In the Cherokee fable of two wolves, a grandfather talks to his grandson about leadership and life. “There is a fight inside of me between two wolves”, says the grandfather. “One is driven by anger, fear, jealousy and envy. The other is kind, sharing, joyful and optimistic”. “Which wolf will win?”, asks the child. The grandfather replies “The one that you feed”.

The Harvard psychologist David McClelland identified the need for power as key to understanding what drives leaders. Like the wolves, Power comes in two forms - personal power, the drive to act in our own self interest – and social power, where we draw strength by being in the service of others. McClelland found that the most effective leaders were high in social power. They focused their ambitions not on themselves, but in making others stronger and more capable. Social power unites others in the pursuit of compelling, shared objectives that are worthy of their best efforts. Which motive dominates depends on which one we feed.

We currently live in a world awash in personal power. Steven Miller, the Chief of Homeland Security said recently on a CNN interview “We live in a world that is governed by force … these are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”. The temptation of personal power is high, in part because it is highly addictive. Give someone dominance over others and regions of the brain linked to addiction kick in. Psychological studies have consistently shown that personal power inhibits self-reflection, promotes greed, decreases empathy and compassion and gets in the way of accurately understanding others.

Given this dominant model of leadership, it is not surprising that a recent Deloitte survey of Gen Z and Millennials found that only 6% said that their primary career goal is to reach a leadership position. If we want to develop future generations who want to seek leadership roles, we need to create the right conditions in which social power can thrive.

In South Africa’s notorious Robben Island prison is a limestone quarry. For 13 years Nelson Mandela along with other political prisoners would toil under the blinding sun hauling rocks, sometimes from one side of the quarry to the other, and then told to move them back again. Many were assaulted and tortured by their guards, who kept a watch high above the quarry pit.

Yet in these brutal conditions, the quarry also served as a clandestine classroom. Mandela and other leaders of the anti-apartheid movement would gather in small clusters and teach younger political prisoners, often poorly educated, about literature, philosophy and political theory, passing down the principles and values of their movement.

Mandela in his autobiography described himself as a life-long learner. His upbringing in the local chief’s court after his father’s death exposed him to the history and culture of his native tribe. He learned about its folklore and witnessed firsthand how complex civic decisions got made. These early experiences shaped how he saw himself and the responsibility of leaders to serve the needs of the people and empower others.

Mandella’s experiences suggest social power is built through three pillars. The first is community – the feeling that people are accepted and supported by a peer group they identify with. Research shows that social support in the learning process, be it from teachers who stimulate their interests and provide opportunities for peer mentorship to learn collaboratively, is essential for growing future leaders.

Second, is the importance of civic education – building understanding of how and why decisions get made in a civil society. A recent national survey of Canadian educators found that less than 25% of K-12 teachers had received any formal training in civic education, but that the vast majority agreed that their students wanted to discuss social issues.

Third, is the importance of liberal arts. In a 2023 New Yorker Article titled “The End of the English Major” author Nathan Heller notes that over the past decade the study of English and history at the university level has fallen by nearly a third. But even Ivey league universities with strong science and engineering pedigree are now recognizing that a liberal arts education improves oral and written communication and helps to answer essential questions about how to live a good life. Not surprisingly, at universities such as Berkley, humanities majors are among the happiest on campus.

The prison guards did not make it easy for Mandela and his fellow prisoners, forbidding them to speak to each other while in the quarry. So, Mandela asked a fellow prisoner to befriend one of the more hostile warders, himself poorly educated and steeped in government propaganda. Over time the strategy worked. The warder became more curious and less harsh as the prisoner explained about the desire for equal rights and a free society.

When you feed the right wolf, you create the conditions where social power can flourish and everyone can rise together.

Last Wednesday night we had family and friends over for the first night of Passover, which we postponed so we could watch the liftoff of the Artemis 2 rocket.

But a few hours earlier, I watched the live transmission of the astronauts as they made their way to the spacecraft and were strapped into their capsule. I was alone, watching, and to my surprise I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

I’m older than most people who were also witnessing the event. I remember being a star-struck 9-year-old, watching the Apollo 11 astronauts prepare for their historic flight to the moon in 1969.

I thought of the life I’ve lived since then: going to university and then graduate school, meeting my true-life companion Liz, raising two brilliant and beautiful daughters, building a career, saying goodbye to parents and relatives.

And through it all, retaining and cultivating that sense of awe whenever and as often as I can.

I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure the current crew of Artemis 2 were not alive when the first Apollo astronauts went to the moon.

Awe — what the crew, and the rest of us, felt this past week — is, I think, nature’s way of giving us a glimpse of immortality. For all of us privileged to be alive in this period of history, we may be the first generation to truly grasp what it means to be a conscious being, created by the universe, that can reflect on itself. A generation that, despite its challenges, has achieved through remarkable advances in science, some measure of wisdom that was unavailable to earlier ones.

As we grow older, we gain wisdom: the ability to step back and see the bigger patterns. Or, to paraphrase John Irving, to see all at once how the individual bricks of our experiences are part of a longer, unbroken rainbow that forms the story and purpose of our lives.

And as we age, there comes a time when there is less road in front of us than behind us. But in the broader context of the universe — one that created beings with the capacity to venture into the cosmos and reflect on their place within it — we come to realize that our limited lives unfold on an immense stage, and we are given the rare privilege of knowing it.

A radically different kind of mind

Octavia, a 2-year-old Giant Pacific octopus living at the Boston Aquarium was nearing the end of her short life. She was pale and was spending most of her time at the bottom of her tank. As Sy Montgomery describes in her book The Soul of An Octopus, Wilson, one of her handlers had not interacted with Octavia in nearly 9 months as her health deteriorated. Now, approaching the end of her life, he opened the top of her aquarium. She rose to the surface, gently wrapping her tentacles first around Wilson’s hand, then his wrist and then up his arms as if to say ‘I recognize you’. “Her wet grip on my skin felt gentle and familiar, the pull of her sucker’s tender as a kiss”, said Wilson. In less than a month, Octavia would be dead.

It has long been recognized that octopus and other cephalopods like cuttlefish are highly intelligent, curious creatures that are about as different from humans as aliens from another planet. Our shared evolutionary lines went their separate ways 600 million years ago. Visually active and creative hunters, they demonstrate the ability to solve complex puzzles, use tools, mimic the shape of other animals and may possess a rudimentary sense of consciousness.

The advanced abilities of an octopus emerge from its massive, distributed nervous system, containing over 500 million neurons, about the equivalent of a dog. Yet, only 50 million of those neurons reside in its brain. The rest are densely packed in its tentacles, each capable of operating autonomously. Severed tenacles will continue to grasp and explore on their own for hours, and researchers observing octopus in the wild have noted that some tentacles appear to demonstrate personalities of their own, some showing bold curiosity, others shyer.

Indeed, there is something deeply unfamiliar about an octopus. Each part of its body seems to possess its own agency without the central organization we assume necessary. Yet we recognize a mind capable of forming bonds, showing intelligence and perhaps possessing a rudimentary sense of self, but not constructed around one obvious center. It begs the question, what does it mean to have a mind?

A mind without a center

When we emerge from the fog of sleep each morning, we are aware of a singular sense of self; we don’t awake guessing who we are. We have that first person sense that we exist, we have a past, desires and goals, and the agency to reach them.

Years ago, in graduate school, I worked part time as a psychiatric assistant. I tended to some very ill patients. Yet, despite many of their challenges I was struck by their ability to still perform the basics of life such as washing their clothes or taking care of their personal hygiene. It was as if parts of their minds were outside their control, yet other aspects remained remarkably intact.

Those experiences made me wonder: Is our experience of unity – that we possess a single mind that we are (usually) in control of – sit at the top of a more distributed organization that can operate on its own? Must the mind be centrally ruled in order to remain coherent?

Why we assume there is only one of us

Open an old textbook in psychology and you will probably see an image called ‘the homunculus’, a distorted figure of a person sitting in the human brain observing and controlling different parts of the mind and body. A long outdated and overly simplified concept, the idea that there is a little person in our head solely in charge, still persists. We continue to have a unitary view of the human mind. There is only one of us.

But studying the octopus gives us another way of looking at how our brains may actually exert control. Rather than one unitary mind that makes us believe we are in charge, the human mind may be better understood as a modular system. We see this at the level of brain organization, where clusters of neurons show dense interconnectivity with each other but sparse connectivity to other clusters. Neurons create their own neighborhoods. Specialized organization makes adaptive sense.

A modular organization works well, until neighborhoods go to war.

We often have conflicting feelings and desires. We experience internal tensions. The clashes between different parts of our minds often occur below ground outside our awareness, until the fight spills over onto the streets where our conflicting desires can overwhelm us.

It is under those conditions – times of prolonged stress, depression, anxiety, threat – that the underlying modular architecture of our minds reaches conscious awareness. The sense that we have one self may be a story generated out of a system that is modular. The mind has many independent systems that together create an integrated sense of self. Stress and conflict disrupt that story.

The octopus does not just challenge us to ask what we think a mind is, it asks us to think what our mind is, helping us see something we may only dimly see in ourselves: That we were never singular to begin with.

It was a very bad day.

Sixty-six million years ago, a mountain-sized asteroid struck the Earth. Forests burned. Darkness followed. Most life, including the dinosaurs, perished.

