They’re not for to-do-lists, they’re for togetherness and tradition. They’re not for working, they’re for everything but.

I am so grateful that someone set an example for me to not work on Saturday’s. It changed the course of my life, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that.At every phase of my life, with every community I’ve been part of, in every location I’ve ever lived, Saturday mornings have become magical, sacred times.

But none of that Saturday has a chance if we’re working - whether that’s emails, doing chores with tunnel vision, or otherwise doing something with the intention of being “productive.” We only have a few thousand of these Saturday mornings and it’s a tragedy to waste them.

Don’t work Saturdays.

Creating Safe and Welcoming Cultures

To help people feel safe and welcome within a family, team, organization, or community, two general strategies are: special attention and consistent treatment.

Examining the tension between those two strategies is a simple, powerful lens for understanding and improving culture.

The Strategies

The first strategy is to provide special attention.

Under this view, everyone is special and everyone gets a turn in the spotlight. Every type of person gets an awareness month or some sort of special appreciation day - nobody is left out. Everyone’s flag gets a turn to fly on the flag pole. The best of the best - whether it’s for performance, representing values, or going through adversity - are recognized. We shine a light on the bright spots, to shape behaviors and norms.

And for those that aren’t the best of the best, they get the equivalent of a paper plate award - we find something to recognize, because everyone has a bright spot if only we look.

This strategy works because special attention makes people feel seen and acknowledged. And when we feel seen, we feel like we belong and can be ourselves.

But providing special attention has tradeoffs, as is the case with all strategies.

The first is that someone is always slipping through the cracks. We never quite can neatly capture everyone in a category to provide them special attention. It’s really hard to create a recognition day, for example, for every type of group in society. Lots of people live on the edges of groups and they are left out. When someone feels left out, the safe, welcoming culture we intended is never fully forged and rivalries form.

The second trade off is that special attention has diminishing marginal returns. The more ways we provide special attention, the less “special” that attention feels. Did you know, for example, that on June 4th (the day I’m writing this post) is National Old Maid’s day, National Corgi Day, and part of National Fishing and Boating week, plus many more? Outside of the big days like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day - how can someone possible feel seen and special if the identity they care about is obscure and celebrated on a recognition day that nobody even knows exists?

The existence of “National Old Maid’s day” is obviously a narrow example, but it illustrates a broader point: the shine of special attention wears off the more you do it, which leads to the more obscure folks in the community feeling less special and less visible, which breeds resentment.

The second strategy to create a feeling of safety and welcoming in a community is to treat everyone consistently well.

In this world everyone is treated fairly and with respect. Every interaction that happens in the community is fair, consistent, and kind. We don’t treat anyone with boastful attention, but we don’t demean anyone either. We have a high standard of honesty, integrity, and compassion that we apply consistently to every person we encounter..

The most powerful and elite don’t get special privileges - everyone in the family only gets one cookie and only after finishing dinner, the executives and the employees all get the same selection of coffee and lunch in the cafeteria, and we either celebrate the birthday of everyone on the team with cake or we celebrate nobody at all.

The strategy of treating everyone consistently well works because fairness and kindness makes people feel safe. When we’re in communities that behave consistently, the fear of being surprised with abuse fades away because our expectations and our reality are one, and we know that we will be treated fairly no matter who we are.

But this strategy of treating other consistently well also has two tradeoffs.

The first, is that it’s really hard. The level of empathy and humility required to treat everyone consistently well is enormous. The most powerful in a group have to basically relinquish the power and privilege of their social standing, which is uncommon. The boss, for example, has to be willing to give up the corner office and as parent’s we can’t say things like “the rules don’t apply to grown ups.” A culture of consistently well, needs leadership at every level and on every block. To pull that off is not only hard, it takes a long time and a lot of sacrifice.

The second tradeoff is that to create a culture of consistently well there are no days off. For a culture of consistently well to stick, it has to be, well, consistent. There are no cheat days where the big dog in the group is allowed to treat people like garbage. There are no exceptions to the idea of everyone treated fairly and with respect - it doesn’t matter if you don’t like them or they are weird. There is no such thing as a culture of treating people consistently well if it’s not 24/7/365.

The Tension

The answer to the question, “Well, which strategy should I use?” Is obvious: both. The problem is, the two approaches are in tension with each other. Providing special attention makes it harder to treat others consistently and vice versa. They key is to put the two strategies into play and let them moderate each other.

A good first step is to use the lenses of the two strategies to examine current practices:

• Who is given special attention? Who is not?

• Who doesn’t fit neatly into a category of identity or function? Who’s at risk of slipping through the cracks?

• What do our practices around special attention say about who we are? Are those implicit value statements reflective of who we want to be?

• What are the customs that are commonplace? How do we greet, communicate, and criticize each other?

• Who is treated well? Who isn’t? Are differences in treatment justified?

• How do the people with the most authority and status behave? Is it consistent? is it fair?

