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I had to laugh: my annoyance at missing a maneuver in a kung fu class resulted in a quick smack to the right cheek. A self-inflicted smack, that is. With the handle of a six foot sword known as a kwan dao.

It was my own fault. After I missed the move, I yelled internally at myself to focus and to pick it up! So I did: I picked up the end of the kwan dao, swung it with more force than I should have used, and promptly whacked myself in the face.

There was no stopping though. I pushed the error and any pain associated with it to the back of the mind. It nestled in next to the realization that my internal reaction to the first mistake had itself caused the second misstep – and in turn the contact of the kwan dao pole to my right temple and cheek. But weapons’ work requires the martial artist to be in “the now”; I understood that any conscious acknowledgement of the first or second mistake could lead to a third. So I kept moving.

Later, however, while massaging my bruised cheek on the drive home, I ran through the sequence of events and broke into laughter. Then I laughed some more. In our school, weapons are taught only as part of open forms and demonstrations. We don’t use them in any type of combat against one other. Nonetheless, I had still managed to find myself on the wrong side of a kwan dao. And the kwan dao that caused me the problem was my own.

Our world has plenty of challenge and tragedy; it seems there is no shortage in contemporary life of valid reasons for worry or sadness. The media airways are full of vitriol. Our leaders are increasingly alarming. The planet may be dying. We kill ourselves and each other with less crisis of conscience.

There is room for laughter. We must make space for fun.

Which is where my close encounter with my kwan dao comes in. Not a day goes by when I don’t do something unusual or unexpected that is deserving of at least a chuckle. Some of my foibles are worthy of small giggles. Others warrant eye-tearing fits of laughter.

When you consider us, we humans can sometimes be a silly species. And I, for one, am a prime example of that silliness, often when I’m trying my best not to be.

Coincidences can be too convenient. 

A teenager gets a vaccine and experiences symptoms of lightheadedness, flushed skin, and tingling in the upper extremities. Examination in a pediatric practice confirms an elevated heart rate, a rash around the vaccine site, and altered sensation in the back of both arms. After three days, those symptoms disappear, only to suddenly return two weeks later, with increased severity. The evening prior to the symptoms’ re-emergence, the teen notices a tender bump beneath the skin at the vaccination site. An ultrasound later confirms the existence of a subcutaneous nodule, a 2 by 2 cm cyst-like swelling that is felt to represent a nonspecific inflammatory reaction, not an active infection.

The teen and her family pose an obvious question. Could the symptoms, the nodule, and the vaccine all be related?

Experts issue a sober reply: the concurrence of vaccination and unusual symptoms is coincidence. The vaccine in question does not cause these symptoms.

“They’re sure?” the teen asks.

The temporal association seems hard to ignore. And yet that is precisely what happens. Dogma casts a critical countenance on the possibility of a vaccine-related problem. Proponents of the vaccine and its large scale epidemiological evidence repeatedly reply “coincidence” with an air of authority and finality.

Over a few weeks, the nodule subsides. Unfortunately, the teen’s symptoms and physical exam changes do not. Autonomic nervous system dysfunction – likely immune system caused – is diagnosed by a thoughtful specialist who cares for children with similar symptoms at a major medical center. Medications are tried, as are intravenous infusions of fluids. Tests are run. Her life upended, the teen struggles through eighteen months of unsuccessful treatment trials. Finally, an intensive neurovascular retraining program at a large children’s hospital successfully knocks the “dysautonomia” into remission.

“Strange”, the affected teenager observes during the course of the illness. “No one really wants to talk about what caused all this.”

Disappointing, more like it. The medical profession is losing its sense of curiosity.

I get it: the vaccine topic polarizes. There is a deepening entrenchment between those who support vaccines and those who oppose them. The battle lines are being starkly drawn. There seems little room for rational reflection.

There is no doubt that immunizations have improved the world. Diseases that once killed or permanently disabled have either been eliminated or beaten back to the brink of elimination. The science is sound behind the vaccines. Their public health results have been astounding.

