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We are an interesting species, homo sapiens. For all our sapience, we sure do some non-sapient things.

Take our penchant for sunbathing. Every year, the part of the global population that spends winters indoors travels to places near and far where sun is plentiful and the opportunity for skin darkening abounds. During those times, the part of the global population that spends winters outside does its best to stay indoors while the rest of us turn ourselves on sand and poolside recliners like kabobs on a barbecue.

It feels good to have the sun warm the skin, I grant you. But it is an odd arrangement, perhaps an even somewhat perverse one, to spend unpleasant mid-day hours trying to change the color of our skin.

We don’t easily feel satisfied with ourselves.

I’ve recently had a wonderful opportunity to travel to Greece. The history, culture, and gastronomy of the country and the Aegean region are rich. So too is the potential for people watching. The world gathers atop the Athens’ acropolis and on the Greek island beaches, in search of its ancestry and itself. It is fascinating to observe the challenges of people from the far reaches of the planet as they lurch and lunge to find what they often do not know they are seeking. Most appear to fall far short of perhaps idealized expectations.

You don’t need to be a linguist to witness the insecurity; it’s plainly there, visible in people’s faces, in their gestures, in the way they move. We stand atop ancient hilltops, we stare absently from beach blankets and chairs, we move along rope-lined paths without being able to touch massive columns of stacked stone and we struggle to avoid the existential questions of ourselves amidst the heat of the day, the fatigue of sore feet, and the press of fellow seekers around us. We want to be happy. We hope to be satisfied. We thirst to feel complete.

And yet we cannot do so, not fully at least. Or seldom with consistency, finality.

It’s not our faults. It is who we are. It is fundamental to the condition of being sapient.

I am learning to find comfort in the collective unease. Personally, I’ve never felt very relaxed on a beach during the mid-day. Early morning or sunset are different; that’s when people walk. The borders of day are when we aren’t so self-conscious. Mid-day on a beach, however, has often felt somewhat nightmarish to me. My body has never been the perfectly sculpted one of the ancient Greek statues. It has irregularities, imperfections. Somehow, those blemishes and flaws feel magnified in the exposure of high surf and sun. And so I move differently, sit differently, even think differently. I find it hard to not adjust a swimsuit, suck in a stomach, wonder why I’m not darker or more balanced or some other feature of physicality that I don’t like about myself. It’s as if I’m on a stage and some invisible audience is watching.

Then I realize that the audience is very visible indeed. It is me. It is you. It is each of us, observing each other, making mental notes and judgments about one another without most of us wanting to do so. We can’t, it seems, help ourselves.

But the children – ah -the young are different. They run, jump, cry, laugh, and act like people should who come to a beach for fun. They don’t fuss over their foibles and frailties. They don’t let their sapience get in their way. They are themselves.

What is it about our need for individual identity that makes it so difficult for us to find personal peace?

Some time in Greece has taught me this: the answer lies not in the sand, the sea, the sculptures, sky, or even the inner self. It isn’t buried beneath volcanic ash or written in ancient prophesy or philosophy. We can’t find it atop prehistoric hilltops or within the recesses of a caldera in the Greek Cyclades.

Because there is nothing hidden about your or my identity. It is right there, in front of us, all the time. Excavation isn’t required. No team of personal archeologists must be recruited to remove layers of physical and psychological ash. Who we are is inherent to who we choose to be. It is – we are – immanent. “Mydentity” is nothing more or less than the experience of being me.

Our sapience is ourselves.

The mice are leading us. My wife read online the other day that mice that have a certain amount of quiet time each day develop more connections in the part of brain that stores memories and strengthens focus. The conclusion? Quiet time may be good for humans too.

Now there’s something worthy of front page attention! I don’t necessarily object to the reasoning behind it. But I must admit to a certain disillusionment with the process required to reach it. To begin with, the mice all died. So the ones that were lucky enough to have a couple of hours per day of decreased environmental stimulation weren’t so lucky in the long run. They benefitted from better attentiveness and neurologic functioning only to suffer a shorter lifespan in their cages. Obviously, that’s a rough trade-off for them. It saddens me that we still raise and sacrifice mice or any other species to perform such studies.

There’s another reason though that I find the report a bit deflating. This one has to do with human insight and, dare I say, wisdom. Have we really failed to progress so far such that we need to prove the biologic importance of intermittent calm – i.e. basic peace and quiet – in our daily life?