It was 1994. I stood at the eyepiece of my telescope staring at Jupiter. Its bright white disc, crossed by lateral cloud bands, looked wounded. As if it had been punched in the eye, I could see several black marks the size of the Earth where fragments of a comet had impacted the planet hours earlier. Even from 500 million miles away, the destructive force of the collisions was clearly visible from my backyard.

Alone on my back porch staring up at the sky, I felt both awe and terror. For the first time, cosmic catastrophe felt real.

It’s doubtful that any creature alive in the late Cretaceous saw the rock coming. It was moving too fast and would have appeared only as a blinding streak of light. What followed is almost impossible to imagine.

At the recently discovered site named Tanis, in North Dakota, fossilized fish have been found with impact spherules of superheated melted glass that rained down from burning skies embedded in their gills, breathing in the first moments of apocalypse. It is one of the few places on Earth that preserves not just the aftermath of the asteroid strike, but the day itself.

But not everything perished.

One of my fondest childhood memories: After dinner, I would gather up the chicken bones from our plates, put them back in the oven to dry, and then paste them onto Bristol board as makeshift dinosaur skeletons. They looked remarkably convincing.

At the time, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs was not yet widely known. But there it was, staring me in the face.

After the asteroid hit, nearly three quarters of Earth’s species on land and in the sea perished. But not all. The age of dinosaurs did not simply end. Some of it flew on. Birds carried that ancient lineage forward, while mammals, long confined to the margins, emerged into a changed world. In the long shadow of catastrophe, survival favored those able to adapt to new conditions. Life returned haltingly at first, then, over immense spans of time, began to flourish, radiate, and become something entirely new.

Earth did not rebuild the late Cretaceous. It began creating a different world.

We are drawn to the idea that recovery means return — that what was broken can be restored, that what was lost can be given back. But deep time suggests otherwise. The deeper lesson of the asteroid is not simply that catastrophe destroys, but that life afterward resumes on altered terms. In human life, we often speak of getting back to normal. Earth’s history offers a different story: more sobering, perhaps, but also more hopeful.

When we face upheaval, we naturally long for the familiar. We want, somehow, to go home again. But in the deepest sense, we rarely can. The lives that emerge from rupture are not restored versions of the old ones. What survives is rarely what once dominated, but what can endure in a changed landscape.

We used to have a bird feeder in our yard, before the squirrels and occasional rats won the fight. I miss seeing that small menagerie of dinosaurs greeting me in the morning. They reminded me that the consequences of that asteroid long ago still surround us.

The Earth did not rebuild the lost world of the dinosaurs. It made room for another one. And that, I think, is the lesson of deep time. After catastrophe, life emerges again, but it does not come back unchanged.

Maybe that is why the story of the dinosaurs’ end still grips us. It reminds us that while worlds can end, life can begin again — though never in quite the same voice.

Further Reading
If this subject fascinates you as much as it fascinates me, two wonderful books are Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. And for a beautifully realized visual experience, the new Netflix series The Dinosaurs is well worth watching.

On a recent trip to Iceland this past spring, we arrived at our small hotel to find it overtaken by a film crew. They were shooting scenes for an upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey.

Early the next morning, while birdwatching nearby on a windy promontory overlooking a desolate stretch of black sand beach, I could see the crew far below — actors in costume (they looked frozen) surrounded by cameras and props. I was transfixed. Not only because I secretly hoped they might let me volunteer for the day, but because Homer’s ancient story was being recreated in a primordial landscape. The timeless myth of a man wandering for years, blown off course, trying to find his way home.

Since then, my mind has kept returning to that moment. What is it about this story that resonates across centuries? It speaks to something elemental. To wandering. To long stretches of uncertainty when the horizon is whipped by waves and black skies, when the sea feels filled with temptations and unseen dangers. To being delayed, tested, blown off course, unsure when — or whether — you will arrive. The particulars change with each generation. The feeling does not.

There are times in life when we recognize this wandering. When plans unravel or simply stall. We scan the horizon for reassurance, for signs of arrival, for control. And in that scanning, our attention drifts outward. We begin to live in anticipation rather than action, in fear of what might happen rather than clarity about how we must act now. We rage at the waves.

In those moments, we are no longer on solid ground. We are at sea.

The temptation is to control it — to predict, to manage, to shout at forces that do not answer. But the sea does not respond. What does respond is the rudder. We cannot command the storm, but we can govern our direction within it. Agency begins there.

I’ve felt this wandering more than once — moments when I worried more about outcomes than the work itself. When I anticipated failure, feared how I was perceived, tried to secure what I wanted before I had earned it. In those stretches, attention drifts toward what isn’t ours to govern. We shout at the waves and lose sight of the rudder.

The Stoic Discipline

This distinction is not new. The ancient Stoic philosophers wrestled with the same problem: how to live steadily in a world that refuses to cooperate. They wrote during times of plague, exile, political upheaval, and sudden loss. They understood something easy to forget — much of our suffering comes not from events themselves, but from our insistence on controlling what was never ours to command.

At the center of their teaching was a deceptively simple idea: some things are up to us, and others are not. Our judgments, our choices, our effort — these are ours. Outcomes, reputations, markets, the behavior of others — these are not. Confuse the two, and we exhaust ourselves. Clarify them, and something inside comes into focus.

The Stoics were teaching the art of agency. Not the desire to control the sea, but the discipline of steering within it. When attention returns to what is ours to govern — our judgment, our next action, our alignment with what we value — energy consolidates. The shouting stops. Direction returns.

The work was internal before it was external. The rudder was always inside the boat.

Returning Home

To be at home is not to have arrived. It is to be internally aligned. When what we value, what we choose, and how we act move in the same direction, something solid returns beneath our feet. Indecision eases. The need to constantly monitor how we are perceived loosens its grip. We stop scattering ourselves across imagined futures and instead inhabit the present with intention.

The Helm

We live in a time when much feels unstable — institutions shifting, technologies accelerating, expectations multiplying. The sea is not calm. It may not be for some time.

But the ancient lesson remains unchanged. You cannot still the waves. You can decide how you will travel through them.

Standing on that windswept cliff in Iceland, watching actors recreate a three-thousand-year-old story, I was struck by how little has changed. The details differ. The storms look different. But the human task is the same: not to master the sea, but to return, again and again, to the helm.

You do not have to control arrival to move toward home.
You only have to keep your hands on the helm.

Tucked away in the north-west province of South Africa lies Pilanesberg National Park. It is the site of a remarkable, little-known experiment in animal behavior with unsettling parallels to human behavior.

In the early 1980s, Kruger National Park—the largest in the region—had too many elephants, and officials decided to cull a large number of them. Because they did not yet have the ability to transport fully mature bulls, they relocated some younger elephants to nearby Pilanesberg.

A few years later, game wardens began noticing something disturbing. A number of rhinos were found dead and badly mutilated, with deep lacerations across their upper bodies. Even more puzzling, their horns were intact, ruling out poachers. As the killings continued, authorities initiated a massive stakeout, installing motion-sensitive cameras throughout the park.

What they discovered shocked them.

A group of young male elephants were stalking, chasing, and killing the rhinos, goring them with their tusks. Such behavior had never been observed before. The cause, researchers eventually determined, was that this group of juveniles had entered musth—a heightened state of sexual arousal normally reached a decade later. Testosterone levels during musth can rise to sixty times their normal level.

Elephant Mafia

Two elephants nicknamed Tom Thumb and Maphuto emerged as the apparent leaders of the group. Tom Thumb, in particular, was observed “recruiting” other young males from a neighboring park.

Increasingly desperate to find a solution—the park had already lost 10 percent of its rhino population—rangers decided to try an experiment. They introduced several fully mature bull elephants from a nearby reserve to see what role older males might play.

The largest of the new bulls immediately asserted his authority. He struck a younger elephant with such force that it lifted him off the ground. It didn’t take long for the rest of the group to fall into line. With mature bulls present, the juveniles were forced out of musth. The killings stopped, and the herd returned to a normal social structure.

What Wisdom Do the Elephants Teach?

Last week, the author and longtime New York Times columnist David Brooks reflected on the moral changes in American society over the course of his career. In his farewell essay, he wrote:

“The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed.”

The young elephants were not violent by nature. Their behavior was not driven by innate aggression. Rather, the violence emerged when developmental guardrails were removed—when the adults left the room. Normal processes of social regulation were absent. Power arrived full force, without the maturity required to contain it.

Uncontained power seeks expression. Violence is often displaced onto weaker, unrelated outsiders. The rhinos were not rivals; they were simply easy, available targets. It is a familiar pattern in group violence.

In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a fictional account of boys abandoned on an island, dominance structures quickly emerge. Peer-reinforced power replaces elder-mediated authority, producing a pathological hierarchy with no one to contain warped, self-serving aggression.

When the older bulls were reintroduced to Pilanesberg, order returned quickly—not through persuasion or punishment, but through presence, legitimacy, and containment. Normal developmental patterns resumed. The violence stopped. The system stabilized.

Reflections on the Nature of Power

Power itself is not inherently good or bad. As the psychologist David McClelland noted, immature power serves the self; mature power serves others and the system. Mature power is socially constrained. Immature power is impulsive, ego-driven, and destabilizing.

