2024 was a doozy. In fact, I heard a lot of griping last year about the dire state of things. Yes, we're facing a lot of challenges. So what are we going to do about it in 2025? Where do we start? 

With good, old-fashioned conversation, guided by three key principles...

This time of year, we spend a lot of off-key caroling on songs about joy. The savior is here, we sing! Let's celebrate! 

But do we know what that joy really means? I'm not sure I do. Which is why I took a trip to the Bethlehem of Jesus' birth...

For C.S. Lewis, life looked a lot like a wandering path — one with twists, turns, and obstacles, but always open to the sun. I think, rather, that a labyrinth is a better metaphor. Visibility is poor, we're frequently lost, and there's little sense of what the "end" looks like. 

So what keeps us going?

I saw the word "free" bandied about often in my food writing days — free meals, free booze, free trips. Inevitably, restaurants took advantage of the old aphorism, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." They claimed that yes, in fact, free lunch was possible — and on offer, provided patrons bought something more expensive first.

This has made me highly skeptical. I now struggle to believe the hawkers who say they have something for free — and I'm even more skeptical when I offer myself something for free, including the biggies: love, forgiveness, kindness. 

Why is that? When did I become so cynical I couldn't even accept my own free-will love? ... and how do I begin again to see free-will gifts as the better part of our humanity?

Every so often, I think back to my days in the church. I examine the rituals and symbolism, and I consider them alongside the sometimes painful happenings in the world. There's so much juxtaposition it's — alarming. 

In this episode, I shine a light on just one of those juxtapositions. How stark it seems if you take just a moment to unpack it...

One of my faves, Robert Frost, once wrote, "A poem is when emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." You could say that was the genesis of this episode: A processing of election angst, global turmoil, and lack of purpose. 

How do you find joy in all of that? You remember where you started before things got complicated. 

A young man make his way onto a stage. He tells a story, a gut-wrenching story of a best friend who suffered — because of him. And at the end... well, I'll let you decide how it ends. 

As we age, we lose our "elasticity." Sure, we lose the ability to stretch ourselves physically and bounce back after a strenuous experience, but our mental and emotional selves become less elastic, too. 

I don't know about you, but this is troubling to me. I don't want to be the old man shouting at kids to get off his lawn. I don't want to be so socially exclusive I end up lonely, brittle, stiff. 

So how do I avoid it? How do I retain mental and emotional elasticity into my 50s, 60s, and 70s?

Or can I?

Everyone approaches midlife reflections differently: indulgent purchases to distract, brooding and isolation, caring less, seizing the day, upending insidious habits. 

As I reflect on the past four decades, I wonder: How is my penchant for rule-following holding me back? What role has it played for me — and for those like me? Should I finally let it die? 

You'll be surprised to know, I wrote a poem to find the answers. 

I'm not sure I like the answers I found.

Poetry is hard. But so is marriage. What happens when you put the two together? Not good things, I'm afraid...

Oh how we love the unexpected! The hero fallen, the downtrodden made king, the right-side-up turned upside-down. What is this obsession with surprise? 

I have a theory, and it has a lot to do with how we're processing our current reality...

Dr. Benjamin Spock was a parenting staple for my parents' generation. His advice to would-be parents is both terrifying and encouraging. But even with his guidance, I have to wonder: Is parenting for me? Or perhaps better put: Am I for parenting?

As the election creeps ever closer, I start to think of historical analogs to our own Donald Trump. One particular Roman emperor comes to mind...

I've long been a poet. Or, perhaps more accurately, I've long tried to be a poet. But little meaningful seems to come from my words. Even when I lean on the greats for inspiration, words fall flat. What am I doing wrong? Am I using the wrong words? The wrong approach? The wrong medium?

Or is my life simply not the stuff of poetry?

Life is hard these days — harder that it was just a few years ago. Part of that is the normal role of professional life as one climbs the ladder. Part of it is an uptick in responsibility and the ache of economic and financial pressures. But what about the political upheaval all around us? How is that impacting us? And how do we engage with the powers that be to ensure our voices are heard? 

