I remember driving home through a Lake Tahoe blizzard in the winter of 1982.

I was a young father trying desperately to make a living. A trip that normally took forty-five minutes could turn into six hours. I would perform all night in Reno, crawl around in filthy snow putting chains on and taking them off, pray the car stayed on the mountain, finally stagger through the front door at three in the morning—and then go back outside to carry firewood into the house.

After that, Stephanie would hand me our year-old twins so she could sleep before going to work herself.

I would stand by the fire with one baby in each arm, walking them back and forth until they finally fell asleep against me. A few hours later, it was time to get the older children ready for school.

I loved all four of my children more than life itself. The twins were my world.

But I was tired.

We were all tired.

And sometimes I wonder what that young family might have looked like in the world we are rapidly creating now.

What if an autonomous car had safely driven me through that snow?

What if a robot had brought in the firewood?

What if artificial intelligence had handled half the mundane work that consumed my day?

What if food, heat, transportation and medical care had cost a fraction of what they did?

Would I have worked less?

Probably.

Would I have loved my children less?

Not for one second.

I might have had more time to love them.

That is the part of the coming AI revolution that fascinates me most.

What If Scarcity Really Begins to Disappear?

I don’t think it is accurate to say that every great thinker believes a world of abundance is guaranteed. It certainly isn’t.

But an extraordinary number of today’s leading technology figures are openly talking about it.

OpenAI now describes the challenge as making advanced AI “abundant, affordable, safe, useful” and broadly available so that its benefits are not concentrated among a few institutions or people. Tesla has gone even further, using the phrase “Sustainable Abundance” for a future in which AI, autonomous systems and robotics dramatically expand the world’s ability to produce goods and services.

This remains a vision, not a promise.

But imagine for a moment that it works.

Robots build houses.

Robots grow and harvest food.

Autonomous vehicles transport people and products.

AI tutors give every child access to extraordinary education.

AI-assisted medicine dramatically lowers the cost of diagnosing and treating disease.

Machines manufacture other machines.

Energy becomes cleaner and cheaper.

Human beings no longer spend the majority of their waking lives doing repetitive jobs simply because somebody has to pay the electric bill.

What happens then?

That question is much bigger than economics.

It becomes a question about the human soul.

Are We Good Enough for Abundance?

Some people look at humanity and say, Absolutely not.

Look at the wars.

Look at violence.

Look at slavery throughout history.

Look at hatred, greed, addiction, exploitation and man’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to hurt his fellow man.

Give everyone extraordinary technology, they argue, and perhaps we’ll simply become more efficient at destroying one another.

I understand the concern.

But I don’t believe that’s the whole story.

There is a line widely attributed to the great broadcaster Paul Harvey that I love:

“In small towns as well as large, good people outnumber bad people by 100 to 1.”

That sounds much closer to the world I have actually experienced.

I’ve certainly met bad people.

I’ve met selfish people.

I’ve seen cruelty.

But I’ve met far more good people.

People who help.

People who love their children.

People who stop when someone is hurt.

People who give money when nobody is watching.

People who sit beside someone dying.

People who bring food to a neighbor.

People who would rather live peacefully than hurt another human being.

What if our fundamental problem isn’t that humanity is overwhelmingly evil?

What if a significant part of the problem is that humanity has spent thousands of years frightened, exhausted, competing and desperate?

Poverty Doesn’t Make People Bad. But Desperation Changes People.

My own family experienced poverty.

When my parents were young, my father was going to medical school while working nights as a laboratory technician and cleaning a morgue. He and my mother were raising four children while living in Chicago projects with virtually nothing. Conditions were so bad that my mother worried about cockroaches getting into the children’s beds. One night, one of my sisters woke up screaming. A cockroach had crawled into her mouth while she was sleeping.

During an earlier period in Memphis, my father once confessed to a priest that he wasn’t sure he could put food on his children’s plates and pay his bills. After Mass, Father Schneider quietly pressed a fifty-dollar bill into his hand.

My father cried.

Years later, when he finally had money, he found that priest, repaid him and gave the church a generous contribution.

There is humanity in that story.

Need.

Compassion.

Gratitude.

Reciprocity.

My father wasn’t a bad man because he was broke.

He was a frightened father.

And somebody helped him.

Now multiply that fear by billions of people throughout history.

People have fought over food.

Water.

Land.

Jobs.

Oil.

Shelter.

Money.

Possessions.

Some steal because they want something.

Some steal because they’re hungry.

Some people commit terrible acts for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with poverty, and we should never romanticize crime or excuse evil.

But remove desperation from the human equation and I believe something important changes.

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But Abundance Alone Won’t Save Us

This is where I part company with people who believe technology will automatically create paradise.

It won’t.

Give an angry person a robot and you may simply have an angry person with a robot.

Give someone unlimited leisure without purpose and you may create boredom rather than happiness.

Remove the necessity to work and we will immediately have to answer another question:

What are we living for?

That is why family matters so profoundly.

I believe children thrive when they have stable, committed parents who love them, teach them right from wrong, establish boundaries, expect accountability and make absolutely certain those children know they are valued.

When possible, a strong two-parent family can provide an extraordinary foundation.

But I’ve lived enough life to add an important qualification.

Two parents under one roof are not enough by themselves.

I grew up watching alcoholism and conflict tear at my own family. A toxic household can wound a child even when both parents are technically present.