• What are the processes and practices that affect people’s lives and feelings the most (e.g., hiring, firing, promotion, access to training)? Are those processes consistent? Are they fair? Do they live up to our highest ideals?

As I said, the real key is to utilize both strategies and think of them as a sort of check and balance on each other - special attention prevents consistency from creating homogeneity and consistency prevents special attention from becoming unfairly distributed.

From my observation, however, is that most organizations do not utilize these strategies in the appropriate balance. Usually, it’s because of an over-reliance on the strategy of providing special attention. That imbalance worries me.

I do understand why it happens. Providing special attention feels good to give and to receive and is tangible. It’s easy to deploy a recognition program or plan an appreciation day quickly. And most of all, speical attention strategies are scalable and have the potential to have huge reach if they “go viral.”

What I worry about is the overuse of special attention strategies and the negative externalities that creates. For example, all the special appreciation days and awareness months can feel like an arms race, at least to me. And, I personally feel the resentment that comes with slipping through the cracks and see that resentment in others, too.

Excessive praise and recognition makes me (and my kids, I think) into praise-hungry, externally-driven people. The ability to have likes on a post leads to a life of “doing it for the gram”. The externalities are real, and show up within families, teams, organizations, and communities.

At the same, I know it would be impractical and ineffective to focus one-dimensionally on creating cultures of consistently well. It’s important that we celebrate differences because we need to ensure our thoughts and communities stay diverse so we can solve complex problems. I worry that just creating a dominant culture without special attention, even one that’s rooted on the idea of treating people consistently well, would ultimately lead to homogeneity of perspective, values, skills, and ideologies instead of diversity.

The solution here is the paradoxical one, we can’t just utilize special attention or treating people consistently well to create safe and welcoming communities - we need to do both at the same time. Even though difficult, navigating this tension is well worth it because creating a family, team, organization, or community that feels safe and welcoming is a big deal. We can be our best selves, do our best work, and contribute the fullest extent of our talents when we feel psychological safety.

We are reimagining what it means to be a man

In the age we live in, what it means to be a man is being completely reimagined. And as a result, what we are trying to do as men - particularly as husbands, fathers, and citizens - is nothing short of remarkable. We are actively reinventing, for the first time, the role of men in society.

I struggle a lot with this.

On the one hand, I am a man. Being a man is a salient part of who I am and how I view the world. This may indicate, to some at least, that I’m less evolved and not as “woke”, if that’s the right word, than others among us. I’m not able to hold a world view that gender is entirely a social construction or that we should create a world that ignores the very concept of “men”. I’m not entirely sure what being a feminist or male ally entails, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that, exactly, either.

At the same time, I reject what being a man means today. And I’m not comfortable with the grotesque baggage that being a man is inseparable from. The criticisms of men and masculinity are legitimate, and that’s an understatement.

Men have controlled and abused women, for most of known history it seems - whether it was politically or through sexual violence. Marriages between men and women, generally speaking, have not be fair or equitable, ever. The glass ceiling is real - I see my women and my female colleague hindered and treated outright badly, in ways that men aren’t. I don’t want to be that kind of man.

But it seems to me, that for the first time, at least some men are trying to take on this tension - identifying with being a man, but rejecting its harmful externalities - and act differently. I don’t know if it’s a majority of men or even that a lot that are trying to reimagine what it means to be a man, but I’m certainly struggling through this tension. So are a lot of my friends and colleagues and it’s something we talk about. So it can’t be an immaterial amount of men who are trying to figure this out, right?

I love the mental model of using an OKR (Objective and Key Results) to set clear goals (you can get a nice crash course on OKRs, here). And so I tried applying it to “being a good man” - this is what being a “good man” means to me:

When I was done, I had a “whoa” moment. The OKR I created, I realized, is quite different than what I would assume the stereotypical man of the 20th century would create if he were doing the same exercise. Hell, it’s quite different than what my own father would probably create. Like, can you imagine the men of 1950s sitcoms (or even 1990s sitcoms) talking about fair distribution of domestic responsibilities or parenting without fear tactics?

I can’t. Most of the protagonists in those shows had wives who didn’t work outside the homes - the contexts in which those characters were cast is wildly different than our own.

And that’s what makes what we’re doing remarkable. We’re trying to envision a different future - and live it ourselves - without having any sort of role model on what this reconception of what it means to be a man can look like. It’s even more remarkable and complex because it’s not just heterosexual men in same-race relationships that are figuring this out. Gay men and men in interracial or interfaith relationships are also figuring out how to be husbands, fathers, and citizens in this time of cultural flux around what it means to be a man.

I couldn’t talk to my own father about this anyway (God rest his soul), but even if he was around he couldn’t be my role model for this journey. Despite my father being the most honest and perhaps the kindest man I’ve ever met, he was still swimming in a culture with remarkably rigid gender roles. All our male role models were, because that was the culture of the times.