Pathology in individuals and in societies does not emerge from the use of power, but from strength without containment. Elders, institutions, and shared norms provide that containment. Maturity and wisdom make power sustainable and generative.

From Animal Behavior to Human Systems

What happened in Pilanesberg is not unique to elephants. It reveals a broader psychological and social pattern. When regulating structures collapse, behavior regresses to more primitive modes of dominance and coercion. This is not ideological or political—it is predictable from what we know about social psychology.

“Adults in the room” are not just individuals. They are institutions, intergenerational wisdom, shared cultural norms, and legitimate authority. These function as containment systems that allow individuals to live together productively and peacefully.

In the absence of containment, restraint and kindness are belittled. Power becomes performance. Aggression is rewarded. Domination replaces leadership. Humiliation and coercion become tools of order, and vulnerable outsiders suffer.

It’s Not Chaos. It’s Predictable.

These patterns follow a clear developmental logic. Unformed systems behave like unformed individuals. As societal guardrails rupture, anxiety escalates and aggression often follows. Control is increasingly asserted through force, and stability is sought through domination. Societies that dismantle their containment systems should not be surprised by what grows in their absence.

David Brooks arrives at a similar conclusion. “The most grievous cultural wound,” he writes, “has been the loss of a shared moral order.”

Read alongside the events in Pilanesberg, Brooks’ words take on sharper meaning. When shared moral frameworks, institutions, and sources of legitimate authority erode, individuals and groups are left to regulate forces they were never meant to manage alone. Power does not disappear in such moments—it loses its containment. And when that happens, what emerges is not freedom, but regression.

The elephants did not need a new ideology.
They needed adults.

Sources and notes
The account of the Pilanesberg elephant translocation and subsequent behavior draws on reporting and summaries available through Safari Pilanesberg (https://www.safaripilanesberg.com/pilanesberg/), along with broader accounts of the episode in the animal behavior literature.

I had just finished The Last Kings of Shanghai—a largely forgotten chapter of Jewish history that tells the story of extraordinary families who helped build modern China while quietly shaping the fate of thousands of Jewish refugees during the Second World War. As I read, I found myself returning to a world my mother had inhabited for ten years as a child: a city that offered refuge without dignity, safety without justice, and survival amid moral grey zones.

Only now do I realize how little I understood the world that formed her.

A City of Last Resort

Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s was an improbable refuge. As borders across Europe and North America closed to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, Shanghai remained one of the few places that required no visa for entry. Stateless refugees poured into a city already strained by poverty, colonial rule, and political fragmentation. It was chaotic, overcrowded, and dangerous—but for many, it was the last open door.

Within this turbulence, two immensely wealthy Jewish dynasties—the Sassoons and the Kadoories—played an outsized role. Through their commercial influence and political connections, they helped shield Jewish refugees from the worst dangers of war. They funded schools, hospitals, and housing. They intervened when German officials pressured the occupying Japanese authorities to eliminate the Jewish population. Thousands of lives were saved because these families chose to act.

Stability and Its Limits

And yet, as the book makes clear, their power came with limits they were unwilling—or perhaps unable—to cross. The book recounts how the families remained largely separate from the indigenous Chinese population and aligned themselves with prevailing political authorities that offered stability and protection for their commercial interests. While they supported charitable initiatives and made some efforts to alleviate suffering, they did little to challenge the deeper structures of poverty or political exclusion that shaped daily life for most Chinese residents. Their primary focus was expanding business opportunities, safeguarding family fortunes, and preserving the conditions that allowed international commerce to flourish.

It was within this context that both families opposed efforts to introduce greater democracy in mainland China and Hong Kong. As the author observes, “They chose commercial profits over political freedom and decency—a dilemma that many foreign companies, from Google to Facebook to Apple, must increasingly face.”

What struck me was how familiar its logic felt. When order, wealth, and survival are at stake, moral questions rarely present themselves cleanly. Neutrality becomes a position. Stability becomes a priority. And power, quietly exercised, reshapes the lives of those who have none.

Shanghai, 1938

My mother arrived in Shanghai as a young child after fleeing Vienna with her family and lived there for nearly a decade. She attended one of the Kadoorie schools.

She once mentioned that while walking home from school one afternoon, she passed a fence where the Japanese had mounted the severed heads of executed men on spikes. This, too, was Shanghai: a place where education and terror coexisted on the same street, where protection for some existed alongside violence that was arbitrary, public, and inescapable.

At that age, she did not know whether her parents would return home at night. During the day, they went out to find work, food, or to help clean up after bombing raids. Even today, she becomes uneasy when people are late calling her, instinctively bracing for the worst.

History does not always remain in the past. Sometimes it settles quietly into the nervous system.

Pragmatism and Its Price

It would be easy to frame the story of the Sassoons and the Kadoories as one of uncomplicated heroism. They did immense, consequential good. Without their intervention, many Jewish refugees, including my mother and her family, might not have survived.

At the same time, Shanghai was an internationally managed city, carved into tightly controlled spheres of foreign influence. Its Chinese population remained overwhelmingly poor and disenfranchised. Political participation was severely limited. Democracy was not rejected as an ideal so much as experienced as a destabilizing force in an already fragile environment.

From the perspective of powerful business families, this was a rational calculus. Stability protected the family. Political accommodation preserved influence. Reform introduced uncertainty. These were not villains making cynical choices; they were pragmatists managing risk in a volatile world. These dilemmas were not unique to these families - they were operating in a commercial system where market access and profit often outweighed political reform, true then as it is today.

And yet, from the perspective of those living beneath that system—refugees, laborers, the local population—this pragmatism carried real costs. It normalized a world in which protection was selective, justice conditional, and dignity unevenly distributed.

Necessity, Revisited

What unsettles me most is how familiar this logic feels.

Today, global corporations continue to operate within authoritarian systems while claiming political neutrality. Decisions are framed as practical rather than moral. Stability is prized. Disruption is feared. Democracy is often treated as optional, or in some cases, irrelevant.

For those with power, such decisions rarely feel like ethical compromises. They feel like necessity—regrettable, perhaps, but unavoidable.

History rarely announces itself as a moral test. It arrives disguised as necessity.

Long before the war, the Sassoons and other companies like Jardine & Matheson fought the British government for years to keep the opium trade legal—a trade that generated immense wealth while devastating millions. It is tempting to see this as hypocrisy. Instead I see it as something more unsettling: a reminder that systems capable of enhancing and protecting lives can also perpetuate profound harm, and that those who benefit from such systems rarely experience their choices as moral failures.

The Question

For years, I understood my mother’s time in Shanghai primarily as a story of survival—of narrow escapes, resilience, and luck. That story is true. But I think it is incomplete.

Survival often depends on stability, and stability is often purchased by looking away from suffering that lies beyond one’s immediate circle of responsibility. The world that saved my mother was also a world built on compromises that reached far beyond her survival.

Which brings me to this question.

When we describe ourselves as being pragmatic—whether as leaders, businesses, or societies—what tensions are we choosing to live with, and what costs are we quietly agreeing to bear?

We live in a time where the language of identity dominates.

Our identity – the story we tell ourselves of who we are and where we belong – has for many become the primary filter through which we interpret our interactions and make our judgements. It colors how we see ourselves. It colors how we see everyone else.

Identity has increasingly become the operating system of the modern self — quick to protect, quick to categorize, quick to divide the world into us and them. Purpose, by contrast, is oriented toward growth, connection, and contribution. Identity asks whom we belong to; purpose asks what we are here to give.

In a world increasingly organized around identity, perhaps our deeper longing is for purpose — the kind that expands our humanity rather than shrinking it.

Identity folds the world inward. Purpose opens it outward.

Identity: The Story We Inherit

Identity is the set of roles, histories, affiliations, and group memberships that tell us who we are and where we belong. It roots us in family, community, memory, and culture. It orients us.

But identity has a second function — identity protects us. It helps draw the boundary between us and them, safe and dangerous. Under conditions of threat or insecurity, we become more defensive, more reactive, more sensitive to insult, and quicker to moral judgment.

In one famous study, participants were asked to write briefly about their own deaths – what will happen and how they’ll feel. They then read a legal case involving a minor crime. Those reminded of their death recommended significantly harsher punishments than a control group. In a similar experiment after being reminded of their mortality, participants rated authors of their own faith as more intelligent, moral and likable than authors of a different religion.

Psychology demonstrates that when we are reminded of our vulnerability, we cling more tightly to the identities that give us symbolic protection. We become more judgmental toward outsiders and more loyal to our in-group. As threat increases, identity tightens.

Purpose: The Story We Choose

Purpose, by contrast, is the deeper “why” of our lives — the bridge between our values and our actions, oriented toward contributing to something larger than ourselves.

There is compelling evidence that people with a strong sense of purpose are more resilient, are better at staying calm under pressure and can maintain a broader perspective and report overall deeper well-being and life satisfaction than those that lack a strong sense of meaning. Decades of research in the field of positive psychology shows that when we live with purpose, we feel more autonomous, , more capable and connected to others.

Having a strong sense of purpose literally reshapes the stories we tell about ourselves. People with a strong sense of purpose lead lives that what psychologist Dan McAdams calls a redemptive narrative. Instead of interpreting life as a series of injuries and threats (a more identity, protective view), those with a strong purpose narrate their life as a journey toward growth, meaning and service to others.