There is plenty of medical literature for human health that reports a reliable correlation between excessive stress and poor outcomes. There is also millennia of human experience that demonstrates the same association.

When’s the last time you felt good commuting to work in heavy highway traffic or a super-crowded subway? I don’t see too many people seeking out opportunities for constant stimulation. Quite the reverse. More and more of us decry the encroachment of continuous noise in our modern lives. It is harder, in fact, to find protected moments to breathe, to withdraw, and to just be.

No worries though – business models have developed in our midst to help us learn to block out the noise. Unfortunately, much of that industry targets the unwelcome intrusion that comes from the space between our own ears. And so we teach ourselves to find calm amidst the growing cacophony through meditation, breath, and other self-soothing techniques. There’s nothing wrong with this; those skills are vital for survival in the modern world. I just wish we’d pay a little more attention to the sources of our discombobulation and discontent. It would be great if we worked together to turn down the volume, even just a bit, of the 21st century.

I can hear the scientific rebuttal.

“The mouse experiment helps prove that there is a connection between regular periods of peace and the health of our brains!”

Ok. But why is that a big advance?

“Because this could demonstrate the importance of interventions such as breaks at work, or quiet zones in hospitals, or rest for the elderly!”

Hmmm …

“You don’t understand at all. This is evidence! People who make decisions about policy and payments will have to listen. All of us will have to listen. The brain is plastic! It can change. Positive habits directly relate to positive brain health. People need to know about this research!”

Many years ago, medical science showed that support groups for women with breast cancer improved outcomes. When I scratched my head about the need for such a study, I was told that the results would change insurance reimbursements. Well – they didn’t. Then I learned that the researchers didn’t expect to see benefit from the support groups. They didn’t think that such activities “worked”.

We haven’t come as far as we think we have. Think about it. We’re still experimenting with the brains of rodents in order to learn more about our own. We’re still playing the human value game by the rules of economics. We’re still designing studies to demonstrate what it is we already should know, subjecting what we used to know to a different set of criteria.

I’m not saying that learning about the intricacies of who we are and how we work isn’t worthwhile. I am saying that we should be careful about how we define worth before relying on imperfect so-called objective studies to do that defining for us. We may put our core values at risk.

Despite this, I offer a big thanks to our four-legged friends who participated in this research. While I wish that you might have lived your days under your own schedules for quiet time, I appreciate the new terminology you’ve given me for communicating my need for some peace and calm in my own life. Why just this morning, when I was staring into space and my wife worried that I wasn’t feeling well, I was able to gently whisper “Mouse time” in response to her concern.

She knew immediately what was – or wasn’t – happening inside me. And she winked and left me to my mindless staring.

I often think about one thing while doing another. You probably are familiar with the experience. You are brushing your teeth and suddenly are remembering something you did or didn’t do without focusing any attention on the feel of the toothbrush bristles or the technique you may have of brushing first one quadrant, followed by another. Then, “absent-mindedly”, you wash your mouth and move off to another activity, such as selecting socks or putting things into your pockets and, the next thing you know, you’re standing at the front door ready to go, patting yourself down, wondering if you have everything you need, including your keys.

“Did I brush my teeth?” you may ask yourself.

There is nothing absent-minded about this experience. Your mind has been present – and very active – the entire time. It just hasn’t been connected and moving in synch with your actions, hasn’t been consciously considering your physical movements and your motives for those movements. And so you can’t recall what socks you are wearing, what items you’ve stuffed into your pockets, and whether or not you’ve completed your usual morning routines, such as brushing your teeth. You may not even be able to recall what mind musings were so important when they occurred that they distracted you from the actions of your hands, feet, and body.

You’ve been on automatic, we like to say. You’ve acted reflexively, mechanically. There has been no thought associated with your movements.

But has your automaticity been purely physical? You’ve had thought, not been without it. However, because that thought has been dissociated from physical action, you may have little awareness of what you were physically doing during that time and hence – later – weak memories of what you have done. You have been, to coin a term, on “mentamatic”.

There is an almost instinctual, involuntary quality to mentamaticity. Like sleep, if we release to it, it just happens. I can be typing away on my computer and suddenly I am off into worry about the safety of one or both of my daughters. The rain tapping at the window may be the instigator; it reminds me of the weather when someone I love was in an auto accident. Without hesitation, an emotional switch is flipped deep inside me and the neural circuitry of concern begins to race in one or another portion of my brain. I separate from words and the connection between awareness and my fingers resting against the computer keyboard. The magnet of mental imagery and its language of hope, fear, and “what-if” lifts my fingertips into the air pending conscious reassociation of mind and body in collaborative intent. When that reassociation happens, then ah, here I am, sitting in front of my blog. Down go the fingers again. Words appear before my eyes. I relax back into the stream of synchronization that some call awareness.