And it is a terrible truth that society is becoming complacent. Worried about potential side effects, the average person is susceptible to misinformation, both in the medical literature (where evidence has been falsified) and in the lay media. Consequently, fewer children are being vaccinated. And some preventable diseases, such as measles, are returning.

But what does medicine do? Instead of engaging in a compassionate conversation, it labels people (mostly parents) who worry that vaccines may cause problems: “anti-vaxers”. The profession expounds the virtues of vaccines and the science of large scale studies. It closes its ears to any dissent.

I was born under the sign of polio. My father contracted the dreaded virus in the late 1950s, when my mother was pregnant with her second son (me). Dad had tried to get vaccinated – three times – but failed because the local medical offices in Philadelphia had run out of vaccine. He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair. With this perspective, I don’t need any self-righteous researcher to tell me about the virtues of vaccination. Most of these people haven’t lived personally with the consequences of missed immunization. My family has.

Despite that experience, I am not naive enough to believe that all vaccines are risk-free. We know they are not. We also know that the public health benefit of vaccines outweighs the individual health risk of some uncommon side effects. Until the rise of autism set anxiety into the hearts and minds of American parents, most Americans were willing to live with this risk-benefit relationship. They remembered polio. They had seen children die from measles. Now, those memories are fading. And recently, the individual willingness to accept risk has changed. Sadly, the flames of parental fear are being fed by inaccuracies and falsehoods.

But that doesn’t make the fear wrong. And it doesn’t mean that medicine and its scientists should be closed to adding to our collective knowledge base. In an age of so-called precision medicine, we should listen better to the perspective of the individual.

Look, I understand that just because events happen at the same time they are not necessarily related. If you review the peer-reviewed medical literature, you will not find a statistically significant difference in rates of dysautonomia between populations receiving and those not receiving the vaccine. Large scale studies show that the rates are similar. If you scour the literature, there is also no evidence that a vaccine, a subcutaneous nodule in the arm, and a condition called “immune-mediated dysautonomia” are connected. But – and this is the significant part – there is no report on this particular triad of concurrence. It has not been studied.

Neither have there been examinations of sub-population data comparing rates of dysautonomia post-vaccination between adolescents (such as my daughter) with juvenile arthritis who are receiving weekly injections of an alpha tumor necrosis factor antagonist and adolescents without such a clinical history. And, because of our collective close-mindedness to inquiry about vaccination effects to subgroups of people, you won’t find my daughter’s recent experience or other similar case reports published for the general medical community to consider.

The course of human discovery has benefitted from inquisitiveness. Examples abound of the unexpected, experience outside the confines of previous evidence, leading to new lines of thinking and investigation, and subsequently, new theories, new explanations, and new therapies. This does not happen randomly. It happens because people in positions of observational power permit themselves to pause when something seems different, to challenge themselves and existing frameworks of understanding when something seems unusual, and to ask questions.

My daughter did just that. When she was told that the vaccine in question did not cause the reaction she was experiencing in her arm and body, she calmly rested a finger on the swelling in her arm and asked “then what caused this?”

We don’t know that the vaccine did or did not cause the arm nodule and the rest of the symptoms. We only know this: there are no data, there is no “n”, there are no reported cases of delayed inflammatory response the size of an avocado pip at a vaccine injection site occurring simultaneous to the onset of dizziness, lightheadedness, and inappropriate tachycardia. The field is open.

Shouldn’t the tender inflammatory nodule at the site of the immunization have made us curious? It did not, to many of my medical colleagues. A shadow drew over most expert faces when the temporal association was mentioned. Behind that shadow, minds compartmentalized.

To the person directly experiencing all this – my daughter – this was not some academic exercise, some theoretical construct regarding the correlation or lack thereof between her experience and an existing evidence base. This was about feeling better. This was about helping other young people with similar medical histories avoid the same situation. This was about trusting that medicine could see past existing dogma and potentially see something new. The nodule in her arm caused minimal physical discomfort. The cool and systematic decision to ignore it incubated a feeling of isolation and intermittent hopelessness. Medicine’s blind defense of vaccination safety brought little solace. And so the nodule – and its unique circumstances – gradually receded into untestable oblivion.

