Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher. He spent a lifetime taking apart the labels we hold onto and what it actually means to love someone without condition.

I visited his former home once, in Ojai, California, years ago. I was two when he passed. His wisdom found me in my 30’s.

Volunteers have turned it into a place where visitors can sit with his teachings, walk the grounds, and find something quiet. He carried a kind of wisdom that is heavy for some people to hold. It was heavy for me, too, until I started living long enough to need it.

The lecture I keep returning to is where he talks about the observer and the observed. He was trying to explain unity, and for some reason, it made sense to me in a way little else had.

Take a tree. The distance between you and that tree is what we call time. Light has to travel. Sound has to travel. It takes time for the tree to register itself in your brain, for the wind in its leaves to reach your ears. Every one of these forces is bound by time.

But look at the tree in silence. Not just silence of words, but silence of thought, and something changes. When you enter total presence, time stops mattering. When you look at something so beautiful, for a moment, the distance disappears. You and the tree are no longer separate. There is unity there, and it doesn’t ask for permission.

That idea has stayed with me. Not because of the tree, but because of what it’s done to my relationship with everything I look at since.

I think about it when I look at the people in my life, the ones who are easy to love, and the ones who take everything I have. I’m older now. I’ve buried people I loved. I’ve lost money and made it back. I’ve had children. I’ve sat with illness in the people closest to me. I have enough behind me now to actually use what I read, instead of just admiring it.

When I look at other people, I see a different version of myself walking around in the world. There’s a name for that kind of love; the Greeks called it Agape.

The East calls it Brahman, or Atman, about the unity of being, the observer and observed collapsing into one thing.

It has nothing to do with the love people chase in altered states, the kind Bob Marley sang about, the kind a generation tried to find in the summer of love on acid and mushrooms. I’ve had real experiences in these altered states, and enjoyed them thoroughly, but they pass.

What doesn’t pass is wisdom, and wisdom only exists in the present, a river that keeps moving, never the same water twice. A mind can only sit there once it’s made peace with its own suffering.

I think about my father a lot, because he’s the person I’ve learned the most from, not from what he’s told me, but from just watching him be. He’s hurt himself many times. He’s handed us the weight of it.

And still, I don’t think I could love that man any more than I already do. There’s nothing he can do for me anymore. There’s everything I would do for him. No matter what, Dad, I’m here, and I love you for exactly who you are.

My wife has had health problems that were never her fault. We live in a world built on innovation, and while some of that is great, there are a lot of factors that go into hurting people, some more than others. It’s challenged everything I knew about health, and although it’s been tough, I am better for it.

It’s changed my definition of marriage. There will come a time when our partners can no longer do anything for us — when unconditional love, if you allow it, can blossom into the beacon of light we all possess.

Our life together has been its own kind of journey. But I keep coming back to the tree. I come back to the distance between my wife and me, and when I erase it, who is she, except another version of me, trying to make it through this the best way she knows how.

I don’t know what happens to me when I’m done here. No one does.

I know suffering and illness are waiting somewhere down the road. I know my daughter will leave one day, and it will break something in me. I know I’ll bury more people I love before I’m finished. But until then, there’s the tree, the erased distance, the place where two things become one.

When I write this down, I’m not writing to someone who happened to click on it. I’m writing to another version of myself. Maybe that’s you, reading this now.

If it is, the distance between us was never really there.

With love,
Anand

In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, there was a war few people talk about.

It was aptly named the Secret War.

The CIA entered Laos and ran a covert operation, arming and training Hmong fighters against other Hmong and Lao communist forces. Same people, split by an ideology neither side had chosen for themselves.

We left without victory. But no one really wins in matters of war.

I say "we" as an American. I carry real pride in this country and am lucky the cards played out the way they did. I had a great childhood, a college education, a respectable career in technology, and a beautiful family of my own to raise.

But pride doesn’t mean looking away from the rest of it. That we’ve also inflicted pain on the innocent.

Freedom has a price.

In 2012, I went to Hanoi, Vietnam. I volunteered at an orphanage with others from around the world.

It was a great experience, one I’ll cherish forever.

The orphanage sat inside the complex of Bo Da, a Buddhist temple.

In the photo above is Ananh, her name almost a mirror of mine. She was a sweetheart, someone I saw and cared for every single day.

Beside her, in red, is Hieu. He had a reputation as the most troublesome kid in the orphanage, but I saw something else in him. I stayed with him in the hospital while he had surgery meant to prevent throat cancer.

When it came time for me to leave, we both got emotional. I gave him my Buddhist rosary. He gave me two bracelets, one for me, and one to give to who I will marry.

That orphanage was full of bright minds that just needed a small light of chance. I still think about what I can do, with what I have, to help make that happen for kids like them.

Children, for all they’re still learning about the world, seem to understand the most fundamental thing about it.

LOVE.

They give it unconditionally, without barriers, without a second thought.

I believe that to truly find yourself, you have to see the world through your own eyes, but live your life through the eyes of others.

The money volunteers gave the orphanage got funneled to the Buddhist monastery nearby, where the monks lived like kings while the orphanage stayed poor on purpose, to keep pulling donations from tourists like me.

It was clearly corrupt, but seeing how everything operates in our world, even in our own government, who am I to judge?

My family and I recently watched a Parts Unknown episode where Anthony Bourdain traveled to Laos. It reminded me of my time in Vietnam.

They’re neighboring countries, and the similarities are stark. The rice paddies and food stalls pulled me straight back to Hanoi.

I remembered the quintessential dish Vietnam is famous for, pho. A hot, piping soup, built from a rich stock and fresh herbs, served with rice noodles.

Laos has its own variations on soup, which Bourdain and the locals feasted on.

On the show, Bourdain and his crew went out with a bomb disposal squad, the ones who spend their days finding these things, digging them carefully out of the ground when they aren’t already sitting on the surface, and detonating them in place.

The bombs are the size of softballs. Small enough to look almost harmless. Small enough for a child to pick one up thinking it’s a toy.

There’s a term the Lao use: bo pen nyang. It means, no worries.

It’s an approach to hardship, one that finds all of us, again and again. It means: don’t cling to what went wrong. Don’t dwell in yesterday. Let it pass.

Find grace in suffering. It’s not easy. It was never meant to be.

When you watch the news, it can feel overwhelming, even though most of what we see touches us only briefly, from a distance.

But sometimes misery is necessary; it centers the truth underneath our lives. That everything material eventually goes. That we’re all headed toward the same door.

Within that frame, I hope that we cling less to what already happened. Most things pass through us, and we let them go without thinking.

But certain things, for whatever reason, grip harder and stay longer than they need to.

I don’t know how everyone deals with that. But the Lao people have a spirit that’s unmatched.

Bo pen nyang. No worries. Life will take what it takes, and I will still be here tomorrow.

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War is heartbreaking, however you look at it. The evil we’ve inflicted on each other is, for lack of a better word, insane, and it’s a reality we can’t escape.

It just changes shape.

The bombs over Laos were dropped from planes flown by courageous men who took orders from an Oval Office.

The next version of this won’t need that. AI will make war faster, cheaper, and easier to wage from a distance, which usually means easier to start. How this will play out is a mystery, but also frightening.

I hope that’s not where this goes. But power has never needed much of an excuse to be misused, and I don’t see why that would change now.

In any case, we lost that war. Vietnam and Laos are still officially communist countries, though from what I saw during my travels, they run more like capitalist societies in practice.

American manufacturers are everywhere. I remember a PUMA factory churning out cheap shoes and clothes, toxic dye running along the Red River. Smoke from the factories, mixed with the pungent perfume of diesel, painted the sky in a bleak undertone of orange, overcast, red.

I remember showering afterward and watching black and brown residue wash down the drain.

The saddest part about Laos: when the war ended, we had dropped roughly 80 million bombs on the country. Since the 1960s, only about 1.4 million have been found and cleared.

The rest are still there, still killing innocent men, women, and children who step on them by accident, decades later. This is still happening every day.

Sometimes gratitude has to come from a dark place.

It isn’t enough to just look at what you have. Sometimes you need to see how bad things can get, elsewhere, to someone else, to actually feel the weight of what you were handed instead.

I still hope for the best, and I wouldn’t wish suffering like what the Lao people have dealt with on anyone. But it’s a reality that’s here, whether we look at it or not.

A lot of the world is beautiful. A lot of it is also, for lack of a better word, fucked up. Period.

Sometimes you have to lean into the devastation to appreciate what you have.

It’s not enough to write in a gratitude journal and be thankful for what’s yours. Sometimes you have to see and learn about terrible things to get perspective. It’s the awareness that life is bittersweet.

I think about the bomb squad again, men walking fields inch by inch, looking for something the size of a softball, buried decades before they were born, left behind by a war they had no part in starting.

That’s what unresolved things do.
They wait.
They don’t care how much time passes.

And someone still has to go looking for them, carefully, one at a time, long after the people who buried them are gone.

I don’t know everything I’m still carrying that hasn’t gone off yet. I don’t know what my daughter, Autumn, will inherit from me without either of us meaning it.

But I’d like to clear a little more of it before it’s her turn to walk the field.

Bo pen nyang.
No worries.

Not because nothing happened.

Because it did, and we’re still here.

With love,
Anand

Our baby girl is turning into such a light. She talks to everyone. She shares. She runs up my shoulder and dives off my head and does somersaults on the bed. She says things we never taught her, but through books, technology, conversations with strangers, and talking with us, she is starting to narrate her life.

“You read this to me, mambo daddy” (remember, daddy)

For the first years, she had mom and dad with her all the time. We went to zoos, parks, indoor kids’ play areas, and just played. Went down slides, rode little bikes where my knees touched the handlebars.

I give a lot of credit to my wife for this burgeoning, precious angel. When we spent the winter in Vegas, we took her to the library almost every day and read whatever we could get our hands on. Sometimes she read with us, other times she played with toys, but we still read.

When we spent time in Madison, WI, we ran into a retired doctor, a child psychologist. She looked at us playing with Autumn and said, “You are doing everything right. They are vessels; keep talking to them, play with them often. Everything is being registered, even when you think it’s not.”

It made us feel good. All parents are kind of blind as bats when we have our kids. We can read the books, listen to the experts, but when that child comes into the world, you never really know what you’re going to get.