But beyond our own uncles, fathers, and grandparents, we don’t have stories in our culture to draw from for role models, either. There aren’t novels with strong, male protagonists that are trying to redefine manhood in the 21st century, that I’ve found at least. On the contrary, every novel I’ve heard my friends talk about with male protagonists were from detective novels, historical fiction, thrillers, or from science fiction - hardly relatable to men trying to recast their male identities.

There are great male role models from the canon of 20th century literature and culture - Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, Reverend John Ames from Gilead, or even Master Yoda from Star Wars are favorites of mine - but those characters are in the wrong context to really help us navigate the process of reimagine manhood as well. Atticus and Yoda are not really dealing with contemporary circumstances, obviously, as much as I really am inspired by their example.

Honestly, it seems like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its superheroes going through real struggles and making real sacrifices are the closest role models we can look to as men trying to be better men. Maybe that’s why I like those films so much. But it’s hard and probably ego-inflating for me to relate to comic book superheroes. We need, and have to have something better than Marvel movies, right?

My wife loves the titles from Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and I honestly love hearing the stories of the novels she’s reading. All the titles are written by women and have strong female protagonists. I would love to have a similar book club, but with strong male protagonists trying to reimagine what it means to be a man. But what novels do we even have to choose from?

So fellas, what we are trying to do is remarkable. We’re not trying to navigate to a new place, as much as we’re trying to make a map to a place that’s never been visited.

We need to talk about it, blog about it, and podcast about it. Some of us have to write novels about it, or make music and movies about it. We have to leave a body of work for the next generation of men to draw upon. We have to leave our sons, nephews, students, players, and grandsons a place to start as they continue this remarkable journey of reimagining manhood that we’ve started.

Radha, My Sister

Her hair would’ve been actually black, I think, two shades darker than mine. My hair being dark-dark brown, but which most people think is black from afar. Though a different shade and sheen, her hair would’ve had equivalent thickness and vigor. And, for some reason I know that she would’ve worn that black, thick, hair of hers just above the shoulders.

Until recently I had only been able to visualize the back of her head - I don’t know why - and get a single breath, though a full one, of her essence only from time to time.

I am an only child; I literally have no siblings, but yet she is my sister. My younger sister, I should specify. She was never born, never conceived. And yet, for years now I’ve had a strong intuition that she existed, even if only as a spirit in the spectral realm. I have not even seen her in a dream, but I still knew of her in a dream, and I knew she was my little sister.

Over the years I’ve discerned more and more about her. Sometimes memories of our relationship come to me in a daydream, or I might feel her presence, usually manifested in the intermittent, but often forceful, breeze of early springtime.

She would’ve been two and a half inches shorter than me, and built with a broader, sturdier frame, more like our father’s than our mother’s. An athletic build, you could say, though she was not athlete. For some reason, I knew she was quietly enamored with art and art history. She was able to sketch and draw, and was a handy seamstress, like our mother. She is the one who inherited the wanderlust of our father, and would’ve moved to a place like New York or San Francisco so she could be close to museums, culture, and cuisine.

For some reason, I know her name is Radha, and that Radha is serene. Stoic and of remarkably even temperament. But every now and again, I know, her charm would shine through unrestrained. Flashing a smile, and patting my back after listening patiently to me vent about something irrelevant - softly but sheepishly interjecting, “That’s how it goes sometimes, big brother” before sashaying off to the kitchen to get us both a glass of water.

Radha and Robyn would’ve had a wonderful relationship. Radha probably becoming an ally and collaborator of Robyn in her pursuits to make work more supportive of caregivers and mothers. Robyn probably becoming a role model and an informal mentor to her for navigating marriage and family life. I think they would’ve been close, confidants even.

And to the boys, she would’ve been a doting Aunt, taking them to the latest exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts whenever she was in town. And she would tell them stories about her and I growing up together, and stoke their interest in our Indian heritage. For some reason, I know she is more assured in her identity than me. And, I also know, for some reason, that she would find safety in the fact that I was her biggest cheerleader and loudest supporter.

I have been thinking about Radha lately because the past few weeks have been a magical time in our family. Our sons are forming a bond of brotherhood. Bo and Myles have taken Emmett into their pack, wordlessly and without initiation. They, even though they have now been brothers for five weeks, still spontaneously erupt into a chant of, “WELCOME HOME EMMETT! WELCOME HOME EMMETT! WELCOME HOME EMMETT!” Without prompting or notice.

And as I’ve seen our three sons become a cohesive unit, images of Radha have come to me - because I’ve finally been capable of it. I see their sibling bond, up close. I see and realize, in them, the relationship Radha and I would’ve had. It is like Bo, Myles, and Emmett are a portal into a sort of semi-real-semi-dreamworld - the past I could’ve had, with my sister who was never born.

For my whole life, I’ve had moments where I’ve so desperately missed Radha. But I am lucky to have had brothers and sisters who were not my siblings. Robyn’s siblings treat me more like a brother than a brother-in-law, even though we have no shared memories of childhood. And it sounds corny, but some of my fraternity brothers, really have become brothers to me.