We missed an opportunity for learning. The vaccine is good; I believe that most young people should still receive it. Is it possible though that a subset of children and young adults with certain immune-related medical conditions should not? We don’t know. We were institutionally too afraid to ask.

Has the medical profession aged such that it has developed its own arthritic restrictions in compassionate learning and humility? My daughter and I hope not. We urge all involved in daily care and service delivery to try to maintain at least a tempered enthusiasm for events and concurrences that challenge the status quo. We urge you to permit yourself continued intellectual engagement in the evolving enterprise of health and wellbeing. We don’t know all the answers. We don’t even know most of the questions.

Please stay curious.

During my surgical internship, we had a formula for identifying when patients were ready for discharge from the hospital. If a patient “looked good, felt good, and was wearing the clothes he wanted to wear”, that patient was ready to go home.

The year was 1985, a different time in health care. I can’t imagine too many docs today trying to apply a similar set of criteria. Insurance companies would have a fit. The physician would be labeled by peers and hospital administrators as non-scientific, evidence-lacking.

Too bad. The criteria were pretty darn good, from a clinical perspective. For days, a patient could be bed-ridden, food tray untouched, face filled with that pasty look. You’d stop by in the evening, hoping to hear of some improvement, only to learn from the patient’s nurse or a family member that nothing was different from the morning. “Maybe tomorrow will be better,” you’d opine. Then tomorrow morning, sometimes surprisingly, there the patient would be, sitting up in the bedside chair, complaining about his hospital gown, trying to get one hand into his own shirt over an i.v. while swiping at an uncooperative eyebrow or patch of hair with the other. You would stand there and review the objective pieces of information. You’d align that data with the expected timeline for recovery. But you already knew how this was going to turn out. If the fellow passed the discharge screening triad by mid-day, he was usually going home.

I thought about those criteria this morning when I awoke at five AM with a headache bigger than the space available inside my skull. This isn’t right! I yelled internally. Day 4 of feeling like crud, looking like Flat Stanley, and wearing sweaty pajamas. This isn’t right. I’d had enough, was unable to sleep because of coughing and unable to be upright for any amount of time because of general flu yuck. I was tired of it all. Sick and tired of it all.

Angry, I made myself crawl out of bed and stumble to the kitchen for some fluids and a dose of ibuprofen that I knew would just upset my stomach. Then I retraced my steps back to bed and some compressed pillows. And more waiting. Waiting to recover.

That’s when the surgical team from 1985 rounded on me.

“Day 4 of admission for influenza,” the intern stated wearily. He didn’t look at me, clearly disappointed that I’d not done better overnight. “Body aches are improved but he has a headache the size of Texas, worsening sinus congestion, intractable coughing, and persistent temperature instability. Limited oral intake too.” The guy’s tone of voice belied a certain cynicism at his patient’s interest in making progress.

Everyone else nodded. They all stared at my pajamas. That meant one thing: I was going nowhere. Which was fine because nowhere was how I felt. I felt like plain old nobody going nowhere. “Try to sleep,” the intern advised. Then off he and the others went.

Not again, I told myself. I’m not disappointing that intern again tomorrow morning. Today would be the day! Today I would turn the corner. Sure, my body replied. It reminded me of my hacking cough, booming headache, and surliness of stomach post-ibuprofen. Ready by tomorrow. Yeah. Whatever. I drifted into a state of uncomfortable non-sleep. By expected clinical course, I should have been up and about this morning. By the criteria of appearance and clothing selection, I was stuck in illness.

However, a few hours later, I’m up. I’m not better, but I feel ready to be better. I need to be ready to be better. So I shave. Then shower. Then wash some clothes. And then I put on something other than pajamas. And I sit somewhere other than semi-propped up in bed.