I have this child watching my every move. How I act when I come home from work. When she makes a mistake, how I approach her matters. I kiss her mother every day and tell her how beautiful she is. I want to be the type of partner she would want one day. I want to be the type of human that will lead her to be the best version of herself.

I’m proud to say, she is already doing that.

Autumn grew up unconventional. She never slept in a crib, never used the bassinet. Raising her was more on intuition than practicality. She’s not afraid or timid. She looks people in the eye, makes friends quickly, and is just such a joy to be around.

We didn't have all the resources, but we were resourceful with what we had. I remember one Christmas. It was tough. We were away from family, and I wanted it to feel like more than it could. I remember standing in a store aisle, overwhelmed, wanting to give her everything and knowing I couldn't. My wife and I went home and wrapped what we had, dozens of small things, wrapped like they mattered, and decorated the room until it looked like more than what it was. When she woke up, she was elated. She didn't see what it cost to get there. She saw a room built just for her. She saw Mom and Dad's smiling faces. So did we, for once.

At that age, we remember very little about our upbringing, but those years, when our memories are preserved in the present, probably play a bigger role in how we will turn out than we think.

Sometimes I wonder if we lived our lives like a child is watching us, if we would be better. Because even as an adult, I remember all the good, but I remember the bad more.

I remember the endless fights over the addictions my parents held onto. Sometimes numbing themselves to the point where they forgot that children were watching, innocence being torn.

It’s made me more mindful of how I treat myself, her mother, and others. I am not perfect, nor do I try to be. Sometimes emotions come out, and that’s ok. It’s probably something important for her to see. That even Mom and Dad are human.

But at the same time, I have to right all the wrongs of my past. The innocence that left me too early, I will preserve for her. Naive as she may be now, the world will undoubtedly test her, but as a father, I can try to be the net that catches some of those inevitable tears that the journey will bring.

My daughter has undoubtedly made me a better person.

I know she’s watching. Before bed, I pick up her toys. For weeks she would just watch me. Yesterday, she started picking them up with me. I never asked, I never demanded. I just showed up.

You don’t need a child to realize this. Little humans, even the ones you see seldom, are watching, analyzing, mimicking our behavior so they can tell their own stories one day.

It extends beyond children, too. Most of us walk around not realizing how powerful we are. An act of kindness. A walk on a trail, phone left behind, just being present with what’s in front of you. A hug to someone who’s in pain and doesn’t know how to ask for one.

We underestimate what these do, not just for the person on the receiving end, but for whoever’s watching us do it.

Showing up just means doing the best you can every day. It means not being so consumed with thought and giving life more action.

More time with less mind.

With love,
Anand

I was twelve when my grandmother died. She’d been living with us. I stood up at her funeral to recite a speech I’d written for her, and when I looked down and saw her in the casket, the words came out broken, pushed through breathless tears.

That day changed me.

That’s when I started seeing caskets everywhere. I’d look around the room at everyone who’d come to our home in Fairfield, CA, and realized everyone here will die one day.

For weeks after, I couldn’t shake it. I’d watch my mother laugh at something and think, one day that laugh stops. I’d watch my father fix something around the house and think, one day those hands stop moving. I would play with my sisters and see us growing apart as we began our own families. It wasn’t morbid, exactly. It felt more like waking up in a closed room and opening a door into the cosmos. Beauty, sadness, and uncertainty all wrapped in one.

When did you last think about your own death? Have you thought about what you’d want said at your eulogy? Who would deliver it? What you’d want people to remember, once you’re not there to hear it?

I try to live in the way I’d want others to talk about me.

I don’t know if there’s ego in that kind of contemplation, because you won’t be there to see any of it happen. But I’ve thought about it. And I’ve learned that the clearest way to know what you’d want said about you is to watch how mortality changes you when it matters most.

Mom & Dad

I learned this again when my parents split up. I wasn’t surprised it happened, but it was still hard. And in the middle of it, the caskets came back.

My mother had carried a lot for a long time. She found happiness with someone else. In our East Indian culture, that’s shamed, to the highest degree. Family she’d grown up with shunned her for it. It was difficult to watch, difficult to navigate. But I knew she would die one day. This was just the next unwritten chapter of her life. Knowing she wouldn’t be here forever is what brought me to acceptance. Even though I wish I’d had more time with her as she was, I knew she had a lot of good times ahead of her too.

Knowing my father will die one day did the same thing for his grief. For losing the life he’d built with her, for the bad habits he leaned on harder to find some relief. I didn’t die to my parents. I died to the idea of them as a couple, to the relationship I’d known, and made room for what came next. This new relationship with them. Not as parents. As humans navigating the challenging landscape of life.

I don’t see my father as much these days. I moved across the country hoping for a better life for my own family. But I call him often. We share a few words, a few laughs. A day will come when he isn’t here, and I don’t want him to die knowing he wasn’t loved. That we wasn’t cherished.

He’s been a thorn in my life. A burden, at times. But he’s been my burden, and one I’ve carried with a strange kind of pride, because when he dies, I won’t be thinking about the times I helped him out. I’ll be thinking about those ten-minute calls where we laughed about nothing important at all.

My parents’ love wasn’t the storybook kind of love, the kind where two people hold each other’s hands and go together at the end. Our stories aren’t scripted that perfectly. But they’re romantic nonetheless, because they’re real. They’re enduring, full of pitfalls and struggle. I find that beautiful.

Death is frightening. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing that when you take your last breath, it’s over, that can be overwhelming for anyone.

I am watching someone I love grieve a parent who’s still alive. Sitting with the knowledge that it’s ending, before it’s actually ended. That’s its own kind of hard, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

So let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying death isn’t sad. I’m not saying it isn’t frightening, or that the grief isn’t real. It is.

All of it.

But it’s important to remind yourself that death is freeing too. Knowing that you, and everyone around you, will die one day is all the reason you need to forgive ferociously. To accept without qualms. To do what your heart actually wants, instead of what’s safe or expected.

I’ve since learned the harder version of that lesson: no one changes because you tell them to. I’ve had the conversations, said the right things, watched the same patterns repeat anyway. The only real change I’ve ever seen in anyone came from inside them.

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Fatherhood

I was tired from work. All I wanted was to binge on a TV show. I looked at my daughter. “Hi Daddy,” she said, playing with her play-ay-dough.

I said, WTF am I doing to myself. I put my phone away.

I spent the rest of the evening making shapes out of play-ay-dough, playing spaceship, eating make-believe space marshmallows with her.

I have this new human in my life. And what makes up her whole world, right now, is me. I could cry just thinking about it. What she wants is so simple, yet the most valuable.

Time.

She will only be two once. And then it’s gone.

So if you’re a parent, fall deeper in love. Cherish it. All of it.

I can’t tell you how many parents with grown children have looked at our young family and said the same thing: enjoy it, it’s gone before you know it.

They’re not just being polite. You can see it happen when they say it. They go somewhere else for a second. Back to a time when their kids lit up over first sights of ordinary things. A time they were more present than at any other point in their lives, and didn’t fully know it until it was already behind them.

I don’t want to be that parent, the one who only sees it clearly in hindsight. I want to be here for it now, while it’s still happening. And the only way I’ve found to actually do that is to remember, on purpose, that none of us — me, her, any of us — gets forever.

Knowing my own mortality is what did it for me, like a prisoner realizing, finally, that he’d had the key to his cell the whole time.

To be free, you have to die while you’re still alive. Not literally. Just die to the idea that life is forever. That you have tomorrow to say you’re sorry. To forgive others, and for heaven’s sake, more importantly, to forgive yourself. Death shows us that we don’t have another second, guaranteed.

If we live life dying to the moments that make it, a new perspective emerges. Everything is more precious, more important, and more beautiful, because it’s going to leave and never come again in the same way.

It’s made me careful and more thoughtful in how I approach anything that life presents. It’s cut the minutiae and made room to lean into the meaningful.

I leave you today with a simple reminder.

Most of living well is simply appreciating it.

With love,
Anand

Passion is the fire that wakes us up. It’s the desire that puts us in motion toward a goal we can’t quite name.

First love. The work that gives us meaning. The first time you look at your child. Passion can hit like a freight train. It’s the creation of something that was only a seed in our minds, planted by a source we never see. Passion is nature’s delicate interplay, weaving love and meaning into the songs of our life.

When I first met my wife, it was intense. Something was ignited in me. The molecules that stir my spirit went haywire. It’s something that can’t be explained. The well-read amongst us call it a chemical reaction, which is very much the case, but how that chain of reactions happens, no one knows.

The work we do gives us meaning too. The lucky ones find it early. It’s like first love, something you can do and enjoy without really trying. A piece of your life that just fits. It doesn’t even matter what it is.

But passion is only what gets us to start.

Competency is the gravity that brings our passion into the net of meaning. It’s the skill, repeated over and over, until it becomes second nature.

Competency in Celebrity

Steph Curry holds a clear version of this. Basketball was his passion. Competency is what has him shooting threes without looking, and what changed the game itself. There is a video of him sinking about 93 straight three-pointers. That type of precision comes from countless hours of practice. Competency is the endless hours in the gym, the taped-up fingers, the time away from family to hone in on a craft.

Julia Child found her passion for cooking in her mid-30s. I grew up watching her on PBS. She enrolled at the famous Le Cordon Bleu and wasn’t among the strongest students.

Her passion isn’t what took her from anonymity to broadcast stardom and her countless cookbooks. It was the painstaking, repetitive, day-in-day-out practice. She dedicated one entire episode to the humble potato, an ingredient that’s been around forever, but whose uses are many. How to dice them, how to blanche them, the French technique of French shaping (Pommes Château): trimming large potatoes into uniform, barrel-like shapes with rounded edges so they do not stick or burn.

The late Thich Nhat Hanh was a monk who fled Vietnam during the war. His life’s work was built around compassion, patience, and peace. His teachings were about how breathing, walking with awareness, and being mindful can bring alive the intention we give to the things in our life. His initial passion sparked when he was a young boy and saw a picture of Buddha, and that spark only grew because of competency. The countless decades of meditation, intentional silence, and extended travel to share his message in public speeches helped millions of people around the world.

These are just some examples amongst countless. It’s not just the famous who hold this. It’s the neighborhood mechanic that everyone loves. The housekeeping manager who constantly gets praised by guests. It honestly doesn’t matter what the thing is.

What people are searching for is purpose and meaning, and competency in something is how you find that.

