I spent more than a decade as a financial consultant helping people prepare for retirement. I knew a thing or two about investments, building wealth, managing risk, and creating a reliable retirement income. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t possibly have known at the time, was how little I understood about the psychology of retirement.

Now, at 65, I’m getting an education I never expected. That includes learning to paint and write better.

Admiration, not envy

I admire my wife and some of my best friends because they chose a single career and industry. Through all the ups and downs of the economy and their lives, they stuck it out and became masters of their domains. They’ve earned the reputations, professional standing, and financial rewards that come with decades of dedication.

Admiration is different from envy. As a decent wordsmith, I’m careful about the words I use, and those I don’t. My path was that of a creative, outlying misfit who needed to prove he could become a successful entrepreneur. I navigated it with unrealistic optimism, too little realism, and a stubborn determination to succeed. A part of me looks back and says, “Dude, did you really need to prove all that, and if so, to whom?”

Over several decades, I founded and built small businesses that provided a moderate income and an extraordinary amount of freedom over my time, something many people spend their entire careers dreaming about. So my tradeoff was being rich with time, making a decent income, and choosing work that fired me up until it didn’t.

All of that to say, the people I admire still have their thing. I don’t. My thing gradually left me over the past few years. Learning to let go is a huge part of the art of life.

What happens when ambition disappears?

For decades, I made my living as a business consultant, executive coach, writer, and nonprofit board facilitator. I loved the intellectual challenges, helping others solve problems, and the satisfaction of making a difference. I also enjoyed making money.

But somewhere along the way, I lost my desire to promote myself, pursue new clients, and build another business. The ambition that had driven me since my twenties faded.

I still earn some money writing, mentoring, coaching, and selling my artwork. But I no longer feel compelled to hustle, market myself, or turn every creative pursuit into another commercial venture.

You might think this newfound freedom would be wonderful. And much of it is. But it also comes with an unexpected psychological challenge. Who am I without the work that defined me? What do I do with all this freedom? And why do I occasionally feel guilty when I’m doing absolutely nothing?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell recognized this problem nearly a century ago. In his 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness, he observed that people accustomed to working long hours can become bored when suddenly confronted with leisure.

I’ve discovered there’s an enormous difference between having time freedom and knowing how to enjoy it.

The retirement void

As I sat down to write this article, I had a warning I wish someone had given me years ago.

Don’t rush to retire, especially if you enjoy your work. If not, invest your time finding work you can do for a long time. That will take a lot of pressure off the compulsion to “stop working.” That’s because retirement may not be what the marketing machine makes it out to be. Even if you have all the money in the world, you may struggle when the work, responsibilities, and professional identity that gave your life structure suddenly disappear.

A 2025 review published in The Gerontologist examined 30 studies exploring meaning during the transition to retirement. Researchers found that leaving work can challenge our sense of identity, purpose, and significance. While many people adjust well, others find the transition surprisingly difficult.

One of these difficulties has a name: purpose anxiety, a term introduced in 2014 by Larissa Rainey, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. It describes the emotional distress we sometimes experience while searching for meaning and direction in life. This anxiety can become especially pronounced during retirement, when the careers, responsibilities, and identities that once gave our lives structure begin to fade.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously associated anxiety with the dizziness of freedom. I think he was onto something. We spend our working lives pursuing freedom, only to become anxious when we finally have it.

I refuse to let this dizziness turn into vertigo.

What if we don’t need another purpose?

I’ve had plenty of practice dealing with my own head trash over the years. I’ve also become increasingly interested in the difference between having a purpose and living a meaningful life.

Purpose often suggests having a goal, something to accomplish or a destination to reach. Meaning can come from something much simpler: loving another person, creating something beautiful, enjoying nature, helping someone in need, or spending an afternoon doing absolutely nothing.

Perhaps one of retirement’s greatest opportunities is learning to stop adding and begin subtracting. Less striving, comparing, and worrying about what other people think. More curiosity, generosity, contemplation, exercise, creative expression, and time with those we love.

I’m not suggesting we abandon ambition or become aimless. I’m suggesting we become more intentional about how and where we invest our remaining time. Not everything we do needs to produce a measurable result, earn a dollar, or impress somebody.

After a lifetime of pursuing goals, I’m discovering that this requires a different kind of discipline. It’s one thing to have the financial freedom to choose how to spend your days. It’s quite another to free yourself from the belief that you must accomplish something worthwhile every day.

Learning to live without having something to prove

I spent years helping people develop retirement financial plans, build a business, and create wealth. Today, I’m discovering how important it is to prepare for the psychological transition, too.

After all, how much is peace of mind and a great night’s sleep worth? Perhaps these things are worth all the money in the world, considering many very rich people have neither.

I’m learning to recognize my own purpose anxiety, question the expectations I’ve carried for decades, and become more intentional about how I invest my time. Some days are easier than others. After a lifetime of striving, the desire to accomplish something doesn’t disappear simply because the desire to make more money has faded.

Of course, we need enough money to live the lives we desire, within reason. Financial security matters, especially as we grow older. But one unexpected benefit of aging may be discovering that we don’t need or want as much as we once thought. With a little wisdom, we begin to distinguish between what genuinely enriches our lives and what we’ve spent decades pursuing out of habit, ambition, or the desire to impress others.

I’m finding that the things that matter most at this stage of life have surprisingly little to do with money. Good health, people I love, meaningful relationships, creative expression, curiosity, and the freedom to spend my time as I choose. I can write because I love writing, make art because I enjoy creating, and ride my bicycle because I love being outdoors, without having to justify any of it.

Perhaps retirement requires more than financial independence. It requires learning what enough looks like, letting go of unnecessary wants, and developing the psychological freedom to enjoy life without constantly measuring what we’ve accomplished.

And perhaps that’s the most important lesson I never learned during all those years helping other people retire.

We need to earn enough to live. But we don’t need to spend the rest of our lives proving we’ve earned the right to enjoy being alive.

I beamed as I walked up to Leo Posillico, carrying the painting you see here. I had worked on it for hours, finally cracked some code in my mind, and couldn’t wait to show it to him.

Leo looked at the painting, then looked at me and said, “What the fuck is that?”

That was the beginning of one of the most brutal and useful art lessons I’ve ever had. Looking back, I’m grateful.

Learning without a classroom

I came to visual art late in life, mostly during the pandemic; doodling during webinars from hell revealed a hidden talent. I kept drawing, then painting, and I’ve been learning ever since. I’ve been learning mostly the way I tend to learn anything that grabs hold of me. I become obsessed with it. I watch artists teach online, read books, study paintings and photographs, ask questions, practice, screw things up, and try again.

Most importantly, I seek out local artists willing to mentor me or let me watch them work. That is one of the great benefits of being an autodidact. Nobody hands you a syllabus, so you follow your curiosity wherever it takes you. The downside of my accelerated learning approach is that nobody hands you the rulebook either.

Leo Posillico taught me that lesson.

I happen to live only a few miles from some of the best seasonal art shows in Scottsdale, Arizona. One of them is the Celebration of Fine Art, which began in 1991 after founders Tom and Ann Morrow were inspired by Laguna Beach’s art festivals. Their concept was different from a traditional gallery. It brought together about 100 juried artists and let visitors meet them, talk with them, and watch many of them create their work.

I figured, why wouldn’t a beginning artist go there and learn from people who actually know what they’re doing?

I wasn’t much of an art buyer. In fact, there wasn’t much art hanging in our house other than my own photographs, charcoal sketches, drawings, and paintings. I was becoming an artist, or at least trying like hell to.

I started approaching artists and asking questions. To my surprise, most were incredibly generous. If there weren’t a buyer nearby, many would talk about technique, brushes, color, composition, mistakes, and whatever else I was curious about. A few became mentors, and every conversation became part of my homemade art education.

Then I met Leo

Leo’s work grabbed me immediately. He painted landscapes, cityscapes, abstracts, and simplified human forms that became known as “Leo’s People.”

His colors were magnificent. The figures often had very little anatomical detail, yet somehow they moved and communicated. His people spoke to me as if to say, “Cliff, paint me. Paint me if you can.”

According to Leo Posillico’s biography and obituary, he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, served as an Army photography adviser and instructor in Vietnam, and worked as an art director, illustrator, photographer, and designer before becoming a full-time fine artist.

His distinctive human figures reportedly began as doodles while he talked on the telephone.

That fascinated me because I was still trying to understand what I could remove from a painting without destroying it.

So I copied him.

Not to sell or pass off a specific painting as my own. I was trying to understand his visual language. How did he simplify people that much? How did he use large areas of color? How could so few marks suggest so much?

I went back to my little hack studio at home and kept working on it. Eventually, I made this painting, and damn, I liked it.

“What makes you think you can do that?”

I carried the painting back to Celebration of Fine Art like a kid carrying his first trophy. Leo’s booth was on the opposite side of the show, so I went straight to him and waited until no customers or buyers were around.

“Leo, I want to show you something.”

I showed him the painting.

“What the fuck is that?”

I explained that I loved his work, had been studying it, and had tried to understand what he was doing. I admitted that, yes, I guess I had copied it.

Then came the second shot.

“What makes you think you can do that?”

I told him the truth. I was a new artist. I didn’t know. I thought this was how artists learned. I wasn’t trying to steal anything from him. I was trying to emulate an artist whose work I admired because I had no idea what I was doing.

I apologized and walked away carrying the same feeling I had when I was six years old and got busted for stealing six dollars from my Mother’s purse. What had begun as an instant of pride had turned into sinister humiliation.

After an hour or so, I decided I couldn’t leave it that way. I went back, apologized again, and asked what I could do to make it right.

This time his tone changed.

“Listen, it’s okay.”

His wife, Isabelle, an accomplished jewelry artist who exhibited nearby, was across the aisle. As I walked away carrying my painting, head down and feeling defeated, I remember glancing toward her. We exchanged a look, and I kept walking.

The lesson sucked, but it stuck

The following year, I mostly avoided Leo’s booth. I kept doing what I had been doing, meeting artists, asking questions, watching them work, reading books, taking online lessons, and painting.

That’s the strange beauty of being self-taught. You wander. You experiment. You follow people down rabbit holes, watch hours of demonstrations, ruin perfectly good paper and canvas, and occasionally stumble into something that changes the way you see. No professor tells you what comes next. Curiosity does that.

At a later show, I noticed Leo wasn’t there. I saw Isabelle and asked if I could tell her a quick story. I told her what had happened.

She remembered me.

Then she told me Leo had died.

Leo Posillico died on June 14, 2024, at age 79. Before writing this story, I researched more about the man I had briefly known. His obituary says he had been diagnosed years earlier with pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive disease that scars the lungs.

That changed how I remembered our encounter. Not because Leo was wrong or because I was right. We were looking at the same painting from completely different places. I was a beginner trying to learn. He was an accomplished artist who had spent decades developing a visual language that was unmistakably his.

Copying, stealing, and becoming yourself

An old line usually attributed to Picasso goes: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” The problem is that little solid evidence shows Picasso actually said it.

The better-documented idea comes from T.S. Eliot. In his 1920 essay collection The Sacred Wood, Eliot wrote about the difference between immature artists who merely imitate and mature artists who absorb influences and transform them.

That makes much more sense to me today.

Beginning artists imitate because we don’t have our own language yet. We borrow brushstrokes, palettes, techniques, compositions, and ideas. Writers read writers. Musicians learn other people’s songs. Painters study painters.

But you can’t stay there.

Eventually, everything you borrow has to pass through your own experiences, failures, imagination, eyes, hands, and heart. That’s when it begins turning into something of your own.

I still learn online. I still read art books and study great artists. I still seek advice from local artists who know far more than I do, and I still make plenty of ugly paintings. Mostly, I practice.

Nobody is coming to certify me as an artist. No diploma is waiting at the end. You become one by doing the work, asking questions, experimenting, failing, practicing, and occasionally embarrassing yourself.

Little by little, what you’ve borrowed from everyone else starts passing through you.

Eventually, they start to look like yours.

I don’t paint like Leo Posillico today.

I suspect Leo would be happy about that.

On a recent cool, clear Arizona morning, I set out on a bicycle ride a little after six. Within a few minutes of soft pedaling, I named my gravel bike Black Widow, because all of my bicycles have names. I climbed the slight grade to the gravel path, which keeps me as far from cars as possible.

It’s just over six miles to the trailhead and access to more than thirty thousand acres and over two hundred thirty miles of trails in Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve. It’s heaven on earth for someone like me, but getting there takes time, and part of the journey requires sharing the road with cars.

Before reaching one of the back roads leading toward the trails, I cut through a quiet private community. I pedaled uphill for almost two miles before reaching its gate. Normally, the gate is closed for security reasons. On this day, the entrance gate was wide open.

At the last second, as I approached, I decided to ride through the exit instead of around. I didn’t think much about it until I saw a delivery vehicle coming straight at me. In that instant, I braced for impact and tried to steer away from its front grille.

The driver slammed on his brakes and stopped within an inch of my right leg. It felt like slow motion. We exchanged shocked looks, and I realized I was holding my breath as I rode around him.

I raised my hand. “Dude. Sorry.”

The driver rolled down his window when I added, “That was completely my fault. I know that’s a crappy way for you to start your day. Forgive me, okay?”

What he said next reminded me of a higher power, one that is all-loving, and he said with a warm smile, “It’s all good, man. I’m glad I got the brakes in time. Have a blessed day.”

We waved goodbye, and I pedaled north, overwhelmed with relief. And gratitude. I’ve ridden these streets, back roads, trails, and small mountains on different bicycles for almost forty years. This was the closest encounter I’ve ever had with a car while riding them for many decades.

For the rest of my twenty-two-mile ride, I replayed the scene countless times. Within minutes, I was overwhelmed with tears of immense joy for being alive. I wondered again how I was still here.

Then a shift occurred

As the tears dried in the cool desert air, a little anger began bubbling up. I noticed it because my solar plexus started heating up as if somebody had installed a ballistic missile in there. I’m happy to report I’ve done enough inner work to know not to launch those missiles anymore. They’re deadly for my karma.

You see, my body keeps score of our emotions—all of them. So does yours. My nervous system was remembering another morning more than twenty years ago when a man driving a Lexus hit me from behind while I was riding my bicycle through another private, gated community.

It was early morning, and almost nobody was on the road. I was soft-pedaling downhill at nearly thirty miles per hour when, according to three cyclists riding behind him, the driver deliberately turned his car into me.