What children need most is love, stability, guidance, protection and consistency. But even more important than that, they need the tools to cope with conflict, setbacks, or grief; to find their way back to optimism rather than becoming jaded; to learn that giving mostly feels better than receiving; and to learn all the other lessons our grandparents taught us.

As I wrote near the end of my autobiography, how children are parented and guided has an enormous influence on what they become. Teaching the Golden Rule, delayed gratification, accountability, hope, forgiveness and self-control gives them tools they can carry for the rest of their lives.

That becomes even more important—not less—in a world where machines provide nearly everything material.

What Happens When Survival Is No Longer Our Full-Time Job?

Perhaps this is where things become extraordinarily beautiful.

Imagine a mother or father who doesn’t have to work two jobs and miss her child’s childhood. Oh, how I would have loved to spend more time with my children when they were young, but alas, I had to work 2 or 3 jobs always to support them.

Imagine a parent who doesn’t lie awake wondering whether the mortgage payment will bounce.

Imagine a gifted young musician who doesn’t abandon music because he has to stock shelves.

Imagine an elderly person who has constant assistance without bankrupting the family.

Imagine children receiving world-class education whether they were born in Beverly Hills, Appalachia, Lagos or a remote village.

Imagine human beings having enough time to care for one another.

To volunteer.

To create.

To teach.

To raise children.

To plant gardens.

To compose music.

To learn languages.

To worship.

To explore the oceans and eventually other worlds.

To sit beside someone who is lonely.

Maybe the strangest result of artificial intelligence will be that it gives us more time to become human.

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I wrote that hope doesn’t merely affect the person who carries it; it can ripple outward through families and communities. Small acts of kindness multiply. Empathy strengthens communities.

My old friend Jack Kemp put the larger idea beautifully:

“There are no limits to our future if we don’t put limits on our people.”

I have always believed that.

Freedom Will Require More Responsibility, Not Less

This is also why the ideas I explored in Flames of Freedom become more important in an age of abundance.

Freedom without responsibility eventually becomes chaos.

Technology without morality becomes dangerous.

Intelligence without wisdom can become monstrous.

The old Golden Rule may turn out to be more valuable in the age of artificial intelligence than any computer algorithm ever written:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Imagine teaching that to every child in a world where scarcity is disappearing.

Not because they are afraid somebody will take their possessions.

But because they finally understand that another person’s happiness does not diminish their own.

There is enough.

Enough food.

Enough energy.

Enough intelligence.

Enough medicine.

Enough opportunity.

Enough for you and me.

That could change civilization.

I Believe Humanity Will Surprise Us

Helen Keller said:

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

I choose that view of the future.

Not blindly.

I’ve lived too long for blind optimism.

I know human beings are complicated.

But I’ve also watched people rise after fires, deaths, poverty, alcoholism, illness, divorce and extraordinary grief.

I have watched people change.

My own father changed.

My mother changed.

I changed.

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I describe healthy optimism not as pretending everything is wonderful, but looking reality directly in the eye and saying:

This is difficult, but there is a way forward.

Perhaps that is exactly the attitude we need now.

AI and robots will not manufacture goodness.

Abundance will not automatically create virtue.

But what if it removes enough fear, exhaustion and desperation that the goodness already present in most people finally has room to breathe?

What if the hundred good people Paul Harvey spoke about are no longer spending all their energy merely surviving?

What might they build?

Who might they help?

What might their children become?

Maybe the great technological revolution ahead of us will ultimately produce something far more important than cheaper products or smarter machines.

Maybe it will give humanity the opportunity to grow up.

And maybe—just maybe—we will take it.

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I believe extraordinary things are coming.

But the most extraordinary thing of all may not be what our machines become.

It may be what we finally have the opportunity to become ourselves.

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Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a wonderful and fulfilling life.

One of my nephews tells me he is an atheist.

I believe he means it sincerely. He doesn’t believe there is a God waiting somewhere beyond what we can see. He doesn’t believe consciousness continues after the body dies. As he sees it, when this remarkable biological machine finally shuts down, that’s it.

Lights out.

Nothing more.

I love him, and I respect his right to believe exactly what he believes.

And I wholly disagree with him.

In fact, I have often thought how profoundly sad I would find that worldview if I believed it myself.

That distinction matters. I’m not saying atheists are sad people, immoral people, empty people, or people without love. Secular humanists explicitly argue that human beings can build ethical, fulfilling lives around reason, compassion, relationships, creativity and human flourishing without belief in God.

Of course they can.

I’ve known wonderful people who don’t believe what I believe.

What saddens me is something else.

It is the thought that this extraordinary human story might have no larger story around it.

I Have Seen Too Much to Believe We Are Only Bodies

I cannot prove God to you.

I cannot put a soul underneath a microscope.

But there have been moments in my life when I have felt the presence of something beyond the physical world so powerfully that dismissing it would require me to deny my own experience.

I have been close to death and witnessed what I can only describe as an almost electrical transition—the strange difference between a living human being filled with personality, warmth, awareness and presence, and the body left behind when that presence is gone.

Something was there.

Then it wasn’t.

You can call that biology if you wish.

I call it the soul.

And I have experienced the mystery from the other direction too.

On the evening my twins were born, a nurse placed my newborn daughter Rachel into my arms. I looked into those astonishingly alert little eyes and had an immediate, almost overwhelming recognition.