Purpose is a direction — a way of moving through the world that makes our lives feel expansive and meaningful. Purpose is what gives us a sense of agency – that we are capable of making a difference for ourselves and the world.

In simple terms, identity asks, “Who am I?”. Purpose asks, “What am I for?”

These differences show up in our brains. When threat looms, the brain regions that maintain a firm boundary between “self” and “other” become more active. The amygdala primes the body for fight or flight. Our sense of self feels under siege. Our world contracts.

In contrast, when we are in a purpose driven or transcendent state – feeling awe, deep gratitude, profound meaning – those very same brain regions responsible for maintaining our identity go quiet. People report feeling a part of something larger, a melting of self-boundaries, connection with others and a sense of openness. The brain loosens its grip on the self. Purpose turns our attention outward – from protecting the self to contributing beyond it.

Purpose and Identity in Human Lives

Viktor Frankl — Purpose as Transcendence

The psychiatrist and author Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) survived the concentration camps. His Jewish identity — the very reason he was there — could have become a lifelong wound or defining trauma.

Instead, he emerged with a purpose - to help others discover meaning, even in suffering.

Vladimir Putin — Identity Hardened into Grievance

Putin is Frankl’s psychological opposite.

His identity hardened around a single idea: that he is the modern Peter the Great, destined to rebuild a greater Russia from past humiliations and historical grievance. Identity became a fortress — and eventually a weapon. A worldview organized around threat, betrayal, and restoration shrank his moral horizon until violence became thinkable and justified.

Carl Sagan — Purpose Beyond Identity

A committed atheist, Sagan nevertheless responded with gratitude when Christian communities prayed for him during his final illness.

His identity as a scientist and skeptic was real and core to his identity. But his purpose was larger: to awaken wonder and remind us of our shared cosmic heritage. “We are star stuff contemplating the stars” is not an identity statement. It is a purpose statement.

Albert Einstein — Identity in Service of Humanity

Einstein carried many identities — Jew, immigrant, scientist, war refugee. But his purpose in later life was moral: to prevent nuclear catastrophe and advocate for human dignity.

Identity roots us, but purpose gives us wings. Identity tells us what group we belong to. Purpose tells us what future we are helping to build.

The Season of Widening Circles

If identity is the story we inherit and purpose is the story we choose, then the wisdom of the season — and of the world’s great traditions — invites us to choose expansively.

Judaism teaches Tikkun Olam, the obligation to repair what is broken. Christianity speaks of Agape, unconditional love for the stranger. Islam centers Rahmah, compassion and mercy. Buddhism offers the Bodhisattva ideal: easing the suffering of others before seeking one’s own enlightenment. Hinduism teaches Dharma, the moral duty to uphold harmony and justice.

None of these are statements about group identity. They are statements about how to live.

They are reminders that identity can locate us, but purpose enlarges us; that identity names us, but purpose calls us forward; that identity can become a closed system, but purpose remains an open one — expansive, connective, generative.

And in a world tightening around identity, the gift we may need most is the courage to live not just the story of who we are, but the larger story of what we are here to do.

The Modern Crisis: “The End of Thinking”

“Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke.”
— Hilarius Bookbinder (pseudonym), cited in Derek Thompson’s “The End of Thinking”

Earlier this year, writer Derek Thompson posed a troubling question in his essay The End of Thinking: What if we are witnessing the slow collapse of literacy itself? He quotes a college professor lamenting that many students can no longer follow an argument through several pages of prose.

Thompson also cites several disturbing trends:

• In 2004, 56% of American adults read at least one book per year; by 2022 Gallup found that number of books read per adult had fallen sharply from 18.5 to 12.6.

• Reading time among young adults has dropped by more than half since 2005

If reading and writing are tools to build cognitive strength, then it’s no surprise that as these decline, so does cognitive ability. Literacy and numeracy scores are falling across the West for the first time in decades, as are science, reading and math scores.

Thompson argues that we are living through a thinning of thought – a slow erosion of our collective ability to follow complex arguments, deal with uncertainty or engage with ideas that stretch beyond 289 characters.

Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch wonders whether we have already “passed peak brain power”—just as we build machines to think for us. At a time when our tools become super intelligent, we risk becoming less so.

Yet this isn’t the first time civilization has flirted with forgetting how to think. After the fall of the Roman Empire, we were rescued by the rediscovery of their books.

The Manuscript That Awakened the World

In 1417, a papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini wandered into a German monastery and unearthed a long-lost manuscript by the Stoic poet Lucretius. On the Nature of Things had lain dormant for over a thousand years. It was well ahead of its time, introducing such revolutionary ideas that the universe was made up of invisible atoms, that countless worlds existed beyond our own, and introduced key principles from which modern astronomy, physics and evolutionary biology would eventually grow. The book helped shift Europe from a feudalistic closed world view to one rooted in observation and reason. Within a few short decades, the rediscovery of classical manuscripts helped ignite the Renaissance, the rebirth of art, science and human inquiry into the workings of the natural world.

At a more fundamental level, the rediscovery of books was the awakening of rational thinking, a belief that the world was knowable through observation and reason, consistent with natural laws rather than blind faith and divine intervention. With the dissemination of texts, knowledge once the purview of a limited few, was democratized. Wide-scale reading became a mental technology—training people to reason, to sustain attention, to imagine worlds unseen and to challenge existing thought. Books gave us a tool to liberate humanity on a scale never seen before in the history of civilization.

Cathedrals – The TikTok of the Middle Ages

Before the 15^th Century, fewer than one in ten Europeans could read or write. They gained their understanding of the world through images and what they were told. Want to learn about the bible? Go to your local church and look at the stained-glass windows or listen to the priest’s weekly sermon.

The stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals were the TikToks of their age: dazzling visual stories that taught the masses what to believe, how to behave, and whom to obey. They compressed belief into spectacle, trading reflection for instant conviction. Weekly sermons served as the soundtrack, reinforcing the same narratives through repetition and moral drama. These media worked because they bypassed analysis and went straight to emotion. They were, in every sense, tools of cognitive influence — shaping collective imagination without ever asking the listener to question or think independently.

Two centuries after the invention of the printing press, literacy rates were 60-70%, representing an unprecedented cognitive and cultural transformation. Books enabled revolutions in science, politics and culture. Copernicus’s and Galileo’s books began a scientific revolution, revealing that the Earth was not the center of creation. Newton’s book Principia showed that the universe was governed by universal laws and did not require divine intervention. The writings of Buffon and Lamarck provided the foundation for Charles Darwin to write the Origin of the Species, a radical break from the Bible’s view of creation and humanity’s place within it.

These books broke the shackles that until then kept humanity chained to ignorance and orthodoxy controlled by the select few.

The printing press didn’t just spread knowledge; it spread a way of processing reality. It liberated thinking, creating a citizenry capable of abstraction and argument. It built the modern mind.

Just as the printing press enabled the collective mind for depth, our screens may be rewiring it for speed. Six centuries later, our challenge is not to recover lost manuscripts but to recover the mental discipline those books once taught us.

The Brain That Learned to Read

Neuroscience confirms what the early humanists recognized: reading doesn’t just fill the mind—it reshapes it.

In a landmark Science study, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues found that literacy reorganizes the brain. Adults who learned to read later in life showed strengthened connections between visual and language regions, enhanced auditory processing, and refined awareness of speech sounds. The act of reading fuses vision and language into a single circuit for understanding.

Dehaene calls this “cortical recycling”: the brain repurposing existing networks for a new cultural invention. The printed page recruits systems for pattern recognition, speech, and memory, binding them into a neural architecture for imagination and reasoning.

Even in adulthood, this transformation occurs—a testament to the brain’s lifelong plasticity. Reading, then, is not only cultural but biological. It trains the mind to think in layers, to integrate perspectives, to hold ideas in tension.

Guess what Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Paul McCartney, Reese Witherspoon and Martin Scorsese have in common? They are all avid readers. Each credits books with expanding their perspective – whether it’s history, politics, the arts, science or social justice. Their creative and intellectual range is the consequence of reading deeply and widely.

The Age of Distraction: The Brain Unlearns

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argued that the internet is remapping our brains for speed, not depth. Each scroll, click, and notification rewards quick shifts of attention. The neural circuits that once formed through long-form reading are being rewired for novelty and reaction.

Carr calls this the “juggler’s brain”—agile, endlessly stimulated, but rarely still. The same plasticity that once made us readers now trains us to flit from stimulus to stimulus, losing the thread of sustained thought. In a prescient 2008 Atlantic article deftly titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr said “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I skip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

Meta-analyses of dozens of studies show that people comprehend and retain more when reading on paper than on screens, particularly for complex, expository material. The scrolling, hyperlinking structure of digital text taxes working memory and interrupts comprehension. We finish with the illusion of knowing, but not the depth of understanding.

When the Mind Forgets Its Discipline

Deep reading is mental training. The brain, like a muscle, weakens when underused.

Mounting research show that cognitive activity—including reading—builds cognitive reserve, the brain’s capacity to adapt and remain efficient as it ages.

In a twenty-one-year New England Journal of Medicine study, older adults who read or played board games had nearly half the risk of developing dementia compared to those who did not. A separate Neurology study found that frequent cognitive activity slowed decline even when brain pathology was present. And a Yale study of more than 3,600 adults discovered that people who read books regularly lived almost two years longer than non-readers—and that cognition mediated this survival advantage.