His passenger-side mirror slammed into my left arm. Then the side of his car somehow clipped my saddle and launched me into the air. To this day, I don’t know how I kept the bicycle upright. Had I crashed at that speed, I could have been seriously injured or killed.

The adrenaline surge made me feel superhuman. I shifted into my biggest gear and hammered the pedals after him. Picture a skinny, furious cyclist in dorky shorts trying to chase down a Lexus. I was pissed, and I intended to catch him.

He made it through the gate before I could. The cyclists behind me pulled up, including a guy I knew named Corky, and one of them was already calling the police. Officers responded quickly, found the driver at the end of the street, and brought him back.

In the end, there was no ticket, citation, or arrest. The officers wrote an incident report, gave us copies, and left. I was incredulous and angry.

I stayed angry far too long. I carried a huge resentment toward that man and even took it upon myself to knock on his door one morning so we could “talk about it.”

Yeah, right.

I’m not a fighter

I’m a lover. I suck at fighting, and the only time I’ve been punched hard in the head, I saw enough stars to learn that winning friends and influencing people is generally wiser than being a smart-ass who gets beat up a lot.

The man didn’t answer his door. Instead, he called the police and taunted me from inside. I walked away because the last thing I wanted was legal trouble—or to see the inside of a jail again.

Looking back, I was being a fool. I was resentful and didn’t yet have enough tools to talk myself out of doing something stupid. What bothered me most was the injustice of it. How dare he hit me and drive away?

But life isn’t fair. Sometimes life sucks—big time. We can learn from these experiences and grow, or we can carry them around with us long after the event itself is over.

For years, I carried that one. This morning, I remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. Yet eventually I came to understand that personal growth—becoming a better human—was the real lesson.

I was one of the actors in that scene. My part was Bicycle Guy, followed quickly by Victim. Perhaps I really was a victim that morning, but I didn’t have to keep playing him for the next twenty years.

The resentment became toxic, and learning to let it go was liberating. I had plenty of other resentments to release, too, because resentment is only one kind of energy we carry in our bodies. Fear, shame, grief, anger, humiliation, and loss can all leave their fingerprints.

Resentments suck the love out of us

Our job, as I see it, is to wake up and understand how mind, body, and soul can become more aligned while we’re attending this school I call life. Man, it can be brutal down here, but it can also be unbelievably beautiful.

But my experience with resentment comes from a former need to control the uncontrollable. How egotistical of me! And selfish. Who am I to think I can control the uncontrollable, or live as the wanton judge, jury, and executioner of those who slight me?

The greater reality is the morning ride was beautiful that day. The sun rose over the desert as I realized I was still healthy enough to pedal twenty-two miles through it. I was still breathing, still learning, and still here.

Loving life, even when it's hard.

I’ve spent years shedding buckets of family, life, and self-induced trauma. Along the way, I learned an important distinction about letting go. Screw being a victim. It’s against my nature. I would rather learn to accept what happened, process what remains, and eventually transcend it.

Letting go of the toxic stuff.

Understanding trauma

Trauma can also involve what happens inside us after something overwhelming occurs—the emotional, biological, and psychological imprint that can remain long after the danger itself has passed. One book that helped me understand this was psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

Published in 2014, the book helped broaden public understanding of how traumatic experiences can continue affecting the brain, body, emotions, and behavior long afterward. The mind may say, “That happened twenty years ago,” while the body responds as though it happened yesterday.

Van der Kolk spent decades working with people affected by trauma, including Vietnam veterans early in his career. His work helped me understand something I could feel on my bicycle this morning: remembering danger is not purely an intellectual experience. The nervous system can react before our thinking mind has even figured out what is happening.

I never fought in a war, even though I lived through more than I’d like to remember, especially the War on Drugs, which was moronic. But like most people who have lived long enough, I’ve had my share of experiences that left marks. Other people caused some of them. Life caused others.

And plenty were caused by me. To let go, to heal, to improve as a human, I had to own my part in all of this. Living down here in the school of life doesn’t mean pretending it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean calling injustice good or suffering pleasant. It means refusing to spend the rest of our lives imprisoned by what happened yesterday.

It means learning to see the pain we experience as the fuel to shift into a higher gear of consciousness. When we know better ways to deal with life’s curveballs, we can sit, be still, and know our part: to learn to love the seeming insanity within and around us.

Accept it for what it is: a lesson from which to learn. End the arguments with reality, which are futile and life-sucking.

A few mornings ago, a delivery driver stopped one inch from my leg. He took it in stride, accepted my apology, and blessed me for the rest of the day. How does it get any more self-evident that we can learn to love all our brothers and sisters even when we are on the road delivering stuff to rich people or pedaling a gravel bicycle to the trails?

More than twenty years ago, another driver actually hit me. That old memory could have ruined my morning, but instead it reminded me how grateful I am to be here still. So I kept pedaling.

Maybe that’s what healing sometimes looks like, and maybe that’s what aging with gratitude looks like, too. We remember what happened, learn what it has to teach us, and slowly loosen our grip on the parts we no longer need to carry.

Then, if we’re lucky, we keep pedaling and realize the power of letting go and letting a higher power teach us to love.

I’m early in retirement, even though I still do a bit of mentoring. Mostly I practice my arts: writing, photography, and painting. I can learn to love life like this. But having so much free time on hand takes work.

Life’s irony cracks me up as I look back. I helped people retire for more than a decade as a financial planner, registered investment advisor, and consultant to hundreds of people who outsourced their money management and retirement planning. The only problem was that I didn’t know a thing about retirement.

Not really.

Sure, I knew how to ask clients the discovery questions. I knew how to operate the software that spit out handsome financial plans, colorful charts, and portfolio recommendations. I understood asset allocation, inflation, risk tolerance, longevity risk, and the unpleasant possibility of outliving your money.

I knew enough to help people prepare financially for retirement. What I didn’t understand was how to live it.

You can’t learn that part from a webinar or online course.

I’m learning it now

As I approached retirement, I had a story in my mind that told me not working would be silly if I loved the work. But over the last several years, I stopped loving my work, and I let go of the business consulting work I hustled for decades. That left a void I’m still working to fill with creative projects, volunteering, and family.

I recently started Social Security, considering it’s not so secure anymore. We live a modest life, so I was open to whatever might come next. And I dove into what began calling to my heart.

Since the pandemic, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with nonfiction writing, photography, and, more recently, learning how to paint. In other words, I’m becoming an artist for the rest of my life.

That sentence would have sounded ridiculous to my younger self.

For most of my adult life, I was an athlete. Sports were my art. I also tied productivity to money. Ego. My self-image as a self-employed consultant. Work created income. Income created security. Achievement created identity.

Traditional retirement messes with that equation. Good thing I’m not hung up on traditions.

My wife and I keep saving, and our modest portfolio is providing well, and we have saved enough to believe we’ll be okay, even though neither of us knows for sure whether we will outlive our money.

Nobody does. Too many variables: markets, inflation, health, longevity, family needs, and whatever surprises life throws through the front window.

But these days, my most important title isn’t founder, consultant, author, or advisor.

It’s Pop Pop, aka Pa Pa, the grandfather.

We will soon have four grandchildren, and I’m having a blast figuring out how to become a world-class grandfather. I’m not bragging when I say this. I’m acknowledging something that took me most of my life to understand.

I have largely arrived at the life I worked so hard to create.

And now I get to learn how to live it

That can be harder than it sounds. It’s as if I own a time bank. I tell my friends that, and they chuckle because they can’t relate to what I mean: being a good steward of time instead of becoming a slob on a couch, plopped in front of an idiot box.

Too much time on your hands can become dangerous territory without curiosity, hobbies, friends, family, some semblance of faith in something larger than your own ego, and a growing sense of contentment.

I strive for sustainable contentment because happiness can be elusive. I glimpse bliss when I meditate or work on my art. Contentment seems sturdier. It means learning to live with what is while remaining curious about what might be.

That may be the retirement lesson I couldn’t have understood thirty years ago. How could I?

The job now is learning how to live a healthy, meaningful, contented life for whatever remains of it. How do I accept the things I can’t change? How do I keep learning and serving others? How do I stay physically active and mentally sharp? How do I meet new people while becoming far more selective about who gets my time?

And how do I accept the inevitable losses, disappointments, illnesses, and other difficult things every human eventually encounters?

There isn’t a training manual

There is only practice.

We age until our final breath. Where we go after that depends on what each of us believes. I happen to believe life is a gift to the soul. Sometimes I even wonder whether, at some level beyond my understanding, I chose this particular life because I needed to learn these lessons.

I can’t prove that. I find meaning in it.

Looking backward, I can see how much of my education had nothing to do with school. My wife and I raised two sons. We endured plenty of family struggles. I built businesses, lost things, rebuilt things, made mistakes, worried about money, chased success, questioned myself, and gradually discovered how little control any of us really has.

We have softened around the edges. Life did that. Marriage did that. Children did that. Age did that.

Managing wants, keeping it simple

You begin to realize how much energy humans waste fighting over things we cannot control while overlooking the person sitting beside us. Despite all the division and vitriol we see online, I increasingly notice similarities between people rather than differences.

Most people want remarkably ordinary things. They want to be safe. They want enough money. They want their children to be okay. They want someone to love. They want to matter. They want a little peace.

That describes me pretty well these days. I like living a simpler life. It’s quieter, more peaceful this way—no rat race.

I’m not chasing fame, fortune, or power. I’m living quietly in the middle, building a growing family clan, making photographs, writing stories, learning to paint, riding my bicycle, loving my wife, spoiling grandchildren, finding my way with God, and trying to become a better human before my number gets called.

I don’t know how long retirement lasts. Nobody does.

Maybe that’s the point.

Retirement requires a different kind of work

It’s the inner work that makes the greatest difference. To die in peace. To love every minute down here, even if it’s brutal.

This stage of life may be the point where we finally get to decide what truly purposeful, personal work is for.

For me, the work now is becoming.

Becoming a better grandfather. A better husband. A better artist. A better friend. A better human.

Turns out I spent decades helping people build retirement plans without understanding the most important part.

Rainbows can remind us what matters

At this stage of life, seeing an early morning rainbow while walking with your three-year-old grandson is heavenly. But eventually, you have to figure out what you’re retiring to.

You have to let go of the title, the benefits, the network, the season tickets, the parking passes, the peers at work, the conventions, the expense account, and even the dread — whatever that may have been. All those things gave structure to a life you may have spent decades building.

Then one day, much of it disappears.

What remains is you.

That’s why staying curious, staying connected, and learning something new matter. So does finding the people and activities that make you feel alive, including that ageless inner child who still wants to explore, create, laugh, play, and occasionally make a mess.

Maybe that’s what retirement is really asking of us.

Not to stop working. To be intentional about being as content and healthy as we can become.

To finally discover what makes life worth working for. Including a significant legacy for your family.

I’d love to know the future, but I do my best to live in the now. It’s better that way.

Tripping into the future and regretting the past are terrible ways to live. I’ve spent enough time doing both to know.

That’s why I was fascinated by a recent Diary of a CEO interview with Professor Jiang Xueqin, an intelligent, educated, strongly opinionated, media-savvy dude who thinks we’re doomed. If you haven’t seen it, check out the nearly two-hour interview. It was interesting enough to keep my attention through most of it.

Jiang makes some frightening predictions about war, globalization, supply chains, financial systems, and civilization itself. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s spectacularly wrong.

I remember the doomsayers preceding Y2K

Plenty of seemingly brilliant people appeared in the mainstream media as prophets of doom. I listened and watched then much as I scan the headlines today. Opinions. Strong opinions, many of them well-informed and espoused by people smarter than I am.

I remember the doomsayers preceding Y2K. Even Jerry Falwell warned that “Y2K may be God’s instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation.” He spoke of the possibility of catastrophe and advised people to stock up on food, gasoline, and ammunition. By late 1999, even Falwell was backing away from his prediction.

Then January 1, 2000 arrived. The lights stayed on. The world kept turning.

Wise prophecy is hard to come by, so it seems.

God, family, and everything else

Here’s where Jiang and I agree most. Our priorities align. Because that’s what happens when we are willing to look for and see similarities. And aligned priorities are always good.

Mine have always been “God, family, and everything else.” Ask my family about this little mantra I often share. It’s embedded in the family gene pool now.

Having been a fervent student of history, world religions, behavioral science, psychology, and philosophy for more than forty years, I know enough to suggest that very little else matters in the end. That’s incredibly liberating for me personally, especially when I take in doomsday information.

Here’s a mindset that helps. Stephen Covey famously taught us to “begin with the end in mind.” For me, the end is actually the beginning of my return home. Since I was a kid shoved into a church pew and Sunday school, I questioned what I learned. All the mystics of all the world religions say the same thing: eternal life, love, light, the soul, energy, is what is real, not this shit show down here.

I also arrived there because I was fascinated with near-death experiences. Listen to enough people describe them, and similarities begin to appear: overwhelming love, peace, timelessness, brilliant light, deceased family members, and spiritual beings. There are distressing NDE accounts, too, but the recurring reports of love, transcendence, and profound changes in how people subsequently live fascinate me.

And now science is beginning to give us another window into that mystery.

What happens when we stop fearing death?

We start living.

Johns Hopkins researchers compared the experiences of more than 3,000 people who reported either psychedelic experiences or non-drug near-death experiences. About 90 percent in both groups reported less fear of death afterward. They also commonly reported lasting increases in personal meaning, spiritual significance, and psychological insight.

Even more compelling to me is a Johns Hopkins clinical study of 51 cancer patients facing life-threatening diagnoses and significant anxiety or depression. Under carefully controlled conditions, psilocybin produced decreases in depression, anxiety, and death anxiety while increasing quality of life, meaning, and optimism. Six months later, about 80 percent continued to show clinically significant decreases in depression or anxiety.

Then there is the fascinating Johns Hopkins research into experiences people described as encounters with God or “ultimate reality”. Researchers surveyed more than 4,000 people. About three-quarters described the experience as among the most meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives, with many attributing lasting increases in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning to it. Fear of death also decreased for many participants.

None of this proves the existence of God, heaven, or an afterlife, and the researchers don’t claim that it does. What it demonstrates is fascinating enough: people can experience a state of consciousness so profound that their relationship with life and death changes.

Maybe that’s where science and thousands of years of spiritual wisdom begin shaking hands.