For me, personally

Sometimes passion transforms into patience and compassion, and to instill those virtues, it takes repetition. I’ve been vocal about my life and my struggles. I won’t go into detail about that, but what I will share is that there is competency in caring for another.

In the beginning, I didn’t have it. Passion got me in the room. It didn’t tell me what to say when there was nothing to say. It didn’t teach me when to speak and when to just sit there. The first few times, I got it wrong. I said the thing that sounded like comfort but landed like a lecture. I tried to fix what wasn’t mine to fix. Love was there, but love alone was clumsy.

What changed wasn’t the love. It was the repetition. Showing up the same way, day after day, even on the days I didn’t feel like it. Learning her silences the way you learn a language, slowly and then all at once. Being relentless in caring for another can be physically and mentally taxing, but through time, I’ve been able to have patience through adversity and love through any storm.

Caring for our loved ones is an art. How you talk to the person, how you treat them, and the intention you bring when in their presence all matter. It forced me to live more honestly.

It’s brought forth new meaning for my writing. While I am passionate about the written word, that passion is fickle and doesn’t burn all the time. Competency is what keeps the wick wet and the lamp burning. It’s not glamorous. I’m a father with a growing family, a career, and a passion that can’t be exercised as much as I’d like.

I had more time when I was younger, but not enough lived experience. Now I have endless experiences to write about, but I have duties and responsibilities. This is the interesting tug of war of life, but even though my personal time is more limited, focused attention to whatever I am doing plays an integral role in how I share wisdom with you.

Whatever time I have, I use it to read and write, but it’s the repetition — constantly reading, keeping my mind free from bad habits, and my intention focused on a central goal- that makes the writing come to life.

In my professional life

I started a job at a healthtech company last month. It’s a virtual reality company where we train healthcare clinicians (nurses, doctors, educators) on how simulation technology can help train their learners and get them into the workforce, and support continued education for adult learners.

I am tasked with managing accounts, but more importantly, training them on the actual virtual reality simulations that take people into virtual worlds, so they can administer medications, inject patients, and talk to patient families. It’s an exciting career, but it takes an incredible amount of competency because it’s such a niche product.

When I first started the job, it was intimidating. But about 4-5 weeks in, and lots of practice, I am starting to get the hang of things. The expectation was for me to get the hang of things in 3-5 months, but to the company’s surprise, I’m already taking meetings and helping medical institutions across America in my first month. How did I get here?

By placing myself in uncomfortable situations, using new muscles. A university had ten clinicians lined up for a call, ten people who train the next generation of nurses and doctors, all of them ready to ask hard questions about a product I’d only known for a month. I told my manager I’d handle the presentation myself, even without the polish, even without years of the material behind me.

So I spent the week before doing the only thing competency ever asks of you: the unglamorous work nobody sees. I researched every clinician on that call, who they were, what they’d care about, where they’d push back. I looked up ways to ease a room full of strangers into a conversation instead of a pitch. None of it was inspired. All of it was preparation.

On the call, they didn’t just take to the product. They took to me. Enough that they asked for the training to happen in person instead of over a screen, and enough that my company signed off on it. Days later, my manager wrote a memo to the entire company about how well I’d done for someone barely a month into the material.

I think about my struggle often, and where I am. I'm in a place where I won't sit in neutral anymore, afraid to be the best me. For all intents and purposes, I'm ready to make it rain.

If I can, then anyone really can. I believe we are capable of anything. I say this as a man who’s in his 40’s and only beginning to realize his potential.

Final Thoughts

I think that’s what competency is. Doing the thing you don’t want to do, but sticking with it long enough that you find the true passion in it.

Or finding passion in something, and constantly reiterating the process. The work that no one sees, until you can truly fall in love with it.

Not just the flicker of excitement, but rather the enduring pursuit of something that requires honesty, time, dedication, and most of all, presence.

With love,
Anand

Fifteen years ago, my parents’ marriage was falling apart.

An eight-year relationship of mine was ending.

And I had a new manager who had it in for me from day one. Eventually, I got fired.

Three pivotal moments, all coming to a crashing halt around the same time. Sometimes you just have to laugh at how when it rains, it pours, but in my case, at the time, it felt like an avalanche, cradled in a tornado.

During that time, I decided to do something with little to no planning. One of my colleagues was Peruvian. She had talked about the beauty of her country and Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Everything at that point in my life was going downhill, so I just said f*** it, I’m going to South America.

Conveniently, her uncle was a travel agent and just an awesome guy. He arranged not just the flights but also my entire trip’s accommodation, which included the arduous week-long journey on foot along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

San Francisco → Miami, FL → Lima, Peru.

From the time I made my decision to landing in Lima was about three days. I needed it. Like many, I was the glue that held my family together. The person who made decisions, who gave my parents hope while their marriage was on the brink. I was a protector to my little sisters, who, like me, were trying their best to accept a new kind of loss.

But I needed to escape, and I was fortunate that I could. Something I think about often, because I know many are not.

The trip was long. I was tired from all the drama at home and the fourteen-hour journey crossing three time zones.

When I got to Lima, I went to a hostel. Exhausted, I showered and went to the courtyard to get some food. There I met a group of Brits who were enjoying beer for breakfast. Inebriated in the best way possible, they introduced themselves to me and asked if I wanted to go surfing.

I barely had any energy in the tank, but I said, why not. This wasn’t a five-star vacation, after all.

I was twenty-five, with a corporate job, but a lot of my income went to helping my family.

So when I got to Lima, I slept in a hostel, on a bunk with ten other people. I lived on rice and fruit and drank copious amounts of lucuma. It was a typical backpacking trip. Not lavish, but full of serendipity.

I also made it to Machu Picchu, hiking the Inca Trail to get there. My group was four Frenchies who were surprised I was American. I challenged the stereotype. I never knew we had one, until that point. I told them I’d always thought the French were arrogant pricks, because you guys douse all your food in butter, which is the best kind of evil, but you guys are okay.

I share this story because my time in Peru was special. Not because of the delicious food, the culture, or seeing one of the most beautiful structures in our world, but because it gave me a new way of thinking about circumstances.

One I still hold today.

That’s what I want to share with you.

Agony will find us all. It’s a prerequisite to living. However, that’s where the adventure resides.

Someone will break your heart. The people you love most will die. Your passions will become eroded and replaced with duties and responsibilities. The things you’re so sure about now will leave you dumbfounded next year. Someone you love will get ill. Maybe it will be you.

Your bank account may not be as full as you’d like. Your job doesn’t bring you as much meaning as you’d thought. The person you gave your years to, your heart, and your energy took you for granted. The families you trusted with everything tarnished that bond.

We live in a world of infinite abundance, but we still have war-torn countries. Women and children mourning the mornings because it’s a nightmare.

I can go on and on.

You will suffer the wrath of life.

We all will.

With all this being said, can we turn agony into adventure?

Can all the things that were labeled terrible help us live with more purpose and courage?

Yes, it can.

The hard stuff that life presents is real, and we need to find a way to fix it. But it helps to have a glass-half-full foundation.

Mine has always come back to the simplest things. The things we know to be true, but we often forget.

Were you warm when you slept? Did you eat when you were hungry? Do you have at least one person you can call and say “I love you” to?

If you answered yes to these questions, then you have already hit the jackpot, my friend.

Also, another thing.

This experience is going to end. A time and place unknown. I know it sounds dark, but that’s perception. We are flying on a giant rock in an infinite nothingness. But even that nothingness is something.

You, here right now, reading and trying your best to live. It’s kind of special if you think about it.

When I feel the micro things in my life are going crazy, I come back to the macro. The big picture. Things we know to be true. They are guiding lights that become my north star in this journey.

I’ve had much. I’ve had less. However, I’ve always had plenty.

You don’t need a gratitude journal or a self-help guide. All you need is yourself, a few moments to breathe, and to acknowledge what you have, and how precious this life is.

We know these things to be true, but a reminder never hurt anyone.

I know I do.

Life is less about learning, and more about reminding ourselves of the wisdom we know to be true.

I’ll leave you today by telling you what I must tell myself every day.

Everything you need is already within you.

It always was.

You just need to recognize it.

One of the most important reasons I write is to make the lives of people a little brighter and to recognize that it’s possible to find beauty in everyday moments.

Also, to know that they are not alone in the struggle. That they have a brother in arms, dealing with everything they are, just in a slightly different way.

If you live truthfully and can be easier on yourself, all of life can be an adventure.

With love,

Anand

In the 1800s, the German artist Moritz Retzsch painted a piece originally titled Die Schachspieler — “The Chess Players.” Today, it’s known as Checkmate.

The painting shows an intense chess match between a distressed young man and the devil himself. An angel watches over them, but her empathic gaze rests on the young man, who appears destined for defeat.

The Devil is confident. He believes he has already won. Victory is his for the taking.

The prize is the young man’s soul.

Legend has it that decades later, this painting hung in the Louvre in Paris. During an event for gifted people from all over the world, Paul Morphy, an American chess grandmaster, noticed something about the art.

He was in awe of the painting. His presence narrowed into the board. He noticed something.

The tour guide noticed that everyone else had moved on, except him. She walked over. “Our group has left, sir.”

“This painting, there is something special that I’m not sure most will see,” Morphy said.

“Yes,” she said. “The piece is called Checkmate. The Devil has won. The young man has lost.”

Morphy looked at her with intensity. “Look closer,” he said.

“The king still has one more move.”

The distressed young man still had one more move. The game wasn’t over.

I told this story to my sister yesterday, to lift her spirits.

And, if I’m honest, to lift mine too.

It’s a story that’s been preached in sermons all over the world.

My interpretation sees the story a little differently, though I think it lives in the same spirit.

I believe good and evil both exist within us. They are enshrined in the soul and play an important part in our lives.

Carl Jung called it the shadow. To truly know light, we have to know our own capacity for darkness.

The Devil shows up disguised as temptation. Disguised as victimhood. Disguised as worry. Disguised as anger.

These are not terrible things to carry. They are things to understand, and then to transform.

Emotions are powerful.

It’s the athlete who takes the game-winning shot when everyone has already called the game for the other team.

It’s the single mom who stays courageous, caring for her children, working and going to school.

It’s the person whose marriage has been shattered, who still carries the will to live and to serve others.