Being sick stinks. I’m lucky though, and I know it. Because this flu illness, no matter its temporary ugliness, is likely going to pass, either later today, tomorrow, or the day after that. Many other patients aren’t so fortunate. Too many people have chronic conditions that either challenge their daily routine or flare regularly and repeatedly, disrupting anything resembling a normal course of life. These folks don’t have the choice of whether or not to wear the clothes they want to wear. Every day, they just have to wear those clothes, look the best they can, and try to balance things so that they look and feel as good as possible on as many days as they can. They have to become warriors for their health.

We understood a little something about warriors in 1985. While there weren’t as many patients living with chronic conditions back then as there are today, there were still plenty of bad things, such as cancer, that gave people good reasons to be and stay sick. Sure, we could cut out some badness, or bypass blockages, or perform other temporizing procedures. But the clinical toolkit was more limited than it is today. So we let time and the warrior-nature of people help. We didn’t want anyone going home before they were ready, not because of insurance DRGs, hospital length of stay statistics, and readmission rates. We didn’t want our warriors to unnecessarily suffer.

Maybe that’s why we watched for reliable signs that recovery at home would be better than care in the hospital. One of the best signs? You guessed it: the patient choice of wardrobe. Once someone put on her own clothes, she was usually ready to take on the challenges of healing outside the sleep-interrupting patterns of a hospital surgical ward. Once someone was inside his own shirt and pants, we didn’t want him spending a day longer in the hospital than was needed.

I don’t know how I’ll be feeling during the next rounds from my imaginary hospital team. My head still feels oversized and my sinuses are still under pressure. But I’m looking better, at least one person has told me, and I’m no longer sitting in bed. I’m also wearing the clothes I’d wear if I wasn’t sick with the flu.

Maybe tomorrow’s my day.

I can’t remember a time when my mind wasn’t busy. For as long as I have memories, I have had a mind with thoughts streaming across it like vehicles on a highway. Sometimes it’s rush hour and sometimes it’s late at night but still the highway has a regular flow of traffic.

The traffic need not always be troublesome; I can step back sometimes and just watch it all happen. The detachment feels good. I imagine that I’m on a bench, by the side of the road, and the sun is out, the sky is clear, and, if I close my eyes, I can ignore the whir of mental momentum and bask in the sunshine warming my face. The two and four-wheeled products of my mind still roll on by. But I don’t always need to see what their make and model is or what state they are from. And I don’t always need to wonder where they may be going.

They are strange things, those collections of thoughts, images, ideas, dreams, and ideas we call minds. They allow us to think, to memorize, to write words in a sentence, to read that sentence and understand it, to read that sentence – the first one in this paragraph – and recognize that the word ideas is listed twice.

My mom once told me that she would sometimes watch me coming home in the afternoon, walking up our sidewalk and short driveway. “You were always talking to yourself,” she said. “Even if your lips weren’t moving, I could tell that there was some story going on inside you.”

I picture Mom standing by the living room window and I can see what she saw as I plodded up the driveway. The kid has short hair, a big head, and ears that might give his body some lift if the wind is just right. He is wearing grey trousers and a white shirt, or an oversized football uniform, or baggy dungarees and a poorly fitting jacket. Things aren’t tucked in. There are dirt and grass stains, on at least one article of clothing. There are probably some grazes, cuts or abrasions on his cheeks, elbows, or knees. He is mumbling and muttering to himself about something, one hand or perhaps two gesturing as he re-enacts some event, real or imagined.

I remember what that kid was thinking. There was usually some story of struggle, some tale of triumph in the face of adversity. The kid wasn’t dreaming he was superman. No, he was imagining how he would do this thing better next time, or tell that person the right thing, or break free based on sheer will from the drudgery of some sort of injustice or oppression and find his day in the sun, his sweet taste of victory. This kid wasn’t as fast on the actual football field as he was in his imagination. No matter. That imagination was always letting the kid see some type of success that was either unrealistic or unimportant.

He thrived on seeing himself overcome adversity – at least doing so in his mind’s eye.