Die before you die

My studies of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Desert Fathers, and theosis have been nothing less than enlightening for an insatiably curious soul like mine.

Saint Anthony the Great, born in Egypt around A.D. 251, gave away his possessions and retreated into the desert, becoming a foundational figure of Christian monasticism. The Desert Fathers weren’t trying to conquer the world. They were trying to conquer themselves.

Their tradition reflects an ancient spiritual idea I love: “Die before you die, so that when you die, you will not die.”

I don’t read that as physical death. I see it as allowing the false self to die while we’re still alive. The ego. Attachments. Resentments. The obsession with control. The endless worrying about tomorrow. The belief that our possessions, accomplishments, status, and even our bodies represent the totality of who we are.

The Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis takes this deeper. Theosis describes the transformation of the human being toward communion with God. We don’t become God. We increasingly participate in the divine life by transforming ourselves.

I’ve encountered variations of this wisdom among saints, sages, mystics, and monks of East and West. The language changes, but the message often sounds remarkably familiar: surrender the smaller self, loosen your attachments, become present, love others, and seek what is eternal rather than desperately clinging to what is temporary.

Learn what life is, embrace death’s role within it, and perhaps death begins losing its power over you.

Fear may be the real virus

I don’t mean we should become reckless, deny danger, or pretend suffering doesn’t hurt. I mean something far more practical.

Fear may be the world’s worst virus.

Fear of dying. Fear of losing money. Fear of losing someone we love. Fear of illness, failure, and rejection. Fear of war, economic collapse, artificial intelligence, or whatever catastrophe dominates today’s headlines. Fear can allow an imaginary tomorrow to steal today.

Trust me. I tried to become an expert at arguing with reality.

Through the hellhole of opinions I held as a younger, naive, egotistical, self-serving man-child, something eventually shifted. Others closest to me noticed the changes before I did. Much of my anger disappeared along with the idiotic expectations I held for myself and others. Impatience tempered itself. Anxiety loosened its grip. Nail-biting ended.

Art showed up. Writing, photography, painting like right now is a blissful flow state.

Maybe that’s part of dying before we die. Surrender to win. Imagine what that could feel like.

We’re not escaping the world. We’re changing our relationship with it. We shift into a higher gear of sustainable consciousness where life can become terribly difficult without destroying who we are.

Where hope comes from

That’s where I believe genuine hope begins.

Hope isn’t believing Professor Jiang is wrong, and everything will turn out fine. That’s optimism, and optimism can be disappointed. Hope doesn’t require tomorrow to cooperate.

Hope says: Whatever comes, I’ll meet it when it gets here.

We cultivate that kind of hope by returning to what is actually here: God, family, love, service, gratitude, creativity, and this ridiculously precious experience of being alive. I can love my wife today. I can call my sons today. I can hug my grandchildren today. I can make something beautiful, help somebody, forgive somebody, and give thanks for another sunrise.

Maybe Professor Jiang is right about some of what’s coming. Maybe he’s wrong about most of it. Neither of us knows.

Perhaps knowing the future was never the assignment.

Perhaps we’re here to learn how to live so completely that we’re no longer terrified of losing life. To understand what life is. To accept death as part of it. To loosen our grip on what we cannot control and place our faith in something greater than ourselves.

That’s when the world can remain uncertain without making us uncertain.

We’re here. We’re alive. We’re capable of loving.

And maybe that’s the deepest source of hope: not believing that nothing bad will happen, but discovering a place within ourselves that no headline, prediction, market crash, war, or fear about tomorrow can take away.

That’s enough for me.

And it’s more than enough for today.

Most of us know the pattern. We want to work on the project, work out, write, paint, exercise, start the project, make the call, or finally begin something we’ve been putting off. But we don’t feel motivated, so we wait. We tell ourselves we’ll start when we feel more inspired, energetic, confident, creative, or certain.

Then another day disappears.

The problem may not be a lack of motivation. It could be our belief that motivation has to come first.

It often doesn’t.

My motivation rises and falls with mood, energy, sleep, stress, fear, and whatever else life throws at me. The same is true for all of us once we become aware. If we require ourselves to feel motivated before beginning, we give our emotions veto power over our intentions.

Knowing that, sometimes the fastest way around that problem is to make the first step so small there is almost nothing left to resist.

A watercolor teacher I recently watched described this beautifully. Don’t tell yourself you have to paint a picture. Fill the water jar. Put the brushes on the table. Mix one color. Make one mark.

The objective is not to finish

It is to begin. As with the watercolor figures you see above, I meet resistance all the time when learning to paint. To get out of my own way, I had to learn these psychological and spiritual principles that empower us to shift into a higher dimension of well-being.

For me and all other artists, it’s the flow state that compels us. But finding that state of mind and being requires understanding the human mind and our behavior.

Psychology supports the idea that action can come before motivation. Behavioral activation, a well-established psychological approach, encourages people to take meaningful action rather than waiting for their emotional state to improve first.

This also helps explain procrastination

We tend to think procrastination means we are lazy, undisciplined, or poor at managing time. But psychologist Fuschia Sirois has spent years studying procrastination and describes it largely as an emotion-regulation problem. We often avoid a task because of the feelings attached to it.

We may fear failure, criticism, embarrassment, boredom, or discovering that we aren’t as good as we hoped.

We cannot reject the unfinished article. The unpainted picture cannot disappoint us. The business we never launch cannot fail.

Avoidance gives us temporary relief, and therein lies the trap. Tomorrow, the blank page is still waiting.

The answer may not be more discipline. It may be approaching the task differently.

Zen Buddhism offers a wonderful concept called shoshin, or beginner’s mind. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

The beginner has less to protect.

A beginner experiments, asks questions, makes mistakes, changes direction, and tries again. A beginner does not expect mastery on the first attempt. That freedom becomes harder to maintain as we accumulate knowledge, titles, accomplishments, possessions, expertise, and identities. Eventually, we can become so invested in protecting who we have become that we stop experimenting with who we might still become.

Beginner’s mind does not ask us to become ignorant

It asks us to remain open.

Henri Matisse understood this. In his writing about art, he emphasized the importance of learning to see things as though we were seeing them for the first time. He believed the artist had to preserve something of the child’s vision of the world.

Perhaps we all do.

Jesus offered a remarkably similar image from an entirely different spiritual tradition. In Matthew 18:3, he tells his followers they must “turn and become like children.” In Mark, he says the Kingdom of God must be received like a little child.

I don’t read that as an invitation to childishness. I hear an invitation to humility, openness, curiosity, trust, and wonder.

Watch a small child create, such as one of my grandchildren, and you see it immediately. Children rarely stare at a blank piece of paper worrying whether the finished drawing will be impressive. They draw. They make green dogs, purple suns, crooked houses, and people with arms growing out of their heads.

Then they proudly hand you the masterpiece.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to judge the work before we make it.

That may be one of creativity’s great enemies.

Taoism offers another useful idea: wu wei, commonly translated as “non-action,” though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes a richer philosophy of acting without unnecessary striving or force.

Think about water meeting a rock

Water does not argue with the rock. It does not procrastinate because the obstacle seems unfair. It finds an opening and keeps moving.

Maybe that is what we need when we feel stuck.

Instead of conquering the entire mountain, take the next natural step. Write one paragraph. Walk ten minutes. Make one phone call. Sketch one hand. Read one page. Fill the water jar.

Movement changes something.

We tend to imagine inspiration arriving like lightning. Sometimes it does. More often, it arrives quietly as curiosity. A thought. A question. A photograph we want to take. A sentence that keeps returning. A faint inner voice saying, Try this.

Our mistake may be waiting for that whisper to become a roar.

It may never happen.

Inspiration can open the door. Action carries us through it. Motivation often catches up after we have already begun.

I’ve been a beginner artist since June 1961, which is another way of saying I’ve been learning since the day I arrived here. I hope I never graduate.

Maybe that is the larger lesson for all of us.

Remain teachable. Be incessantly curious. Expect imperfect beginnings. And when you catch yourself waiting to feel motivated, make the next step ridiculously small.

Then take it. And have fun as you did as a child.

Thanks for commenting and restacking this article if it helped.

We’re currently dealing with a rogue son learning to live with a traumatic brain injury post-divorce. He chooses to live in a car due to the lack of executive function that comes with excessive blunt force trauma to the head.

What follows is how I deal with the tough stuff. Nobody is exempt from living through tough stuff down here. We all face our trials. The question is, how do we rise to the occasion and get through it?

For me, love, understanding, and surrender lead the way. I did not choose this crash course in surrender. I found surrender by realizing I had been fighting myself for most of my life. Arguing with reality is futile.

Pursuing a spiritual understanding of life makes all the difference for me, which is why I want to share it with you. My spiritual way of being melds well with the many psychological tools in my toolkit.

The inner work takes a lot of practice and is essential.

Learning from the past, living in the present

When I read any book of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, or any other spiritual text, I seek to understand the intended cultural, historical, spiritual, and psychological lessons.

In other words, how can this verse or book help me live a better life? First, beware. Seek to understand. Find the similarities. If we take these words too literally, we end up living in an extreme, and we all know what that looks like.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the oldest stories in the Western world: the parable of the prodigal son. It’s more significant today than ever for me and my family. Here’s how it goes.

A father has two sons. The younger demands his inheritance early — a request so blunt that many readers hear an unspoken wish for his father’s death inside it — then leaves for a distant country and squanders everything on “wild living.”

A famine hits. He ends up feeding pigs, so hungry he envies their food. And then, Luke tells us, “he came to himself.” He heads home rehearsing an apology, expecting nothing more than a servant’s room. His father sees him from far off, runs to him, and throws a robe on his shoulders before the boy can finish his speech.

For years we read that story as being about the son

I see it as being about the father, the only character who never leaves the property and never stops actively loving someone who is destroying himself. I am that father today. And there are many fathers and mothers who could benefit from this ageless wisdom when confronted with family trauma and drama.

Here is what the parable does not say.

The father let him go. He did not chase the boy into the far country. He did not wire money to soften the famine. He did not track him down among the pigs to negotiate better terms. That love is fierce, but it is not controlling or rescuing.

It is a love that waits by the road. It is patient, understanding, and serene.

My family has lived the ending of that story before. Our eldest made his own share of poor choices years ago, choices with consequences serious enough that we did not always know, on the hardest nights, how the story would end. Today he is a living miracle: married, gainfully employed, healthy, and soon to be a father of two.

He came to himself, the way the boy in Luke’s gospel did, and we were still standing in the field when he did. That is not proof of a formula. It is proof that the far country is not always the end of the story.

Psychologically, this is one of the harder truths

Humans are wired to fix what is broken in our children, especially when the brokenness followed an injury that was not their fault. A traumatic brain injury damages executive function, the brain’s capacity for planning, sequencing, and impulse control, and it can turn a grown man back into someone who cannot manage the basic architecture of daily life, even while his personality and memories remain intact.

Watching that happen to our son, then a marriage end under the weight of it, then watching him end up sleeping in a car, activates every rescuing instinct a parent carries. Jung called this the pull of the parental complex, the unconscious belief that our children’s fate is still ours to author.

Letting go of that belief does not mean withdrawing love. It means recognizing where our authorship ends and his sovereignty, however impaired, begins.

This is where prayer and meditation stop being religious decoration and become psychological work for me. I am not writing only in metaphor about the desert. We live in an actual one, in a corner of Arizona where each summer arrives hotter and longer than the last, and there is something instructive about practicing stillness in a landscape that scorches anyone who fights it instead of adapting to it.

The hermits who withdrew into that same kind of literal wilderness to burn off their illusions were not running from the world. They were training themselves in a single discipline: letting go of the need to control outcomes while remaining fully present to what is. Meister Eckhart called it Gelassenheit, letting-be. I equate it to surrendering, letting go, and letting God run the show.

The Desert Fathers called it stillness

Whatever the name, it is the practice the father in the parable seems to have already mastered before the story begins. He does not pray for his son to come home. He keeps watching the road, keeps his house ready, keeps his heart soft, and trusts something larger than himself with the timing.

There is a metaphysical claim buried inside that patience. The father’s stillness is not passivity. It is faith that the deeper order of things, the higher power some call God and others simply call life, is still working on our son even in the far country, even among the pigs, even in a car in a parking lot at two in the morning.

We do not have to be the only intelligence attending to his healing. We just have to remain available when he comes to himself.

And we never stop loving our sons, no matter how much they do wrong. That is not a nice sentiment. It is the love my own father taught me, handed down like an inheritance worth more than money. I didn’t manufacture that kind of love out of willpower alone.

It’s within me and you and all of us. Any parent knows what I’m talking about. And you need not have a prodigal child to understand the power of letting go, or surrendering to win.

We cannot fix our son’s brain

He, like the rest of us, must become willing to do the inner work. We cannot undo the past or restore executive function through sheer parental will. What we can do, every morning, is sit in silence and hand the outcome to whatever we call the thing bigger than us.

Some days that looks like faith. Other days it looks like exhaustion wearing a robe of acceptance. Earlier this morning it looked like tears. I let them freely. Another powerful lesson I learned from my father.

For now, we keep watching the road. We keep the porch light on, the way that father must have, waiting for the shape of someone we love to appear, however far off, however changed.

And in the meantime, we will rise to become the best grandparents we can be for his children. My wife and I will once again rise to the occasion and get through this together, in unity.

Thanks for leaving a comment and restacking this article if it helped you.

I’m in an interesting stage of life, one I didn’t understand very well when I was younger because I was too busy climbing. As of this month, part of my income comes from Social Security, and the thing I own the most of is time.

The biggest question I face is: Where should I invest it?

For most of my life, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. Get good grades. Play sports. Compete. Win. Work hard. Build something I could call my own. Provide for my family. Solve problems. Make money. Get better. Get hurt, suck it up. Keep moving.

There was always another goal on the horizon, another reason to believe that reaching it would settle things. It’s as if starving ghosts ran the show, never good enough or satisfied.

Doing came naturally to me through my sports, hobbies, family, and business life. Now that I’m winding down the business and focusing on the art of life, being is proving to be much harder. The same is true of letting go of the many masks I used to wear.

The next quest

David Brooks wrote about this transition in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. His idea: much of the first half of life is spent climbing the mountain of achievement. We build careers, identities, businesses, families, reputations, and a sense of independence. We want to become somebody. We want to matter.

Then life interrupts the climb.

Sometimes it happens through failure, divorce, illness, loss, or retirement. Sometimes success itself creates the problem. You reach the place you once wanted, look around, and quietly wonder, Is this it?