Deep reading doesn’t just enlarge the mind—it fortifies it.
And when the discipline of reading erodes, both the individual and the culture lose resilience.

The Return of Shallow Thought

The invention of printing created the cognitive conditions for democracy: citizens who could follow arguments, weigh evidence, and imagine alternatives.

As deep reading declines, those capacities fade. Slogans replace reasoning; outrage replaces understanding. We become more reactive, less reflective—moved by images rather than ideas.

A post-literate society is not an egalitarian one. It’s a potential return to feudalism—rule by those who control the symbols while the rest consume the pictures. In this new digital order, algorithms, images and influencers shape belief much as clerics and stained glass windows once did, dispensing easy certainties to those too distracted to question them.

Reading as a Civic and Cognitive Act

In the fifteenth century, monks preserved the manuscripts that would one day revive civilization. Our task is subtler but in no way less urgent: to preserve the capacity for deep thought itself.

Each time we sit with a book—patient, absorbed, following an argument or a story—we are rebuilding the neural circuits of reason and empathy that society depends on. Reading is not an escape from the world; it is an act of resistance against its shallowing.

The monks of the Renaissance saved the manuscripts. Ours is the task of saving the mind.

Pick up a book. Read deeply. Think slowly. Our future may depend on it.

Further Reading

• Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade & Becca R. Levy. (2016). A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity.

• Nicholas Carr. (2008). Is Google Making Us Stupid?

• Nicholas Carr. (2011). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

• Stephen Greenblatt. (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

• Jeffrey M. Jones. (2022). Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past.

• Jason Roberts. (2023). Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life.

• Derek Thompson. (2025). The End of Thinking.

• Robert S. Wilson et al. (2013). Life-span Cognitive Activity and Cognitive Aging.

By the time I realized Finn had escaped the kitchen, it was too late. He’d had ten minutes alone in the living room—just enough time to chew through a wicker basket. When I walked in, he looked up with that unmistakable stare that said “What’s the problem?”

I’m sure Finn didn’t ruminate about what he’d done, engage in self-recrimination, or assign blame. Maybe it’s because dogs don’t rationalize. They simply are, and then they move on. It struck me how easily we forgive dogs—and how hard it can be to forgive ourselves or others for mistakes.

Years ago, I had a major run-in with my boss (who happened to be the CEO). Not enough to get me fired, but enough to potentially limit my career. Several months later, during my performance review, our conversation was straightforward and constructive, but he never mentioned the incident. At the end, I asked him why. He looked at me and said, “I haven’t been thinking about it. Have you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “It’s water well past the bridge.”

I learned more from those last few words than from any feedback since. They’ve helped me navigate many of my other personal Finn moments.

When mistakes are made, observe, learn, and then let them pass under the bridge.
With apologies to Matt Groening.

The View from Thirty Thousand Feet

This past May, on the flight home from Iceland, I happened to be sitting on the right side of the plane as we passed over the southern tip of Greenland. Even from thirty thousand feet, I could see vast glaciers splintering apart, calving mountain-sized icebergs into the North Atlantic. The ice sheet stretched endlessly to the horizon, mountain peaks poking through, in some places, nearly two miles of ice.

It was breathtaking—incredibly remote but beautiful all at once. I thought about how I was seeing the remnants of the last ice age that once covered North America. How long, I wondered, can something so ancient endure?

The Planet’s Memory

I just finished the book When the Ice Is Gone by glaciologist Paul Bierman. His work, based on decades of drilling through Greenland’s ice, reads like the planet’s autobiography. The book recounts how in 2018 Bierman found lost frozen soil samples from a Greenland deep ice core, rediscovered in Denmark. When melted, they revealed perfectly preserved twigs, moss and leaves from a time when Greenland was ice free, about 400,000 years ago. It was a time when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was less than half of what it is today. Let that sink in for a moment.

It means our planet has already experienced the kind of warming that would raise global sea levels by about 24 feet, drowning the world’s coastal cities and displacing billions of people. The question isn’t whether Greenland’s ice will melt again—it’s how fast, and how prepared we will be when it does.

Learning to Hope Anyway

And yet, there is reason to hope.

This weekend I listened to Fareed Zakaria’s GPS segment on climate change. “As political enthusiasm around climate policy retreats,” he said, “the green economy has begun to thrive.” Renewables now generate more electricity globally than coal. China—still the world’s largest polluter—is investing more than $200 billion in clean technology across fifty-four countries. It’s building nearly three-quarters of all new solar and wind projects on the planet.

Market forces, he said, are now doing what moral appeals could not.

When I picture those glaciers breaking apart, I see the enormity of what we stand to protect. Living day to day in our crowded urban environments, I’m often struck by how much of the world we live in doesn’t have any people in it. Greenland’s ice is not just melting; it’s speaking—reminding us that we are part of a much bigger story.

An elderly neighbor once said to me, we don’t really own our houses, we just lease them.

The same I think is true for our planet. Over the long term, the Earth doesn’t really care what we do to it. It has moved through multiple ice ages (it even completely froze over once), the Mediterranean was once a blistering wasteland that would make Death Valley look like Toronto in February. All of life came close to being wiped out at least once in the distant past. And Greenland will be green once again. But humanity’s timeframe is measured in decades and centuries, not millennia. We think we own this world, but humanity’s very existence owes itself to the fact that civilization emerged in a warmer, stable environment that in many ways is an anomaly in the history of the planet.

Although we’ve been reasonable tenants, I think we risk an early termination notice on our lease if we don’t make some changes soon.

As we left the tip of Greenland, I craned my head to catch the final glimpses of ice. The sun hit at just the right angle – I caught a golden flash of light glinting off a glacier.

Optimism isn’t about denying reality. It’s about also noticing the light that despite those challenges still breaks through. Even from thirty thousand feet, fear and hope have always been intertwined.

I was miserable.

After several decades of a fulfilling, successful career, I ended up working for a new organization that was not a fit for me.

It felt like I had been abandoned at an orphanage.

OK, maybe a bit extreme. But I knew I had hit a wall when I was excited to find a new route from the elevator to my office where I didn’t have to see anyone.

That moment became a turning point. I began to shift from the specifics of my personal situation and asked myself some bigger questions: How do I get out of this? What do I want from the next chapter of my life? What truly makes me happy?

Transcendent Thinking

Psychologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has a term for this kind of reflection — transcendent thinking — and our ability to engage in it has been shown to boost life satisfaction, improve stress recovery, and even reshape the brain in positive ways.

In fact, her research has shown that transcendent thinking:

• Slows the loss of gray matter — the brain tissue that supports information processing and decision-making

• Makes us happier and more satisfied with our lives

So, what exactly is transcendent thinking?

On a recent Hidden Brain podcast, Immordino-Yang described how a young woman’s brain activity shifted in real time while listening to the story of Malala Yousafzai, who risked her life to attend school:

“She moves from analyzing this one girl’s sad situation… to this much more powerful narrative… relating it to her own story, relating it to the possible future story she hoped to invent for herself, and from there thinking about what’s right or good or possible everywhere for everyone. This is the thing we’re calling transcendent thinking.”

It’s this back-and-forth movement from detail to meaning, from brushstroke to stepping back and seeing the whole painting that gives transcendent thinking its power. It’s not just a flash of insight in the moment, but the ongoing process of shifting perspective.

Immordino-Yang’s research shows that transcendent thinking strengthens coordination between two critical brain networks: one that turns inward, helping us reflect on feelings and identity, and one that turns outward, helping us focus, solve problems, and respond to the world.

The Stuck Switch

The switch between these two brain networks is managed by the salience network — a set of regions that acts like an air-traffic controller, deciding when to turn your attention inward to reflect and when to direct it outward to act.

Under prolonged stress, unhappiness, or relentless pressure to keep executing, that switch can lose flexibility — locking your attention in one mode. Too much outward focus leaves you hypervigilant and anxious, while too much inward focus traps you in rumination and immobility.

Getting the Switch Moving Again

Transcendent thinking is what loosens the switch and gets it moving again. Like applying WD-40 to a sticky lever, it restores the brain’s ability to toggle smoothly so you can respond with agility instead of staying stuck.

Over time, this mental flexibility predicts greater well-being, resilience, and a stronger sense of purpose.

Transcendent thinking is how we train the brain to stay flexible — to keep that switch moving instead of letting it get jammed. Over time, it builds the internal architecture that keeps us motivated, creative, and emotionally grounded.

During my miserable phase, my switch was jammed — stuck in constant vigilance and performance anxiety — but transcendent thinking loosened it, helping me shift perspective and move forward. The good news is that it’s a skill anyone can practice, cultivate, and strengthen. Here’s one simple way to start:

Think Like a STAR

Transcendent thinking is about finding meaning whenever something stirs you, whether that moment is painful or filled with beauty and awe.

Think of it as a mental habit you can practice whenever you feel inspired, stuck, or simply curious. It’s about practicing the back-and-forth between the concrete and the universal, the specific and the big picture.

The acronym STAR is a simple way to remember the process:

S – See the Moment
When I was at my lowest, avoiding others was a clue that something was wrong in my life. At other times, it’s been the opposite: the first time I saw the rings of Saturn in my telescope, I literally gasped.