I knew her.

And somehow, impossibly, I felt that she knew me.

In my autobiography, I described it as though two old friends or soul mates had finally found each other again. It remains one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

I’ve experienced other moments of Déjà vu, and I imagine you have too.

Was that scientific proof of anything?

No.

But human life contains truths that don’t always arrive wearing laboratory coats.

Love is like that.

Beauty is like that.

Music is like that.

Faith is like that.

The Bible says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

I’ve always loved that.

Not evidence of things disproven.

Evidence of things not seen.

There is a difference.

What Happens to Meaning If Nothing Means Anything Ultimately?

An atheist can rightly answer that life doesn’t need a divine assignment to have meaning.

You love your children because you love them.

You create because creation matters to you.

You help a stranger because compassion is good.

You experience a sunset, Mozart, a baby’s first laugh, a kiss from the person you love—and the experience itself is enough.

I understand that argument.

But I have difficulty stopping there.

If human beings are ultimately accidental arrangements of matter in an indifferent universe, then every Mozart symphony, every mother’s sacrifice, every heroic act, every murder, every wedding, every prayer, every injustice and every human civilization ultimately reaches the same destination.

Nothing.

That is where I would struggle.

C.S. Lewis explained his faith beautifully: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Faith has served that function in my own life.

It doesn’t answer every question.

It gives me a framework in which the questions themselves have meaning.

That idea runs through all my books, particularly The Science of Positive Thinking and The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body. I’ve never believed positive thinking means smiling foolishly while your world collapses. Faith isn’t denial either.

Faith says:

This hurts terribly—and I still believe the story isn’t over.

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Death Is Sad Enough Without Making It an Eternal Goodbye

I’ve buried people I loved.

Too many.

I’ve experienced deaths that were peaceful and others that tore my family apart.

After the death of Stephanie, the mother of my children, I spent a long period in confusion, grief and guilt. I thought about everything I should have done differently. I grieved that I would never again look across the room at that one person and say, Look what we created together.

Faith didn’t make that pain disappear.

But imagine adding one more sentence:

And you will absolutely never see her again.

I can’t accept that.

Perhaps that is emotional rather than intellectual.

Fine.

Human beings are emotional creatures.

Love itself makes us vulnerable to an enormous question: Where does all that love go when somebody dies?

A wonderful minister and friend of mine, Dr. Tom Costa, used to say that just as there are waiting hands for us when we are born, we must believe there are waiting hands when we pass on. I remembered that especially while watching my friend Larry approach death.

I don’t know exactly what Heaven looks like.

I don’t pretend to.

But I believe there are waiting hands.

Faith Gives Suffering Somewhere to Go

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said during the terrible burden of the Civil War, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

I understand that sentence.

When you have exhausted your intelligence, your money, your friends and your own ability to fix something, prayer offers one more place to go.

I learned that remarkably early.

As a teenager at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, I met a very religious boy whose name I can’t even remember. One night he explained how he prayed: first asking forgiveness, then expressing gratitude, then asking God to watch over the people he loved, and only afterward asking for help for himself.

I never forgot it.

In fact, I followed that simple sequence for the rest of my life because it brought me comfort during difficult times.

What a remarkable legacy from a boy whose name disappeared from my memory.

Maybe God occasionally sends teachers who don’t even know they’re teaching.

And Then There Is Right and Wrong

This is where the argument becomes more difficult.

An atheist can be deeply moral. Obviously.

Empathy, reason, culture and our shared human experience can provide powerful foundations for ethical behavior; that is precisely how humanists describe their moral outlook.

But another question remains for me:

Is murder wrong because humans have collectively decided it is wrong?

Or is it wrong even if every human being decides otherwise?

If a government declares slavery acceptable, does that make slavery acceptable?

If a society decides that certain human beings no longer possess rights, have their rights actually disappeared?

In Flames of Freedom, I return repeatedly to the American proposition that our fundamental rights are not gifts bestowed by government. They exist before government.

That is why the words “endowed by their Creator” matter so much to the American idea.

Without something above human authority, eventually human authority becomes the highest authority.

I find that troubling.

Justice Beyond the Courtroom

Then there is injustice.

Some monsters die peacefully in bed.

Some wonderful people die young.

Children suffer.

Families lose everything.

People commit horrific acts and are never caught.

If this life is the entire universe of justice, then sometimes evil simply wins.

Faith allows me to believe that it doesn’t.

Not necessarily through some cartoon image of clouds, harps and fiery furnaces, but through the conviction that our actions possess eternal significance.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have faith in the future because I have faith in God.”

That faith helped sustain a man confronting evils far greater than most of us will ever face.

Denzel Washington expressed the same idea in simpler language to graduating students: “Put God first in everything you do.”

Faith doesn’t make us superior.

Sometimes religious people behave terribly.

Sometimes atheists demonstrate greater kindness than professed believers.

The label isn’t the achievement.

The life is.

Maybe the Longing Tells Us Something

There is one final reason I could never comfortably embrace atheism.

Human beings seem to hunger for transcendence.

We stand beneath a canopy of stars and feel awe.

We hear a great symphony and sometimes cry without knowing why.

We fall in love and instinctively use words such as forever.

We hold a newborn child and feel something ancient.

We stand beside someone who is dying and whisper, I’ll see you again.

Why?