Brooks argues that a second mountain appears, one built less around accomplishment and more around commitment —to family, community, faith, and something larger than ourselves—and that the direction changes. We move from independence toward interdependence, from self-advancement toward contribution, from achievement toward meaning.

I am just beginning to climb that mountain. But lately I’ve begun to wonder whether there is one more.

The last mountain

Not the mountain where we prove ourselves, but the one where we finally stop needing to. Giving becomes the secret to living.

Thomas Merton spent much of his life exploring the difference between who we really are and the identity we construct to survive in the world. He described a false self built around status, achievement, approval, and possessions. That identity can serve us well for decades.

The trouble begins when we mistake it for the whole person.

That idea lands differently later in life. I noticed this decades ago when working as a retirement planner. Clients were headed into clergy, volunteer work, art, community service, and completely different ways of being in the world. My favorite mystics, monks, saints, and many psychologists understand the underlying psychological dynamics. They also embrace the mystery of Spirit, the Collective Unconscious, the Void.

For decades, my work gave me purpose. Ambition gave me energy. Achievement taught me discipline and helped me provide for the people I love. It seems universal. We all face similar existential and spiritual dilemmas later in life: how to be, and how not to fear dying.

The School of Life’s curriculum changes

Carl Jung believed the second half of life demands a different psychological task. Younger people naturally turn outward. We establish ourselves, build careers, raise families, and find our place. Later life calls us inward. The work becomes less about expansion and more about integration.

Jung warned, in essence, that we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the rules of the morning. I am learning that now.

For most of my life, I asked, What’s next?

The better question may be, Who do I want to be while doing whatever comes next?

That is a different mountain. There is no title at the summit. No sales target. No trophy. Nobody applauds because you finally became comfortable with enough. There is no scoreboard for becoming more peaceful, present, or grateful.

And yet this may be some of the hardest work we ever do

The path seems to involve subtraction more than addition. Less proving. Less comparing. Less rushing. Less worrying about how our lives look from the outside. Less confusing productivity with purpose.

And more attention to what is actually here.

The people we love. Our health. A good conversation. A bicycle ride. A photograph worth making. A blank sheet of watercolor paper. A grandchild climbing into our lap. A quiet morning when absolutely nothing important happens.

This does not mean withdrawing from life—quite the opposite. I still want to write, create, mentor, and contribute. I hope I never stop. But I am beginning to understand that these things can become expressions of life rather than measurements of it.

That’s a big deal.

If you are approaching your own final mountain, perhaps the answer is not another reinvention. Maybe it begins with uncomfortable questions. What am I still trying to prove? What am I afraid will happen if I slow down? Which parts of my identity belong to me, and which belong to an old résumé? Where does my life feel most alive now?

And perhaps the hardest question of all: If I stopped measuring my value by what I accomplish, would I still believe my life mattered?

I think that is the work.

We spend the first half of life learning how to become somebody.

The last mountain may be discovering that we were never just what we did in the first place.

Thanks for leaving a comment and restacking this article if it helped you.

It was 1961 when John F. Kennedy became president. Americans were buying Ford Falcons, a gallon of gas cost about 31 cents, and the United States government owed roughly $289 billion.

It’s the same year I was born. The $289 billion in 1961 is about $3.1 trillion in today’s money. But in recent weeks, we just hit more than $40 trillion.

That means the debt hasn’t merely risen because a dollar buys less today. Even after accounting for more than six decades of inflation, the national debt is about 13 times larger.

And that $40 trillion figure is current: Treasury data show the debt has already passed that threshold.

I’m not an economist, even though I earned a bachelor’s degree in International Business. I also grew up in a family that consistently spent more than my parents made. My father was a dreamer who pursued entrepreneurial success at great cost to himself and our family when we were kids.

This means I am hypersensitive to money issues, and when I see the national debt, I wonder how many of us take the time to break the numbers down and understand what’s happening. We’re not frogs in slowly boiling water. We are human, most of us drowning in debt and struggling to make ends meet.

As a nation, we are failing financially, emotionally, and spiritually. All one needs to do is observe the chasm between rich and poor, the devastation of millions falling out of the middle class, and wonder why we have mental health problems beyond social media and data centers.

The national debt is just like ours. It’s the accumulated amount of money the federal government has borrowed and still owes. Washington collects money mainly through taxes. When it spends more than it collects in a year, it has to borrow the difference.

That yearly shortfall is called the deficit. The accumulation of all that borrowing over the years is the national debt we see today. Think of the deficit as what you added to the credit card this year. The national debt is the balance already sitting on the card.

And we have been aggressively adding to the balance for a very long time.

When billions were still serious money

The federal debt was about $289 billion in 1961. But America’s economy was much smaller then, and a dollar was also worth considerably more. Economists therefore compare the debt with GDP, or Gross Domestic Product. GDP simply means the total value of the goods and services America produces in a year.

Think of GDP as roughly the country’s annual economic paycheck. If you owe $100,000 and earn $50,000 a year, that’s one situation. If you owe $100,000 and earn $500,000, that’s quite another.

The size of the debt matters. But so does our ability to carry it, which means paying or servicing the debt. During the decades after World War II, America’s economy grew rapidly. The government still owed a lot of money, but the economy often grew faster than the debt did.

Then came Vietnam, expanding federal programs, oil shocks, inflation, and the economic problems of the 1970s. Washington discovered something every family with a credit card eventually discovers: yesterday’s extraordinary expense has a strange tendency to become today’s normal expense.

And none of this can be pinned on one political party. We are all in this mess together.

A trillion-dollar tsunami

By the early 1980s, federal debt was approaching $1 trillion. President Ronald Reagan signed major tax cuts while the government substantially increased defense spending. The economy later grew strongly, but Washington continued spending more each year than it collected.

So it borrowed the difference just like most of us would if we could. The debt kept climbing. The 1990s gave us politicians seriously arguing about balancing the federal budget. Strong economic growth, higher tax revenues, and spending restraint eventually produced several years when Washington actually collected more money than it spent.

That’s called a budget surplus. Imagine that. But the national debt didn’t disappear. By 2001, it was roughly $5.8 trillion. Then history began sending us more bills to pay.

Wars, recession, and emergencies

The September 11 attacks were followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taxes were cut. Medicare expanded prescription-drug coverage. Then America’s housing market collapsed.

The 2008 financial crisis caused a severe recession. Businesses failed, unemployment soared, and tax collections fell. At the same time, Washington spent heavily trying to prevent the financial system and economy from collapsing.

Debt climbed again. By 2008, gross federal debt had reached just over $10 trillion. And something fundamental had changed. Borrowing became the new normal. Going into deeper debt was no longer something America did only during wars, depressions, and national emergencies—it had become routine.

Then COVID hit. Humanity panicked. The federal government responded to the economic shutdown with trillions of dollars in emergency spending. Businesses received assistance. Americans received stimulus checks. Unemployment benefits expanded. The government borrowed enormous amounts of money to keep the economy functioning.

There were understandable reasons for doing it. Massive fraud is now being revealed in our courts. And there was a big, fat bill to pay.

And now, $40 trillion

In August 2026, America’s national debt crossed $40 trillion. Some of that money is effectively owed by one part of the federal government to another. But roughly $32 trillion is owed to outside investors who have loaned money to the United States by buying Treasury bills, notes, and bonds.

Those investors include American citizens, retirement funds, banks, insurance companies, the Federal Reserve, foreign investors, and foreign governments. A Treasury bond is basically an IOU from Uncle Sam.

You give the government money. The government promises to give it back later. And while it has your money, it pays you interest. Which brings us to the part that concerns me most.

Interest

Borrowing money costs money. The government has to pay interest to the people and institutions that loaned it all those trillions. Through fiscal 2026 to date, that interest expense has already reached $1.17 trillion.

That’s money we, as taxpayers, cannot spend on roads, defense, Social Security, medical research, education, or anything else. And unlike paying down the original debt, paying interest doesn’t make the debt disappear. It’s simply the price of carrying it.

Debt is a wonderfully patient houseguest when interest rates are low. I remember my father telling me during the days he was drowning our family in debt, “Clifford, debt isn’t the primary problem in business and life. It’s being able to service the debt with lots of free cash flow.”

When interest rates rise as they have in recent years, you discover the houseguest has ordered room service, enrolled the kids in private school, bought private planes, added a new ballroom and pool, and apparently has no intention of leaving. The same houseguest seems to love war, too.

The view from 1961

I have now lived long enough to watch America’s national debt grow from roughly $289 billion to $40 trillion. That’s about 138 times larger in raw dollars.

That comparison needs perspective. America is vastly wealthier today, the economy is much larger, and inflation means today’s dollar isn’t remotely equivalent to a 1961 dollar.

But there’s another comparison that’s harder to dismiss. America now owes roughly as much to outside lenders as the entire country produces economically in a year.

Imagine a household earning $100,000 annually while carrying roughly $100,000 of debt. That doesn’t mean bankruptcy is coming tomorrow. It does mean the debt deserves attention—particularly when the household continues spending more than it earns every year.

That’s essentially where America finds itself. The same is true for millions of us, struggling to keep our heads above water without stable employment or any real check on the recent, rampant inflation.

I won’t bother you with comparisons between good debt and bad debt. That’s a matter of context and perspective. Overall, our national debt allowed generations of Americans to enjoy things today that would be paid for tomorrow.

For politicians, tomorrow is a particularly attractive payment plan because somebody else may be in office when the bill arrives. They know that. But I’ve lived long enough to learn something about tomorrow.

Eventually, you wake up and realize it’s already today. And here we are, now, drowning in debt, and nobody is sure what to do about it.

Thanks for leaving a comment and restacking this article if it helped you.

Most workplaces have an Achilles. Not the person with the obvious weakness. The original Achilles was nearly unbeatable. He was the greatest warrior in the Greek army at Troy, faster and more formidable than everyone around him.

His problem was not weakness. His problem was what happened when his sense of self was wounded. Hence, the metaphor of the unprotected heel.

That makes Homer’s Iliad, written nearly 3,000 years ago, surprisingly useful for understanding the modern workplace.

Achilles goes to war knowing something most of us spend our lives trying not to think about. He has been told he faces two possible futures. He can return home, live a long life, and eventually be forgotten. Or he can remain at Troy, achieve everlasting glory, and die young.

He chooses glory.

Then his commander, Agamemnon, humiliates him. The dispute involves a woman named Briseis, whom Agamemnon takes from Achilles. But the deeper injury is not romantic. In the honor culture of ancient Greece, Agamemnon has publicly diminished Achilles’ status.

Achilles responds in a way recognizable to anyone who has spent enough time around talented people: he withdraws.

If they don’t appreciate me, let them see what happens without me.

And they do. Without their best warrior, the Greeks begin losing badly.

The Achilles in the conference room

Versions of this drama happen every day in organizations. A gifted executive gets passed over for a promotion. A founder dismisses a senior leader’s advice. Someone else gets credit for an idea. A new boss changes the hierarchy. A high performer discovers that being indispensable does not necessarily mean being respected.

The visible disagreement may concern strategy, compensation, territory, title, or authority. The invisible conflict is often about identity.

Who am I if I am no longer seen the way I believe I deserve to be seen?

This is where affliction enters the workplace. It’s everywhere, and the primary reason work can suck the life out of us.

I use affliction deliberately. Pain is what happens to us. Affliction is what pain begins doing inside us. We tell ourselves stories about the injury. We replay conversations. We assign motives. We recruit allies. We withdraw effort. We become angry at people who had little to do with the original offense.

The mind turns a workplace event into a verdict on the self.

Achilles does exactly this. His wounded pride becomes more important than the people depending on him.

Until the cost becomes unbearable.

When suffering breaks the story

Achilles’ closest companion, Patroclus, enters battle wearing Achilles’ armor and is killed by Hector. Suddenly the argument with Agamemnon looks very small.

This is one of life’s cruel methods of restoring perspective. Something genuinely important happens and reveals how much energy we have been spending on things that weren’t. We sweat the small stuff until bigger stuff hits us in the face.

Achilles returns to battle consumed by rage. He kills Hector and desecrates his body. Yet revenge does not heal him.

Patroclus is still dead.

Then Homer gives us one of the most moving scenes in Western literature.

Hector’s elderly father, King Priam, enters the enemy camp, kneels before the man who killed his son, and begs Achilles to return Hector’s body. Priam asks Achilles to remember his own father.

And Achilles does.

For a moment, warrior and king stop being enemies. They become two grieving human beings. Achilles grieves for Patroclus, and for the father he knows he will never see again. Priam grieves for Hector.

They weep together.

What Achilles finally learns

That may be the deepest lesson Achilles can bring into our workplaces.

Beneath the titles, compensation packages, performance reviews, rivalries, ambitions, and organizational charts are human beings trying to matter. The difficult CEO is carrying something. So is the angry employee. So is the executive who cannot tolerate criticism. So is the colleague who suddenly withdraws.

Understanding this does not excuse destructive behavior. Achilles causes enormous suffering because he cannot see beyond his own wounded identity.

But Homer offers another possibility. The breakthrough comes when Achilles sees himself in another person.

That is empathy in its deepest form. Not I agree with you. Not even I forgive you.

Simply: I recognize something of myself in you.

Nearly three thousand years later, we still walk into our own little versions of Troy. We fight over status, recognition, territory, money, authority, and whose version of events will prevail. We convince ourselves that winning the battle will settle something inside us.

Usually it doesn’t.

Perhaps the strongest person in the workplace isn’t the one who wins every battle.

It is the one who eventually realizes that not every wound requires a war.

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One afternoon in 2005, it felt like I’d been shot with a supersonic pellet gun at close range, or maybe a bolt of lightning igniting and exploding from within the disc that used to live in my spine between L4 and L5.

I dropped like a boulder, hitting the deck of the asphalt tennis court while I was warming up for a local tournament.

We can’t learn this stuff on a webinar

It just happens. My training partner and friend, a local pro at the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, rushed to the net asking if I was okay. Clearly, I was not, but neither of us knew what had happened.

I tried to stand up. Gravity won. I crumbled to the ground, groaning in agony. I had never felt a pain that numbed both mind and body at once. My friend helped me crawl, as best he could, to my car in the parking lot. It must have been a hundred and fifty yards.