Ask:

• What just stirred me?

• What emotion am I feeling? Let it sink in.

T – Think and Connect
Once you’ve noticed the moment, pause and connect it to who you are and what you value.

Ask:

• What does this moment tell me about my deepest values?

• Why does this matter to me and to others I care about?

A – Aspire and Imagine
Imagining a different future is difficult if you only rely on the information already in your head.

In the same way, using awe-filled experiences or reading a powerful book — can unstick your perspective.

Ask:

• What new perspective might help me see this differently?

• What future would I want to create — for myself, my work, or my community?

R – Respond and Act
Reflection without action can turn into endless rumination. The power of transcendent thinking is that it nudges you toward action.

Ask:

• What small step could I take today that aligns with what I just discovered?

• How will I know I’m moving closer to the future I imagined?

Whenever I look through my telescope, I’m reminded that I’m seeing the light from objects that have travelled for thousands or millions of years to reach me. It shifts my perspective, connecting me to something much larger.

That’s the essence of transcendent thinking — zooming out far enough to see the bigger story, then zooming back in to live with more purpose.

Follow your STAR. It might just get your switch moving again.

References & Further Reading

• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (Guest). (2023, June 26). Hidden Brain: Why We Find Meaning in the Little Things [Podcast episode]. Hidden Brain Media. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/why-we-find-meaning-in-the-little-things

• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2023, November). How Transcendent Thinking Builds Resilient Brains. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-transcendent-thinking-builds-resilient-brains

• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015). Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience. W.W. Norton & Company.

A few weeks ago, my friend Marilyn sat on our patio and told me the story of her late father, Mark Charness.

He was one of the original Pathfinders – a small, elite group of the Royal Air Force navigators who flew in the massive Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. Their job was to fly deep into enemy territory at night, ahead of the main bombing force, and mark their targets with powerful flares to pinpoint the targets. They would stay over their target while waves of bombers followed behind them, dropping their payloads. They then turned around and tried to get back home.

Seventy percent didn’t make it.

Remarkably, Marilyn’s father did.

Mark Charness rarely talked about the war. But he did give interviews, some to high school classes. In listening to one of them, I was struck by his humor, how matter-of-fact he was about the risks, the fear and the job.

“We had one mission to Chemnitz, close to the Czech border. It took eight hours and five minutes. As the navigator, one of the big problems was making sure we didn’t stray and burn too much fuel. A lot of planes didn’t make it back — not because they were shot down, but because they ran out of gas.”

He described his workspace inside the Lancaster as cramped, paper-thin, and freezing. At 8,000 feet, they had to wear oxygen masks. When they flew over Leipzig — a heavily fortified industrial city with anti-aircraft guns that “would get way, way up” — he could hear the flak hitting the underside of the plane.

Crammed into a tight, claustrophobic space, knees crammed under a navigation table, using a pencil and a slide rule to plot their route, he diligently did the math to keep everyone alive.

Leadership in the Shadows

Mark joked that he joined the Pathfinders because he was “an idiot”.

The job of wartime navigator was to operate under uncertainty, in maximal, unrelenting pressure, and near zero margin for error. If he got it wrong, everyone died.

Yet, he was not in command, but he was in a key support role. His precision, his endurance, his ability to stay calm and focused in the midst of chaos, made the mission possible. And when he got home, he just logged his time and prepared for the next flight.

I think we often mistake charisma for leadership. The story of Mark Charness and the Pathfinders serve as a reminder that the most critical roles are often the least seen.

Leadership at it’s best is about guiding others safely through the night.

Flares in the Dark

“We’d drop flares over the target. That’s how the bombers knew where to go.”

You go first. You swallow your fear. You light the way.

And then you stay in the fire just long enough to move everyone to the next objective.

The world we live in is not at war in the way it was in 1944. But the experience of uncertainty, danger, fatigue, and quiet decision-making under pressure still defines leadership, no matter what your position or role. In a crisis, in a hospital, in a boardroom, or in our personal lives, we are all, at some point, the navigator in a paper-thin cabin, trying to guide people safely home.

The Importance of Memory

Marilyn had never shared her father’s story with me. He didn’t talk about his experiences until later in life. One of his last missions was the bombing of Dresden, where over 1000 bombers destroyed the city over two days of relentless attacks. A mission I suspect that left even a 22-year-old navigator struggling with the morality of war.

A story almost lost to history, but then recovered and handed down to future generations. Like a flare in the night.

On a recent trip to Prince Edward Island, I walked among trees older than the dinosaurs. It changed how I think about time.

I took my family on a Prehistoric Walk led by a local geologist who clearly loved what she did. We joined about 20 other adults and children on a red-cliff lined beach.

An ancient forest buried in mud 300 million years ago. The beach was littered with petrified trees turned to stone millennia ago.

“This is the largest fossil in Canada,” our guide said as she pointed out a linear rock stretching along the beach that was once an ancient tree.

I reached down and touched it, thinking this tree grew in an ancient forest millions of years before the dinosaurs.

We’re naturally curious to understand what the past was like. I stood on that beach looking at the other round clumps of rock that were once trees and tried to imagine I was standing in an ancient forest that looked unlike anything that exists on earth today.

Humans live on average 80-plus years. We tend to view the world through that very limited lens. We think in terms of days, months, and years. We have no concept of deep time.

On the PBS podcast Eons the host said when we think of something that happened a million or two million or 20 million years ago, it’s hard to conceptualize what it actually means.

It’s about seeing ourselves within deep time – a fleeting life against the backdrop of hundreds of millions of years.

Through our 80-year life span lens, the rhythms of our lives - our goals, our plans and worries - fill our world. Standing on that beach, for just a moment, they felt both urgent and insignificant at once.

“I would resent living next to somebody who was a foreigner,” said a 14-year-old girl being interviewed for a research study. “They should go back to where they come from.”

The interviewer asked, “Where should they go if they were born in America?”

“A lot of them were,” the girl admitted. “But I still think they should go back to where they came from.”

That unsettling quote wasn’t pulled from a modern-day headline. It comes from the 1940s, part of a research study led by psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik. She was trying to understand the psychological roots of prejudice—what makes a young person, barely a teenager, think this way?

What she found has echoed through decades of research: the most prejudiced children weren’t simply echoing the dominant views of their time. They were, quite literally, thinking differently.

The Roots of Rigidity

Frenkel-Brunswik interviewed thousands of children from different family backgrounds. Her conclusion was clear: children raised in authoritarian households—those characterized by harsh discipline, high parental control, and strict moral rules—tended to think in rigid, black-and-white ways. The world was divided into good and bad, strong and weak, “us” and “them.” Ambiguity was threatening. Exceptions to the rules didn’t compute.

In contrast, children raised in more democratic, nurturing homes showed greater mental flexibility. They were more curious, more tolerant of difference, and more capable of holding multiple perspectives at once.

To test this, Frenkel-Brunswik administered a series of tasks designed to measure cognitive flexibility—story completions, object-sorting challenges, and interpretation of ambiguous scenarios. The results consistently pointed to one insight: prejudice wasn’t just about what people believed. It was about how they thought—or more precisely, how rigid or flexible their thinking was.

Rigidity Isn't Just a Personality Trait—It's a Cognitive Style

In her recent book The Ideological Brain, psychologist Leor Zmigrod picks up this thread and takes it into the realm of neuroscience. Cognitive rigidity, she argues, is not just a matter of worldview or education—it’s a neurobiological pattern.

Flexible thinkers tend to have higher levels of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for executive functions like reasoning, planning, and impulse control. Rigid thinkers, by contrast, tend to show greater activity in the brain’s striatum, a deep structure associated with habit, repetition, and automatic behavior.

When we form strong ideological beliefs—or practice rigid thinking over time—our neural activity shifts away from conscious decision-making and toward automatic responses. The brain effectively goes on autopilot. Repetition replaces reflection. Belief becomes habit.

That helps explain why extremist ideologies feel so hard to shake. Over time, they become less like chosen ideas and more like ingrained routines—neurological shortcuts we fall into under stress, scarcity, or threat.

Why Flexible Thinking Matters

Cognitive flexibility is not just a virtue—it’s a survival skill. It allows us to:

• Shift strategies when conditions change

• Tolerate ambiguity without panic

• Integrate new evidence rather than ignore it

• Break out of mental ruts and innovate

In contrast, rigid thinking is associated with prejudice, dogmatism, and even increased willingness to harm others in defense of one’s group. As Zmigrod writes, “The more inflexible you are, the more willing you are to harm others in the name of your group.”

And yet, most of us don’t realize how rigid we’ve become—especially when the rigidity wears a moral disguise.

What Shapes Flexible Thinking?

Three forces shape our capacity for flexible thought:

1. Biology

Some people are naturally more wired for adaptability. Higher dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex supports greater flexibility. But biology isn’t destiny. Neuroscience shows the brain is plastic—it can change and adapt with practice.

2. Upbringing and Habit

Children raised in rigid, authoritarian environments are less likely to develop flexible thinking habits. They are discouraged from asking questions, punished for mistakes, and taught to value obedience over curiosity. These early experiences become encoded in the brain’s wiring.

Zmigrod draws a parallel to religion—not as belief per se, but as a system of repetitive rituals and moral certainties. “Every religion begins its indoctrination in childhood,” she writes. In her studies, frequent engagement in religious ritual was correlated with lower cognitive flexibility. Rigid patterns are strengthened by repetition—whether in faith, politics, or culture.