Perhaps atheism is correct and these are simply emotional responses produced by extraordinarily sophisticated brains.

I acknowledge that possibility.

But I don’t believe it.

I believe those longings may be clues.

I believe there is more.

I believe consciousness is more mysterious than we understand.

I believe love matters beyond its immediate utility.

I believe the soul survives.

I believe God is real.

And I believe death is a doorway rather than a wall.

And faith can come to you in a thousand different ways. There’s that saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” When fear consumes you and your own mortality seems imminent, most of us instinctively move towards prayer. After all, we’ve been created, so logic dictates that we must have a Creator.

Interestingly, research doesn’t prove any of that—but it does suggest that religious participation is often associated with greater reported happiness and life satisfaction, although the relationship is complicated and community itself appears to play an important role.

But statistics aren’t why I believe.

Life is why I believe.

The people I’ve loved.

The people I’ve lost.

The prayers that steadied me.

The coincidences that seemed a little too perfect.

The spiritual teachers who appeared when I needed them.

A daughter’s eyes saying, somehow:

Hello, old friend.

And those mysterious moments around death when a body remains before you while the person you knew seems unmistakably gone somewhere else.

So when my nephew tells me there is nothing after this life, I don’t argue with him.

I love him.

I hope he has a magnificent life.

And perhaps someday he’ll experience something that causes him to ask the question again.

Because I don’t think faith requires us to stop asking questions.

I think faith begins when we become humble enough to admit that the universe may contain answers larger than our present ability to understand them.

And if I’m wrong?

Then I will have spent my life believing that love matters eternally, that my choices have meaning, that forgiveness matters, that good ultimately matters, that I will see those I love again, and that I am part of something greater than myself. And all of that, I guarantee, has made me overall more of an optimistic person in general throughout all of my struggles.

But if I’m right—

what an extraordinary reunion awaits us.

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We don’t all have to reach the same conclusions today.

We should never stop asking the great questions.

And we should never stop loving one another while we search for the answers.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a wonderful and fulfilling life.

I can still see the neighborhood.

It was Memphis in the late 1960s. Ivy climbed the sides of old red-brick buildings around my grandparents’ apartment, and directly across the street, on the corner, was something that would seem almost exotic to many children today.

A drugstore.

But not merely a drugstore.

It had a soda fountain.

My grandmother Audrey would give me a little change, and I would walk across the street by myself. For a few cents, I could order a cherry Coke, have a milkshake, or stand there contemplating the almost unlimited possibilities contained in penny candy. I looked forward to those trips with the intensity only a boy with coins in his pocket and sugar on his mind can fully understand.

There was something magical about a real soda fountain.

The long counter. The stools where you could swivel around while you waited. Tall glasses. Ice cream scoops. Chocolate syrup. Strawberry syrup. Cherry Cokes. Root beer floats. Malted milkshakes. Sundaes piled higher than anyone really needed. The hiss and fizz of carbonated water.

And people.

That may have been the most important ingredient of all.

The Library of Congress describes the neighborhood soda fountain as a meeting place for people of all ages, often located right inside the local drugstore and frequently combined with a lunch counter. It was part restaurant, part neighborhood bulletin board, part teenage gathering place and part social club.

You might sit next to a businessman having lunch.

A couple of schoolchildren could walk in with a handful of coins.

An elderly woman might know the pharmacist by his first name.

And somewhere at the end of the counter, a young couple could sit close together sharing one enormous milkshake with two straws, believing with absolute certainty that nobody in the history of civilization had ever been as much in love as they were.

Sometimes, I think we lost more than the milkshake.

My Parents Met at One

There is another reason soda fountains have always stirred something in me.

My parents met at one.

My maternal grandfather, Theodore Witt, was an immigrant who became a pharmacist in America. For twenty years he owned a corner pharmacy at 11012 Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Like so many neighborhood pharmacies of that era, it included a soda fountain. My mother Elaine grew up working there beside her father.

Then came World War II.

My father, Maynard, enlisted in the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor. Around age nineteen, he was transferred to Chicago while a ship was being prepared for duty in the Pacific. One day this handsome young sailor walked into my grandfather’s drugstore and saw seventeen-year-old Elaine working behind the counter at the soda fountain.

He needed to make a telephone call.

In those days the telephone required either a nickel or a little token called a slug. My father asked the pretty girl behind the counter whether the phone took a nickel or a slug.

She gave him a slug.

It may have been the most consequential piece of metal either of them ever held.

They started talking. He was looking for a room to rent and asked her about an address. Elaine told him it was too far to walk but happened to be in the direction she was going after work, so she offered to drive him there.

Then she invited him home for dinner.

My grandmother, already occupied with a toddler and a newborn, was apparently less thrilled with this spontaneous act of wartime hospitality than my mother was. She told Elaine to pick up pancake mix. My father went into the grocery store and emerged with buckwheat pancake mix because that was what his mother made back in West Virginia.

My Hungarian grandmother had apparently never encountered such a thing.

Thus began not only my parents’ romance, but a long and occasionally complicated relationship between my father and his future mother-in-law.

My parents had only a handful of days together before Dad shipped out to the South Pacific. He wrote to my mother every day while enduring three years of war, malaria and battles in which some of his friends never came home.

When the war ended, he returned to Chicago as quickly as he could.

And married the girl from the soda fountain.