I, too, have a deep bond with many brothers and sisters - which most other Americans would call cousins - despite geography and age. In Indian culture, we call our elder brothers “Bhaiya” or “Bhaisahib”and our elder sisters “Didi” or “Jiji” - it’s a sign of respect. It is one of my great gratitudes and joys in life to have people that I can call those things and really mean it, rather than just “cousin”.

And yet, I still think longingly about the time with Radha I never had and the memories that could’ve been. She would’ve kindly but firmly reminded me who I was when I was floundering in my early twenties. And I would’ve been her rock when our father died and her stoic personality succumbed to her broken heart.

I do feel more than a few shreds of ridiculousness talking about what to many might seem like an imaginary sister. And yet, there’s something of Radha I know exists. She is not a ghost. There’s a little speck of her soul I feel I am always carrying with me, as if my spirt had a charm bracelet with a link to her on it. My words here are merely animating and coloring her into a quasi-corporeal form that she will never take. But, still, she is real.

What a wonderful thing it must be to have siblings, in the real world, I mean. It truly injures me when our sons get into childish arguments. If they only knew what it was like to be the without-a-sibling-will-be-an-orphan-someday type of alone. I know in my head they will grow out of their intermittent terrorizing of each other, but I hope they someday go beyond that and sincerely appreciate the beautiful gift - a brotherhood - that they’ve inherited.

It is a bizarre thing to have a bond with someone who doesn’t exist, but it’s remarkably affirming and comforting. For Radha and me, it was not meant to be in this life. All I can do is hope that she’s listening or reading my blog, I suppose. And that whatever part of her spirt that is able to be carried is something I possess.

And someday, maybe just maybe, I will meet her once I pass from this world onto the next. I will meet her and she will be as I’ve imagined her. Waiting, with my father, at the front door of a bungalow atop a hill. The hill is grassy, like that of a mountainous, western state. And as I climb the hill, up the cobblestone walkway, she will be there with two glasses of water. And she will flash her unrestrainable charm, and say, softly but sheepishly, as I’ve always known her to: “Welcome home big brother, It’s so like you to be exactly five minutes late.” 

Where Compassion Starts

We said goodbye to Apollo, our family dog of 17 years this weekend. We adopted him my senior year of high school and I’m grateful that he had a long and generally healthy life. I’m also grateful for his friendship and love, especially for the company he’s given to my father and mother since I moved out of my childhood home.

This passing was different than that of my father, which was sudden and chaotic. Apollo’s passing, rather, is one that I had seen coming for almost two years now. Because of that, I feel like his loss is one that I’ve accepted and grieved already, for the most part - as much as one can anyway.

I don’t mean for this post to be a eulogy, however. But I wanted to open with his passing because I work out my feelings with words and I am sad that he’s no longer with us. More than that, that he’s gone ahead is important context for an unexpected moment of compassion.

The Doctor, and the staff surrounding here, who administered his final medication were obviously compassionate in all the ways I expected. Like in the tenderness of their words and body language, their expression of sorrow, the gentleness in their voices when walking us through the process and paperwork.

Then the Doctor, Dr. Preston, I think her name was - surprised me with an act of quite unexpected compassion.

The final dose of medicine was given through injection. To administer this, Dr. Preston carefully and gently shaved a bit of Apollo’s hair from his hind leg. Makes sense, I thought, much easier to find a blood vessel that way.

But then she sterilized the area with an alcohol solution, not in a robotic, I-do-this-a-dozen-times-a-day sort of way, but in a way that was peaceful and more deliberate. It was if she was acknowledging the gravity of the moment by performing this unnecessary act - Apollo had no medical purpose to avoid infection because he was about to die - and doing it anyway. This gave the whole affair, a welcome sense of respect and dignity.

And then he received the dose. It was done. And about 10 minutes later Apollo had gone ahead.

But then, again, Dr. Preston surprised me.

She informed us that his heart had stopped. She let a moment pass, letting us exhale. And then she covered his poke point with a little bandage and a little turquoise bandage wrap. The same sort of dressing, a healthy dog would’ve received. He was already gone, but she still bandaged his leg. Medically, it was totally unnecessary, but she did it anyway.

It was one of the greatest acts of compassion and respect I have ever seen.

“Thanks for wrapping him up,” I said, sincerely and matter-of-factly, with my upper cheeks quivering.

And then I asked if she needed anything else from me. She gently and politely said no, and then I left.

I have been thinking a lot in the past 24 hours about Dr. Preston’s unexpected act of compassion. It instantly made me feel hopeful, seen, and loved even.

How does someone find the grace to act, and be, like that that? How did Dr. Preston? How can I be that compassionate in my life? What might the world be like if even 1% more people regularly showed compassion like Dr. Preston had so unexpectedly?

