My littlest dog, Rambo (small but mighty) has an issue. He is scared of my son. Now my son is not to be feared, let’s be quite clear about that! My son loves animals. He’s been around them his entire life. And animals love him. Except Rambo. It’s problematic but we work around it and…
There’s a question many people never think to ask themselves: Am I trusting the timing of my life—or am I hoping reality will eventually match what I want it to be? From the inside, these two things can feel identical. Both involve patience. Both involve faith. Both can look like surrender. But one creates space…
Whenever a group of people is responsible for stewarding something together—whether it’s a town, a company, a nonprofit, a board, or a leadership team—there’s an expectation that shared responsibility will strengthen decision-making. Different perspectives are meant to integrate into choices that hold up over time and serve the core mandate of what’s being stewarded. That’s…
I stopped at a red light this morning, readying to make a right turn back into my neighborhood. No cars in the intersection but mine. No pedestrians. A prime opportunity for a ‘rolling stop.’ But the fact remained. The light was red. So, I stopped. A full stop. And then proceeded to make my right…
I don’t even remember what we were discussing. Something ordinary, probably – the kind of conversation that fills the spaces between bigger moments. But I remember stopping cold when my son said it. “You’re not wrong.” I tilted my head, let the phrase linger and settle in the air between us. Then I smiled. “I…
Can you have too much of a good thing? Most of us would say no — especially when it comes to virtues like empathy, kindness, or compassion. These are the qualities we’re taught to cultivate, the markers of a good person and a healthy society. But what if, in celebrating them, we’ve started to overvalue…
In Part I, When Belonging Becomes Identity, we explored how one of humanity’s oldest survival instincts, the need to belong, can quietly transform into something else. What begins as human connection can harden into identity because our natural wiring to belong runs deeper than our intentions, making it easy to drift from belonging to defending,…
There’s a strange comfort in becoming the things we love. The runner. The dog person. The entrepreneur. The devoted fan. At first, it’s just a thing we do — and then, quietly, without announcement, it becomes a thing we are. Not because we chose it, exactly, but because somewhere along the way, connection became identity.…
I had not yet made a phone call that I knew I needed to make, and I was giving myself a bit of a hard time about it. It wasn’t a crisis. It wasn’t urgent. It didn’t really affect anybody but me, but it mattered. It was important. And even though I know better, I…
The Illusion of Independent Thought Picture this: You’re in a room with a small group of people. A simple test is in front of you—two lines drawn side by side. One is clearly longer than the other. Obvious, right? You trust your eyes. But then, one by one, every person in the room confidently…