Although the details of the story changed over the years, the basic script did not. Somewhere, inside the neural platform of my brain, the storyline of challenge, struggle, and triumph was etched into the basic circuitry of how my mind liked to interpret the world.

I can watch that circuitry in action, even now, decades later. It runs like a predictable loop at a racetrack. It has the same types of stereotypical barriers, challenges, and responses. It always aims at some sort of success or recognition, some type of acknowledgement.

We like these types of stories. And why shouldn’t we? They are archetypal, as described by Jung. Mine followed the basic structure of the hero’s journey, as outlined by Joseph Campbell. They map the basic prototype of protagonists we identify with in movies, novels, even the histories of nations. They are predictable. They are cliche. And yet they are sometimes so comfortable. Because they are loaded with culture, values.

I’ve been watching my stories recently. Sometimes, I’ll actively try to redirect them, in the same way that a change in a road will redirect cars and trucks. It’s funny how the stories will still try to get back to the original plot line. I can take them off on a odd tangent, aim them in a direction that is both foreign and freeing, and then, like homing pigeons temporarily thrown off by a storm, they will fight to find their bearings and their way home.

That’s when I laugh. I watch the stories veer off course, lurch back towards where they expected to go, and I lean back against the bench, feel the warm boards against my back, raise my gaze to the heavens, and breathe. And I smile. And I breathe again.

I am more than my neural circuitry. I am searching for contentment inside that profound realization.

It should be contagious, like a cold. We should receive and be transformed by it as easily as sunlight making vitamin D inside the cells of our skin. Integrity should be as easy – and as important – as our every breath.

And yet we think of it as a nebulous higher quality, don’t we, something that we aspire to achieve rather than something that we are, something that is inherent in the state of our daily being?

It is about making decisions that your future self will be proud of.

That’s how I’ve occasionally defined integrity to some people. By “some people” I mean my children, and perhaps a few of their friends. I’ve not had much opportunity to do that, really; teens and young adults don’t want to hear too much moralizing from their own or someone else’s parent.

And it can sound that way, can’t it? A reference to integrity can sound like a sermon from a plinth or pulpit.

The news media is full of integrity angst. Not a week goes by, it seems, without some sad, head-shaking, gut-clenching or otherwise astonishing revelation of non-integrous decision-making or action by public figures and officials. Some leaders defend their ‘personal integrity’. Others challenge someone else’s. And some admit to first losing and then regaining their integrity, as if it’s something slippery and elusive, a behavioral code balanced atop their genetic code that can slip away as quickly as a scoop of ice cream from a sugar cone.

Maybe it is. I don’t really know. I just wish it wasn’t so difficult to have integrity, to be “integrous”. Even the words feel distant. And that’s not right. Integrity should be simple. It shouldn’t be arcane or conceptually challenging.

My refrigerator might have the answer. It’s right there, on the door. I am face-to-face with it many times a day and yet I’ve forgotten to see what’s in front of me. Five words printed on a magnet that is part of a tapestry of photos, sayings, and reminders.

All I need to do is ask myself, at any time during the day, one of these questions: Am I being kind? How about brave? Am I being honest? Am I generous?

Living with integrity may not easy. But having those questions so readily accessible can be. Sure, there is much to consider inside the values of kindness, courage, honesty, and generosity. I don’t, however, need to fully unpack those values to know if, at any moment, what I am doing, thinking, or intending meets the basic criteria. I can do my best to be kind, brave, honest, and generous. I can admit when I’m not succeeding and try harder.

We all have Ys in the roads of our lives. These are significant branch points, decisions to go left or go right. When I idle at those forks in my own life, I like to imagine myself as an old man, looking back at the current me. The older guy knows how things worked out. He knows what choice was appropriate, especially if the options have implications for others and not just myself. That fellow lifts an eyebrow at me across time when he sees me lean down a path that is selfish or self-serving. He’s old, after all. He doesn’t care if the right choice was more difficult. He watches me, with a hawk eye, hoping that I will show big scale integrity.