So perhaps you can understand why an old drugstore counter means a little more to me than ice cream.

My family began at one.

Nostalgia Needs to Tell the Truth

But when we remember America, we should remember it honestly.

Not everything about the old days deserves resurrection.

Those wonderful lunch counters and soda fountains also became symbols of one of the great moral contradictions in American life. In many places, particularly across the segregated South, Black Americans were denied the simple dignity of sitting at counters where white Americans were served.

On February 1, 1960, four Black college students sat down at the whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to surrender their seats. Their peaceful act helped ignite a broader sit-in movement. After months of protest, that Woolworth counter was desegregated.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said during that era, “The time is always ripe to do right.”

That belongs in our memory too.

I don’t want to return to an America where one child could sit at the fountain and another could not.

I want to recover the fountain—and leave the injustice buried forever.

That distinction matters enormously whenever we talk about Lost Americana.

We don’t need to recreate every feature of yesterday.

We can preserve what was good, reject what was wrong, and perhaps build something even better.

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What Else Did We Lose?

The soda fountain gradually disappeared as bottled soft drinks, commercially packaged ice cream and fast-food restaurants changed the way Americans ate and gathered.

Progress does that.

And I am hardly an enemy of progress. I love technology. I am fascinated by artificial intelligence, longevity science and what the next twenty years may bring.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1816, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

So do I.

But loving the future doesn’t require throwing away everything that made the past worth remembering.

I miss some of the places where Americans simply ran into one another.

The neighborhood hardware store where the owner knew which screw you needed before you finished explaining the problem.

The barber shop where three generations might be waiting for a haircut.

The little diner where the waitress knew how you took your coffee.

Front porches.

Drive-in movies.

Local ball fields.

Church suppers.

Town parades where children waved little American flags without wondering whether anyone was recording them.

School bands marching badly but enthusiastically down Main Street.

Handwritten letters.

Family dinners where everyone stayed at the table after the food was gone.

Neighbors who noticed when your newspaper had been sitting outside for two days.

Local merchants who knew your children.

Places where nobody had to make an appointment to have a conversation.

Fred Rogers once said, “Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.”

Maybe part of what we’ve lost isn’t architecture at all.

Maybe we’ve lost some of the places that made listening unavoidable.

We Don’t Have to Leave It All Behind

That thought was part of what led me to write Flames of Freedom—America’s Resilient Dream and Why It Is Humanity’s Last Hope.

FLAMES OF FREEDOM is available on Amazon HERE.

A country isn’t only laws, elections, monuments or lines on a map.

It is habits.

Customs.

Families.

Stories.

Shared memories.

Little voluntary acts of community that teach us how to live alongside people who aren’t exactly like us.

Ronald Reagan famously warned that “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

I think culture works that way too.

Don’t teach something to the next generation, and eventually they don’t know it existed.

But here is the optimistic part:

We can bring some of it back.

There is no law preventing somebody from opening a neighborhood soda fountain in 2026.

There is nothing stopping us from building new town squares, neighborhood cafés, community concerts, local markets and gathering places.

We can put down the phone at dinner.

We can learn the name of the person next door.

We can take our grandchildren to a minor-league baseball game.

We can write somebody an actual letter.

We can invite people over without first spending three days making the house look as though nobody lives there.

We can sit on porches.

We can support the little restaurant that remembers us.

We can teach children old songs.

We can tell family stories before the people who remember them are gone.

And somebody, somewhere, could certainly make a decent cherry Coke again.

I hope they do.

Because when I close my eyes, I can still picture that boy in Memphis with a few coins from his grandmother, crossing the street toward an old neighborhood drugstore.

He didn’t know he was experiencing Americana.

He didn’t know those places were disappearing.

He certainly didn’t know that decades earlier, hundreds of miles away, another soda fountain had helped bring his mother and father together.

He only knew there was a cherry Coke waiting across the street.

Maybe that is how culture survives—not because we put it behind glass in a museum, but because somebody decides a good thing is worth doing again.

We don’t have to live in the past.

But we shouldn’t become so enamored with tomorrow that we abandon everything beautiful that brought us here.

The best America has always been an unfinished America—capable of remembering, correcting, preserving and creating all at once.

So let’s keep the cherry Coke.

Let’s keep the counter.

Let’s make sure there is a stool for everybody.a

And then let’s invite the next generation to sit down beside us.

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Almost all of us have used this phrase.

You have already had a long day. Maybe you didn’t sleep well. Something went wrong at work. Somebody irritated you. The sink is stopped up again. A bill you weren’t expecting shows up. The computer decides this is the perfect moment to stop cooperating.

You finally get one problem handled.

Then something else happens.

And you hear yourself say:

“It’s always something.”

I’ve said it.

You’ve probably said it.

But lately I have been thinking that maybe we have it completely backward.

We want it to be always something.

Because the alternative is that there is nothing left to deal with.

Years ago, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale made essentially that point. I went back and checked the wording, because the quote is often paraphrased as “the only people without problems are six feet under.” His actual line was simpler:

“The only people who have no problems are in cemeteries.” The wording appears in Peale’s syndicated writing at least as far back as 1965.

Think about that.

Problems are irritating.

Problems are exhausting.

Problems can hurt.

But problems are also evidence that we are still participating in this extraordinary, complicated, unpredictable thing called life.

The trick is not learning how to live without problems.