“Be gone, mentamaticity!” I may command. All will be ok. Or it won’t. I can’t control it, everything, or most things around me. I can barely control which hand holds the toothbrush every morning and night.

Wait. Did I brush my teeth this morning?

There are techniques we can learn to manage the speed of our thought flittering. Meditation is one; it teaches us to sit back and watch thoughts pass by, as if we are observers on benches next to the raceway of our minds. These techniques are useful. They help us slow. They remind us to breathe. Unfortunately, at least for me, they do not always connect me with my movements, motions, and activities. Calming the mind is vital for health. Our brains, and the vehicles of thought transport traveling through them at high speed, need rest, just as our muscles do. They also need guidance, direction. Mine sometimes needs a neural traffic cop with a whistle and a large red-gloved hand to control the flow and direction of my mental traffic.

Pick up the toothbrush. FWEET. No, you can wait, first meeting of the day! Pay attention to the toothpaste tube. HALT. Engine off, fear of dying without doing something in the world! Cap off the tube, squeeze toothpaste onto the brush, notice if the brush touches the end of the tube. Stay where you are, question about spread of germs from tube to brush to tube to brush to … FWEET! Quiet! Just brush your teeth. First top, then bottom, then side, then spit. I am brushing my teeth. I am not fixing the world. I am not staying alive. I am not slowing down the cars that are threatening my family as they drive when I’m not there. I am here. I am not there. All you thoughts are about there. Get back to thinking about here. And don’t forget to make your lunch today. No, wait, I’ll be in a meeting and lunch will be provided. FWEET. Teeth! Toothpaste. Let the meeting and lunch go through, mentamaticity. Off you go now. I’m putting the cap back on the toothpaste tube. I’m rinsing my mouth with water. It’s good to have clean teeth. It’s good to have lunch, to pray for protection for my family, to have a purpose in life. It’s good to also put the toothbrush back where I store it. FWEET. You can go now, fear of failing. I’m going to figure out what socks match these pants, what things go into my pockets, and what sandwich I’ll bring to the office, just in case lunch isn’t provided. I’m also going to apologize to my wife for ignoring her in the kitchen a few minutes ago and I’m going to text my daughters to remind them to please drive safely today. And, gosh, look, the rain has stopped. Maybe the clouds will clear and it will be sunny today. Maybe I won’t need my rain jacket. What time is it anyway? Do I have my phone? What about my keys? Ah, well, at least I started the day knowing that I brushed my teeth while I was doing so.

Automation is part of our lives. It is part of our actions and part of our thinking. Occasional pauses to notice both the automation and mentamaticity, and to try to synch body time with mind time and vice versa, are good. They remind us that we live among the spaces of voluntary and involuntary being. And the more we experience the feel of those spaces, the more in harmony with the world we may become.

I say goodbye this week to my sixth decade. It’s not a sad occasion; I’m pretty lucky to have had a wonderful first sixty years of life. I’m ready for number seven. When the clock strikes midnight on Tuesday, I aim to transition gracefully into my next decade of breathing and being through a regimen of four S’s: sleeping, smiling, and simple striving.

Routines can offer magnificent respite to the vicissitudes of our days. This isn’t the type of insight I might have reached during decades number 3, 4, or even 5. Honestly, it took number 6 for me to understand that pace itself can bring peace. Sleep – on a reasonable schedule – is one of those core biological needs that we resist or ignore at our peril, especially during the middle years. If you are in any way driven to excel like I have been, getting seven or eight hours of sleep per day can seem wasteful. You may, consequently, cut some corners. You may be proud of that pruning, even brag about it to your friends and family. “I don’t need all that time in bed,” you might boast. “I can get by with five or six. That gives me extra time to do more things, to learn more, to enjoy more of life.” Well, decade number six taught me the ego-centric folly of that attitude. Millenia of evolution have programmed us to live longer and healthier if we sleep sufficiently and with regularity. I function better when I give sleep its due.

So please don’t send me any texts of well-wishing at 12:01am on Tuesday; I’ll be snoozing. I will gladly welcome such communications after sunrise.