3. Environment—Your “Nest”

We don’t think in a vacuum. Our beliefs are shaped by the environments we inhabit—what Zmigrod calls our “nest.” This includes our social relationships and the community we live in. In times of threat or scarcity, we become more tribal, more reactive, more susceptible to black-and-white thinking.

A powerful study found that when participants were told financial resources were scarce, their brains literally processed faces differently. The area of the brain responsible for face recognition—the fusiform gyrus—showed less activation for Black faces. When resources were framed as plentiful, this racial bias disappeared. The implication is sobering: under pressure, our capacity for flexible, humanizing thought can collapse.

So How Do We Become More Flexible Thinkers?

The good news is that flexibility isn’t fixed. It can be cultivated—through effort, intention, and environment. Here’s how:

1. Adopt a Growth Mindset

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on fixed versus growth mindsets is foundational here. A fixed mindset assumes that intelligence, creativity, or talent are innate and static. A growth mindset sees them as skills that can be developed through effort and learning.

People with fixed mindsets tend to avoid challenges, fear failure, and give up easily. People with growth mindsets are more resilient, curious, and open to change.

Flexible thinkers don’t avoid being wrong, they use mistakes as feedback. They persist through discomfort. They view abilities as plastic, not predetermined.

2. Practice Deliberate Discomfort

In Limitless Mind, Jo Boaler describes the science of brain plasticity. When we work at the edge of our understanding, when we’re struggling, making mistakes, and correcting them, our brains grow. New neural pathways form. Thinking becomes faster, stronger, and more adaptable as our brains build up myelin - insulation that wraps brain fibres with a coating that increases signal strength, speed and accuracy.

Environments that support this kind of learning—what Boaler calls “talent hotbeds”—emphasize effort over perfection, feedback over judgment, and mistake-making as a key part of growth. In other words: flexible minds grow in flexible environments.

To stretch your own thinking, seek out opportunities that challenge you. Ask yourself: What if I’m wrong? What else could be true? Sit with discomfort. Delay closure. Stay open.

3. Build a Better Nest

We become like the people we surround ourselves with. If your “nest” is filled with certainty, conformity, and repetition, your brain will follow. If it’s filled with curiosity, humility, nurturing relationships and challenge, it will grow.

Find communities that reward nuance and encourage questioning. Make space for disagreement without moral panic. Don’t just tolerate ambiguity, practice it.

The Courage to Be Uncertain

Being a flexible thinker isn’t about being indecisive or weak. It’s about having the courage to hold complexity—to pause before judging, to question your own assumptions, to change your mind when the evidence calls for it.

In a world increasingly divided by rigid ideologies, the most radical act may simply be to stay open.

You don’t need to be born flexible. You can train your brain to stretch. You can choose curiosity over certainty. You can build a mind that bends without breaking.

And you can start today.

That’s what my neighbor said when we brought home our new puppy, Finn. They had recently put down their aging dog—just as we had said goodbye to our 17-year-old poodle, Ollie, this past December. The house had felt awfully quiet.

So we got Finn—a poodle–Irish setter mix. He’s very cute and seems to be a quick learner.

I’ll admit, after Ollie passed, I felt a bit relieved. No more carrying him up and down the stairs because he was blind and couldn’t hear. We were finally free—free to go out to dinner, see movies, visit friends. Ollie’s final year had left us housebound.

And now? We can’t go out for dinner and can only have friends over. Baby gates are up in the kitchen. Dog toys litter the floor. I’ve taken out the old carpet cleaner I almost gave away.

But… we have a new dog to fill the house.

He gently tugs at my pant leg to get me to sit on the floor so he can curl up in my lap. We just graduated from puppy class—he was, of course, the star pupil. He’s growing fast. A few days ago, I put Ollie’s old collar on him.

“It belonged to your ancestor,” I said, staring into his eyes.
He licked me on the nose.

So yes, I suppose I am a bit out of my mind.
But pets fill a unique and special place in our hearts. And I’m reminded that we should never let ourselves get too comfortable—whatever our age.

On the remote island of Tenerife, a remarkable experiment is underway…

But first—some news.

It was announced today that the James Webb Space Telescope has, for the first time, directly imaged a planet orbiting a star about 10 light-years from Earth. The image—just a single-pixel dot—reveals a planet roughly the size of Saturn.

As extraordinary as that accomplishment is, I still wanted more.

What if we could one day take a picture of a distant planet in another solar system that showed not just its existence, but its features? Details like cloud bands, mountain ranges, maybe even continents. And maybe—just maybe—glimpses of life.

That dream is not as far off as it once seemed.

A Telescope Unlike Any Before

A group of astronomers and engineers is working on a project called the ExoLife Finder, or ELF, and they’ve chosen Tenerife—a volcanic island off the coast of Africa—as their testing ground. Their goal is ambitious: to build a new kind of telescope that can directly image Earth-like planets orbiting the stars nearest to our own, and detect signs of life on their surfaces.

Until recently, that idea belonged to the realm of science fiction. We’ve gotten good at spotting exoplanets by watching their stars flicker or wobble, and in some cases, we've even detected the fingerprints of their atmospheres. But a direct image—a real view of another Earth—remains beyond our reach.

ELF may change that.

Using an innovative ring of segmented mirrors, advanced light-suppression techniques, and machine learning tools, ELF is designed to cancel out the blinding light of nearby stars and isolate the faint glow of their planets. The prototype—called Small-ELF—is under construction. If successful, it will pave the way for a full-scale version capable of scanning dozens of nearby solar systems.

And not just scanning them. With time and enough data, ELF could reveal coarse planetary maps: changes in cloud patterns, evidence of oceans, even the hints of vegetation—one of the most promising indicators of life.

A New Kind of Perspective

In a universe so vast that light can take centuries to travel from star to star, we are building tools that may allow us to see, dimly but directly, life on another planet. Not in crisp, iPhone-worthy detail—but enough to suggest that we are not alone.

That possibility is more than a scientific milestone. It’s also a human one.

I often write about identity, leadership, and the search for meaning. We are a species wired to wonder—about where we came from, where we’re going, and who else might be out there.

ELF is just one possible answer to one of those questions. But behind it is a bigger truth: that curiosity is its own kind of courage. That wonder still matters. And that by looking outward, we might just come to see ourselves more clearly.

So yes—perhaps one day, hopefully in my lifetime, we really will photograph life on a planet outside our solar system.

And when we do, it may change our story.

Recently, I found myself in two conversations that offered me a powerful lesson: that at any point in our lives, we have the ability – and perhaps the responsibility – to reshape who we are, push ourselves beyond our comfort zone, to create who we are from anew.

At my mother’s 90th birthday celebration, I talked with my cousin Ayal, whom I hadn’t seen in several years. Ayal, now 62, shared that he had just graduated from a certificate program in artistic blacksmithing.

“A blacksmith?” I asked, surprised. Ayal had spent his career leading a number of not-for-profit organizations. But he described how, later in life, he became fascinated with the idea of working with iron and heat—learning to shape metal with fire.

He was the oldest student in his class, filled mostly with people in their twenties and thirties. And yet, despite having no previous artistic background, Ayal excelled. He shared photos of two stunning works he had created: a five-foot-tall menorah, its iron and brass arms twisting together in a swirl of colors, and a kinetic sculpture of an eagle that balances on its beak and turns in the wind.

What’s more, Ayal was chosen as valedictorian—not just for his program, but for the entire graduating class of the college. He delivered his speech to 5,000 people, speaking about the importance of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, no matter your age.

A few days later, another encounter brought it into sharper focus.

My wife Liz and I went to visit our local jeweler to pick up a pair of earrings made from gems that had belonged to her mother. While Liz and his wife talked at the front of the store, the jeweler invited me to see his workshop.

Born in Lebanon, he came from a good, stable family but struggled in school. After two different schools failed to engage him, his parents looked for a trade he might learn. One day, by chance, he visited a friend’s father’s jewelry shop. He was fascinated watching molten gold take shape under skilled hands. “It was like magic,” he told me, his eyes lighting up at the memory. From that moment, he knew he wanted to be a jeweler.

He apprenticed and eventually built a career creating beautiful pieces—some for famous clients—but always, as he said, for the joy of the work itself. He showed me how he melts small pieces of gold and silver, how he feeds the metal through machines that form long, thin bars, ready to become chains or rings.

Before we left, he shared what his mother had told him long ago: “Life is limited, but learning is forever.” Even now, in his late sixties or early seventies, he spoke of wanting to take a pottery course. There was more to discover, more to create.

A blacksmith and a jeweler—each shaped by fire, each discovering joy in working with their hands. Both embodying something we sometimes forget: that learning and reinvention are not bound by age.

In a world that often nudges us toward comfort, predictability, and staying in our lanes, Ayal and my jeweler reminded me of something essential: that we can still be surprised by what moves us, that we can still find magic, even later in life. Sometimes that magic begins in small, accidental moments—a visit to a friend’s shop, or a decision to take a class you’ve always been curious about.

It made me wonder what would it mean for each of us to take up something new. To step into a room full of younger classmates and forge something unexpected? To follow that spark, wherever it may lead? Life is indeed limited, but learning is forever.