It felt more like a mile. I got myself into the driver’s seat and reclined it as far back as possible to relieve the pain. I could barely see over the dashboard pulling out of the lot. The pain blinded me. I winced, more to endure the agony attacking my body than the harsh light of the Sonoran desert in early summer.

My ego kept me from calling an ambulance

I drove to the emergency room a few miles away. I parked the car like a kid who just got his learner’s permit, opened the door with my body’s weight, and let myself fall onto the pavement before crawling to the entrance. The doors found me on the ground, waving at the infrared sensors, and let me into a cold, full ER.

Everyone stared as I crawled through the doorway. A nurse ran toward me with a wheelchair, but sitting made the pain bad enough that I wanted to punch myself in the face. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was cold, leaning against the chair, answering questions. It felt like an eternity.

The nurse told me to wait

But waiting is against my religion. Patience is not my virtue, especially when I feel like I’ve been shot. So I crawled back to my car, drove to the drive-through liquor store next door to the hospital, and ordered three Gatorades and the largest bottle of Advil they had.

I made it the few miles home and crawled into the house, only to be met by Roxanne, our Labrador puppy, who couldn’t wait to greet me by licking my face. And I was home alone because my wife and best friend were on a road trip with our kids.

Getting to know chronic pain

Chronic pain is the most miserable kind of pain I can imagine, and I’ve got a great imagination. I had to build a working relationship with it.

I took on physical therapy as if my career depended on it, even though I wasn’t a tennis pro. I was an excessively stressed-out, overcontrolling small business owner who loved to play tennis, spend time with my family, and build my financial advisory practice.

I blamed the pain on being an athlete, not on being a worn-out business warrior in my forties—a huge wake-up call.

Chronic stress and pain are insidious by nature

I had no clue what role stress played, or how it crushes people from the inside out more than we want to admit. Until a major health issue forced the truth on me, mine did.

I had surgery the following year, in 2006. Toward the end, I lived on a blue walker my wife and I bought at Walgreens. Remember, I was a legend in my own mind, a big tennis cheese in Arizona, and here I was needing an old dude walker to get around.

I met humility

Life was hell. Chronic pain dragged me into a black hole I didn’t know existed. I couldn’t sleep well. I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t work well or manage my business.

Pain pills made me hurl like a first-time passenger on a cruise ship that just hit a white squall. I could eat Advil and drink beer, wine, and whiskey, but none of it put a dent in the level ten pain that ate me alive. Same with weed, plus it was too expensive, hard to find, and the mere stink of it would send my wife into a terrifying battle cry.

When my back fell apart, so did the rest of my life

It took two years of intentional fitness training and physical therapy to walk normally again. I’ve never stopped working to live free of chronic pain. I never played tennis again, though I did learn to play, compete, and win at pickleball, starting at 3.5 and working my way up to 5.0 tournaments around Arizona. I also got certified to teach, but I walked away from it all.

I’ve lived with chronic pain every day since the pellet gun whacked me in the lower back and dropped me to the ground like human jerky.

Sciatica is my nemesis

Medically, sciatica is pain, numbness, or tingling that radiates along the sciatic nerve, the thick nerve that runs from the lower back through the hips and down each leg.

A herniated disc or bone spur usually causes it, pressing on the nerve root, exactly the kind of damage that blew out at L4-L5 that day on the court.

It’s more common than most people realize. Roughly 40 percent of people will deal with it at some point in their lives, and most cases ease up within a few weeks. Mine didn’t. Mine settled in for the long haul, which meant I had to find a way to manage it that didn’t involve pills, needles, or giving up on the rest of my life.

Pain can change us

The pain of my back injury profoundly changed me. Could I have gone back to tennis? Sure. Could I have taken pain meds at the risk of making a career out of jacking convenience stores? Heck, I didn’t even know what a “pain program” meant when I first herniated a disc. It’s hardcore drugs. Yuck.

Instead, I shifted my mindset into a higher gear and dialed in new priorities. The older I get, the less my ego plays a role in my choices. That’s true for all athletic activities now. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone.

I prefer to live as pain-free as I can. It’s a choice.

Since surgery, I rededicated myself to becoming the fittest version of myself now that I’m sixty-five. I’m extremely vigilant with self-training at home, on a bicycle, hiking, and great naps. I learned how to rebuild my core from chiropractor Eric Goodman’s book, Foundation: Redefine Your Core, Conquer Back Pain, and Move with Confidence.

Their premise flips the usual core workout on its head. Stop obsessing over six-pack abs and start strengthening the posterior chain, the muscles running up the back of the body that were built to hold us upright in the first place.

Simple movements, no equipment, and it works.

Self-healing isn’t selfish

The other book that helped most was Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John Sarno. Sarno, a former rehabilitation physician at NYU, argued that most chronic back pain isn’t structural at all.

He called it Tension Myositis Syndrome, pain the brain manufactures to distract us from emotions we’d rather not feel. It all made sense looking back on my life over twenty years ago.

Stress owned me. Chronic pain pummeled me. One line of Sarno’s has stuck with me for years:

“There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.”

I read that sentence and saw my entire career staring back at me

My entire adolescent life was dedicated to banging tennis balls into a garage door, a wall, or anyone willing to hit with me. Like all adolescents, I was an emotional mess.

Winning meant feeling okay even though I seldom felt good enough. I couldn’t win enough to fill the void of not knowing myself well enough to be good enough, grateful for it all, here and now.

Rebuilding from the inside out is a process, not an event. When our health fails, and life falls apart, we have a choice: give up or fight back from the inside out. I chose the latter, because the alternative would suck.

What actually helps

Somewhere in year two of rebuilding, I stopped looking for a cure and started looking for a practice. That shift changed everything, and it’s the part I wish someone had handed me on day one.

Breathwork is the tool I reach for first, every time. Slow, deep breathing calms the nervous system that’s been on high alert since the day my disc blew out. When the pain flares, I breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, and breathe out for six. Nothing fancy. It works because it works, and it costs nothing.

Mindfulness meditation isn’t a soft, feel-good add-on either. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health points to mindfulness-based stress reduction as a first-line, non-drug approach for chronic low-back pain, the same condition I’ve lived with for over twenty years, and the American College of Physicians recommends it ahead of medication. I didn’t need a study to believe it. I needed one to explain why it was working.

The practice itself is simple, if you’ve never tried it. Instead of fighting the pain or trying to think my way past it, I sit with it. I notice where it lives in my body, whether it’s sharp or dull, whether it’s moving or holding still, and I let it be there without stacking panic or resentment on top of it. Pain plus resistance is suffering. Pain without resistance is just pain, and pain by itself is more bearable than most people expect.

Movement matters just as much. Cycling, hiking, and the posterior chain work from Goodman’s book keep my body strong enough to support the nerve that gives me trouble. Sarno’s book retrained my mind to stop manufacturing pain out of stress I wasn’t dealing with. Between the two, I built a system instead of waiting for a cure.

If you’re new to this, start with your breath. It’s the one tool no doctor can take away, and no insurance company can deny.

None of it made the pain disappear. It made the pain manageable, which is a different and, I’d argue, more honest goal.

The dance with chronic pain continues

When chronic pain knocks on my front door, and the sciatic nerve starts pinging me with shocks running from a low seven to a high nine on the pain scale, I don’t want to dance. I prefer to cycle.

So I smile, take a series of long, deep, healing breaths, the same four-four-six count that gets me through the worst of it, and let the pain be there without a fight. Sometimes it sticks around for a while. Most days now, it doesn’t stay long, and I’m okay either way.

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After reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, I found myself returning to one question:

How could anyone go through so much and still emerge with his humanity intact?

Mandela was persecuted, separated from his family, treated as less than human, and imprisoned for 27 years because he opposed South Africa’s apartheid system. Those years were designed to break his body, silence his voice, and convince him that resistance was hopeless.

Yet when he finally walked out of prison in 1990, he did not appear consumed by revenge. That does not mean he had forgotten what happened. It does not mean he accepted injustice or excused the people responsible for it. Mandela remained a determined political leader who understood power, conflict, negotiation, and sacrifice.

But he also understood something many of us never learn: hatred can imprison the person carrying it. The same is true for resentment and other lower emotions.

Mandela was born in 1918 in the village of Mvezo, South Africa. As a young man, he studied law, became politically active, and joined the struggle against apartheid, the government system that enforced racial separation and denied basic rights to South Africa’s Black majority.

His resistance eventually led to his arrest and conviction. He spent most of his imprisonment on Robben Island, where inmates endured hard labor, poor food, limited contact with loved ones, and deliberate humiliation.

Imagine losing nearly three decades of your life. Imagine watching your children grow up from a distance. Imagine being unable to comfort your family through illness, death, fear, and uncertainty. Imagine waking every morning knowing that the people holding the keys wanted you to surrender not only your freedom, but your dignity.

Many people would have left prison determined to punish everyone responsible.

Mandela left prepared to help build a country.

He became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and served until 1999. Rather than using the presidency to settle personal scores, he worked toward democracy and reconciliation in a nation that could easily have collapsed into greater violence.

This is where I find the deeper connection to gratitude.

Gratitude is often presented as appreciation for pleasant things. We are told to be thankful for a beautiful sunset, a comfortable home, a healthy meal, or time with family. These things matter.

But Mandela’s life points toward a more demanding form of gratitude. It is gratitude for the opportunity to keep serving after life has wounded us. It is gratitude for the freedom to choose our response, even when we could not choose what happened. It is gratitude that does not deny suffering, but refuses to let suffering have the final word.

Gratitude in action.

Mandela did not become great because terrible things happened to him. Millions of people experience terrible things and are never given recognition, justice, or a public platform.

He became great because he decided what those experiences would make of him. He took the high road, one of virtue, one I deeply admire. He could not recover the years taken from him. He could not undo the pain suffered by his family or erase the cruelty of apartheid. What he could do was use whatever life remained to help create something better.

That may be one of the most important lessons of aging. As the years pass, each of us accumulates reasons to become bitter. People disappoint us. Dreams collapse. Bodies weaken. Loved ones die. Opportunities disappear. Some wounds never completely heal.

We cannot always choose what we lose. We can choose what we become.

Nelson Mandela died in 2013 at the age of 95. His life does not offer us a sentimental story about remaining positive. It offers something more honest and useful: evidence that a person can experience enormous injustice without allowing injustice to become his identity.

That is why his story belongs in Aging with Gratitude. Gratitude is not pretending the past was better than it was. It is deciding that the pain of the past will not be permitted to destroy the possibilities of the future.

Mandela’s long walk was not only a walk toward political freedom. It was a walk toward freedom from bitterness. And after everything he endured, that may have been his greatest victory.

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Buckle your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m fired up. The renewed attention surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey motivated me to return to Homer.

I began listening again to both The Iliad and The Odyssey. This time, something shifted.

Greek mythology finally made sense to me.

Perhaps I needed another four and a half decades of living before I could understand what I missed in the CliffsNotes versions of these stories. Some lessons can be taught when we are young.

Others must be lived before they can be understood

Reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, along with the work of Carl Jung and other great thinkers, also changed how I approach mythology.

I no longer see these stories merely as strange tales about gods, monsters, wars, and supernatural events.

I see them as stories about us.

This realization has also inspired a new direction for The Clarity Letter. And I invite you to invite your friends and family to join us for the journey.

In the articles ahead, I want to explore the world’s greatest stories, ageless wisdom, and practical psychology to help us live with greater clarity and purpose.

Not to escape the modern world, but to understand ourselves more clearly within it.

A quick caveat

This is philosophy, not history or theology.

Zeus swallowed his pregnant wife.

Athena burst fully grown from his skull.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods.

Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection.

The Minotaur lived beneath a labyrinth.

Read literally, these stories seem impossible. They sound more like modern superhero movies than serious attempts to understand reality.

Yet they have survived for nearly 3,000 years.

Why?

Because stories can reveal truths that facts alone cannot always express.

The ancient Greeks were wrestling with the same questions we still ask:

What makes us wise?

Why do we destroy ourselves?

Where does courage come from?

Why do good people suffer?

How should we live?

Those questions never disappear.

The questions eventually find us

Many of us do not seriously consider these questions when we are young. The calls don’t start until later in life.

In our twenties and thirties, we are busy building careers, raising families, paying bills, and establishing our place in the world. We construct the scaffolding of a life without always asking what the structure is meant to hold.

Then, somewhere along the way, achievement stops being enough.

We begin asking about purpose instead of productivity.

Meaning instead of status.

Inner peace instead of the next material milestone.

This shift often arrives after we lose something, survive something, or accumulate enough years to notice how much of the noise never mattered.

The modern world has not made this search easier.

We have access to more information than any previous generation, yet many of us feel less certain about what is true, valuable, or worth pursuing.

Overwhelmed by noise, we begin looking for solid ground.

Some people turn toward faith. Others rediscover philosophy, psychology, literature, or mythology.

We begin searching beneath the surface.

Mythology was the language of meaning

The ancient Greeks used mythology to explore the invisible forces shaping human life.

The mistake we sometimes make is assuming these stories must be either literal history or meaningless fantasy.

There is another way to read them.

Myths can be understood as metaphysical stories expressed through symbols.

Metaphysics asks what lies beneath appearances. It explores reality, existence, consciousness, identity, and purpose.

It does not merely ask what something is made of.

It asks what it means.

Symbolism works the same way. Instead of asking only whether an event happened exactly as described, we ask what lasting truth the story is trying to communicate.

Sometimes a symbol is the only container large enough to hold a difficult truth.

Once we begin reading mythology through this lens, its strangest stories start making sense.

Athena and the birth of wisdom

Consider the birth of Athena.

According to the myth, Zeus learns of a prophecy that one of his children may someday overthrow him. To prevent this, he swallows his pregnant wife, Metis.

Metis represents wisdom, counsel, and intelligent foresight.

Later, Zeus develops a terrible headache. His skull is split open, and Athena emerges fully grown, wearing armor and carrying a spear.

Taken literally, the story is bizarre.

Taken symbolically, it becomes profound.

Zeus does not destroy wisdom by swallowing Metis. He internalizes it.

Athena then emerges from his head. She represents wisdom becoming conscious.

She becomes the goddess of strategic thinking, justice, learning, craftsmanship, and civilization. Unlike Ares, who represents the chaos and fury of war, Athena represents disciplined intelligence.

Even her armor has meaning.

Wisdom is not passive. It must sometimes defend truth, resist impulse, and face conflict with clarity rather than anger.

The myth stops being strange.

It becomes human.