Smiling is the second ‘S’ of my plan number 7. When I examine the creases of my face each morning, it’s painfully clear that I haven’t exercised my mirth muscles enough during decades one through six to sufficiently counteract the drag of gravity, muscular laxity, and worry. I’ve laughed plenty, sure. But smiling – from the heart – is different than chuckling from the intellect. I like a good joke with the best of us. That’s been good for my heart and my soul. It’s also kept the larger muscles of my face limber. It has not, however, trained the smaller facial muscles and neural patterns that control my ability to broadcast kindness, support, and positive intent with my eyes, with the lines of my cheeks and lips. That type of smiling is proactive. A joke stimulates a response; it is externally-driven. A mindset of kindness lifts my view, helps me see through a different lens. It is, fundamentally, about identity. And that comes from within.

So I aim to smile more from my insides during the next ten years. Success will hopefully smooth some of the features of frown that accompany physical aging. More importantly, it may soften and rejuvenate internal patterns of perspective that may, like my cervical discs, have become somewhat arthritic over time. Radiance emanates.

Which brings me to the last two ‘S’s for my seventh decade of sun cycles: simple striving. Whereas sleep and smiling may be somewhat easier to achieve through a procedure of physical reminders and existential hygiene, this pair of curvy guideposts requires more in the way of moment-oriented awareness, balanced in the broader context of personal purpose and being. I still have goals. I still need goals. I still need to work to achieve those goals. And yet decade number six has a message for number seven about the nature and intensity of those goals: keep them simple.

There are plenty of things that I have yet to accomplish in my life. If I’m being honest, most of what I’ve truly achieved has been fairly limited in both scope and importance. Yes, I’ve been fortunate in career endeavors. I’ve been even more fortunate in health and happiness. But many, if not most, of those so-called successes are more attributed to the people who have taught, guided, loved, and come into my life over the past sixty years than to my own skill, decision-making, or abilities. Great prosperity – in family, friends, and mentors – has shaped and nurtured me more than goal-oriented effort. Genetic luck, in partnership with some personal habits, has sheltered me from an excess of health challenges. Providence, much of it divine, has held me closer.

There is much that I don’t understand about the nature of life, consciousness, and human existence. Book learning, journaling, and deep thinking can only get a person so far. It is increasingly evident to me that there is more to our world that what we sense. There is something else – Spirit. Religions may have imperfectly formulated the framework for approaching and appreciating the nature of spirituality. They have been, nonetheless, expressions of the hope, joy, and possibility that is nestled within the essence of the spiritual. There is grace in our world. There is wonder. I don’t pretend to any special insight or knowledge about the nature of God, Allah, Buddha, or our other limited references to the divine. But I do know that help is often there when I ask for it. And I do feel that I can be part of how that divine – Spirit – helps others, if I only keep myself open and if I maintain a certain simplicity and humility of intention and purpose. Spirit has flowed through others to sustain and nurture me. Perhaps, if I try to keep my strivings to be relatively unadorned and uncomplicated, that same Spirit can flow through me to benefit others in the years ahead.

Thank you, decades one through six! You have been very kind to me. I hope to begin to return that kindness during number seven.

“What does your generation think about the state of things?”

The teenager is the understated type. She’s not one to speak much in public but her eyes reveal an active, internal intelligence.

“We don’t expect to live past fifty.”

The comment quiets the room. Heads turn. Eyes flash.

“Really?” I respond. “Why is that?”

The young woman shrugs. “Just look around. The climate is changing. Everyone is arguing. There isn’t much positive news in the world. Something bad like a global epidemic or war or some other social meltdown is bound to happen.”

The teen’s nonchalant acceptance of a bleak future is disarming. “Everyone my age understands it,” she sighs. She clearly believes what she is saying. She clearly isn’t happy that she believes it.

Listen up, everyone! This isn’t acceptable. This cannot be let be. Our young people deserve better from us. At a time when our country’s economy is reasonably strong, when we are not rationing goods and services because of war, we cannot stand idly by while our Centennials experience some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and generational negativity in recorded history.

The burden we are placing on our youth is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is unnecessary.

I’m not just another voice of concern regarding the calamity of our contemporary discourse. Quite the contrary. I aim to be a voice of hope. We must be better, yes. But, importantly, we can be better. A more resounding yes. We truly can be better.

We just need to “Stop, Slow, and Go”.

First, let’s stop the blaming. The weight bearing down on our youth is not just a consequence of social media or smart phones. This is not about Republicans, or Democrats, or Independents. The more we blame technology or each other the less we engage individually, as human beings. The less we engage as people the more we acquiesce, to cliched expectation. The more we acquiesce to that expectation the less we are open and able to help, to make a difference. So let’s please stop.