It’s the father who has traveled across the country, clinging to hope wherever he can find it, even when it’s bleak, so he can bring his family somewhere safe.

I am well aware of my own vices. The temptations that make me fall. The comfort that victimhood can offer in the middle of chaos. The part of me that clings to despair and believes, like the young man in the painting, that the game is already lost.

This is coming from a man who has lost everything, more than once.

Like a home you’ve built again and again, only to watch a storm come through and tear it back down.

I’ve been there.

But like Morphy pointed out, it’s not over.

You can still win.

It takes an incredible amount of courage to walk through this existence and still not lose yourself.

You have been through a lot.
We all have.

The fact that you are here is something.

It’s your move.

With love,
Anand

Perched along a string of oaks and pines, past rows of Mary Jane’d farms, the future blunts of America. There I was, in Kelseyville, CA. A place you wouldn’t know unless you’ve been there.

I decided to sit still for 10 days. Eyes closed, meditating, up to 13 hours a day. It was a meditation retreat called Vipassana.

The good part: it was free. Volunteers cooked delicious veg food. We had a room to sleep in, four to a room with two bunks, but comfy enough for a good night’s rest.

Only one problem. I was bored out of my freakin’ mind.

It sucked. It’s something I really never shared. To be honest, it was the thing to do in Silicon Valley back then, one more stop on the circuit of mind-altering interventions people tried in search of the third eye, or whatever version of enlightenment was trending that year. I get it now more than I did then. We were all just looking for peace and didn’t know where else to find it.

For 10 days, I sat in quiet. I learned a breathing technique that helped me concentrate on specific parts of the body by scanning different regions in order.

There was a type of euphoria I can’t quite explain, something akin to being drunk or high. But if you need 10 days of silence to get that, I’d rather have a beer.

That euphoria felt like the high you get coming back from a really good vacation. And like a vacation, it wasn’t built to survive contact with real life. Within a few weeks, I was back on my phone, scrolling, consuming content that served no purpose in making me the person I knew I could be.

Vipassana gave me that peace inside a very structured environment. Most of us don’t have that structure. We have to build it ourselves, and even when we try to schedule it, life has other plans.

Peace seems like a cliché word, but the best way I can describe it is the mind staying focused on what’s in front of it for an extended stretch of time. People call it presence, another overused term, but I was in that place. Not just conceptually. In practice.

The more I talk to people, the more I understand that’s what most of us are looking for.

The question I was left with after those 10 days wasn’t about the euphoria.

It was this.

How do I get back to that place of peace, the place where I was content, clear-headed, and not running after every thought?

The answer has come to me as of late.

The answer is boredom.

I had nothing to do but sit with my own mind. After the first day, I thought about leaving. I wasn’t alone in that. Countless others have left after a few days, only to come back.

I wondered why.

Boredom, I think, will be the ultimate habit to have.

From it, you gain focus. The ability to live fully in the moments that mean the most. But also, and this is the part people miss, the moments that feel meaningless.

The waiting. The driving. The standing around at a park doing nothing.

Both kinds of moments, given enough room, lead to the same place. Peace. A space where the noise of endless sensory input finally goes quiet.

Lately I’ve started driving with no sensory input at all. No music, no podcast, nothing. Even during workouts, I’ll put the phone away. No Rocky theme music. Just me and my chattering mind.

When my daughter, Autumn, is playing and I’m just standing there, it’s tempting to check the phone. I need to figure out what to cook. I need to check the weather for the week so I know what to pack her in. The phone is a machine that answers any thought the second it shows up. It doesn’t let a question just sit there anymore.

So I’ve learned to let the questions run. Dinner will figure itself out. The weather will still be there in an hour. I put that energy into being present with my daughter instead. She loves it when I actually get in the sandbox or push her on the swing, or try to weasel myself into toddler slides, rather than standing off to the side.

Usually I’m the only adult doing that. Most of the other parents are on their phones, half-watching, half-somewhere else. Monkey see, monkey do. I don’t have to teach my daughter what to do. I just have to do what I want her to learn.

And like all parents, we are works in progress. Becoming the best you comes with effort. Not chasing every thought, facing the discomfort of no sensory input, that’s hard. But the peace you gain is worth the sacrifice.

Make a real effort to disconnect, even in short spurts. Work has its own demands; that’s not always realistic. But in the moments that are actually yours, your leisure, your drive, your time at the park, that disconnection is available to you right now.

It doesn’t take ten days in a silent room. It can start with the drive to the store, or ten minutes at the park with nothing but your kid and your own mind for company.

Pick one thing. Give it your whole mind, for longer than feels comfortable.

That’s the entire practice. The practice of being bored. Nothing more mystical than that. But it’s astonishing how hard it’s become, and how much is waiting for you on the other side of the boredom, if you just let it run its course.

With love,
Anand

The World Cup is now in its elimination rounds. Sixteen teams down to the final bracket.

It’s the biggest event in sports.

The United States is among the sixteen, facing Belgium on Monday. I’ll be rooting for the red, white, and blue.

Happy 4th, America!

But last night, my family and I watched what many are already calling the best game in World Cup history.

Everyone loves a David and Goliath story. This one didn’t disappoint.

It was between Argentina, a giant in the world of futbol, captained by Messi. Arguably the greatest specimen the sport has ever produced.

He’s already won a World Cup. He and his country are chasing a fourth title.

But this game wasn’t about Argentina.

It was about the little engine that could.

It was about Cape Verde.

A country I had no idea even existed. Not ashamed to say that. I don’t know a lot of things.

It's a nation of half a million people. A string of islands off the western coast of Africa. A nation with a history of colonization and oppression, that carved out its own independence, and today stands as one of the most tolerant and democratic countries in our world.

This was their first World Cup appearance ever.

Just getting here meant surviving one of the toughest groups in the tournament. They had to face off against Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia. And they didn’t lose a single game. Three draws, including a stunning 0-0 against Spain, the reigning European champions.

The smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup knockout round.

When you think about soccer, this is what it’s about.

Even Argentina, after the win, didn’t celebrate like conquerors. Both teams left everything on the field and embraced each other.

In the stands it was mostly light blue and white, Argentina’s colors. With a small, defiant section of Cape Verde. Even though I was rooting for Messi, like many, my heart found their section. Their excitement became mine. My heart connected to theirs.

They showed the world that with a little elbow grease, hope, and a nation behind you, anything is possible.

Even if you lose.

Because what is loss?

A loss in a game, eventually, everyone forgets. That happens all the time. Losing is just a part of life.

But the manner in which you lose tells you everything.

Argentina took the lead in the first half, Messi finding the net himself. Cape Verde answered late, tying it. Then, in extra time, Argentina went ahead again, and Cape Verde tied it again.

Twice, this tiny island nation looked the world champions in the eye and refused to blink. Adrenaline was high on both sides, a battle to the death.

Only in the final minutes did Argentina finally find a way through, the ball deflecting home for the winner, off a near-perfect corner kick from Messi.

3-2.

Cape Verde goes home. But not before giving their opponent, and the world, a roller coaster of emotions.

My eyes welled up with tears. My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief at what we’d just witnessed.

Cape Verde didn’t lose tonight. They just ran out of time. Sometimes, we just don’t have enough of it, and that’s okay because giving it your all is what counts.

The World Cup is more than just a country trying to win a trophy. It’s deeper than that.

Our world is at an inflection point. We are more connected, yet more divided. Politics, propaganda, and our digital divide create distance in a boundless world.

It was good to see fans from all over the globe embracing America. Saying how nice the people are. How beautiful the places have been, and how amazing the ranch dressing is.

Hidden Valley created a travel-size bottle because the world can’t get enough of flavored buttermilk.

Jokes aside, Cape Verde, an unknown soccer club until yesterday, wrote their legacy into the gates of soccer greatness. They brought millions like me to feel something special.

Soccer, a game where the ball takes the shape of the globe itself. Patterns stitched together in unity.

Just a reminder: we are one world. And even as many nations, our dreams for ourselves and for each other are the same.

To love our country.
To live a good life.
To care for and love those we cherish.
To help our neighbors, and those less fortunate than us.

At the heart of it, I think most people can agree those things are good.

Argentina showed me that this game is about pride in one country. But also about love, no matter the outcome.

Cape Verde showed me that we are all little engines that could. That if we use what we have, with an untethered belief in ourselves, we can do extraordinary things.

At its heart, this game revealed something simple.

It’s only impossible until it’s done.

With love,
Anand

She walks up to him. He’s seated at the diner. His children are playing at the gumball machine, full of joy, and a little bit rowdy. Not a problem in the world. Innocence intact. Their day is bright.

A boy and girl, barely ten years old, holding “get well soon” balloons.

“Excuse me, young man,” the elder woman says. “Some of us are trying to enjoy our brunch. Your children are disturbing the peace. Why don’t you be a father? Teach them how to act.”

The man looks at the woman. Desperation in his eyes. He turns away and looks at his kids.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

She nods in approval and begins to walk away, until he says:

“They... uh, they just lost their mother. And they don’t know.”

He takes his wedding ring off, twirls it, and admires it in sadness.

Tears welled up, “And I just lost my wife.”

He puts the ring back on.

“I’m sorry that today, we don’t know how to act.”

The woman is stunned. She has no words. After a few moments, she says, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The older woman returns to her table with her friend. She sits down and looks out the window, as if searching for answers.

Her friend looks at her. “What happened?”

She ignores her, but not intentionally.

She calls the waitress over. “Put that man’s ticket on my tab. And please send over two scoops of ice cream... wait, no, three scoops.”

“Sure thing,” says the waitress.

She looks back out the window, caressing the necklace that carries her deceased husband’s ring. She’s in tears. She looks at her friend.

“Look at us. Just two old hens, bitter at brunch.”

Video of this dialogue.

I’ve preached kindness many times.

Why?

Because we’re fallible, we don’t need to be taught this, we need to be reminded.

Everyone is fighting something we can’t see. Tears and cries go muted because, for one reason or another, we have to hold it together. For ourselves, and for everyone watching.

Sometimes it’s hard to hold back the tears, but we do anyway.

So keep this in your back pocket: a kind word, a smile, a small act…it can travel further than you’ll ever know.

I’ve seen it.
I’ve lived it.
I am not alone in this.

Here is a past story from the drive-thru. The interesting thing about our encounter is that she remembered me when I saw her again almost six months later. People may forget your name or what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel.