The trick is learning how to stop allowing every problem to become a crisis inside us.

I learned that distinction the hard way.

In my autobiography, It’s a Long Climb to the Middle, I wrote about a period when I was working during the day, dealing with turmoil there, then going home to another set of serious problems. I described myself quite literally as being “at my wit’s end.” One night my sister Suzanne called, noticing that I wasn’t myself and asked if I wanted to talk. I finally did. She listened and reminded me of when we’re on an airplane and a flight attendant tells us that if the oxygen masks come down, we must always put one on ourselves first so we can help others. She suggested I take a break and do something just for me… take a walk, or find some quiet time so I could get some distance and figure out what to do. At first I thought the idea was ridiculous. Then I realized I needed to do something different.

That story matters to me today because the problem did not magically disappear.

I changed the way I dealt with it.

And that changed everything.

The ancient philosopher Epictetus put it remarkably well: “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”

Two thousand years later, we call part of that reframing.

And modern research gives the old philosopher some support: cognitive reappraisal—deliberately reconsidering the meaning of a stressful event—can reduce the negative emotion we experience after stress.

That doesn’t mean pretending the problem isn’t real.

It means refusing to make it worse inside your own head.

So the next time life gives you one of those “It’s always something” days, here are ten things I believe can help.

1. Stop for a moment before you react.

This sounds almost too simple.

Breathe.

Not because breathing fixes the plumbing, pays the bill or changes the person who just made you angry.

It gives you a chance to come back into the room.

When several problems arrive at once, our emotions start stacking themselves. The fourth problem may get the reaction produced by the first three.

Slow breathing is not merely a slogan. In a randomized trial, regular slow-breathing practice reduced psychological stress among healthy adults.

So before sending the email, making the accusation or declaring the entire day a disaster, take a few slow breaths.

Sometimes thirty seconds prevents three days of unnecessary trouble.

2. Separate the problem from the story you are telling yourself about it.

There is the event.

And then there is our interpretation.

“The car needs repair” is a problem.

“Nothing ever works out for me” is a story.

“I made a mistake” is information.

“I am a failure” is a verdict.

Those are not the same things.

This is one of the ideas that runs through The Science of Positive Thinking. Positive thinking, as I see it, isn’t pretending that bad things are good. It is learning to see reality without automatically adding hopelessness to it.

Ask yourself:

What actually happened—and what have I added to it?

That question alone can change the temperature in the room.

3. Solve what you can solve now.

There is a strange comfort in postponing an unpleasant task.

For about five minutes.

Then you still have the problem—and now you have the burden of knowing you are avoiding it.

Research has repeatedly linked chronic procrastination with higher stress and poorer health-related behaviors.

And this is where we should distinguish delayed gratification from procrastination.

Delayed gratification means giving up an immediate comfort because something better matters more later.

Procrastination means delaying an intended action even though you expect the delay to make things worse.

Very different.

Make the phone call.

Open the envelope.

Schedule the appointment.

Answer the email.

Take the first step.

The problem may not disappear, but the dread often begins shrinking as soon as you move toward it.

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4. Don’t try to solve ten problems simultaneously.

Sometimes life really does pile on.

But ten problems do not necessarily require ten simultaneous solutions.

Ask:

Which one needs me first?

Then deal with that one.

Years ago, I found myself financially stretched by a house that was far beyond what I should have been carrying. Then an opportunity arrived to produce music for Yamaha. I worked relentlessly for more than two years and created over one hundred albums. That project helped me meet enormous financial obligations, and I remember actually crying when the first check arrived.

I couldn’t solve my entire life in one afternoon.

But I could do the work in front of me.

Sometimes the answer to overwhelm is not doing more.

It is deciding what comes next.

5. Ask for help before pride makes the problem larger.

I have become a great believer in this.

Don’t confuse independence with isolation.

My sister helped me because I finally told her what was happening. Other moments in my life have seen relatives, friends, colleagues, and even near-strangers step forward at exactly the moment I needed them.

When my family faced crushing medical bills years ago, we swallowed our pride and asked relatives for help. It was uncomfortable. We were desperate. But help mattered.

There is no medal awarded for suffering unnecessarily by yourself.

Call someone.

Ask the question.

Find the expert.

Ask God for guidance.

Let somebody know you’re struggling.

You may be surprised by who shows up.

6. Look for resources, not excuses.

We live in an extraordinary time.

Whatever problem you face, someone has probably faced some version of it before.

There are books.

Professionals.

Support groups.

Churches.

Friends.

Online communities.

AI tools.

Government agencies.

Nonprofits.

Mentors.

Teachers.

Doctors.

Financial counselors.

Attorneys.

People with experience.

One of the lessons in my own life was learning that knowledge can turn helplessness into options.

You may not like all the options.

But having three imperfect options is usually better than believing there are none.

7. Take care of the body that has to carry the problem.

Everything seems darker when you are exhausted.

I know that from experience.

During most of my young career, I performed late at night but still woke early with my children. I began taking naps whenever I could and joking that I “slept in shifts.” I also kept running, and later walking, several miles on most days.

That didn’t eliminate life’s problems.

It helped give me enough physical reserve to meet them.

Sleep.

Move.

Drink water.

Eat something decent.

Go outside.

Turn the noise off for a while.

In The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body, I keep coming back to the fact that mind and body are not separate departments. Stress lives in both.