Second, let’s slow things down. We need to slow the pace – of images, of pressure, of the general speed of our time. There is breath within the spaces that open up when we slow down. There is recognition of purpose with that breath. Everyone needs purpose, especially those maturing in our midst. Let’s slow so they can know how important that search is.

Then finally, let’s go forward, together, gradually, with our Centennials, and with our Gen X and Y’ers too. Going together is our best chance of getting somewhere. Looking forward is our best way to see where it is we all feel it is important to go. Without a common sense of where it is we are going, we don’t stand much chance of knowing when it is we’ve arrived. Let’s learn then, with our youth, where it is we should go. Then let’s go.

If you check the statistics, young people have a right to be worried; the average lifespan of Americans has peaked and, in fact, has recently decreased. We would do well, therefore, to listen to their concerns. The young have a right to feel entitled to a more than fifty years of life! We have a duty to help them live as long as we ourselves plan to.

So the next time you might be tempted to join the chorus of critics about the young, or to feel frightened by the trends regarding their health and welfare, try to listen a bit more gently to what it is they are saying. There is amazing wisdom from our teens. If we allow ourselves to hear some of that insight, maybe we can better help them – and ourselves – become more optimistic about our collective future. And then we can translate that optimism into meaningful action.

The woman in front of us didn’t know what she wanted. A colleague and I were talking, not paying much attention. There was no rush. The cafe had plenty of caffeine and sugar.

“You guys go ahead,” the woman said, stepping aside. “I need some more time.”

We told her we could wait but she insisted. So we thanked her and ordered. When I gave the barista my credit card, I leaned forward and quietly asked him to hold onto my card and charge the woman’s order on it.

There was no reason for me to pay; I didn’t know the woman and she didn’t appear to be in any distress. I just decided spontaneously to cover the cost of her coffee. Maybe she was a tourist. Maybe she lived locally. I had no idea, didn’t much care, and moved off to a table with my scone. My colleague and I fell into a work-related conversation. I lost track of time and the cafe goings-on.

You might think I was practicing randomly. Not at all. I look for opportunities to do something nice for someone, something unexpected. The unexpected part is the key. I don’t try to predict what I will do and when. But I do try to keep aware of chances to be kind. A smile. A gentle word. A good tip. A little bit of patience. There is nothing random about offering unexpected kindness when the decisions to do so are intentional.

Let’s be clear: I’m no saint. Most of the time I’m in my own little world. I am often impatient. I sometimes ignore what’s happening around me. Hence I miss all sorts of opportunities to recognize others – family, friend, or stranger – and help them feel better.

Which is all I am aiming to do: help someone feel better. In the process, I know that doing so will help me feel better as well. Because there is no doubt that my intentional acts of kindness, however small, have that result.

They also bring unexpected reciprocation. People return smiles. Their eyes light up. They nod and wave. They extend a hand to another person. They surprise me with their own intentionality.

Back in the cafe, the barista quietly returned my credit card to our table, my colleague and I finished our meeting, and we left. The woman wasn’t there. The cafe was now otherwise empty.

Later, it occurred to me that I hadn’t received a receipt with my credit card. Could I have been charged a lot more than I planned? Feeling slightly concerned, I decided to log-in online to my credit card account and see what the charge was. There was none, not even for the coffee and scone that my colleague and I had ordered. No problem; the cafe was probably delayed in submitting the charges. But the next day, there was no charge. And ten days later – still no charge.

The only explanation? The woman paid for our coffee and scone, not the other way around. Now that was unexpected! What’s a guy to do when his attempt to extend kindness rebounds with the exact same kindness?

Smile, I suppose. And look for even more chances to be non-random.

Today my oldest daughter graduates from college. Tomorrow my youngest daughter begins high school advance placement tests and finals. Today is celebratory in our family; tomorrow is challenging. Regardless of each young woman’s perspective, both daughters are passing a milestone in their lives. For each I share some insights based on my own moments in time.

1. Be proud of what you have accomplished. Recognize what may not have worked out so well. Learn from both. Then move on. Our society has taken to measuring life’s early developmental progress with academic markers. Education is important – let there be no doubt about that. But not all forms and types of education are as meaningful to some people as to others. Find the types that mean something to you. Don’t perseverate about the ones that do not.