The life I lead everyday does not always need that eyebrow-flicking fellow. It involves lots of decisions, many small and seemingly inconsequential, and yet most meaningful in some way, to people around me. Did I smile instead of frown? Am I listening rather than talking? Does what I am rushing to do need to happen so quickly? I can think of no better guideposts for the daily meanderings of my life than the five words stuck in plain site on my refrigerator door.

Who knew that integrity could be so cool.

I offered the dieting advice as if I knew what I was talking about.

“Try changing two things,” I said. “One thing in your diet and another thing in your day. Such as, no more pretzels and doing 15 minutes of daily yoga.”

It seemed like a good formula; after all, it had worked for me years earlier. I hadn’t been trying to lose weight. I had just stopped eating pretzels (“empty calories”, my wife called them) and had coincidentally started doing fifteen minutes of yoga each day. I was terrible at both, in the beginning. I craved pretzels and I was so tight that I practiced with the VCR yoga tape in the darkness of the spare room, lest my wife or children see how inflexible I was. But then, Bam! I lost more than ten pounds. Without trying to.

Based on my own history, I smiled at awaited the person receiving my advice. “It’s amazing how small changes can bring big results.”

What’s amazing is how easily I came up with the advice, how quickly I forgot I had given it, and – this is the most interesting part – how well it actually worked. A couple of months later, and a healthy amount of pounds lighter, the recipient of my dieting advice suggested that we start a website. We laughed about calling it “Two Things”.

With age comes uncertainty. Or so I often tell myself. And yet sometimes I say the darnedest things and I say them with the darnedest certainty. When those sometimes occur, I don’t deserve for them to be right. It bothers me if they in fact turn out to be right because, deep inside, I know it’s not me that should get the credit.

It’s life. It’s the cosmos. It’s some collective consciousness that occasionally channels itself through my casual commentary.

The mother of a college classmate was an actual channel. She wrote a book about it and was, unfortunately, criticized for sharing her experiences in print. Like many college students, I wanted to be, and hence I thought I was, open-minded. When I met my classmate’s mother, I acted as if being a channel for friendly consciousness from another dimension was common. It made sense, at least to me. This woman was a lively, intelligent, and insightful person. What did it matter to me if she was or wasn’t really in contact with some other form of consciousness? Besides, who was I to say that she wasn’t experiencing what it was she wrote about?

She probably was. I say that not because I myself experienced anything remotely similar to what she described in her books; I didn’t. Instead, I just decided to believe my classmate and what she told me that she herself had experienced through her mom. In short, I turned off skepticism and turned on acceptance. In return, I made a lifelong friend. And I never worried whether or not her or her mother’s reported experiences could be fact-checked as “true”.

Whose advice is it when we spontaneously offer suggestions that turn out to be good? I’m not sure. But I’ve learned some things about my own suggestions-sound-like-wisdom-because-they-worked experiences. Two things, actually.

First, my better advice is spontaneous, genuine.

And second, the stuff works best when I forget that I even gave it. No expectation, for me. Only good intention, for someone else.

It’s nice to channel some of life’s wondrous side when I am able to get myself out of the way. It’s even nicer when I never know I’m doing it.

Her name was Vivaldi but we called her Viva. She sang to us when we first met her. She was a calico cat.

I almost referred to her as “our” calico cat. That would have been wrong. Viva didn’t belong to us.

It’s strange how relationships work. We meet so many life forms, during our time in this dimension, period of consciousness, or whatever it is that we should name the human experience. Many of our fellow travelers leave a mark on us. They make us who we are. We do our best to appreciate these beings during the time we have together with them. And yet something extra is added to that appreciation after they have passed.

Yes, Viva has passed. Day after day, year after year, she was there, following one of us, and then there, sleeping on one of our beds, and then, oh yes, there, hollering early in the morning for food. She was gentle, sweet, and, mostly, undemanding. We enjoyed her. We loved her. We knew – when illness struck – that we would miss her. We are saddened to be proven right about missing her.