Surely part of that is just circumstance, and probably practice. But even given those explanations, the compassion Dr. Preston shared was still remarkable and uncommon. 

And I really don’t have a precise answer on where compassion comes from. But I got a sense of where it might start while reflecting on, of all things, my trip to the grocery store today.

I was weaving through the aisles briskly, picking up supplies as I usually do. A piece of fish at the butcher counter. A bottle of ketchup. A carton of strawberries. The usual. But I also happened to need some water chestnuts, because we’re making a simple stir fry dinner one night this week. Luckily a store associate was stocking the shelves just as I got to the international foods section.

As I was driving home, I was remembering the interactions I had at the store. I had asked the person at the meat counter for about a pound and a half of salmon, but l didn’t even really remember her. The associate near the water chestnuts seemed unusually meek and quiet, that I noticed. But instead of saying good morning I just awkwardly snuck between her supply cart and the shelf to pick up my can of water chestnuts and went on my way. I think was polite to the self-checkout manager, but again, I had more or less forgotten my interaction with her.

During my run to the store, I had done nothing that different than anyone else. I was focused, efficient, and cordial enough to anyone I happened to speak to. But to not even be able to remember anything about those people? That indicated something overly transactional and not fully human.

I had left home, was weaving through the aisles of the grocery store, but had remained fully engaged only inside the world of my own mind, and my checklist. I had let the invisible people around me stay more or less invisible. My choice wasn’t improper, perhaps, but it wasn’t imposed upon me either. I didn’t have to stay so locked in my own world; so determined to complete my shopping trip as efficiently as possible.

Compassion is an act between people. It’s not something we experience when having an exchange with say a toaster, blender, or lawn mower. We don’t experience compassion with machines. And yes, I don’t know exactly why or how Dr. Preston was so disarmingly compassionate toward me.

But, what I do know is that she was there. She was fully there. She wasn’t going through the motions of her veterinary checklist. Her actions acknowledged that there were other living things she was engaging with. At a minimum, she was in a position to be compassionate, just by choosing to do that.

To be compassionate, we must withdraw from the inner world of our thoughts, chores, checklists, and daydreams. Even if I don’t know much about compassion, I do know this: we have to be fully with the people and creatures around us to be compassionate. That’s where compassion starts.

A Prayer Over Our Sons (on Emmett’s Birth Day)

February 28, 2022

Today, I prayed in the early morning instead of the evening. And it was a silent prayer, just with myself, instead of out loud with our whole family before tucking in the kids. When I first had the chance to hold Emmett about an hour after he was born today, a prayer just came over me.

It started as it usually does, with “Thank you God for this day, and for the good life we have…”

But today, the day-to-day blessings of family dinner, good friends and neighbors, our family, and the fresh air outside which I usually share in prayer were supplanted by prayers for our son, still weary from his 9 month journey into our arms.

Thank you God for today, and for the good life we have. Thank you God for bringing us Emmett. Thank you for he and Robyn both being healthy and safe. Thank you for the doctors and nurses who cared for them. The opening overture of this prayer was one might expect. But then, something deeper and purer started to emerge, involuntarily in my whispering thoughts.

I pray that he has a long and healthy life. I pray that he is able to learn and grow. I pray that he is able to contribute something in his life. I pray that he has a loving relationship with his brothers. I pray that we have many days and years with him, and as an entire family. I pray that he knows love and knows joy. I pray that he is able to experience both the simple and majestic beauties of nature and our world. I pray that his heart finds his way back to you, God. I pray that we can help him grow who he is to become, teach him right from wrong, and help him see life as the blessing that it is. I pray, God, for you to help us be the parents he needs us to be. And I pray for the chance to be good tomorrow.

Though not verbatim, this was my prayer over our son Emmett, on his birth day.

Sometime around lunch time, I began realize what I didn’t pray for earlier this morning. I didn’t pray that he’d become rich. I didn’t pray that he’d get into Harvard. I didn’t pray that he’d become famous. I didn’t pray for him to become a U.S. Senator or the President of the United States. I didn’t pray that he’d become a CEO of a publicly traded company. 

I didn’t pray that he would drive a Cadillac or a Porsche. I didn’t pray that he’d live in a house 2x-3x larger than our home in Detroit. I didn’t pray that he’d be the most popular kid in his high school. I didn’t pray that he’d find his what onto a who’s who list of his profession or his metro. I didn’t pray that he’d be the first person to set foot on Mars or find his way into the scrolls of human history.

Of course I didn’t pray for all that. When we are holding our children, literally, for the first time, power, status, and riches are among the things furthest from our mind. We pray over newborn children for something deeper and purer, because we know that the truest blessings in life - the ones we ask God or whatever we believe in for help to deliver - are deeper, and purer than power, status, and riches.

But, that’s surprising in a way. Emmett, today, is literally at the point in his life where his possibilities are most limitless. He was born, today. Anything is still possible, today. His choices are most unconstrained, today. Which in some senses makes it the perfect to contemplate large, aspirational dreams and pray for them, for him. If I wanted to pray for him to have power, status, and riches, today would be the day to do it.