Be kind to kind people. Be kind to unkind people. Not because they deserve it, but because you deserve to keep that place of compassion awake in you, always.

Maya Angelou once said there’s a place inside each of us that must stay untouched, pristine and protected from anyone who’d curse it or wear it down. That may be the very place, she said, where we go to meet God.

Whether that place exists in the fields of beyond or not, I know that kindness is something available now, and forever.

With love,
Anand

I am currently reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. The current chapter struck me, reminding me of a superpower we all possess. Maybe some of us have deployed it; maybe you have not.

Let’s get to it.

Abraham Lincoln almost died because of a letter.

Yes, a letter. Words printed mint fresh off the press, published in a Springfield newspaper in 1842. He was targeting James Shields, a political rival. The town laughed. The torment was satirical, which only adds fuel to the fire.

I still don’t understand why people heckle comedians. You are going to lose.

Shields didn’t laugh. He tracked down Lincoln and challenged him to a duel. Cavalry broadswords. Lincoln took lessons, showed up at a sandbar in the Mississippi River ready to fight, and right before it started, the duel was called off.

That day gave Lincoln something he wasn’t ready for, but needed.

Funny how life plays little games like that.

From that day forward, Lincoln vowed never to publicly criticize anyone again. That single choice helped make him one of the greatest leaders this country has ever seen.

Fast forward to the Civil War. General Meade had Robert E. Lee cornered. Lee was trapped against the flooded Potomac with nowhere to go. Similar to how Leonidas and his Spartan men, pushed Xerxes’ Persian army to the edge of a cliff where they had only two choices, either jump from a cliff or die by sword.

Lincoln sent direct orders to Meade. Attack. End this. He hesitated and Lee escaped.

Lincoln was furious. On the verge of victory, the war suddenly had no end in sight. He sat down and wrote a letter. The kind you write when your hands are trembling and your internal chaos needs somewhere to go.

He never sent it. They found it sealed in a drawer when he died.

He knew sending it would stir resentment in an already battered infantry. Meade was on the front lines. Lincoln wasn’t dodging bullets. Preserving Meade’s trust mattered more than releasing his disappointment.

Broken relationships don’t win wars. They don’t fix friendships or families either.

I thought about Lincoln a lot this week.

I have written that letter many times. A fresh college-ruled notepad and a .7mm pencil. The paper holds my battles, my pencil is my bayonet.

I’ve written about the people closest to me.

Things I wouldn’t dare say to their faces.

Things that have caused my soul to stir.

Writing is more fruitful than wallowing. The physical act of putting feelings on paper releases them. It’s letting go of things that shouldn’t occupy space in your mind and heart.

We all write those letters. Most of us just hit send. I just don’t.

In my forties, I have seen some things. And I have learned that preserving my inner peace is paramount above everything else.

Lincoln learned something most of us spend a lifetime resisting . That the most powerful thing you can do with anger is choose what you do next. Not because the other person deserves your restraint. But because you do.

From his Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, weeks before the war ended:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Charity in this sense means grace.

It isn’t weakness. It’s the hardest thing a human being can practice.

Anyone can retaliate.

Anyone can send the letter.

Anyone can assert dominance over the timid.

But to look at someone who failed you and choose grace anyway, that is a trained muscle. I am still perfecting it.

Lincoln had a favorite saying: “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

I had to look up what gall was. People spoke more eloquently in the past. Gall is bile. Bitter. It repels. Honey draws things in. Even a small act of kindness can draw people into the web of grace.

So write. Write your feelings, your wrongdoings, the wrongdoings of others. Write with no pretense and only to fulfill your soul and release what puts you in a place of unrest.

As for Lincoln, he never got to see the peace he preserved. John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford’s Theatre just days after Lee’s surrender.

Think about that.

A man who spent decades learning to fold the letter. Who swallowed his pride on a Mississippi sandbar. Who watched general after general fail him and said nothing. Who held a fractured, bleeding country together not with force, but with restraint.

Gone before he could witness what that restraint built.

There is something both heartbreaking and heroic in that. The work of becoming who we are meant to be is rarely witnessed by the one doing the becoming.

We plant.

Others harvest.

The Zen teacher plants the seed, steps back, and disappears. One day the student finds the answer, and feels as though it was his own all along. The teacher is long gone. But the harvest happened because of him.

That is Lincoln. He didn’t lecture the country on grace. He modeled it quietly, daily, at great personal cost.

The lesson didn’t land in his lifetime. It landed in ours.

Lincoln didn’t send the letter.

Not every feeling needs an audience. Not every wound needs a weapon. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is feel it fully, write and let it go.

Fold the letter. Put it in the drawer.

Save the relationship.

Trust the long game.

Even if you never live to see it pay off.

Lincoln didn’t.

That’s humility.

That’s just being Honest Abe.

With love,

Anand

It’s the memories we gather that will sustain us when loved ones leave. It’s like a fruit tree that we’ve built with those we’ve lost, and only at the time of death do we start nourishing ourselves with what we’ve created together.

The trips, the late-night laughs that cause Heimlich-worthy hemorrhages, the energy we can feel even when they are not here, keep me in awe. With every walk down memory lane, we laugh while creating a trail of tears.

There is no preparation for death.

Other than birth, it’s the most important day of our lives. One being when we open our eyes to the world for the first time, and the latter is when we close them to the world, for the last time.

We all have loss.
Eventually, we will lose more.
It’s the hardest thing to overcome.

Even those who have faith in something after don’t know for sure. Why else does death feel so permanent? If I knew for certain that I would see my mother again, I would not think about her as fondly as I do.

As far as I know, the material body, its dreams, egocentric ways, and suffering die when we do.

Is there anything after?

I sure hope so, and I’m in the camp of believing there is, even if it’s grounded in delusion.

Grief, which is very real, also brings about hope. Hope that one day, maybe, there can be some reason for the circle of love and loss.

When we lose someone we love, the welcomed kindness from others is reassuring and extremely important, but after the dust settles and the traffic starts moving again, we are left sitting on a bench, just watching the world whiz on by.

When my mother passed away, my whole world was torn. She was one of the most important people in my life. The person whom I called multiple times a day for no reason at all. We bickered, we laughed… she was just a joy to be around. How I wished to take care of her as she aged, but sadly, life isn’t fair.

It just isn’t.

I wish I could tell you otherwise.

We have all worn the badge of loss, and as we live longer, more loss will come. I know I am stating the obvious, but putting it down in words makes it more visceral, and I strongly feel it’s something more people should contemplate. It will, at the very least, make you think twice about how you treat yourself and others, because this existence is finite with an unknown expiration date.

No one hands you a manual for this. But grief has taught me a few things along the way.

Things I wish someone had told me.

Grief doesn’t arrive on schedule. It ambushes you.

Grief didn’t hit me at the funeral. Sure, there were tears. It didn’t even hit me months after Mom passed away. No, grief hit me when I drove by her apartment years later. When my cousin sent me pictures of her before I was born. It’s when I went through my storage and found a mala (prayer beads) my mother gave me. 108 of them, symbolizing the 108 energy channels that meet at the heart chakra. The 12 zodiac signs, when multiplied by the 9 planets, make 108. She never got into the details about why, but would say, “All energy is aligned, son, and everything has already been written.”

So I listen. Perhaps death was destined, but it still feels like an ambush. Those moments when you can’t control your tears, where you sob uncontrollably, belching sounds that seem at odds with you, it’s healing. The ambush of grief will hit us time and time again. Each time, it doesn’t get easier or harder. It’s a song that you listen to now and then, and without knowing how or why, you can recite the chorus just like the first time you heard it.

You start grieving the future, not just the past.

She always wanted to be a grandmother. When she passed away, my sisters and I each had a child in succession. Even when we talk today, we talk about her. How much she would have loved to be here. How my siblings and I would fight over her, “You had Mom last month, it’s my turn.” How she would love the fact that I bought a farm, reminiscent of her home in Fiji. Country living. How she would sit with my wife and daughter on a chatai (mat made from natural fibers), cutting fresh green long beans, laughing about something silly, and drinking hot chai. The mere images that I conjure, that will never see the light of day, bring their own tears to sight.

I used to think imagining her in moments she’ll never see was a kind of torture I was putting myself through. Now I think it’s the opposite. It’s grief’s way of keeping her present, instead of letting her slide into the past for good.

Some may say it’s not healthy to imagine what can never be, but I still feel that it’s grief doing its bidding, so we can continue to heal.

Sometimes, the future of what could never be anymore gives us a sliver of something real in our imaginations. With matters of grief, who’s to say what’s real?

You start to forget, and that’s its own grief.

We cremated Mom. Just as the material body of those we loved burns to ashes, the memories eventually become more fragmented. The puzzle pieces break. We are left to chase the pieces until they themselves start disappearing. The image of Mom is very alive, but her voice is less apparent. The songs that would make me cry, rainfalls are drying up. Sometimes I cry just because I am afraid of forgetting.

But it happens.

Sometimes I feel like a terrible son, but I forgive myself, because that is life. When my mother’s father, my grandfather, passed, it was an onslaught of grief for the first few years, but later, as I got older, my mother was able to tell those same stories more clearly, with more enthusiasm, because the undertow of grief and sadness, although not gone, was less.

You just want to hold as much of the person you lost as possible, but just like all things, what He giveth, He taketh away, and that’s just the way it is.

I don’t know what the point of my article was, and to be honest, I don’t care. Sometimes it helps to know that you are not alone in the journey of grief and loss. I am just one person who lost someone special, who’s sad.

There are a billion others that have shared the same fate, but at the same time, in a billion years, there will never be another like Mom.

There will never be another like yours.

Whoever they might be.

God rest their souls.

I was going to make this a paid article, but it touched me deeply, and I wanted to make sure I shared it with anyone who stumbles across it. If you like articles like this, consider subscribing. And if you already have, consider becoming a paid member, where for $7/month, you get 4 additional posts a month where I dive deeper into the things that drive life's emotions, so we can feel connected and not alone.

With love,
Anand

Public Enemy once said, “Don’t let a win get to your head, or a loss get to your heart.”

They were one of the most influential groups of hip-hop’s golden era. A time when many artists used their lyrics to explore consciousness, politics, history, and self-knowledge.

The quote has always reminded me of the Middle Way, a philosophy central to the East. It encourages us to avoid becoming attached to either triumph or despair.