Take care of the person who has to do the solving.

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8. Don’t make permanent decisions from temporary emotions.

Anger wants action now.

Fear wants escape now.

Despair wants you to believe that tomorrow has already been decided.

It hasn’t.

Maya Angelou expressed this beautifully: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

Feel the emotion.

Respect what it may be telling you.

Then give wisdom a chance to catch up.

You are allowed to say:

“I am too angry to answer this tonight.”

“I need to sleep before making this decision.”

“I need more information.”

“I need to talk to someone.”

That isn’t weakness.

That’s maturity.

9. Ask what the problem is trying to teach you.

I don’t believe every terrible thing happens because we needed a lesson.

Sometimes painful things are simply painful.

But I do believe we can take a lesson from almost anything.

Years after some of the most difficult periods of my life, I began to recognize my own patterns—my need to fix people, my fear of being alone, the baggage I had carried from childhood, and the ways those things influenced my choices. I eventually had to acknowledge my own responsibility, forgive others and forgive myself. I described that as one of the greatest healing periods of my life.

That wasn’t pleasant knowledge.

But it was useful knowledge.

A problem can reveal a weak boundary.

A bad habit.

A relationship that needs attention.

A financial mistake.

A fear.

A skill you need to learn.

A conversation you have avoided.

Every problem does not contain a blessing.

But many contain information.

10. Remember that this problem is not the whole story.

This may be the most important one.

When I was little and my father was away in treatment, I missed him terribly. One day I began to cry. My sister Suzanne took me to the window and pointed out a red bird. She told me that whenever I saw a red bird, I should remember it as a sign of hope—that everything would be okay.

From then on, whenever someone in our family was down, somebody might say:

“Remember the red bird.”

I still love that.

Not because everything always turns out exactly as we want.

It doesn’t.

But because this moment is not necessarily the conclusion.

This problem isn’t your entire life.

This bad day isn’t your entire year.

This mistake isn’t your entire character.

This loss isn’t everything that remains.

And the fact that there is still something to deal with means there is still something ahead of you.

Maybe that’s the better way to hear the phrase.

It’s always something.

Yes.

Thank God.

There is another morning.

Another decision.

Another person to love.

Another problem to solve.

Another chance to become wiser than you were yesterday.

Another opportunity to ask for help—or give it.

Another chance to breathe deeply, straighten your shoulders and say:

All right. What do I do next?

You don’t have to believe you can solve every problem that will ever come your way.

You only need enough belief in yourself to face this one.

Then the next one.

Then the one after that.

That’s how a life gets lived.

And, if we’re fortunate, it will be “always something” for a very long time.

If this article made you think of someone who is having one of those days—or one of those years—please share it with them, or share my Substack feed with anyone you think might find some encouragement here.

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What follows is a fictional first-person look back from the year 2036, grounded in technologies and ideas already emerging today.

I am writing this in 2036, and sometimes I still find myself staring out the window and wondering how we got here so quickly.

A driverless car glides silently down the street. Nobody thinks twice about it anymore.

A delivery robot rolls up the sidewalk behind it.

Across town, robots are assisting surgeons, caring for elderly patients, stocking stores, preparing meals and doing jobs that, only ten years ago, we assumed would always require people.

Flying cars are no longer something George Jetson takes to work. They are still expensive, still regulated, still not everywhere—but they are real.

The Jetsons are here.

And yet none of that is the biggest change.

The biggest change is time.

For most of human history, progress seemed to happen in steps. One invention led to another. One generation handed something slightly better to the next.

Then artificial intelligence collided with robotics, biotechnology, genetics and quantum computing.

And suddenly it felt as though 400 years of progress had been compressed into ten.

I first caught a glimpse of this possibility back in the 1990s.

Ray Kurzweil was talking about exponential technological growth when most people were still figuring out how to connect to the Internet. In 1999 he predicted human-level artificial intelligence within roughly 30 years. Later, in The Singularity Is Near, published in 2005, he argued that technological change would accelerate in ways human beings naturally underestimate. He put it simply: “Exponential growth is deceptive.”

He was right about the deception.

We are psychologically built to imagine tomorrow looking somewhat like yesterday.

It doesn’t anymore.

The Year Aging Changed

Perhaps nothing shook people more than what happened in 2035.

That was when the first generation of widely available age-reversal medicines moved out of specialized trials and into ordinary medical practice.

I was first in line.

Why wouldn’t I be?

I had been preparing for that possibility for decades.

Back in the early 2000s, I started slowly. I power-walked at least a couple of miles most days. I worked out several times a week. By 2010, I had quit smoking—anything and everything. I began paying closer attention to supplements, nutrition, sleep and what I was putting into my body.

I was never perfect.

I’m still not.

I’ve eaten too much sugar sometimes. I’ve enjoyed alcohol in moderation. I’ve made plenty of choices that would never make the cover of a health magazine.

But I kept trying to give my body a fighting chance.

That philosophy eventually found its way into books such as Stay Healthy, Stay Youthful—The Science of Living to 150 and The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body. I wasn’t trying to become immortal. I wanted more healthy time.

You can find ALL of my books on Amazon HERE.

Today, a year after beginning the new treatments, I look and feel perhaps five to ten years younger than I did when I started.

Doctors now talk seriously about diseases that once terrified every family becoming manageable, preventable or disappearing entirely.