Because starting tomorrow, the choices we make as parents and the slices of life he begins to experience will shape, ever so slightly, his future choices and possibilities. Even after a single day, path dependency starts. Today, the possibility set of his life is at its widest and wildest.

Emmett, Bo, and Myles, I’m now speaking to you directly here. I hope someday you stumble upon this post, after you’ve grown and started to make your way in this world. Because what I’m about to say is more than just an opinion, it’s a deeply-held conviction.

When I was growing up, adults around me - my parents, my family, my teachers, my parents’ friends, everyone - asked me the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And answering that question, month after month and year after year started to shape my worldview without me evening realizing it consciously.

All those years of responding to adults about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I started to think being something and all that is related to what we be was most important. Without even realizing it, I started to believe that accomplishments were most important. That money and status, and ultimately the power that comes from being something was most important. Because, if these adults I loved and respected were asking me this all the damn time, how could what I become when I grow up not be important?

And it will be tempting for me to keep asking this question of what you three want to be when you grow up, instead of the more benign question of “what do you want your life to be like as an adult?” It will be tempting for me, because what you become reflects on me as your father. If you three become wealthy, respected, or powerful it will elevate how our community and our culture see me. 

Even though I try, sometimes desperately, to strip myself of this ego, I am a mortal man, and I haven’t reached that level of enlightenment yet. The chance to elevate how the world sees me is still a temptation.

I don’t have the data to back this up quite yet, but I have a strong intuition that’s a substantial reason why adults ask this question - our selfish desires to be praised for the accomplishments of our youth emerge. We’re only human I suppose.

Boys, listen carefully and remember this: you do not have to achieve money, status, and power for me. You do not need to live your life to prove something to me. You do not need to become successful by conventional measures of success to validate me. It is not your responsibility to help me become a respected man because I took a role in raising impressive sons.You three are not here to justify your mother and I as parents. 

You three, beautiful, honest, intelligent, kind-hearted boys - you need no justification. You owe nothing to me, directly. Your mother and I didn’t choose to be parents because we wanted something from you.

What you owe is what we all owe through our inter-temporal bonds. These are the bonds that bind us to the generations that came before us and the generations, God-willing, to come after us. We all owe something to those that came ahead and those that will come behind our time living on earth.

We owe it to those people who came before us to honor and cherish the sacrifices they made for us. We owe it to those that will come after us, even many centuries in the future, to make sacrifices so their lives may be better. That is what we owe. You do not owe that to me, we all owe it to all of them.

And the way I see it, the best way to honor our inter-temporal bonds are to live long, healthy, lives. Or to make a contribution to our communities and broader societies. It’s to experience joy, love, and nature. It’s to devote our lives to others - our families, friends, communities, and for some, 

There is a reason your mother and I pray for your health, and for time together, and for you to know love , joy, beauty, and God. Achieving riches, status, and power do not honor our inter-temporal bonds, those things are too impermanent. The way we honor these sacred bonds is to live fully, with goodness, honesty, gratefulness and grace. 

What I’ve found in my almost 35 years, too, is that life is sweetest when we live in a way which honors our inter-temporal bonds. Our culture doesn’t seem to always understand this, and maybe I’m wrong that a life of sacrifice is actually sweetest, but I’ve found it to be true in my own life.

So please, please remember boys, the wide and wild possibilities present on your birth days. Remember that you do not need to justify or validate me with riches, status, or power. Remember to really live, during your time on this Earth. And if you feel like you’ve lost your way - if you can’t remember how to really live - remember my prayers for you.

The Easiest Way to Become Popular

To me, it’s not so much that being popular great, it’s that being unpopular is usually terrible. To articulate why, I look to the greatest explanatory model for social dynamics there is: high school.

I’ve been on both sides of popularity in my school days. When I was unpopular, I was constantly stressing about girls, being harassed, being lonely, or missing out on having fun. When I was popular, I flourished. I had a lot more fun and it was a lot easier to just be myself and have energy when I was liked and not constantly feeling under siege. 

I get why people, myself included, will go to great lengths to avoid being unpopular. For me, it wasn’t that being popular was great, it was that being unpopular was much worse. 

And the simplest way to avoid being unpopular is to become popular. So how to be popular? Again, it’s informative to think about high school.

One road to popularity is to be the best at something, to have a niche. It’s easy to be at least somewhat popular when you have a lane - whether it’s academics, athletics, arts, or an extra-curricular activity. If you’re the best in the school at something or have a varsity letter on your jacket you earn the respect of your peers.

Another way is to have rich parents. Which I don’t actually mean flippantly; it’s not about being able to buy “friends”. But rather, if you have access to money, you don’t have to say no to fun stuff. You can go to the movies whenever someone’s going. You can take your friends to concerts and sports games, or host fun gatherings at your house with ping pong tables, nice food, and maybe even a pool. Money doesn’t buy friends, but it creates opportunities to have fun and make friends.