It’s a lesson that has stayed with me for years.

Yet my own interpretation has become a little more complicated over time.

If I were to rewrite Public Enemy’s lyric, I might say:

“I am wary when I win, and understanding when I lose.”

It’s not as poetic. But it feels closer to my experience.

When good things happen, I accept them, but I don’t fully trust the wins, because getting attached to things going your way can drum up its own problems.

When things go badly, disappointment still hurts. But it feels more familiar. More normal for how things have tended to go in my life.

Rather than resisting it, I try to understand it. I speak to myself in silence. I look for meaning in the setback. I ask what it is trying to teach me.

It’s become my default setting. And it’s helped me stay out of the spiral that confusion weaves.

Lauryn Hill, another artist whose music shaped my younger years, once suggested that every day is judgment day. Not in the biblical sense, but in the sense that our daily choices reveal who we are.

Every decision, every reaction, every act of kindness or selfishness becomes a small judgment of our character.

We are constantly writing the story of who we are becoming.

Disappointments are abundant and ripe for the picking. In a world like that, it’s tempting to join the chorus of fear, outrage, and cynicism. It’s easy to become another voice predicting disaster, another person falling prey to the herd of fear-mongering.

You may find yourself living around constant disappointments from others, even when you try not to let that energy follow you. It’s why the news is still a booming business. CNN and Fox have morphed into microcosms of the same song.

The timeless Dickens line that I have echoed before speaks to this:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It can be inserted into almost any moment in history.

For many people, right now feels like the worst of times. During Vietnam, it was then. For others, it was WWII.

The song stays on repeat no matter where humanity finds itself.

There is a lot in life worthy of disappointment. Most of it is out of our control.

How we respond is our choice. Even saying you don’t have a choice in how you respond is, itself, a choice. We choose what we eat, what we consume, and a multitude of other things — but during times of uncertainty, we unconsciously justify our feelings as happenstance.

Disciplining our disappointments is casting a courageous net, day in and day out.

It’s knowing full well that some things are destined to be terrible, and that’s okay. It’s okay for things to be difficult.

And still, we keep casting — trying to catch the fish of hope, resilience, patience, compassion, and ultimately, love.

What has been working for me may not work for you.

But I want to give you a glimmer of shared hope, coming from a man who has lost more than he’s won. A man who has been broken, again and again.

What’s proved beneficial for me is simply talking to myself without words. It’s funny how we can speak to ourselves in silence — how we can reflect and contemplate. It’s intriguing how, with patience, that voice guides us.

You probably already do this sparingly. Spend more time if you can.

It’s more difficult now, because we can reach for our devices and find refuge from our boredom.

But I’d argue that boredom is where wisdom waits.

Having a conversation with ourselves can be useful. It’s where I find my higher self — the self that is one with that tune. The name Lao Tzu describes as going by ten thousand names, but still isn’t it.

I still don’t know who or what that is.

It’s when I go deeper into this that I can discipline my disappointments. It’s when I can see them differently — not as things against me, but instead, for me.

I still see myself as a child sitting at a desk in an empty classroom, writing down what is being written on the chalkboard.

Who the writer is has not been revealed. But the lessons have.

One of the lessons is that true value in life is not in getting things.

It’s hinged on what I can live without.

With love,
Anand

I saw a video recently from the actor Bob Odenkirk, known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but most remembered by my wife and me for his single episode appearance on The Office.

In an interview, he was asked who he’s most jealous of. Without hesitation, he said, “Anyone with young children at home, growing up.”

He said it like a man who knows what it is to search for meaning, and to find it, and then watch it grow up and leave. I am beginning to understand him, but not entirely. He’s lived the life of fatherhood that I am just starting.

As Autumn grows, it becomes more and more apparent to me what matters. I’ve been fortunate to spend every day with her since she was born. Watching her grow, tell jokes, and do funny things like touch my bald head.

Daddy, your head is cold. She pats it and runs her tiny hands across my stubble.

At the park, she sometimes wants to do things alone. Other times she turns around. Daddy, help me! Daddy, Daddy!! I’ve noticed the moments when she’s shy around other kids but still wants to connect, and how she keeps one eye on me, just to know I’m there. A parent right now, but later will be a fallback friend. She doesn’t know yet that I’ll always be that. Just here, waiting, whenever she needs it.

Mornings are the best. She smiles and starts talking, her mind and mouth in a constant race.

Daddy, I want breakfast. Once upon a time, there was a dog who went searching for mousees. This is my baby horse, and I want ice cream.

Some mornings, I’m in the bathroom shaving, and she’s right beside me, using the cardboard from the toilet paper roll as a makeshift telescope. Daddy, I see you, haha!

Parents whose children have already grown look at our young family with such reverence. It’s not envy. It’s a look that says I wish I could go back. You can see them gazing into the distance, their adult children suddenly small again in their minds.

We all have a version of that look. Some place, some person, some time we’d return to if we could. Children live inside that place naturally. They haven’t left it yet. And if you’re lucky enough to be near one, yours or anyone else’s, they take you back there with them, just for a moment.

My intention with these reflections on fatherhood isn’t only for parents. It’s for anyone trying to find their way back to innocence. Because my daughter’s innocence helps me find and perhaps preserve my own. In a world full of discouragement, it’s encouraging to know that you can still laugh and be amazed by the simplest things.

Maybe the simple things matter most because they take us back to a time when we were children, too.

With love,
Anand

Love is not a feeling. It’s an act of will.

Those words belong to M. Scott Peck, from his landmark work The Road Less Traveled. A book that doesn’t ease you in gently. It opens with three of the most truthful and devastating words a person can read:

Life is difficult.

And during those times, when it is, I feel a force against me.

Also during those times, the right song comes on, or I wake up earlier than usual and find the sky just waking up, hues radiant in pink, orange, and reds. My eyes meet tears in the early dewdrops.

Because the realization keeps finding me, again and again, quietly and without warning:

Falling in love is not a choice. But keeping love is.

Hardship finds all marriages. We cannot divorce our egos.

But we can forgive, try to understand, let our guards down, and invite love.

What I have learned about marriage, I did not learn in the good times. I learned it in the hard ones. Here is what those years taught me.

Love is an act of will. We choose it daily.

Since the first day I met her, that has been true. In the beginning, it’s a flurry of feelings, an unbridled energy, the rush of being mesmerized by another human being. But after the song ends and the lights come on, we return to the mountain to climb once again, except this time, we have a companion.

Even though love is a gift, it takes effort, patience, and compassion to sustain it.

These are not feelings. These are decisions.

When she’s in pain, it’s never the biggest things that make an impact. It’s always the smallest.

The cup of lemon ginger tea I brew. The heating pad I place on her chest. The warm towel on her head. The foot rub she didn’t have to ask for.

There have been many times when her pain was so severe that we both just cried in silence. No words. Sometimes those moments speak louder than anything I could have said. There is something I’ve slowly learned about silence: it can heal. We need more of it in this noisy world.

The days I have been in pain, she rallies the troops, her, my daughter, and my pup, and they provide hugs and kisses. If there are things I wish I could take with me when I eventually depart, it’s moments like these.

I imagined marriage to be storybook love, the kind I had seen in movies, replicated amongst friends and family. Two healthy souls doing ordinary, beautiful things together, like going to movies, concerts, and trips. The simple pleasures most people enjoy freely and without a second thought.

Those things were taken from us.

So I grieved. I grieved the marriage I had imagined. I had to let it go before I could truly show up for the one standing in front of me.

What I found on the other side of that grief was something I didn’t expect: a love that is not a dream. Struggle and sacrifice have become the language of our lives together. And oddly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because a storybook doesn’t prepare you for anything real, it only teaches you to expect. And expectation, unchecked, is the quiet enemy of a real marriage.

Acceptance, no matter the outcome, is its savior.

When we sold our first home in Oregon, we left more than a house. We left the life we were building, the friends we had made, the extended family we had grown close to, and the version of ourselves we thought we were becoming.

We had envisioned a life, but…

circumstances changed course, and we left everything behind. Tagore once said, “If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”

For a long time, I kept looking back. But then I made the decision not to anymore.

The turning point, the exact moment I stopped, came when I took leave from work for a few months and watched my wife’s health recover in ways that felt like mercy. Those months were powerful. They became the foundation of my understanding of an illness that so many still misunderstand.

It was there that everything I had read about nature finally became true. Literature, things I would feel in my soul, words that I could drink from a cup, became daily practices.

John Muir wrote, “Keep close to Nature’s heart... and spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

It washed our spirits clean. It washed our health clean, too, and made room for recovery.

The battle since then has not been linear. But after half a decade of struggle, we are on the right course. And when that course will be fully corrected is no longer the goal.

We have made peace with the process.

Emerson said it best: “Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.”

In a world built on instant gratification, that is something I have to remind myself of daily. The best things in life do not arrive quickly. They arrive slowly, quietly, and only to those willing to wait.

I have learned to live with pain. And to dance with the good times when the song plays.

To keep love, communication matters deeply. And sometimes the greatest lesson communication teaches is this.

Be still.

Not still, as in dormant. Not aloof or absent. Still, as in calm and present with intention.

When she’s in pain. An internal voice I have come to trust.

It says:

She is hurting. You cannot fix everything. She needs your presence, your touch, your attention, and your action. She is a human being who chose to love you. This is where your love is tested. Anand, you always wanted real love. Here it is. It doesn’t get any more real than this.

In those moments of self-talk, I know it is the best of me speaking, helping me overcome the hurdle of self-sabotage, so I can focus my energy on protecting someone I love from further pain.

There are no words spoken, just the ones within my heart.

Spending time reflecting and contemplating my existence, alone in silence, has always been loyal in giving me the answers I need.

In my heart, in my prayers, I hold a place for my wife. A place that only I keep for her. For how I see her, have seen her, and envision her to be at her very best.

This is different from expectation.

Expectation is a demand dressed up as hope. This is something else entirely. It is holding space for someone who is not ready to see their own true nature. Too worn down by pain to remember who they are.

I saw her again for the first time in Death Valley this past winter.

Within days of arriving, someone who had been tired, fatigued, and getting worse began making a steady recovery. Nature heals isn't just an aphorism. It is the highest form of truth, physically and spiritually.

The place I hold for her in my heart looks like this.