2. Notice the way a towering evergreen tree dips its tip into a deep blue sky. Imagine the feeling that all life experiences in reaching beyond itself. Reach.

3. Listen to your pulse. It beats in a rhythm uniquely yours. Pay attention to what you hear in that pulse. Sometimes it will tell you that you can press on, try harder, stretch further. Sometimes it will counsel you to take things slower, to pace yourself better. Trust what you hear. Act on that trust.

4. Walk. Don’t scoff at age-old learning related to exercise, nutrition, hydration, sleep, and healthy habits. Your wellbeing is under your control. Simple lessons from those who have lived before you should not be summarily dismissed or ignored. Walk, as much as you can.

5. Hug people. Modern science has shown that daily hugging is biologically good for you. Centuries of social living have shown that touching others with care and respect is one of the joys associated with being.

6. Forgive yourself when you disappoint yourself. Because you will. Forgive others when they disappoint you. Because they will.

7. Laugh. Smile. Enjoy being kind. Appreciate kindness shown to you.

8. Keep going. The sun sets on today so that it can rise on tomorrow. Rise with it, if not at the same time then with the same steadfastness. Don’t be fooled by overcast or rainy days. The cycle of life is still spinning. Spin too.

9. Show up. You won’t find fortune in this world if you aren’t engaged in it. You may miss part of life’s wonder if you aren’t present. So be present. Be present when you don’t feel like it. Be present when it’s not convenient. Be present when it’s not trendy. Just – be – present.

10. Nurture humility. We all want to make a difference. And we all do. Some of us get more public recognition than others; that is the way it is. Be happy for those who are acknowledged. Be happy that you are able to acknowledge others.

11. Love. A lot. Even when it hurts. Even when it feels one-sided. Don’t confuse love with other forms of affection. Do find comfort in the realization that real love takes a lifetime to understand.

12. Touch the majestic. It is there, around you, each and every day. No can experience it for you. No one can take it away from you. The miracle of life manifests itself in a multitude of ways. Experience the wonder of being inside moments of subtle and supreme connectedness.

Above all else, breathe. And always remember that you matter.

“Hey! Who are you?”

I had just left kung fu class and was rounding the sidewalk corner of an intersection. The guy asking the question was bearded, middle-aged, and sitting cross-legged on a short concrete wall in front of a homeless shelter on the opposite street corner. I turned. He wasn’t yelling at me but instead was looking towards one of my classmates, a woman who was moving down a third connector of the intersection.

“Who, me?” she asked.

The guy nodded dramatically. “What’s your name?”

Without hesitation, the woman responded. Because a car passed on the road between us, I couldn’t quite hear what name she had shared. But I did hear what she said next. “What’s yours?”

The guy seemed pleased to be asked. “Larry,” he shouted. “Hey, come talk to me!”

To my surprise, the woman stopped and crossed the street to talk with him.

Impressed, I continued on towards my car, questioning my own potential response. Would I have given a guy sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter my name? Would I recommend that my wife or daughters, or any woman for that matter, respond truthfully to such a request?

We live in interesting times. For all the media and electronic communication methods available to us, we are not necessarily able to connect any better than we used to. In some ways, the increased variety of capability has hampered our trust in trying to do so.

Consider this: these days I know who is calling before I answer a phone. More accurately, I expect to know who is calling. Consequently, if I don’t recognize a number, I usually don’t answer as it is often someone trying to run a scam or sell me something. The same is true of emails. Even if I do recognize the name on an email, it can still be a phish or some other trap. So I often don’t respond. Or I quickly hit delete.

And I wonder how, in little more than a decade, the world has gone from a place in which phone calls were answered from a phone hanging on a wall – when we didn’t know who was calling but understood that it was almost always someone we knew – to a world in which calls are often made by computers, from numbers spoofing other numbers or from people with deliberate malintent rather than general good will in mind.

Despite this change, has social communication become so potentially treacherous that a person shouldn’t give his real first name to a man sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter? Does it even matter what name I might give a guy like Larry or rather is it ok that I simply respond to him, as a fellow human being, even if in a guardedly compassionate way?

Who have we become? Who am I in the midst of that becoming?

“I didn’t give him my real name,” my classmate explained the next day, when I had a chance to ask her about the encounter. “People can’t pronounce it very well so I gave him the name that people sometimes hear.”

I nodded my understanding. “That was still pretty nice of you to go over and speak with him.”