The gods and monsters within us

The same pattern appears throughout Greek mythology.

Prometheus represents the courage to bring knowledge into the world, even at tremendous personal cost.

Icarus warns that ambition without humility can become self-destructive.

Narcissus reveals the emptiness of excessive self-absorption.

The Minotaur represents the darker instincts we hide beneath the surface of civilized life.

The labyrinth represents the confusing inner journey each of us must eventually navigate.

These are not merely stories about distant gods and imaginary monsters.

They describe forces that remain active within the human mind.

Carl Jung believed myths express universal patterns in the human psyche. He called them archetypes.

The hero.

The ruler.

The trickster.

The shadow.

The wise elder.

Cultures separated by centuries and continents created similar characters because human beings continue to struggle with the same fears, desires, temptations, and questions.

Technology evolves.

Human nature changes much more slowly.

Myths were not simply entertainment. They helped cultures pass their hardest-earned wisdom from one generation to the next.

Odysseus is trying to become worthy of home

This may be why The Odyssey continues to captivate us nearly three thousand years after it was first told.

Odysseus is not merely trying to sail home.

He is trying to become the kind of man capable of arriving there.

The dangers he encounters represent more than physical obstacles. They reflect the inner adversaries every person eventually faces.

Pride.

Temptation.

Fear.

Distraction.

Anger.

Despair.

The Sirens tempt Odysseus away from his path.

Circe transforms men into animals ruled by appetite.

The Cyclops represents brute strength without wisdom or restraint.

Calypso offers comfort and immortality, but only if Odysseus abandons his true home and purpose.

Each challenge asks the same question:

Will Odysseus remember who he is?

That may be the central challenge of every human life.

The world constantly tries to distract us, flatter us, frighten us, and convince us to exchange our deeper purpose for immediate comfort.

The journey home is the journey back to ourselves.

Why mythology will never disappear

Mythology does not vanish.

It changes costumes.

The ancient hero becomes a modern detective, soldier, athlete, entrepreneur, rebel, or superhero.

The dragon becomes addiction, illness, grief, corruption, fear, or personal failure.

The outer details change, but the inner journey remains.

As I have grown older, I have become less interested in proving whether every ancient story happened exactly as written.

I am far more interested in understanding why certain stories have survived for thousands of years.

The most useful questions may be:

What does this story reveal about human nature?

Where do I see myself within it?

What is it asking me to confront?

What is it asking me to change?

Science helps us understand how the universe works.

Mythology helps us understand how human beings experience it.

One explores the mechanics of reality.

The other explores its meaning.

We need both.

The greatest journey in The Odyssey is not the voyage across the Mediterranean.

It is the journey every one of us must make toward wisdom, clarity, and purpose.

It is the long journey home to ourselves.

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Notice the scrawny tennis kid on the left with a racket made of metal, not wood. Conversely, his younger brother and sister have wood rackets, for good reason. “Chewy,” the kid on the left, had a very bad tennis temper because he expected to win every point, game, set, and match.

He hated losing.

It was the worst thing that could happen on any given day. His attachment to winning, combined with his confounding ability to say brutally critical things to himself, often out loud so spectators and opponents could see and hear, meant a Jack Kramer tennis racket could get smashed to smithereens in a nanosecond.

Bad. Very bad. Shame, guilt, and remorse followed.

Let’s talk about self-talk

The game of life is best played when we see and talk to ourselves in healthy ways. I didn’t learn how to pull this off until well after age 50.

Before that, I used to be vicious to myself. Most people would never know it because I did a great job of acting and burying my emotions so as not to explode. Never good enough, in my own mind, I used to hold myself against ten thousand false ideals I’d invented, including becoming a world-famous tennis pro.

Of course, every time I fell short of my false ideal, I’d unleash fury on myself, but where could I run, and how could I hide? Emotional maturity was never my strength, and my inner demons ate me alive.

This morning changed that memory into something useful, and now, my article. I was standing in my kitchen with a cup of fresh medium roast, listening to the particular silence a house makes early, when I caught myself mid-conversation. Not with Janice. Not on the phone. A conversation with myself, and it went like this.

“Hey, your self-talk is completely different these days. Have you noticed that when you worry about the future, or regret something from the past, you don’t beat the crap out of yourself anymore? Like when you paint, and it sucks, you’re okay with it. You don’t need to find a flamethrower and torch yourself or your work. Nice job, dude.”

I stood there holding my coffee, struck by the question under the question, to which I already knew the answer. Who was talking? And who, exactly, was being talked to?

Welcome to the “inner game” of life

The psychological wisdom that follows is profound. It started changing my life in the early 1980s when I was a serious tennis player, chasing a serve that would hold up under pressure, and a friend handed me a paperback called The Inner Game of Tennis.

Timothy Gallwey wasn’t really writing about tennis. He was writing about the two people living inside every player’s head. He called them Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is the talker, the critic, the voice that narrates every mistake before it happens and grades every shot after it lands. Self 2 is the doer, the part of you that already knows how to hit the ball, the part that learned to walk and ride a bike and fall in love without a lecture from Self 1 telling it how.

That paperback rewired how I understood pressure and, eventually, how I understood myself. Once I could name the two voices, tennis got easier. But something bigger happened over the following decades. I slowly, imperfectly, trained myself to spend less time listening to the critic and more time living from the part of me Gallwey only pointed toward: an aware, accepting, higher self.

It was a form of spiritual progress in action. I lived it; I got help, read lots of books, practiced healthy self-talk, and started shedding the masks I wore to make a living as a consultant. My family and friends noticed the changes in me before I saw them in myself. I was becoming more patient, loving, humble, compassionate, and calm.

I had become willing to forgive a bad shot, a bad decade, a version of myself I no longer recognize. The kid you see in the picture above is still part of me. He’s the one who did indeed smash a pickleball paddle in half, and honestly, it felt good until I had to pony up $300 for a new one. But right after I called myself an idiot, I forgave the inner child who sometimes punishes me.

The psychology of self-talk

Long before Gallwey split the self in two, psychologists were discovering that simply talking about ourselves, out loud, to another person, could loosen something a pill never touched. Sigmund Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer called it the talking cure, a phrase coined by one of Breuer’s patients, a young woman known in the case histories as Anna O. She found that describing her symptoms in detail, tracing them back to the moment they started, made them lose their grip. Freud built a discipline on that discovery: the thought left unspoken calcifies into symptom, and the thought spoken aloud starts to lose its power over us.

Religion figured this out first. Catholic confession, at its best, isn’t about groveling. It’s about the power of penance. It’s about naming the exact place you missed, out loud, to a witness, so the miss stops living in the dark where it multiplies.

Millions of people in recovery programs worldwide do the same thing in the 5th step: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Talking about sin

The word we translate as “sin,” hamartia, comes from an ancient Greek archery term. It means to miss the mark. Not evil. Not damned. An arrow that didn’t land where the archer meant it to land. Every person in that confessional is an archer describing a miss, not a monster describing a crime.

Zen archery asks for the same humility from a different direction. In Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, the master tells his frustrated German student, “The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.”

The lesson was never about the target

It was about the archer’s mind. A mind gripped by fear of missing will miss. A mind at peace with itself, arrow after arrow, finds the target without trying to.

That’s what shifted in my kitchen this morning. I’m not aiming less carefully at a good life. I’ve just stopped torturing the archer.

Every wisdom tradition I’ve studied points to the same architecture: two selves, or two attentions, gathered around a single soul. The Bhagavad Gita calls them the lower self and the Self with a capital S. Christian mystics call it the false self and the true self hidden in God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1841 essay Prudence, described the degrees of proficiency in knowing the world, and the top tier belonged to what he called wise men.

“There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient, to our present purpose, to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol; esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception.”

Living in the present

For most of my life, I lived in the first class, chasing symbols, health, wealth, and approval, mistaking them for the destination. My self-talk back then was the internal auditor of that chase, always finding the shortfall.

Somewhere in the last years I moved up a level, then started reaching for a third. Not because I earned it. Because I finally understood the critical voice was never me. It was a program I built out of fear, running on a loop, mistaking itself for my identity.

The voice that spoke to me this morning over coffee, the one that said nice job, dude, wasn’t Self 1’s replacement. It was something older than Self 1, something that was there before I ever built the critic, watching the whole performance with more patience than I ever gave myself. Call it the higher self. Call it the soul, the eternal witness, the part of Mind that religion calls God speaking in the first person, the We underneath the I.

You don’t get there by trying harder to hit the mark. You get there the way Herrigel’s archer did, by loosening your grip until the arrow, the target, and the self so afraid of missing all quietly become one thing. Then you notice you’re already home, standing in your own kitchen, sipping coffee, being spoken to with more love than you ever thought to ask for.

That’s self-awareness, and it’s a beautiful thing.

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Nobody gets a painless ride in the school of life. No hall passes. No exemptions. Just life teaching us the way to navigate a crisis. I’ve had some doozies that helped me grow up a lot.

What follows isn’t just about what happens to us mid-life, because that can be relative to how long we live. Nonetheless, the best way I’ve learned to navigate a family or business crisis is to face it head-on, and be fearless knowing there will be a lesson in the experience somewhere down the road.

If you have faced a crisis, you know the feeling. It’s like looking at a massive tsunami of emotion barreling toward you, and you can’t run. You freeze in your tracks. You don’t know if you will survive. Abject terror strikes.

Then, if it is your destiny and you strike good fortune, a lifetime of shedding the trauma becomes your primary purpose. That’s how I see crisis, what happens to us, and trauma, what happens within us, as powerful stepping stones to higher consciousness.

You can’t learn this stuff reading books. You have to learn to deal with unhealthy stress, and at some point in your life, a crisis. For me, my most devastating crisis hit me in my late thirties, crushed my ego, my mental health, my physical well-being, and wiped out my entire net worth.

That was over 20 years ago, and every day I do the inner work to prepare for anything, using radical acceptance as a springboard to courage, honesty, and humility.

Virtue, not vice.

What life in the rat race teaches us

Fake it til you make it. Work hard. Take the risk. Build something valuable. Win the game. Retire, play golf, and try not to become a day drinker.

That is the script many of us inherit. Society teaches us to compete, produce, perform, accumulate, and prove ourselves. Culture teaches us to chase status, money, titles, approval, comfort, and control. School teaches us how to obey, memorize, measure up, and prepare for work.

But almost nowhere are we taught how to know ourselves. We are not taught the art of self-awareness. We are not taught how to examine our fears, question our motives, listen to our bodies, understand our pain, or direct our lives with focused intention. We are taught how to succeed on the outside, but not how to awaken on the inside.

So we keep running and gunning

Then, one day, something breaks. The marriage. The body. The business. The identity. The illusion. What we call a crisis may be the first honest moment of our lives. It wakes us up because the old life can no longer carry the weight of who we are becoming.

Looking back on those years, I can now be grateful for the agony of my fall into an emotional abyss so deep and dark that only a higher power could save me, once I was finally done doing dumb, selfish, fearful things. That’s when I knew to begin the inner work.

To be true to myself, get the heck out of the rat race, metaphorically speaking.

There’s a huge payoff for doing the inner work

Crisis changes us once we’re ready to shift gears from fear, shame, guilt, anger, and all the other head trash we carry around. Crisis can destroy the false life. It can burn away the costume. Torch the many masks we wear to please people, fit in, do good, and chase the delusion of perfection. Crisis can leave you standing there with nothing but the truth.

Most of us face some version of this in midlife. Maybe not as dramatically. Maybe not with the same financial collapse, emotional wreckage, or spiritual desperation. But the questions come for nearly everyone. Who am I now? What have I built? What have I lost? What did I trade for success? What still matters? What am I here to give?

Psychologist Erik Erikson described midlife as the stage of generativity versus stagnation. That means we begin to ask whether we are creating something useful for others or becoming stuck, self-absorbed, and spiritually stale.

That is the heart of the midlife crisis

Midlife is not merely about aging. It is about meaning. Growing up by shifting the way we see ourselves and the people, places, and things around us from a place of acceptance and love.

The body starts telling the truth. The mirror starts telling the truth. The calendar starts telling the truth. Parents age or die. Children grow up and leave. Careers plateau. Marriages are tested. Old dreams either come true, fall apart, or stop mattering.

Money no longer answers the deeper questions. Achievement loses some of its magic. The applause gets quieter. The soul gets louder.

The first half of life often asks, “Can I prove myself?” The second half asks, “Can I become myself?”

We stop sweating the small stuff, which is pretty much everything.

Survival is not the same as wholeness

At some point, the old identity begins to crack because it can no longer bear the weight of the soul. That is when the crisis begins.

We call it a midlife crisis, but maybe that phrase is too small. Maybe it is a midlife correction. Maybe it is a reckoning. Maybe it is the soul refusing to keep living inside a story that is no longer true.

This is where the metaphysical part comes in. A midlife crisis is psychological on the surface, but metaphysical underneath. It forces us to ask what is real. Not what looks real. Not what impresses people.

Not what keeps us busy. We shift to being real by asking the big questions and seeking the inner, higher wisdom for answers. That’s the heart.

What is the nature of my life? What is the cause of my suffering? What is the purpose of my remaining time? What kind of person am I becoming? What kind of person do I still have time to become?

These are not small questions

They are the questions beneath all the other questions. The crisis happens when the old answers stop working.

The money answer stops working. The status answer stops working. The people-pleasing answer stops working. The ego answer stops working. The escape routes stop working. The soul wants truth, and the ego wants comfort. That is the fight.

That is why people do strange things in midlife. They blow up marriages. Quit jobs. Buy toys. Chase youth. Drink too much. Spend too much. Run from silence. Run from grief. Run from the truth. I understand the impulse.

When terror hits, escape looks like wisdom.

Escape is not the solution

Truth is far better. Honesty.

The cause of the midlife crisis is not age. Age is just the messenger. The real cause is misalignment of our souls. It knows we are not living honestly enough, freely enough, lovingly enough, or purposefully enough.

It knows we have made too many compromises with fear, greed, gluttony, and other soul-crushing ways of living.

Knowing is a feeling that comes from inside.

That knowing can feel like anxiety. It can feel like depression. It can feel like rage. It can feel like numbness. It can feel like the quiet voice inside saying, “This cannot be all there is.”

That voice should not be ignored. It may be the healthiest part of us trying to get our attention. All you have to do is answer the call and listen carefully.

Become part of the solution

Once you own your problem, you become part of the solution. Not panic. Not denial. Not self-destruction. Not another shiny distraction.