Sand dunes, smooth in texture into the distance, mountains rising behind them, and my wife running. Sweating. Feeling like herself again. Autumn and I are embracing her after the run. I have the grill ready for some grub.

That is who she is. This is what I have experienced. That is who I am waiting for, every single day, until she can find her way back to herself.

I have told my wife this many times, and I will say it again here:

I would rather be miserable with you than happy with anyone else.

Because I have learned that love is not about being happy. Happiness visits us, yes, in bouts, in seasons, in unexpected moments. But love is more than the trips we take, the memories we gather, and the nice dinner out.

Love is carrying your wife to the ER because she cannot walk. It is selling everything, hitching a truck to an RV, and driving toward the unknown together. It is the fight before bed, and finding each other in the middle of the night anyway, arms reaching across the dark, forgiving one another.

For what, you may ask?
It doesn’t even matter.

So tomorrow, I will still choose her.

That is the act of will Peck was talking about. Not the grand gesture. Not the feeling. Just the quiet, daily, unshakeable choice.

It is a testament of a will that only grows stronger as the days go by.

I did not find the perfect love. That doesn’t exist. What does exist is the ability to wake up, day in and day out, and say, yes. I still choose her.

And when you choose to stay in the heat of the battle, you are also choosing yourself.

I wish everyone the will to endure. To sit with pain. To love despite hardship. And to visit the place of silence often, so the chatter of thoughts can subside, allowing your soul to speak words to you that you may already know, but still need to hear.

With love,
Anand

We see it on packages of processed foods: beautiful colors, images of health, maybe a tree bark or something actually found in nature. It’s comforting to see it as the last ingredient, almost as if putting it at the end gives it a smaller stature. “There are only a few natural flavors.”

In the late 1970s, the FDA came up with the term natural flavors to differentiate artificial foods. The definition hasn’t changed since, but the process of how to take something natural, extract its essence, add solvents and other chemicals, and combine it with other things that have little or no bearing on the original ingredient, that process is here and common practice.

We actually don’t see the term artificial anymore, except when talking about data centers and GPTs that will eventually run us off the road and stop spam mail.

Food companies have gotten smarter. We marvel at stealth bombers, but I’d argue corn is the more impressive weapon. At least a bomb is honest about what it does. Corn does it slowly, while you’re alive, and you enjoy every bite. The zombie apocalypse is among us. It just tastes like a snack.

It’s the cash crop. I’ve seen more of it than anything else on my travels back and forth across the United States. Corn can be fermented to produce citric acid, which most people assume comes from citrus. It doesn’t anymore. Almost all citric acid in packaged food is corn-derived. Same with lactic acid, xanthan gum, and many vitamin C supplements labeled as ascorbic acid.

Through fermentation alone, food companies can list every ingredient on a package without saying the word corn once.

Using legalese and extraction processes to dupe the masses, natural flavors are showing up more and more. It’s getting harder for food companies in our era of information, which gives me some hope. However, the truth remains, natural flavors are just artificial.

I walk through the food aisles, and the brands I do enjoy are starting to have them more and more. Just because natural flavors appear at the end of the ingredient list doesn’t make them a small part of what you’re eating. It could very well be that 99% of the packaged food you’re buying is natural flavors and 1% of something actually recognizable.

This is where Plato walks in.

In the allegory of the cave, prisoners are chained facing a wall. Behind them, a fire burns, and shadows of objects fall across the wall in front of them. The prisoners have never seen anything else.

They name the shadows. They argue about them. They build an entire reality around them.

The strawberry in your yogurt is a shadow. Your brain receives a signal and says strawberry. Believes it completely. The signal was engineered to produce exactly that response, derived from some source material through a process no label is required to describe. You didn’t consent to the shadow. You were never given enough information to know one was being cast.

But it makes me think, what else toes the line with natural flavors?

I’ve realized that it’s many things.

The news outlets we so blindly follow are their own kind of natural flavoring. A headline engineered to produce a feeling. Outrage and fear all in a few words. People are content with just an appetizer of information. The feeling of being informed without the substance of it. That’s a natural flavor.

The content we consume works the same way. Thirty-second clips optimized to trigger the same reward centers as genuine connection, genuine humor, and genuine beauty. The algorithm has done what food scientists did, isolated the active compound, removed the rest, and delivered a concentration of something nature never intended. You get the hit without the thing itself.

And like addicts, we keep coming back. Because, as Chris Rock said about big pharma, there is no money in the cure, the money is in the comeback.

Boy oh boy, do we keep coming back.

Real things are becoming less and less, and when you find something real, it’s starting to feel nostalgic. Like water in Waterworld. I hope we don’t get there, but if we do, please save me a pair of those ears Kevin Costner was wearing.

Laughs aside, we need:

Real reading.
Real conversation.
Real food.

The original ingredients are still out there, but it takes effort to find them and make them delicious, and most of us have been so conditioned by the concentrated version that the real thing almost seems bland by comparison.

That’s the part that stays with me when I walk those food aisles. It’s not anger exactly. It’s more like recognition. The same machinery that puts natural flavors in everything has been running on our attention, our time, and our understanding of the world for just as long.

We just never saw the ingredient list.

So what now?

It’s simple. And incredibly hard at the same time.

For food, eat things that don’t have the capacity to be labeled natural or artificial. These are usually the things with no labels at all. We know this. I know this. It’s hard because In-N-Out is so good, but I still try.

For information, consume less of it and talk to people more. Let shared experience be the thing that shapes how you see the world, not a headline written to make you feel something awful.

For life in general, we don’t need more connections. We need communities that actually show up for each other.

Take more time to cook your food with the people you love. Spend more time around the dinner table, watching each other get older, hopefully wiser, and easier on ourselves.

The original ingredient was always each other.

We just forgot to read the label.

With love,
Anand

“I’m American.”

I was waiting for the obligatory follow-up that most immigrants face.

“No, but where are you really from?”

There it was.

“I was born in Hayward, California. But my family is from the Fiji Islands, and my ancestral roots are from India.”

I am not even sure why I say “but” in that sentence.

This is how I usually answer when asked about my lineage. I used to throw in the Fiji card to seem more exotic. Less curry, more white sandy beach, because too much spice too soon can cause heartburn for some.

I used to say I am Indo-Fijian. I stopped when a Native Fijian woman once told me:

“Your people are Indian. You are NOT Fijian. The British borrowed you from India and left you here.”

She said it with a certain vitriol that made my confused identity even more apparent.

Truth be told, she was not wrong.

The Girmit, or the agreement, was the name given to the indenture system that brought Indians to Fiji. British and Australian colonists recruited illiterate Indian farmers with promises of a better life, a short journey, and a fair wage. What they did not tell them was that they were signing themselves into decades of indentured servitude for pennies on the dollar, in a land that was not India and would never quite become home.

I imagine that is what the first Indians who set foot on that island felt. A new land far from everything familiar, uncertain if they would ever return to the families they had left behind. The pursuit was for a better life. The undelivered promise was pain.

However shattered that past may be, the first generation of immigrants from Fiji to America, people like my parents, my aunts and uncles, became nostalgic for their childhood on the island. They look at Fiji with a certain reverence. Because an attachment to land, community, and everything you have ever known is important. It connects us to ourselves, to each other, to something larger. Where we grow up and who we are around shape us during our formative years.

I understand that.

But the pride of the island nation never fully stuck with me.

The times I visited as a child were beautiful. With family, we would sit huddled in the living room on a concrete floor, the humid tropical air coming through the windows, coconut trees in the front yard. Eating fresh clams, also known as nakai, cooked with Indian spices and small Fijian chillies that could send you to the moon, a tomato chutney with a sweetness you can only get right off the vine, and a cold, refreshing pop that just made my day.

Playing football barefoot with the neighbors and cousins on my grandfather Dewa’s land, just to fit in with the others. Eating sugarcane, the very cash crop that had brought us here, every bite a rush of sweet and crunch I can still taste today. Tebeeta, the local native Fijian horseman, took me out on horseback through the village. All memories I am fond of today.

The people, both native Fijian and Indian, were kind, hospitable, and full of smiles. Despite the tangled past, they tolerated each other and sometimes even embraced one another. However, interracial marriage among natives and Indians was, and still is, rare and looked down upon from both sides.

And yet despite everything, I felt something was missing. It did not feel like home.

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As a lifelong hoops fan, the NBA Conference Finals are when basketball gets intense and exciting. At the time this article was published, the Oklahoma City Thunder had just suffered a devastating loss to the San Antonio Spurs in double overtime in Game 1 of the series. The first team to win 4 games will go to the NBA championship finals. The deciding factor, unanimously, was Victor Wembanyama, also known as Wemby for short.

At 7’4” and only 22 years old, Wemby, who is French, carries a poise, skill, and grit that feels borrowed from decades of experience he has yet to live. Watching him play, you find yourself reaching for the archives of past giants that towered over the NBA. Names like Wilt, Russell, Kareem, Robinson, O’Neal, and Olajuwon stand out. And yet here he is. Something the game has not seen before.

My cousin mentioned offhand that Wemby had trained with the Shaolin monks. I was intrigued, to say the least, since Eastern wisdom has had a positive impact on my life.

Last June, Wembanyama spent 10 days at the Shaolin Temple in Henan province, China. His visit was kept strictly confidential, but hundreds of fans gathered outside the temple the day he arrived anyway.

What follows draws from a remarkable account published in Sixth Tone by Master Yan’an, the Shaolin master who trained Wembanyama personally.

The first thing Wemby did when he arrived was ask his master a question.

“Do I have to shave my head to become a true kung fu practitioner?”

Yes, Yan’an told him. Without hesitation, Wemby sat down on the stone steps beside a statue and let the master shave off his wavy brown hair with a razor. No ritual. No audience. Yan’an knew immediately his intentions were completely sincere.

Before training began, Wemby outlined three objectives with his master:

• To improve his physical coordination and control in complex conditions

• To explore conditioning modalities beyond traditional training methods.

• To enhance his mental focus and inner stability.

As Yan’an noted, this young man knew exactly what he wanted. A lesson we can all take with us. Some of us don’t truly know what we want in life. With matters of love, careers, or anything, we are at times lost. Clarity cuts noise. A lesson I am just beginning to actualize.

Wemby’s Daily Schedule at the Temple

Shaolin monks live their lives with regimented discipline.