In my experience, character and leadership also matter. In high school, if you’re genuinely nice and can transcend the pettiness of the cafeteria or the hallway, people want to be around you. If you can rally people around a shared purpose - whether it’s a charity drive or social change, people want to be around you. If you can stand up for injustices or do something innovative, people want to be around you.

But those three strategies - being a star, being rich, or being a leader - are actually pretty challenging. The easiest way to be popular is to be aggressive.

We have likely all seen this play out, it’s basic in-group out-group stuff. We can be popular by talking crap about people behind their back or bullying other kids. By excluding others, we can build strong cohesion with our peeps (which makes us popular), albeit cheaply and darkly. Also, if the rest of the school knows you roll deep and are willing to be mean, most would prefer to stay out of your way instead of challenge your dominance.

The easiest way to be popular is to be aggressive. Sadly, it works almost every time.

And yes, maybe in high school the stakes aren’t as high because everyone’s awkwardly going through puberty, and everyone leaves in four years anyway. Everything’s made up and most of the time, the points don’t matter.

But these dynamics don’t stop in high school. I’ve seen them play out in every organization and company I’ve ever been a part of. And after high school, it’s not just that people try to become more popular, they try to become more powerful. The stakes and consequences get bigger and realer.

And yes, in the real world - whether it’s in the workplace, at church, or just socially - some people gain power by being a star. Or they gain power by being wealthy. And luckily, in some cases people gain popularity and power by leading people toward an inspiring, noble, shared purpose.

But damn, lots of people take the easy way. Like at work, people get aggressive at the water cooler by demeaning a project team, their boss, their direct reports, their peers, or the customer. Or in social settings, people gossip about the other people in their club, the congregation, the neighborhood, or even their extended family.

A lot of times, I think people intend to lead with integrity and do start with a noble purpose in mind, like: ending the patriarchy, saving the American dream, stopping racial injustice, or preserving freedom. And they inspire people and lead them to achieve something meaningful. And then they get popular, and then they get powerful. And it’s great, because you’re doing what you think is right and you’re popular, too.

But at some point the streak ends. And not everybody is a Dr. King or a Gandhi. Not everyone realizes they have to do the work of self-purification to stay true to their principles and integrity. And then that well-intentioned person devolves into aggression, and brings in all the chest-thumping, and the outrage, and the vitriol to stay popular. And they become a bully in the end, when all they wanted to do at the start was noble and virtuous.

The easiest way to be powerful is to be aggressive and it’s so easy to fall into unintentionally. This stuff starts in high school but for damn sure doesn’t end there.

A through-line of my writing and thinking is the concept of intentional choices. Some choices we make have huge consequences for ourselves, for others, and for the culture itself. These are the choices we should make intentionally, but it’s so easy not to. How to be popular is one of these unassumingly consequential choices.

I think we all want to avoid being unpopular and powerless (because it sucks). The choice we have is how. What path will we take to avoid unpopularity? What strategy will we use to become more popular?

Will we try to be a star and make a huge contribution to earn respect? Will we use our money to create amazing, memorable, experiences that bind us with others? Will we build a deep sense of purpose and fellowship by leading with integrity? Or will we make ourselves part of the in-crowd by making someone else an outcast?

The choice of how to be popular is one we should make intentionally.

What Loneliness Feels Like To Me

I fear loneliness. More than anything. I don’t always mind being by myself as I’m happy to be in my own thoughts or take a long run, but I hate being alone. Loneliness is my darkest place. Isolation is my hell. I will do almost anything to avoid loneliness.

I recently finished listening to Will Smith’s memoir, Will, on audiobook. It’s my third venture into listening to memoirs read by their authors, which has become a bit of a hobby as it’s perfect for washing dishes. I’ve completed A Promised Land (Barack Obama), Greenlights (Matthew McConaughey) and I just started Becoming (Michele Obama). All are excellent.

One of the central theme’s in Will is fear. We must face our fears if we want to thrive. If we want to live a meaningful life serving others, we cannot let fear take the wheel. We have to conquer our fears. There is no other way.

Smith has a unique perspective on fear because of his profession. Fear is central to acting. I’m paraphrasing here, but in one of the passages, Smith describes that how fear helps an actor understand a character. Fear shapes our desires, and our desires influence our behaviors. So to play a character well, and represent their story well, you must understand their fears. Fears are central to their story.

Loneliness, therefore, is central to my story. To understand me, you must understand my fear of loneliness.

Honestly, this is something I don’t even understand. I haven’t been able to go there, even though I’ve loosely acknowledged that “I don’t really like being alone” in my own mind. I haven’t even really spoken about the stories I’m about to share, let alone writing them, until literally right now.

—

What does loneliness feel like?