This week the Washington Post published an opinion piece titled We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower. It’s about the assault on science and institutions that support it. It reminded me of a talk I attended a few years ago by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was on why some societies nurture scientific advancement while others suppress it.

Imagine, Tyson said, that you were transported back in time to 9th-century Baghdad, during what historians now call the Islamic Golden Age. At that time, Europe was mired in superstition, concerned mostly with burning heretics. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, scholars of all backgrounds—Muslim, Jewish, Christian—gathered in libraries and courtyards to debate astronomy, mathematics, theology, and justice.

It was a true renaissance in thought. Together, they laid the groundwork for the modern scientific method and the belief that rational inquiry could illuminate the nature of the universe and humankind’s place within it. Baghdad’s House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) rivaled any modern research institution. And the reach of that discovery endures today: nearly three-quarters of the named stars in the night sky bear Arabic names. So too does our numerical system.

And then—it stopped.

Yes, the Mongol invasions and the crusades played a part in destroying this intellectual flowering. But Tyson pointed to something else—more subtle and, in many ways, more destructive: the rise of theological orthodoxy. In the 12th century, philosopher Al-Ghazali argued that natural events were not governed by cause and effect but by the direct will of God. Rationalism and empirical science—the lifeblood of the Golden Age—were pushed aside in favor of spiritualism and doctrine. The world no longer asked questions. It enforced answers.

Although some scientific activity continued, the intellectual vitality of the Islamic world never recovered. What had once been the center of global learning became a place where questioning the world was no longer encouraged—only submitting to it.

An Ill Wind Blows

Fast forward to the United States in 2025. A country that, for most of the past century, led the world in innovation across nearly every scientific domain. A nation that decoded the genome, landed on the moon, invented the internet, and built institutions like MIT, Caltech—and yes, Harvard.

But a nation of discovery is not a guarantee. And there are troubling signs of regression.

China has now overtaken the U.S. in scientific output, publishing over 407,000 scientific papers annually—compared to 293,000 by the U.S.—accounting for 23.4% of the world’s research. Nine of the top ten global research institutions are now Chinese, with Harvard the lone Western outlier. Meanwhile, the number of top-tier scientists in the U.S. has declined from 33% to 27% of the global share in just four years, according to the Guardian newspaper in a lead article published in 2022.

And it starts with education. The U.S. ranks 28th out of 37 OECD countries in math performance, and 24th in adult numeracy. Over one-third of American adults now score below primary-school math proficiency (up from 29% in 2017).

Public trust in science is faltering as well. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans believe humans were created in their present form by God within the last 10,000 years. While this is the lowest level of creationist belief Gallup has recorded in decades, the figure remains strikingly high for a developed nation.

These are signals. The engine of progress is shifting while we watch.

And yet, instead of rallying to reinvest in science, some political forces in the U.S. have turned against it.

Harvard as the New House of Wisdom

Harvard, arguably the symbolic heart of Western academia, now finds itself under attack—not from invading armies, but from homegrown political hostility. Conservative leaders have called for its defunding, accused it of elitism and ideological corruption, and claimed it no longer represents American values. In the aftermath of student protests, federal research funding on a wide range of critical initiatives from leading edge cancer research, aging, neuroscience and antibiotic resistance are now threatened or in some cases already suspended.

In early May the National Science Foundation, the world’s biggest supporter of basic research, was informed to stop awarding all funding actions pending a government review to ensure priorities align with government policies, jeopardizing research at top universities including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia. These cuts directly undermine biomedical research, climate modeling, and basic science—fields that have historically driven American leadership.

These attacks are not isolated. They are part of a broader anti-intellectual current in American life—a strain that distrusts expertise, questions scientific consensus, and prefers simple certainties over complex truths.

Why Anti-Intellectualism Persists

America has long harbored a deep tension between intellect and ideology. Evangelical Protestantism—especially in its more fundamentalist expressions—taught that spiritual truth trumped scientific evidence. As the 19th-century evangelist Dwight Moody once said, “I do not read any book unless it will help me understand the Bible.” One’s personal experience with God was given primacy—truth wasn’t something discovered through scholarship or reason, but something felt through divine encounter. If one experienced the spirit of God within, that was the truth—no further evidence was needed. In this worldview, facts became secondary to revelation.

This orientation helped give rise to a distinctly American religious culture rooted in emotional experience over intellectual inquiry. Sects like the Shakers and the Latter-day Saints (Mormons) reflected this ethos, emphasizing inner light, prophetic vision, or spiritual ecstasy over formal theology or empirical understanding. These movements contributed to a broader suspicion of science, rationalism, and institutional knowledge that persists in parts of the American psyche to this day.

What Exceptional Leaders Know

What the great thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age understood—and what the best 21st-century leaders emulate—is that inquiry is not a threat. It is a lifeline.

Steve Jobs didn’t want to just save Apple. He wanted to make great products. If you could help do that, Apple wanted you—regardless of your background. Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys, refused to pay bribes to grow his business. Instead, he built a company grounded in purpose, creating jobs, hospitals, and libraries across India. Bill Gates has used his personal billions funding basic scientific research programs and evidence-based health initiatives to help cure the world’s most devastating diseases and threats to human health.

In a world of complexity, exceptional leaders do not retreat. They reach out. They build bridges across cultures and disciplines. They ask better questions. They refuse to fear knowledge. They build it.

Protecting Institutions of Knowledge

The decline of Baghdad reminds us that great civilizations are not destroyed in a day. They falter slowly—through fear, through dogma, through the slow erosion of curiosity.

When we treat Harvard as a partisan battleground, when we ridicule scientists, when we suppress research or punish dissenting views—we are not just debating education policy. We are cutting the root of progress itself.

As a long-time amateur astronomer, I still marvel that so many stars bear Arabic names—traces of a culture that desired to understand the heavens. Let us not forget that it was not war alone that dimmed that light. It was fear of questions.

We would do well not to repeat the same mistake.

I noticed something curious.

We have a 38-gallon fish tank that sits in our breakfast nook. Each morning, my first act is to feed the fish. I try to mix it up to keep them engaged—one morning fish flakes, the next dried worms. They look forward to breakfast, racing to the top of the tank when I walk in.

One day, I tried an experiment. My wife Liz and I approached the tank at the same time from opposite ends. The fish swam to my side, waiting to be fed. They clearly recognized me as their source of food.

This past week I listened to the science podcast Quirks and Quarks. A group of scientists from the Max Planck Institute had discovered that wild fish can recognize which humans have fed them treats in the past. It made me think of our little ‘Planet Earth’—as Liz often calls my fish tank.

I like to add unusual fish to my tank. Recently, I visited my local fish store. Each tank is labeled: green for friendly species, yellow for “proceed with caution,” and red for aggressive ones that don’t play well with others.

I noticed a tank full of little puffer fish—a cute species that looked like fat bumblebees. It had a yellow sticker. What could possibly go wrong? I thought.

I added one to the tank.

Immediately, the other fish dove for cover in the plants. The puffer staked out his territory—the entire tank—and bullied the others, nipping their tails and chasing them off. After a few weeks, I brought him back to the store. When I returned home, my daughter Rebecca stood at the tank. The other fish emerged from the shadows and looked at us as if to offer their thanks.

“The reign of terror is over,” she said.

Peace returned to Planet Earth.

I’ve seen the emotional lives of fish before. When I was younger, I had a large black molly. We developed a kind of bond. When I placed my hand in the tank, she would swim up and rest in my curled fingers. She liked having her tummy stroked.

Years ago, a fellow aquarist shared a story about a friend who kept two saltwater tanks in his basement, separated by a few feet. One held a lone octopus. The other, a collection of fish.

Fish started disappearing.

At first, the friend assumed the other fish were scavenging the bodies. But then he noticed water puddles on the floor. Curious, he set up a camera.

In the footage, the octopus climbed out of its tank, lowered itself to the ground, crawled across the floor, and climbed into the other tank to help itself to a fish. Then it returned home, leaving behind only a trail of water as evidence.

Octopuses seem to be having their cultural moment, with documentaries like My Octopus Teacher and The Secret Life of Octopus. Highly intelligent, short-lived, and uncannily creative, these creatures possess problem-solving abilities that rival those of primates and birds.

In the book When Elephants Weep – The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffrey Masson recounts a story of two adult chimpanzees climbing a tree at sunset. They met at the top, held hands, and sat watching the sun descend.

Humans are not the only species to experience awe.

Even fish, it turns out, are more emotionally complex than we once believed. Daffodil cichlids, for example, exhibit social bonding and cooperative behavior. When exploring new territory, one fish may take the lead while the other waits, watching for cues. Their actions mirror trust, connection, even friendship—traits we’ve long reserved for “higher” animals.

All of this points to a growing body of evidence: fish and many other species experience rich emotional lives.

At the end of the month, we’ll be welcoming a new puppy into our home—after saying goodbye to our little 17-year old Ollie who died this past December. At this stage of our lives, raising a puppy may be a bit crazy. But in our hearts, we know it will bring us joy. The kind of joy that fills a house with life.

I’ll teach the puppy to sit by the fish tank and watch this little aquatic world in miniature. Maybe they’ll exchange knowing glances—or at least be curious about each other.

And maybe—just maybe—they’ll make each other’s lives a little richer.