• 4:30 AM — Wake up

• 5:00 AM — Morning chanting with the monks

• 7:00–11:00 AM — Physical training

• 11:00 AM — Lunch in complete silence

• 12:00–3:00 PM — Rest, reading philosophy, leisure time, with no technology

• 3:00–5:00 PM — Shaolin 13 Fist Form martial arts training

• Evening — Group meditation, 100 monks, complete silence

• 9:00 PM — Lights out. Phone untouched. Disconnected from the world.

Enlightened in Darkness

Toward the end of his time at the temple, Wemby asked his master whether there was a way to train his awareness. Yan’an arranged a nighttime hike to Bodhidharma Cave in the mountains behind the temple. The climb takes one to two hours on a steep, rugged path with no lighting at night.

They set out at dusk. Everyone turned off their flashlights. They relied only on faint moonlight and the sense of touch to feel their way forward. The only sounds were insects and footsteps. Wemby walked in the middle of the group, with monks in front and behind, because the path had a sheer drop in some sections.

Yan’an remembers the sound of his breathing. It was steady and deep throughout, without the slightest hint of panic. He took each step with exceptional care, feeling each foothold with his hands before committing his weight.

An hour later, they reached the cave. Wemby sat cross-legged on the flat ground and began to meditate.

“In that moment, I saw a completely different Victor Wembanyama — no longer the dazzling NBA superstar but a man quietly seeking inner peace.”

— Master Yan’an

His time at the temple made me reflect on my own life. How connected we are to the world, and yet still in darkness, unable to find awareness. The irony is very real.

Some of the Shaolin wisdom I have been living without knowing it. Maybe you have been, too.

Each section below is a short description of the philosophy, followed by an example from my life. As you read, think about your own life and how this philosophy might add value to yours.

Shaolin Wisdom

The body is the temple. The body and mind are inseparable. Physical discipline is not the goal; it is the vehicle for something deeper.

My mornings have become somewhat sacred. I am up around 5:30 AM. A workout, time to read, take a walk, gather my thoughts, and write. It has become a discipline. I don’t always have access to a gym, especially on the road, so sometimes a workout is a jump rope and a patch of pavement for push-ups and squats. Nothing is ever perfect, but the discipline is sticking.

Wu De or Martial Morality. Will, endurance, perseverance, courage, and patience. Humility, sincerity, righteousness, trust, loyalty. You cannot separate what you do from who you are.

Suffering is relative, but my own suffering has shaped me. The virtues listed in Wu De are ingrained in me, characteristics I aim for daily. It has come from life’s experience. For me, morality has come from seeing everything done wrong. My life test was to see the path laid down before me and change directions.

Chan or Presence. No past, no future. Only this moment, this breath, this step.

The monks train for years to achieve being present. Being in the moment, echoed by past saints and preached by many, goes unheard by our deaf ears. We are here for a certain amount of time, with a surprise expiration date. I keep this wisdom in my back pocket, especially when life feels stacked against me. I take life slower, one breath, one step, and one day at a time. Painting a vision is important, but seeing your vision in real time, step by step, flowering before you can unlock something special and unique for each of us.

Ku and Embrace suffering. Suffering is not avoided. It is leaned into. What does not break you refines you.

Being a caretaker to my wife has made me the man I have always wanted to be. There were many roadblocks in our marriage. Financial woes, illness, and things that have decimated families and caused anger and resentment. We have seen it firsthand. I did not let it break me or break us. Maybe you are going through something grave in your life right now. Just remember, the setbacks are redefining and refining a better version of you.

The invisible years. Most monks train in complete obscurity before anyone outside the monastery sees them. The work happens in private. The mastery appears in public.

My life’s mastery will be writing. I have made the decision. It is something I am passionate about, something I believe I was put on this earth for, and I will continue to focus on this discipline. However, beyond writing, the mastery that I am focused on is how to live in peace with myself every day. I think that is something worth striving for.

Beginner’s mind. No matter how advanced, return to curiosity. Return to openness. Return to not knowing.

At some point, especially with age, we are more likely to give up on hope and consider our best years already lived. Having that beginner’s mind, knowing full well that you don’t know everything and that you can get better every day, is everything. I hope to carry this well into my senior years. I am grateful the seed has been planted. It’s never too late or too early.

Nothing is wasted. Every experience, every hardship, every failure is material for the practice. Nothing that happens to you is separate from your path. It is all the path.

You may have had a horrible relationship. Your children may not talk to you. You have not forgiven your parents. You feel that some of your life has been wasted. I used to beat myself up about this. I wish I were further ahead. I wish, I wish, I wish. But I don’t do that to myself anymore. Everything that has happened has made you who you are. Lean into those hardships, while knowing they don’t define you, and use the past as knowledge on how to live a better moment, and then the next.

Selfless devotion.

Being a father and caring for my wife during the hardest times in her life is a duty I am grateful for. You don’t have to look far to find selfless devotion. It can happen right now. No matter what you are doing, if done with a pure mind and honest intention, it can be devotion. A genuine smile to a stranger is a form of devotion. I see you, stranger, as you see me. Two souls in this momentary lapse in time, trying to figure it out without messing it up.

Yan’an described what Shaolin gave Wemby that NBA training could not.

“His previous program was like swimming in a pool. Professional, efficient, and standardized. Shaolin is like swimming in the sea, exposed to wind, waves, hidden currents, and uncertainty.”

Most of us are trained for the pool. But life keeps putting us in the ocean.

The monks train for the ocean. Not by avoiding the waves, but by learning to breathe inside them.

Whenever I think of Wemby now, the image paired with his amazing athletic prowess is also a young man sitting cross-legged at Bodhidharma Cave in the darkness.

I am still looking for that cave. And perhaps that search never ends.

Maybe that is what the writing is for me. Maybe something different for you.

I am still climbing.

I know you are too.

With love,
Anand

Source: The account of Victor Wembanyama’s time at the Shaolin Temple is drawn from an article originally published in Sixth Tone, written by Master Yan’an as told to reporter Dong Sheng, translated and republished from Fir Record.

On long trips, we keep an eclectic playlist. Lately, Alicia, Autumn, and I have been deep into Indian music. Songs that bring therapy to our long drives.

Whenever Love You, Zindagi comes on, Autumn can hardly contain herself. She screams the chorus from the top of her lungs in pure joy. An apple juice box spilling everywhere. Excitement that cannot be contained.

She keeps singing. We sing with her.

The song is Indian pop — upbeat, warm, and infectious in the best way possible. But underneath the rhythm, it is about something profound. Our relationship with life itself. Sometimes life holds your hand and walks with you. Sometimes you let go and walk alone. Both are part of the same relationship.

What your heart loves, greet it, say hi. What unsettles you, let it go, say bye. And maybe you said hi to things you should have said bye to a long time ago.

That is okay. We have all been there.

Children remind us of this without trying. They have not yet learned to hold on to what helps them or wave goodbye to what doesn’t.

They are still close to something pure, something the rest of us spend years trying to find our way back to.

I try to cherish everything about her. Her presence, her laugh, the way she moves through the world without hesitation. I want to give her that life, but cloaked in the awareness of my own mistakes, I know she will make hers too.

I will let her.

Autumn wears her Disney princess dresses everywhere. While at the playground, she tripped on it and went down hard. I moved toward her. She was already getting up.

“I’m okay, Dad,” she said. And kept playing.

She is two. She does not know yet how hard it will be to mean those words someday. I am in my 40s, and I am still learning.

Sometimes it is not even about what happens to us. It is about what we do after. Can we get up, dust ourselves off over and over again?

My daughter does not know what awaits her. The beautiful joys and new experiences she will have, but also the heartbreaks she will have to endure.

I have seen loss, heartbreak, illness, and an incredible amount of suffering. I am not alone in this. Some have it worse, some not so worse, but that was never the point.

My biggest lesson is also a question I pose to life.

Despite the heartbreak that is intertwined with joy. Despite the loss, I will blanket with love. Despite the tears that will fall even while I smile, can I still love you?

Yes, I can, life. I can still love you.

With love,
Anand

If you truly take a look at life, it’s one crazy predicament. Born into a foreign world, share in its many experiences, only to leave at a time and place that’s not of our choosing. It really puts the notion of free will into perspective.

Life is overwhelming at times, but would you rather it be underwhelming?

We like our eggs over-easy, we put our luggage in the overhead compartment so we can have more leg room, and we jump over things. Even Sebastian was wrong — life under the sea isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. You can’t even grill down there.

If you’re married, or work for someone, or have children, or know how to speak, for that matter, it’s better to overcommunicate than undercommunicate.

And if we are honest, no one wants to be under a bridge for a long period of time. Even the dead probably don’t want to be underground, even if the casket smells like mahogany. No one wants to be underappreciated, and if we spend too much time underwater, we die.

That doesn’t take away the fact that life is overwhelming.

You may have bills galore. You aren’t retired like you thought you’d be. People you trusted turned on you. Your children don’t need you anymore. You can’t eat dairy anymore, which is the biggest setback, in my opinion.

You have seen your life flash before you and think it’s too late. Too late to take that trip, to find love, to find a new career, to get in the best shape of your life.

It’s not.

It’s never too late, my friend.

Everyone in their own unique way is fighting a battle we know nothing about. Truth is, yes, life is overwhelming. It never wasn’t. We are overworked, and sometimes we overeat. Some more than others — raising my hand here.

But still, we secretly like over-the-top things. No one wants under-the-top things. Is that even possible?

What I am really trying to convey is that this thing we call life, and everything everyone has to deal with, is overwhelming. It’s hard, and it takes an incredible amount of courage to still wake up and live the best we can.

But we are. Breathing, feeling, crying, laughing, everything that builds streams of blood into our veins.

I’ve been in places with so much uncertainty. I have doubted myself again and again. I feel alone sometimes. I am overly sad at times, but still, I’d rather be that than under-sad.

Feeling anything strongly is something special. It’s life telling us there is fight left.

Keep punching.

The days when you feel overwhelmed, sometimes it’s okay to bask in your misery and know you have plenty of company, like yours truly.

You are not alone.

So take time and just laugh at it all. All that stuff — the minutiae, the surface-level things. You will be okay. Be like the cow, and laugh at it all, hysterically if you can, and jump over the moon.

And remember, you didn’t choose to land here, but you’re still here.

That speaks volumes.

With love,
Anand