The solution is honest reconstruction from the inside out. You become the best student you can for as long as you’re here in the school of life. You must be willing to change the defects in your character and become better.

Tell the truth about what hurts. Tell the truth about what you fear. Tell the truth about what you regret. Tell the truth about what you still love. Tell the truth about where you have been selfish, careless, arrogant, afraid, or asleep.

Help yourself by getting help

Get professional help if you need it. Forget your pride. Take care of your mind and body. Repair what can be repaired. Forgive what can be forgiven. Let go of what is dead.

Serve someone.

Create something.

Teach what you have learned.

Slowly. Humbly. Practically.

Become useful again by serving others

Usefulness saved me from myself more than once. When I stopped obsessing over what I had lost and began helping other people solve real problems, I found my way back to life.

Not all at once. Not perfectly. But enough to keep trudging along.

Maybe that is the hidden gift inside a midlife crisis. Any crisis. It interrupts the life that is no longer true. It breaks the spell. It tells us the scoreboard we worshiped may not have been the right scoreboard.

And if we are willing to listen, it gives us a chance to build the second half of life with more honesty, humility, courage, and grace.

The crisis is not the end. For some of us, it is the first honest beginning. And that’s how the art of crisis management becomes essential.

Thanks for restacking this article if you found it helpful.

Good morning from semi-nuclear hot Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m happy to let you know that I’ve launched a new Substack newsletter called Aging with Gratitude. It’s about the art of living a longer, happier, healthier life.

Because aging is unavoidable

Wisdom is optional. I’m not the wisest guy in the world, but I love sharing insights from my life and from those of others far more intelligent than I am in psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and, of course, art.

“Creativity takes courage.” - Henri Mattisse

Why start another project?

Glad you asked.

Because, first and foremost, my love for writing, photography, digital, and mixed-media art blossomed late in life. I love my creative life, and we outsource money stuff to someone we trust so I can have more time to do things I love.

Second, retirement is vastly overrated for me. I notice the same thing with most of my retired friends; no purpose, no mission, big void.

I turn 65 this week. I’ve been blessed to work for myself since I was 30. That means I’ve enjoyed time, creativity, and ultimately, hard-won financial freedom. I will never stop doing things I love, whether they generate income or not.

Money for creative work is a bonus, not the focus. And owning a time bank makes me feel rich. Living a fulfilling life boils down to being creative, courageous, and persistent, as we were when we were kids.

Enough about me.

Aging with Gratitude™ is different from The Clarity Letter

But it comes from the same place in me. This project gives me a reason to get out from behind my desk, out of my comfortable home office and studio, and into the world.

It gives me a reason to sit across from real people, listen carefully, make a portrait, and share a piece of their story.

It’s a black-and-white portrait and story project focused on people who have lived enough life to tell the truth. People who have suffered, rebuilt, lost, forgiven, recovered, reinvented themselves, and somehow found gratitude on the other side.

Not the glamour and glitch b.s. Hardship that leads to transformation.

Here’s a portrait of someone you can read about next week on Aging with Gratitude™—no wowzer filters and no pretending.

No fake perfection because people who make progress make better stories.

Humanity, one person at a time

The people I am looking for are not necessarily famous. They do not need a big platform, a polished message, or a perfect life story. In fact, perfect is not the point.

The point is wisdom, vulnerability, and transparency. I love stories revealing what life teaches us after the big plan falls apart. The point is what remains when ambition softens, grief has done its work, and a person can look back with honesty and say, “I am still here, and I am grateful.”

That is the heart of Aging with Gratitude™. For those of you who subscribe to The Clarity Letter, I want to be clear about something. You are not automatically subscribed to Aging with Gratitude™.

It is a separate Substack publication. If you want to receive those stories and portraits, you will need to subscribe there as well.

And I hope you will.

Click here to start your free subscription.

Thanks for restacking this article if you found it helpful.

Retirement is overrated, and I am at retirement age. Instead of sitting around, moving my sheckles, and being a quiet, content introvert, I’m facing my fear and getting out of my comfort zone to meet new people.

I am beginning a new photography and storytelling project called Aging with Gratitude. It’s a new project, so there is no website or newsletter yet. But I did manage to hack a new Instagram account, so feel free to join me.

I’ve got nothing to sell.

My project isn’t about money. It’s love of art, humans, and their stories. Especially people who are fifty-five and older.

The older, the better.

For example, even though my project is only a couple of weeks old, I met an eighty-one-year-old woman earlier this week who was born in 1945 in Germany. She barely made it out alive, and her story, her black and white portrait, will be ready to publish shortly.

A stranger became a friend. More to come.

The conversations I value most are not about success

They are about human struggle, suffering, and life-changing stories. Reinvention, regret, grace, recovery, meaning, purpose. The quiet wisdom that only comes from living a long, difficult life, because life is hard for all of us.

My mission is to capture black-and-white portraits alongside the stories behind them. Conversations with people who have lived, suffered, recovered, lost, rebuilt, loved, failed, forgiven, and kept going.

People who carry wisdom in their wrinkles. People who know life is both beautiful and hard—people who have become more fully human.

And people who are willing to sit in front of my camera, which is up on the list of fears with public speaking, unless you’re an influencer.

Aging with gratitude means we’re at a stage in life where we can look back and be thankful for the journey through hell and back. The suffering hurt so much that it profoundly changed us.

The photography side of it

I’ve been practicing photography since 1978, when I learned to make my first prints in a darkroom. Then, life happened, and even though I had a camera my entire life, I didn’t discover the inner artist within me until 2020. Since then, I’ve been learning the business of art, photography, and painting, which is brutal, just like with writing and selling any decent book.

I practice art for love, like most artists. For some of us, money trickles in. But this particular project has nothing to do with money.

Aging with Gratitude includes portraits that could be worth 10,000 words written in the wrinkles.

This portrait is one I captured a couple of years ago. I still think about it. My dear friend Stewart Smith was one of my first mentors, and when I look at this image, I do not see age.

I see one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known. And yes, he’s still very much with us, living his dream.

I see humility

Resilience. Joy bound with hardship. I see someone who has lived enough life to stop pretending. It’s not easy to close to people who are weathered by life’s storms, but when you do, and the eye of the storm reveals itself, we see another world.

That is what this project is about: real people. Honest stories. Hard-earned wisdom. No filters. No pretending. Just humanity.

In black-and-white portraits, using my super-lean mobile studio, considering that my tiny home studio is too small for most of my work.

Introductions, please

If you or someone you know has a story worth telling, I would love to hear from you because I believe some of the most powerful people in the world are not the loudest or the richest.

They are the ones the world may never know until someone asks them to share their stories and how they have suffered, healed, and found grace, then gratitude, anyway.

My artistic desire is to sit across from them with a camera and listen. Just keep in mind that I live in Arizona, and don’t like to travel much.

Thanks for reposting this article if you found it helpful.

When I was younger, I believed the good guys would win. I believed hard work mattered. Integrity mattered. Kindness mattered. I assumed honesty would eventually rise to the top and that people who tried to do the right thing would somehow come out ahead.

Then life happened. Phenomenal, but for a few genetic rip tides. I never loved school, but I loved learning how to break unhealthy generational cycles. To evolve.

I watched decent people struggle while manipulative people prospered. I watched institutions disappoint us. I watched image outperform substance, charisma outperform character, and luck quietly shape outcomes far more than most people want to admit.

Somewhere along the way, many of us become realists. But I have learned over the years that sometimes realism is simply disappointment wearing a suit.

And now, I am learning to embrace the beauty of an interior life. It’s like cultivating a garden and living in a desert.

A lush, green field after Sunday Mass

I spent my early childhood in a suburb outside Boston, not far from Concord, Massachusetts. Something about that town stirred me even as a child. I could not have explained it then.

I only remember a feeling. It was a strange mix of curiosity, awe, and quiet reverence. The old homes. The trees. The stillness. A sense that humans had asked important questions long before I arrived—evergreen standing against the backdrop of astonishing blue skies.

Around the time I was eight or nine, my family moved north to Laconia, New Hampshire, where my father had taken a partner role in a hospitality business. One Sunday after morning Mass, I found myself sitting beside him in a lush, green field near our home.

The mountains rose around us, dotted with majestic rows of pines. Lake Winnipesaukee shimmered in the morning light, a glacier lake in forever glory. Puffy white clouds floated above us, the way they do in late summer before the leaves change color.

As we sat there looking up, I asked my father how he knew there was a God. I was confused, the way kids get confused when faith and the world refuse to line up neatly. Of my two parents, he was the one I could ask anything. (One out of two isn’t bad for an insatiably curious kid.)

He thought for a moment, and then he said, quietly, the way he said most things: “Clifford, I don’t know for sure. But I have a good sense of it when I think about my love for you, your sister, brother, and mother. And when I look at those white pines, and the lake down there, and those clouds.”

My father was a good man. He worked hard, trusted people, and tried to build something honorable in business. He was, in the language of Dostoevsky, something of an Idiot. This version of "idiot" is not foolish but open-hearted in a world that rarely rewards open hearts without also breaking them.

Soft in a hard world.

Yet, my father was my first human hero. He always will be. And like many decent men, he often found himself outmatched by rogue players, bad timing, and a world less fair than he hoped it would be.

It pained me in my later years to see him suffer. He was an idealist who learned, slowly and at some cost, to become a realist too. Watching him do that shaped everything that followed for me.

Brook Farm and the beautiful dream

Years later, after raising a family, chasing my entrepreneurial and creative whims through business, setbacks, disappointment, psychology, metaphysics, and the long search for meaning, I finally began to understand why Concord had stayed with me.

It’s the same reason I’m attracted to the great writers and thinkers. The early Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Putnam, and Frederic Henry Hedge, were wrestling with questions that started at a very young age, even before I could talk with my father.

This curiosity, seeking, would quietly follow me for the rest of my life. Today, here, now, I found what I needed to know, which isn’t much. But it’s everything to me: the real me, true self.

What makes a meaningful life? Can human beings grow beyond suffering? How do we remain fully human in a world that often rewards ambition more than integrity?

They found the answers not only in institutions, but within. Nature mattered. Solitude mattered. Reflection mattered. The soul mattered. External success meant very little if a person lost themselves along the way.

Then, an experiment happened

One of the most fascinating expressions of this philosophy was Brook Farm, an idealistic social experiment founded outside Boston in 1841. Influenced by the Transcendentalists, its founders believed that human beings, given the right conditions, might become better versions of themselves.

It was a community in which meaningful work, education, equality, and cooperation could replace competition and social climbing. It was a beautiful dream. And like many beautiful dreams, it collided with reality.

Money problems surfaced. Personality conflicts emerged. Human ego entered the room. Eventually, Brook Farm collapsed. We’ve witnessed countless attempts to live in paradise fail. But that is not all.

In my early years, I would have viewed that story only through the lens of failure. I see it differently now. Brook Farm may have failed economically, but it succeeded philosophically. Its founders asked questions that still matter. Can human beings grow? Can we build lives rooted in meaning instead of status?

Most of us wrestle with those same questions, whether we admit it or not. These were humans who, hundreds of years ago, showed us the way to the interior life.

The shadow of realism

I know I have wrestled with the big questions. For decades, I trusted too easily. Wanted to believe the best in people. Assumed sincerity mattered more than strategy. Believed competence and integrity would eventually rise to the surface.

Sometimes they did. Often they did not.

There were countless moments when disappointment tempted me toward cynicism. Cynicism, like revenge, feels intelligent after betrayal. Safe after loss. Protective as a result of too much broken trust. You stop expecting much from people. You stop getting hurt. You call it realism.

But realism has a shadow. Too much of it quietly hardens into bitterness. And bitterness, in my experience, is wounded idealism that never healed. I catch myself becoming bitter now, and I can more easily shift into the higher gear of acceptance.

My conclusion is this. Bad things happen to everyone, but it’s the good people who have the hardest time accepting that. In the end, goodness, love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, gratitude, and the One always know and win.

What compounds quietly

The older I get, the more I believe wisdom lives somewhere in the middle. I can now easily summarize my philosophy:

“Not too high, not too low. Not too left, not too right. The middle way is the best way to go.”

A realistic idealist sees the world clearly without surrendering hope. Understands human flaws but still believes growth is possible. We know institutions fail, markets fluctuate, and some people manipulate and take shortcuts. Yet still chooses integrity, not because integrity guarantees success, but because character matters. They trust, but verify. Care deeply, but notice patterns. Remain hopeful, but not naïve.

I learned something the Transcendentalists understood long ago. The interior life matters. I referred to it earlier. It’s simpler and quieter. Peaceful, serene.

My many roles, titles, and attachments are gone. I clearly see how external success fluctuates. Money comes and goes. Material becomes meaningless. Fortunes fall.

Bad things happened to my father, a very good man. It took me a lifetime to understand the purpose of the struggle, the suffering.

It’s to love. To let go. Forgive. Serve. Rest. Heal. Rejoice.

When that shift happens within us, the interior life quietly compounds. The ability to sit in solitude and love it. To remain curious. To deepen spiritually. To understand yourself.

To become emotionally mature. Nothing can trigger you. You’ve been triggered too much. You’ve done the inner work. Your faith leads the way. That’s how we become less reactive, less resentful, more forgiving.

To walk in nature and feel awe. To paint, draw, read, relax. Flow state stuff.

No rogue player can take that from you. No recession can erase it. No betrayal can bankrupt it.

Finishing as best you can

Maybe that is what it means to finish strong. It’s not competing against all odds, finishing first, winning every battle, or escaping disappointment. But arriving later in life with your integrity intact, your spirit still alive, and an inner life richer than anything the outer world could ever offer.

At this stage of life, whenever that might be for each of us, our greatest wealth is few wants and no regrets. We stop competing, knowing we have and are enough. We focus on cooperating and being true to ourselves.

Wealth beyond measure. We know we’ve done our best, and that most of what happened was far beyond your conscious control at the time. Despite the challenges we endure, we seek a sustainable serenity, inner peace, and the knowing that we are souls living in a school called life.

Oddly enough, never loving school, I’ve learned to love the school of life even though I don’t like what I see by virtue of the rampant collective insanity. The good news is, goodness wins, and beneath the dreary headlines is a great awakening in the following generations.

It is what it is

These days, I no longer expect life to be fair. But I still believe civility, mutual respect, and kindness matter. I still believe integrity compounds quietly over time and is more valuable than wealth on paper.