It’s a cliche that a human never really appreciates another person or being until she, he, or it is gone. We do recognize others, sometimes very much so, when they are alive with us. What we don’t recognize, what we can’t be expected to recognize, is what our lives will be like when those special others – whether human, pet, or other – are not physically here. It’s impossible to know that, isn’t it? And it’s also a bit different, isn’t it, similar and yet unique in its own feeling, each time one of those special others departs from us.

We all have an impact, on and for each other. So we all matter. The world is not the same when any one of us leaves it. The music changes.

I wasn’t thinking about humans and relationships when I sat at the piano last week. I was thinking about Viva. I was thinking about how fortunate my family was that she chose us those many years ago in the animal shelter. How she wouldn’t leave us alone when we walked through the cat area. How she was softly singing for our attention.

The melody that follows is how it felt for me remembering her song. It was recorded in one take. No rehearsal. Spontaneous.

Just like Viva.

It was snowing, heavily. I’d just finished helping clean the martial arts academy after our instructor training class and had bundled myself into a blue down jacket, a faded patterned hat, and a single black glove. Drats. I’d arrived with two gloves but was now leaving with only one. A check of pockets and jacket sleeves failed to turn up the missing glove.

It’s no fun when things disappear from our lives. Some of those vanishings are inconsequential; while it is annoying to lose a sock or a glove, the world still turns at the same velocity. Other disappearances are more challenging. The globe’s spin is never the same when someone we love leaves us. It is off-kilter, at least temporarily, when good health or job security slip from our grasps.

This, fortunately, was not a major loss. So I zipped, bundled up, and trundled into the cold night, both hands stuffed into their respective jacket pockets. One glove worked just fine when I cleared snow from the car’s windshield and windows. I tried to put its partner’s departure from my mind.

The subconscious, however, has its own ideas. It perseverates. It observes perturbations in the typically smooth surface of space-time and it tries to suss out their source. This guy entered the kung fu school with two gloves on his hands. He left with only one and he’d shared the duties of sweeping, mopping, and tidying up the school. The glove should not have had an opportunity to exit his life. Someone would have seen it.

Stop, subconscious! Hands, don that other glove pair there, the ones you inherited from Dad that are always sitting on the passenger seat. Eyes, focus on the road before you. Let’s all pay attention to the unplowed six inches of snow covering that road, the swirl of precipitation falling atop us and the night, the poor visibility that accompanies a winter storm.

My conscious self can be so serious. It can forget things about me, such as the enjoyment I get from driving in the snow, especially when other people aren’t doing the same thing. I used the back roads as much as I could and had a nice car-ski home. The trip required a nice blend of focus and forgetfulness.

Once out of my car, the conversation restarted. Hey, the subconscious said, where did that other glove get to? It doesn’t make any sense that he lost it. Is he sure that it’s still not stuffed into a pocket?  The conscious tried its best to ignore the banter. It focused on a little bit of shoveling by the front door, on getting dry things from the garage into the entryway, on the comfort that a nice wool hat brought to the head and ears, on the hat itself and how long I’d had it, on the worn wool of the hat covering the head and ears, on the hat, on the bulkiness of that hat, on the possibility that – no, could it be possible? – that the missing glove was sitting inside the hat, atop of my head.

No wonder the hat was keeping me so warm!

There are plenty of things that I wish my mind would leave be. Every day, usually without any effort, a steady stream of thoughts flows behind my forehead. Some thoughts I pay attention to. Others I seem to have no awareness they are happening. Occasionally, I either direct my mind to think on a particular topic or I sit down by the banks of my mind’s river and just watch the thought current bounce by. It’s nice not to always feel responsible for guiding the mind flow. It can feel reassuring to dry off on the shore.