I’m transported back to my childhood. I remember mental images of pay phones. Lots of pay phones. I always had quarters in my bag - whether it was my school backpack or a bag for dance class or swim practice. I always put the quarters in the outside top pocket - the little one, so the quarters would be easy to find when I needed them.

I used so many quarters calling home. It’s me, I’m done with class. Can you come pick me up? Where are you? When will you be here?

In those moments between a phone call and pickup is when the clock was always slowest. Will they make it in time before the building closes? Will I have to wait outside? What will everyone else think as their parents come, of me just standing here? Will I be the last one picked up? Loneliness was the panicking, the waiting. It was the feeling of being stranded, stuck.

What does loneliness feel like?

At our dance studio growing up, we’d have guest teachers come in for workshops. One workshop that I remember vividly was a partners’ workshop. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. Every male dancer in the company was assigned a female dancer as a partner for the workshop. My assigned partner’s name wasn’t “Michele” but let’s just pretend it was.

One of my buddies, who was a year or two older than me and admittedly a better dancer, was without a partner. His wasn’t there, she was sick or something. Michele knew my buddy better than me, too.

Michele comes up to me, averts her eyes, and tells me she’s leaving to dance with someone my partner-less friend.

“…his partner isn’t here, and he needs one…so I’m going to go dance with him...”

And there I was. Completely dumbfounded. This workshop was about to start, and my partner just left. What is wrong with me? Am I that bad a dancer? Am I disgusting? What is wrong with me? Am I ugly? Does she think I’m weird? Am I a loser? What is wrong with me? 

Within seconds, I felt the bottoms of my cheeks starting to quiver, which remains to this day the first physical reaction I get when I’m about to start sobbing. I was humiliated, and it’s still one of the worst memories to relive in my entire childhood.

Loneliness was the feeling of being an outcast, the feeling of being discarded. The feeling of being singled out as garbage. Thank God for Miss Carla, my ballet teacher, who saw this transpire and immediately stepped in to be my partner for the workshop, making it so I could pretend like nothing happened. I wish I had thanked her then.

What does loneliness feel like?

It’s so odd, but in addition to these childhood memories, when I think about what loneliness feels like, I can’t help but think about hotel rooms.

My first job out of college was as a business consultant. I still joke that it was a job I was paid too much for. Starting in November 2009, I traveled every week for almost four years. 

The routine was consistent: get up early Monday morning, catch a flight somewhere, drag my briefcase and carry-on to a client site. Then, I would work all day, exhausted from the early morning. When it was finally quitting time, I’d hitch a ride from a colleague in the team’s rental car. Sometimes we’d eat together, sometimes we wouldn’t. I’d usually get a quick run in, and work in the hotel lobby.

And then it would be bedtime. The dreaded bedtime.

I’d walk into the hotel room. It would be dark. It smelled exactly the same as the previous week. Like every hotel room I’d ever been in. The bed would be pristinely made.

But that goddamn bed. Every single week, the bed would remind me that it was just me. I was out here, hundreds of miles from home, with nothing to do but work. It reminded me that I had no partner in life. No girlfriend or wife to call. No children. No kickball game to go to with friends. Nowhere to go. I was just…gone, the only places to belong to were the hotel lobby, and that damn hotel bed. In those days, I worried that I’d always come to an empty home, which wouldn’t be a home at all.

Loneliness feels like the opposite of being home. It feels like being nowhere. Belonging nowhere. Living in nowhere. It feels like what it feels like when I’m in the absence of love. It feels like hopelessness.

—

So many of the choices in my life make sense when applying the lens of loneliness. I have gone to such great lengths to avoid loneliness.

Being a part of every club in school helped me avoid being alone. Trying to be friends with everyone helped me avoid being alone. Joining a fraternity helped me avoid being alone. 

Staying in Michigan after college helped me avoid being alone and apart from my family. Living with roommates until I was married helped me avoid being alone. Living in a City helped me avoid being alone. Having a big family helps me avoid being alone. Having music on in this house helps me avoid being alone.

Even my profession is affected by this fear. I work in the niche of business and management that works on organizations, their performance, and their culture. The nature of my works is in teams, so I never have to be alone. The work that I do helps build teams and companies that thrive - and when teams thrive, nobody else ever has to feel alone.

—

I don’t really know how to conclude this essay, because the story isn’t done yet. I am not the hero of this story. I still fear loneliness. Even tiny little things that happen - whether in our marriage, family, or community - trigger this loneliness. It’s paralyzing, still. It’s dark, still. It’s lonely, still.

One of the other recurring theme in Will is that of the “hero’s journey”. It’s something Smith draws on often in his narrative, because the hero’s journey is the most core of human stories. Basically every great book, and every great movie is some form of the hero’s journey. One of the core elements that makes a journey heroic, is that the hero suffers a terrible fate and must overcome adversity, and their fears.

We are all on a journey. We are all living out our own memoir, in a way. For our journey to become that of a hero, we must face our fears and conquer them. For me, that means confronting and conquering loneliness.