And while the good guys may not always finish first, I have learned something better. If they cultivate the interior life, the way my father did in that field, without quite knowing that’s what he was doing, they can still finish strong.

Thanks for reposting this article if you found it helpful.

I was the kid who needed the cool kids to need him back. I’m not sure what “cool” meant to me then, somewhere between the kid who could throw a spiral and the one whose family had a ski pass. But I chased it hard.

Football on the playground. Tennis with my dad. Skiing from age six. These weren’t just things I did. They were proof I belonged somewhere. To someone. In some version of the world that mattered to me at the time.

Here’s the painful truth about being young: None of us knows who we are yet. So we borrow identity from the people we’re drawn to. You see something in them you want to see in yourself. A psychologist named John Bowlby spent years studying why this happens. His conclusion was simple and a little heartbreaking.

From the time we’re very small, we need to feel like we’re okay just as we are. (How’d that go for you?) When that feeling is shaky, we spend years looking for it in other people’s eyes. Their approval becomes the mirror we use to check if we’re still there.

For a lot of us, that mirror became a habit we couldn’t put down. When we seek approval in the wrong ways, things can go terribly wrong, such as early substance abuse, self-harm, and other mental health issues.

Carl Jung called the mask we wear for the world the persona. In adolescence, the persona isn’t vanity. It’s survival. The problem is that some of us keep wearing it long after we’ve left the cafeteria. We say and do things we don’t mean to stay liked. To stay safe. I know the consequences of that personally. Dumb things have a long shelf life.

A researcher named Susan Cain wrote a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Her finding was straightforward: roughly a third to a half of all people recharge by being alone rather than by being around others. Not because something is wrong with them.

Because that’s how they’re wired.

But we live in a culture that treats stillness like a warning sign. The quiet kid gets asked if something’s wrong. The person who’d rather stay home gets called antisocial. We’ve confused solitude with loneliness for so long that many people are ashamed of needing silence.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Not even close. It took me decades to figure this out. It was like a slow shift in my consciousness and in the way I saw myself. I noticed I was always okay alone, and as a child, I loved to wander alone through the woods for hours.

When I learned this psychology insight, it immediately helped me realize what I’d been up against my entire life as a competitive athlete, entrepreneur, and later in life, a better writer and visual artist. I was trying to be a hitter in the business world. I never believed I had a choice. It was hustle or die, back to a day job.

I hope you find yourself sooner than I found the real me. It’s brutal wearing the many masks I chose to play the game of life. Now, I get to be the real me. I never really loved that person before.

And even though I’m happily married and blessed with a wonderful and healthy family, I spend most of my time practicing the art of solitude. That rocket burner that used to launch new marketing campaigns, pound more cold calls in a day than most mortals, win the new business, and celebrate at the club is gone.

I let go of needing to belong, and that made all the difference.

My shift in recent years has created much more time later in life to do the things I truly love. Think about what you absolutely love to do, but you put off because you’re “too busy” chasing the dream.

How often do you make time to be alone, and what does that look like? Many of us can’t stand to be alone with ourselves, especially with the many tech devices and digital noise hijacking our attention spans.

For example, there is a quality of quiet available on a long solo ride that I haven’t found anywhere else. The first 20 minutes are usually lingering static in my mind, whatever is unfinished, whatever is not okay that day.

But somewhere past the first hill, something lets go. The body takes over. Autopilot kicks in. My breathing becomes the focus without focusing. My mind goes still, and I’m moving up to 40 miles per hour.

That stillness can happen at speed with my body fully occupied, or while sitting on a bench in the local park. In that magnificent stillness, something underneath the noise becomes audible.

I didn’t have words for it then. I do now.

Carl Jung said the second half of life is an inward journey. Less about building yourself up in the world’s eyes, more about finding out who you actually are underneath all that effort. The people who move through midlife with the most peace, he observed, are the ones who stopped performing and started listening.

What were they listening for? Themselves. The version underneath. The mystics got there first. And they said it better.

Rumi wrote about the silence between the notes being the music itself. Thomas Merton, a monk who chose to live alone in the Kentucky woods, said that solitude wasn’t about escaping people. It was about finding the ground from which real love of others becomes possible. For many reasons, he’s one of my heroes.

You can’t give from an empty vase. Teresa of Ávila wrote about the soul as an interior castle, many rooms, many distractions, but at the very center, a stillness that nothing outside can touch.

What the mystics understood, and what psychology is slowly catching up to, is the difference between what some traditions call the lower self and the higher self.

The lower self isn’t evil. It’s just scared.

It’s the part of us that needed the cool kids. The part that says and does dumb things to stay visible. The part that confuses being alone with being abandoned. It’s our inner poser showing up to get what the ego wants.

The higher self is quieter. It’s the part of you that can watch the anxiety without becoming it. It’s the same part that remembers to breathe when you forget.

It’s the dreamer that dreams. The watcher that watches. That part of you and me can sit with not-okay and know, somewhere underneath the noise, that okay is still there.

We need to believe so. Believe me, belief matters. There’s an entire science about it called Epigenetics. It’s known as the “biology of belief.” Believe you have experienced solitude, and you can find it again. We had it when we were kids, before school, at the playground, at dance recitals, and at tryouts. All of those experiences were a purposeful journey for your soul—a soul with a seat in the school of life.

Believe and feel your way through the shift. Let go of the negative self-talk. Permit yourself to shift into solitude, never feeling alone. Smile often.

If I could sit down with that kid on the playground and say one thing, it would be this: “The restlessness you’re trying to outrun with other people’s approval will follow you until you stop running or pedaling.”

Not because something is wrong with you or me. Because there's something right between you and me that we haven’t found yet, the true self.

The people who have made real peace with solitude aren’t people who gave up on others. They’re people who found, usually through suffering, loss, age, or some hard stretch of life, that the most important relationship they could build was with their own interior life.

From that place, connection with others becomes a choice instead of a need. You stop showing up as needy, always wanting, with hungry ghosts behind your eyes.

You show up to be present. Content. Accepting.

I still have days when I’m not okay, or when I think I may need to get back into a new consulting gig, or dive deeper into the business of selling my art. But if I am unsure about what I need to do, I’m okay waiting, even though patience wasn’t my virtue.

The lower self doesn’t retire. It just gets less airtime. If it knocks on my front door, I greet it with a smile and ask it to move on.

I know where to go. I sit or lie down in silence. Or, if I feel like riding, I clip in, spin through the early miles, and wait for the shift within. That’s when I always thank my higher power. Sometimes I experience tears of joy for no reason other than just being happy to be here.

Serenity shows us. It always comes. But we have to do the inner work. We must believe. You must believe in your higher self, not the lower self, because the highest power of all loves us dearly, especially when we can’t.

Being alone and being lonely are separated by exactly one thing: whether you’ve learned to be good company for yourself.

It’s a choice. You have to choose to shift.

There was a season in my early forties when anxiety didn’t knock. It just moved in, took the best chair, and started telling me what was going to happen next. None of it was good.

I had sold a small business to someone I shouldn’t have trusted. A lawsuit loomed. A decade of savings was evaporating. Every morning, I woke up already exhausted from whatever my brain had been doing while I slept. The hangover from drinking the night before never helped.

My chest was tight before my feet hit the floor. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating right. I was white-knuckling my way through every conversation that required something from me I didn’t have.

The picture you see above? That was a very bad day when a family tragedy hit. Fear and anxiety showed up, and this time, I had a way to shift through it.

Even though I’m not a therapist, I’m an expert when it comes to managing my fear, anxiety, and anger. It’s why I freely offer my way of taking on my toxic emotions.

If you learn nothing else, just know that self-help isn’t selfish.

That’s what anxiety does at its worst

Same with fear. It doesn’t just make you nervous. It makes you a stranger to yourself.

It’s a war we wage within ourselves. And most of us hate war.

Here’s the part nobody tells you: the anxiety about the anxiety is almost worse than the original thing. You start monitoring yourself. Am I okay right now? Why can’t I calm down?

It compounds. It becomes its own problem stacked on top of the problem that started it.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I went broke. I won’t dress that up. And somewhere in the wreckage of that emotional disaster, not because I was wise, but because I had run out of other options, I started paying attention to what was actually happening inside me instead of just reacting to it.

I dove deep into group therapy and fellowship with others struggling. It was all local, sitting in rooms talking through our head trash and problems. Writing helped me process what I was going through. And eventually, I formalized the process that worked for me and started teaching and sharing it with anyone willing to try it out.

I eventually named the process The Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method™. Not born in a boardroom and not pulled from a book. Built in the middle of a mess, I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.

Today, I don’t suffer from fear, anxiety, or anger the way I once did. That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

And I want to walk you through the reason why.

Start here now, wherever you are

If something is weighing on you, and if you’re reading this, something probably is, I want you to stop, just for a moment. Put the problem down like a bag you’ve been carrying too long.

It’ll still be there in five minutes. Right now, stop.

Breathe. Not a polite little breath. A real one. Fill your belly like there’s a balloon in there. Let it expand. Hold it one beat. Then let it go, slowly.

Do it again.

And once more.

Keep going, close your eyes, and imagine a happy place that warms your heart.

Smile.

Be still, observing yourself and the sounds and smells around you. Take it all in with each breath, and let the oxygen do its magic.

Did anything shift? Not the situation. But something in you, a few degrees. That’s not nothing. That’s the gateway to higher consciousness.

Now you’re ready. If not, keep reading and believing that you can help yourself face the anxiety that is trying to tell you something big.

The first step is called Self-Awareness

It begins with the simplest, hardest thing: noticing what’s actually happening inside you. You already started that step.

It’s called being present. Observing and asking, listening. Write your notes in a journal if you feel like it.

What are you telling yourself right now? What are you feeling, and where do you feel it: your chest, your throat, your gut? What’s the story running in the background, the one you’ve been half-listening to all day?

Don’t judge it. Don’t fix it. Just name it. Anxiety lives in the shadows. The moment you shine a light on it and say this is what’s happening inside me right now, it loses a little of its power.

Not all of it. Just enough.

From there, we move into Higher Understanding

This step is about seeing the bigger picture beyond the fog of the feeling.

Ask yourself this: what do you actually know to be real right now, based on your current perception?

Be honest.

Not the worst-case scenario your mind has been rehearsing. Not the catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet. What is verifiably, honestly real in this moment?

When I did this during my own meltdown, the picture was still hard to see. But it was a picture. Something I could stand in front of and look at clearly.

Anxiety was calling me. But in that place, that moment, I could ask myself what values or principles apply here.

How can I see this from a higher, more honest perspective than fear is offering me right now?

That question alone changes everything because we are shifting our consciousness, our point of view, to a much higher perspective where we can see the situation differently.

The third step is Introspection

It’s where the real work lives. You begin to search inside yourself. Again, pause where you are unless it’s in the middle of a road.

You don’t need to be a monk to do this. Just be willing to practice wherever you go, actually.

You’re working on yourself by going within yourself. You’re learning to ask and be with your higher self. We all have that part of us; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to talk to ourselves, would we?

What beliefs, fears, or old patterns are driving what you’re feeling? Because anxiety rarely arrives alone. It travels with old stories. Fear of losing everything. Fear of not being enough. Fear that the ground you built your life on was never as solid as you told yourself it was.

I had known fear and anxiety for my entire life. And until I shone an introspective light on it, it held a fierce grip on me.

What do you need to let go of to feel better about your situation? What are you trying to control that is absolutely impossible to control, which is pretty much everything other than your perspective?

And here’s the quieter, harder question underneath that one: can you begin to see the outcome you want most as already possible, even now, even here?

It’s about knowing what you want by knowing what you don’t want. That takes lots of practice. Over time, you no longer let fear and anxiety own you.

That question leads us directly into Focused Intention

Here’s the fourth of five steps. What outcome do you want, and by when? Not vaguely. Specifically, as it relates to you, the person, place, or thing that sets off your fear and anxiety.

Because anxiety thrives in vagueness, clarity is its natural enemy. It’s the ultimate peaceful warrior that defends you against your lower self; that’s the part of you that tells you that you suck.

That’s just a story. You can change the story. Imagine that.

What new story can you begin telling yourself? Not a lie, not toxic positivity, but an honest, forward-facing script you can practice morning and night.

How can you begin weaving that into the ordinary fabric of your days, so that over time, the new story becomes louder than the old one?

Your intention is where transformation stops being a concept and starts being a practice.

You begin to have faith in yourself and your ability to shift, to change the one thing you can change: yourself, and in turn, you treat yourself and the world around you with compassion.

Because the world is your mirror, it reflects to you what you show it.

Here’s the fifth step

Transformation. A daily transformation of yourself by aligning with your higher self, such that your lower self doesn’t suck the life out of you.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

What will you actually do, starting today, to overcome the old beliefs, the old scripts and untrue stories, the old patterns that anxiety has been feeding on? How will you know you’ve shifted? What will be different about the way you move through the world?

And maybe most importantly: who benefits when you do?

Because this was never just about you, the people in your life, the ones who need you present, steady, and real, see and feel the difference when you shift.

Your anxiety costs them something, too. Your transformation gives something back. You align with your higher self.

Anxiety doesn’t check credentials

It finds the gap between who you are and who you’re afraid you might actually be, and it moves right in.

I’m almost 65. I work with executives, founders, and professionals who have built remarkable things by every external measure and still lie awake at three in the morning wondering when it’s all going to fall apart.

What I tell them is what I’ll tell you. Practice this method daily.

Not when a crisis hits, by then you’re already behind. Build the muscle quietly and steadily before the meltdown comes.

Five minutes in the morning before the noise starts. Breathe. Move through the steps. Ask the honest questions.

Five minutes sitting anywhere, you find yourself feeling fear or anxiety knocking on your door. You can open that door, and when you do, you now have a way to let your emotions know you’re in charge.

That’s the power of the higher power within you; your higher self

The people who shift aren’t the ones who had it easier. They’re the ones who kept showing up to the practice when nothing seemed to be working.

I no longer wake up with my chest already tight. I no longer white-knuckle my way through the day. I haven’t needed to chug a small bucket of beer to take the edge off life at night.

Fear, anxiety, anger, they visit sometimes, the way the weather passes through. But they don’t live here anymore.

That didn’t happen because life got easier. It happened because I built something that works.

Daily progress. Not perfection.

That’s all this is.

If you’re stuck in the business of life, start your shift here.