This episode, I share a couple of poems I wrote as reflections on these questions. 

It's Pride weekend — and that's something to celebrate. Or is it? It's been hard for me to take pride in anything as an adult. Is that a byproduct of life's pressures, my survivalist mentality, my self-flagellation — or a combination of all three?

A reflection-turned-short story, this view of a quiet suburban neighborhood wades into the notion of ultimate sacrifice — and how we honor those who have come before us.

Subscriptions run the market: from dating to cars, our consumer lives are ruled by incremental buy-in to goods, services, and experiences. But it doesn't end there. The subscription mindset is taking over our relationships, too. It's redefining what it means to be loyal, present, and engaged with those we care about, often at our collective expense. What are the short-term and longterm consequences? And how do we stop it before it triggers a pandemic of loneliness? 

Life has been challenging lately. It's hewing a little too close to Thoreau's "quiet desperation." I've been thinking about that a lot lately: grinding through daily life, searching for purpose, questioning who I am. It's a lot, I know, but it's a useful exercise if only to more clearly understand my motivations, my needs ... and my lack. As I share this with friends, I learn I'm very much not alone, and I turn to poetry to understand it...

People-pleasers everywhere understand the terror in having to say "no." But as we grow older, we understand how critical it is to boundary-setting and grace-giving. Where it's too often absent: Work. Corporate America loves the "yes-sayers," especially those in the leadership chain. And that "yes-saying" can be exhausting to employees on the ground. So how do we switch gears and perfect the art of "no-saying" while still harnessing progress and profit and innovation?

AI is exciting, isn't it? It can write emails for us, draft outlines, do research, create images from whole cloth. But what about this pesky background debate on AI ethics and the downsides to too-speedy, unregulated development? Are we really paying attention -- and factoring this information into our buying decisions? If not, we may run the risk of accelerating an unimaginable chaos...

Many of us have absorbed a notion of success that has little to do with what we value or want. It's easy to bake traditional success measures into our daily life without thinking about it. But maybe it's time we rethink this "success" business — both how we define it and how we get there.

In sixth grade, I was given the opportunity to lead my class through a mammoth science project. Instead, I fell on my face. That memory haunts me, particularly as I consider the opportunities to lead new ever-growing teams in my career. How do I avoid what sixth-grade Jeff did as my work responsibilities now grow? How do I lead confidently, thoughtfully? And how do I handle failure more gracefully when it happens again?

There's an epidemic that's taking hold in urban areas: a failure to signal. As dangerous as that is for pedestrians, there's actually an analog happening in society at large that's much worse. People just can't seem to communicate — or process communication. You say "no" and they hear "yes." You say "thank you," they hear "f*** you." Where is this coming from? And how do we get our messages across so that we maintain healthy relationships (and stay safe in our concrete jungles)?

As a kid, I spent hours building Lego castles grounded in many-layered stories. Around that time, I began to suffer from "creative" anxiety attacks. It was only recently that I discovered these two very different experiences had a lot in common...

Around college, my writing imploded. A professor told me a computer could write better poetry; where was the self in it? So I started from scratch, revisiting what it means to write at all. In the process, I have turned myself upside-down. 

It's easy to let your 40s creep up on you. It's even easier to let exhaustion and resignation take over. I've seen this all too frequently in my own life lately: Weekday nights spent gorging ice cream on the couch watching TV to escape. Clearly I need to turn something upside-down; why can't I? Am I doing this midlife crisis thing wrong? 

Ash Wednesday and Valentine's (un)fortunately overlapped this year. It made me laugh: the juxtaposition of a day designed to acknowledge the fleeting nature of life and a day when we celebrate the impermanence of love. It also got be thinking. Maybe we're looking at both wrong. Maybe they're more similar than we think...

I sometimes find myself conducting music in my living room. Eyes closed, arms flailing. I'm not conducting Mahler or Bach or Copland. It's usually some forgettable tune that strikes a chord.

This episode, I open up about my sometimes embarrassing musical tastes, and how they keep me grounded in the past — good and bad — while preparing me for what's to come (including exploits in the daunting dating game).