The woman shrugged. “Yeah, well, I just said hi and recognized him, you know? He wasn’t sober so they wouldn’t let him into the shelter. I just wanted him to know he wasn’t invisible.”

All of our so-called social media does not necessarily make any of us more visible. Personally, I often feel more exposed, more unshielded, instead of more seen. That vulnerability can make me more likely to close in, to withdraw, and hence be less likely to acknowledge someone like a guy named Larry, a guy sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter. A guy who might only want to know my name.

Who am I? I am someone who, despite my fears, needs to try better to make others feel visible.

Who are you?

It’s good to have a safe place. It’s also not guaranteed. Some people are born into situations of protection. Many others encounter strife from the start. Our paths to shelter vary.

Safe places are not necessarily geographic, place-based. They can be internal, state-based as well. In fact, over a human lifetime, some of the best refuges are those that we discover within. They are havens of being, senses of circumstance in which the lines between individual and social, me and other, why and how are blurred. These are the ultimate sanctuaries. They are the spiritual ones.

It isn’t easy to build such connections in our lives. It takes practice. It demands acceptance of failure. It requires courage.

All too often I’ve thought that I could construct myself, and my future, through personal will. Brute force. Sheer determination. These can be helpful qualities, to be sure. My life, however, has taught me that those qualities do not assure success in touching security. Effort and focus can lead to experiences that are satisfying, yes. But satisfaction in personal goal-accomplishment is not the same – over years of being – as the comfort associated with feeling part of something larger than oneself, the transcendent peace that may be entered when separations shatter and me-you dualities dissolve.

A memory stirred in me last night from thirty-three years ago. I was a surgical intern in a busy urban residency program. My days were challenging. There was limited time outside the hospital. There was independence in care delivery and decision-making that, by contemporary standards, would be considered dangerous to patients and detrimental to learning.

Daily rounds began at 4AM. Evening work typically ended well past dinner. And most months found the surgical intern on call every other night.

One day, well into the internship, we had a very heavy operating schedule. I had been up all night, doing pre-operative work for the seventeen or more patients on our service’s list. The intern’s job was to admit new patients to the hospital and make sure that all the screening, labs, intravascular lines, and other preparatory work was completed in time for anyone scheduled for procedures the next day. Depending on the complexity of patients and their conditions, this could take most of the night. Often it continued into the course of the actual operating day.

Fatigue was standard, of course; I could fall asleep standing and sometimes did, if I wasn’t careful. In order not to nap when it mattered most (such as in the operating room), I learned how to voluntarily cramp the muscles in the backs of my calves. The painful spasms kept me alert during surgeries when my only role was to hold retractors steady inside body cavities and spaces that I usually could not see.

“How about you finish this one?”

The vascular surgical fellow’s question snapped me to attention as quickly one of my leg cramps. The patient was one of the final planned operations for the day. He was prepped, draped, and under general anesthesia. Because of poor circulation in his foot, and multiple failed previous procedures to improve blood flow to his toes, we were performing a mid-foot amputation.

“Sure,” I replied.

The surgical fellow had prepared everything for the final stages of the distal foot removal. All I needed to do was finish. And yet the moment he handed me the reins for the remainder of the operation, something flipped inside me, a switch of uncertainty, a bolt of hesitation not relating to the mechanics of what-came-next in a mid-foot amputation but rather to the leg and foot that was having that amputation. I suddenly felt uncertain that we were operating on the correct side. My hands froze. Everything stopped.

Was it too late? I tried to gather myself, to orient to what was happening and to what I should do. We were standing on the brink of surgical no-return. Had we already crossed it? Noticing my hesitancy, the surgical fellow reassumed the surgical helm and deftly completed the amputation. “Sorry but we need to get this done quickly,” he muttered. “This guy’s heart won’t tolerate too much anesthesia.”

The surgical fellow probably assumed that I was tired; I was. He may have also wondered if I knew the surgical steps to perform the surgery; I did. What he didn’t know, what it was impossible for him to guess, was that my mind was racing over and among the previous night’s seventeen histories and physicals, left vs. right visual memories, a flood of paper consent forms and signatures, the process of reviewing consents before anesthesia, and the clear reality confronting me that half of what may have been the wrong foot was now permanently severed from our patient’s leg. I could barely stand. I couldn’t speak. I had no idea what to do next.

Except help the surgical fellow finish. Which I did. Saying nothing. Doing what I was told. Watching the anesthesia team to see if they had noticed anything awry. Scouring my memory banks to try to recall for certain which side was the patient’s poorly perfused one. I let my hands work while my insides screamed and my heart fell closer, ever closer, to the floor.