Until, that is, when I do things without paying attention. This morning, for example, a bobcat crossed the road in front of me. I was just leaving the house, on the beginning of a drive to the airport, when I saw an animal that, at first from a distance, I assumed was a large domestic cat. As I pulled closer, I realized that this wasn’t someone’s pet. As if to prove the point, the animal stopped and a second bobcat appeared on the other side of the road. I stopped too, to let them pass. They were very polite; the second bobcat only crossed when it was clear that it was her turn. Her partner, already on the other roadside shoulder, waited patiently for her. Once across the road, they turned and looked at me. The second cat seemed to suppress an instinct to wave.

Hey, I almost heard her say before she slipped into the bushes, are you sure you put your luggage in the back of your car?

What?

The luggage? You know, those clothes you need tomorrow in Philadelphia for your meetings?

Of course I’d put my luggage in the car. Hadn’t I? To humor my new friend, I pulled off the road, not too many yards away from where she and her partner had disappeared into the bushes. Wait, I thought, were those really wild cats that had just sauntered across the morning road? They looked like kids going off to school. Had I really just seen what I saw?

Ah. How things out of sight like to sometimes stay in mind.

She was sitting on a backpack at the end of the exit ramp. Although I barely had time to look at her, I saw enough as I passed in my car to notice that a) she appeared clean, b) she held a cardboard sign on which the word “traveling” was printed, and c) she resembled a young woman I know.

The last part of that observational triad jumped at me. It made me want to stop in the middle of the road (after I had made the turn) and find a way to go back to her, to give her some money or encouragement.

That’s when I realized my bias. Because the young woman reminded me of someone I know, because she didn’t display any obvious signs of extreme poverty or substance abuse, I was more inclined to feel some connection with her, I was more open to feeling empathetic.

She was somebody’s child. That was somebody’s daughter asking for travel money at the end of an interstate exit ramp.

It’s not easy to see others through the sympathetic and caring lens of a parent. It’s especially difficult to recognize common humanity with someone who is or seems drunk, someone who is or seems high, someone who is or seems mentally unhealthy. And yet we see them every day, there, by the side of the road, or here, leaned against the walls of downtown buildings. They hold signs, often with lettering that is difficult to read even if we made an effort to do so. They aren’t typically well-groomed. They aren’t usually well-mannered. We know nothing about them; we don’t really want to know more about them. Their presence disturbs us. We feel powerless to know how we can help, if at all. We often convince ourselves not to help, not usually at least, as if that single gesture, even done just once, could cause us to wonder why we don’t repeat it or, even worse, cause us to someone touch accidentally or otherwise talk and connect with a person whose life may represent a giant heap of trouble, poor decisions, terrible luck, and general human mess.

We aren’t wrong to hesitate. We aren’t wrong not to help everyone with an outstretched hand. We aren’t wrong to pass some of these people without any action. It’s not clear who each person is and what it is they need. It’s not practical that every person we encounter is someone that each of us should help. It’s sometimes simply not safe to try to give that help when people are asking for it in high traffic locations such as exit ramps and busy interactions.

There is something we can do, however, something that doesn’t require pulling off the road or rifling through our pockets at a traffic light. It needs no money. It doesn’t require physical contact or interpersonal risk.

We can remember that all of these people – and all of us, together – are somebody’s child.

Parents aren’t perfect. Many children never know one or the other of their parents. And too many children suffer abuse at the hands of one or more of their parents. But there is something special about the relationship between a parent and child, something unique. While some of the people we see, people whose lives are stuffed into backpacks and shopping carts, while some were maltreated as children, many were not. Most likely have family who wonder about them, every day, who worry if they are safe, who hope that the world will show a bit of kindness to people – their children – lost in the sometimes hope-depleted maze of modern existence.

For each of these struggling souls, whether fretted about from afar or adrift alone in the sea of life’s struggle, I can try something new, something that takes little time and may or may not be associated with a five dollar bill or any visible gesture of recognition. I can imagine, briefly, what that person with a cardboard sign may have been like, months or years ago, before things took a turn for the worse. I can remind myself that this moment was not one they envisioned would happen when they were young, when they were innocent, and when they dared to dream.

All of us, once, were children. In some ways, all of us still are.