“Good work,” the fellow said, removing his gloves and gown and leaving the operating room. “Get him to post-op.”

I finished bandaging the patient’s toe-less foot, and then shuffled to the silver tray table where the man’s thick chart lay. Post-op orders were required. I sat on a stool, watched as the nursing staff readied to wheel the gurney to recovery and cautiously opened the chart to confirm what by then I was sure that I knew: we had operated on the wrong leg.

I was wrong. We had performed the correct procedure, and on the correct side.

The ensuing minutes are lost to my memory. I don’t recall writing the orders or leaving the operating suite. My next memory is being seated on the floor of the surgeon’s locker room, my head leaning back against my locker. Even though we had done the right thing, I still felt like I’d made a mistake. When had I first wondered if we were operating on the appropriate side? Had my uncertainty begun in time to have said something?

My pager buzzed. Call the operator. I reached for the wall phone, dialed “0”, and slid back to the tile floor.

It was my father. “Just thinking about you,” he said. Dad knew better than to call me in the middle of the day. I was almost never available. And yet here he was.

“Everything ok?” I barked.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I just wondered how things were going.”

I wanted to tell him that I was bobbing in a stormy sea of emotion and instability. Instead I muttered that everything was fine. “Long night and day,” I offered.

There was a pause on the line. “Good,” Dad said. “I won’t keep you. I know you are doing important work.”

Important work. I was on the vascular service. We were trying to salvage people’s limbs, sometimes their lives, and occasionally witnessing our own wreckage piling up in the wake of our interventions.

“Oh, Mark.” Dad’s voice had that I-need-to say-something tone in it. “Mom and I understand that you’ll probably be too busy to make dinner on Sunday. Just know you can stop by if something changes. We’ll be around.”

Easter week of 1986 taught me many things. One lesson concerned safety checks for patients and speaking up for uncertainty; voice that is unexpressed is compassion that cannot be shared. Never again would I stand still and say nothing if someone’s well-being was on the line.

Another lesson – an insight that I feel as strongly today as I did thirty-three years ago – involved shelter. Somehow my father knew that his son was raw, that he was utterly and completely exposed to the elements of human experience. Somehow he trusted that instinct and reached out when his son needed it most. The young man was lucky that he answered the call.

Across space, and now through time, there can be safety. We need only roll back the boulders that block our access to such sanctuary to feel the peace that is possible in its embrace.

I thought she was dead. Apparently I was wrong. Included in a large email group, an acquaintance from years ago (let’s call her “Greta”) sent a message that was very much from someone who is alive.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve received email from people I never expected to hear from again; on two previous occasions, friends whom I’ve known quite well have sent me invitations to be Facebook friends long after I knew those friends to be gone. The difference was that those people were, in fact, deceased. Also, I had smiled when I received their emails because I wouldn’t have put it past either of those two to find a way to get my attention from the other side of the consciousness veil.

“The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain once quipped. I was glad to learn that the report stored in my memory about Greta was, similar to Twain’s, erroneous.

Feeling celebratory, I thought about sending Greta a congratulatory note. After some reflection, however, I decided against it. What do you say in such a situation? Hey there! I thought you were dead! So glad to hear that you aren’t. How’s life been treating you over these many years? Obviously, that’s not a very considerate communication, especially to someone who wasn’t a close friend. Besides, who knows why I “remembered” that Greta had died. Suppose she had, in fact, been seriously ill – or still was? Or suppose I’d confused someone else’s death with hers? I decided it was better to just feel warmed by the news that Greta was still with us and that she seemed well.

It’s not often that we have such opportunities. Most of the time, the situation is quite the opposite: we learn that someone has died and the information we receive is accurate. Sadly, as one gets older, not everyone else does. We lose each other too quickly.

I’d like to pretend that my belief system is sufficiently strong such that death doesn’t unnerve me. I cannot. Vital spiritual traditions and their texts teach that there is continuation after human life. It also feels like there should be. But absent the type of direct confirmation perhaps only possible through a relinquishment of this form and its useful sensory capabilities, there is no absolute way of knowing. I am left only with my experience, faith, and hopefulness.

That’s why it’s good to know that people like Greta – people I thought were gone – are alive. I don’t need to see or talk with her to understand that she is still with us. Her voice, through a single communication, is enough.

Despite the rumors that may waft on time’s winds, there is rebirth, renewal.