Kurzweil had long argued that the 2030s could bring dramatically more powerful life-extension technologies; in his later work he described a progression from biotechnology and AI toward nanotechnology capable of attacking aging at increasingly fundamental levels.

Whether every optimistic prediction proves correct remains to be seen.

But the equation has unquestionably changed.

My children and grandchildren now talk about living to 120, 130 or even 150 as something that may be possible—not fantasy.

And I keep coming back to a very simple question:

Why wouldn’t we want that?

Not another fifty years of sickness.

Another fifty years of life.

Time with people we love.

Sunsets.

Music.

Conversations.

Birthdays.

Christmas mornings.

Places we have never seen.

Books we haven’t read.

Things we haven’t created yet.

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What Happens When We Suddenly Have More Time?

This turned out to be one of the great questions of the 2030s.

Some people said, Wonderful. I have all the time in the world.

They stopped pushing themselves.

Others reacted in exactly the opposite way. They decided that an extra fifty healthy years meant fifty more years to build, create, discover and contribute.

But those were only the beginning.

Some people started second and third careers at 70.

Others went back to school at 80.

Some decided to spend decades traveling rather than saving every dream for a retirement that might never come.

Grandparents became much more involved in the lives of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

People who once thought they were “too old” to learn an instrument, paint, write or start a company suddenly realized that they might have decades to become good at it.

Others devoted their extra years to service, mentoring and helping younger generations avoid mistakes they had already made.

Some rediscovered faith because longer life forced them to confront an unexpected question: If I have more time, what am I supposed to do with it?

And some discovered that longevity without purpose can become its own form of emptiness.

That lesson didn’t surprise me.

Years earlier, while writing The Science of Positive Thinking, I kept returning to the relationship between thoughts, habits and the life we eventually build.

Scripture expressed it long before neuroscience did: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

A longer life doesn’t automatically become a better life.

We still have to become people capable of living it.

The World Around Us Changed Too

By 2036, money itself has begun to mean something different.

Robots now produce so much of what we consume that many prices have fallen dramatically. Entire industries operate with a fraction of the human labor they once required.

People still work—but increasingly because they want to contribute, not simply because survival requires forty or fifty hours every week.

Machines maintain machines. Specialized human teams supervise fleets of robots that repair other robots.

Meanwhile, the first permanent lunar settlement is expanding.

Robotic construction crews are preparing habitats on Mars long before most human settlers arrive.

AI tutors give children individualized instruction once available only to wealthy families.

Personal medical AIs continuously watch for subtle changes in our bodies instead of waiting until we become sick.

Laboratories are growing replacement tissues and increasingly sophisticated organs.

Autonomous farms produce food with extraordinary efficiency.

And immersive communication has reached the point where a grandparent thousands of miles away can sometimes feel almost physically present in the same room.

None of this made humanity obsolete.

It made being human more important.

Ronald Reagan once warned that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Technology doesn’t change that.

In fact, it may make questions about freedom, responsibility and human dignity more important than ever—a subject I wrestled with repeatedly in Flames of Freedom.

What I Wish I Could Tell People in 2026

I wish I could send a letter backward ten years.

I would tell people not to panic about the future.

I would tell them to prepare for it.

And I would give them ten pieces of advice:

1. Protect your health now. Walk, move, build strength and maintain your body so you can reach tomorrow in good condition.

2. Stop smoking. Don’t bargain with something that steadily destroys the very years you hope science will extend.

3. Eat reasonably well without demanding perfection from yourself.

4. Learn about nutrition, supplementation and preventive health instead of surrendering all responsibility for your body. (check out my books!)

5. Protect your sleep. Your brain and body repair themselves while the world is quiet.

6. Train your mind. Question resentment, fear, hopelessness and old stories that keep repeating themselves.

7. Keep learning. AI will reward curiosity far more than credentials alone.

8. Strengthen your relationships. Extra years mean very little without people you love.

9. Develop faith, gratitude and a sense of purpose larger than yourself.

10. Become comfortable with change. Don’t worship the past simply because it is familiar.

Dolly Parton once offered a wonderfully direct piece of advice: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

That may turn out to be one of the best survival strategies for the age of artificial intelligence.

Because technology can give us more years.

It can give us extraordinary tools.

It may cure diseases, eliminate drudgery and carry us to other worlds.

But it cannot decide who we should become.

That part remains ours.

And as I sit here in 2036, watching another driverless car disappear down the street while a machine somewhere helps design a medicine that might give someone another twenty healthy years, I don’t feel frightened by the future.

I feel grateful to have lived long enough to see it.

The future is stranger than we imagined.

Faster than we expected.

More disruptive than many people wanted.

But it is also filled with possibilities our grandparents could scarcely have dreamed of.

If you are reading this back in 2026, don’t wait for the future to become obvious.

Take care of yourself.

Take care of the people you love.

Keep your mind open.

Keep your principles strong.

Keep learning.

Keep moving.

And prepare yourself—not merely to survive what is coming, but to live long enough, wisely enough and joyfully enough to become part of it.

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The future belongs not simply to those who live long enough to see it.

It belongs to those who are ready to make something meaningful of the years they are given.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a wonderful and fulfilling life.

Me and my Friend Kurt (Years After I Broke My Arm!)

When I was twelve years old, my friend Kurt and I went ice skating. We were full of the fearless energy that only boys that age seem to possess. One moment we were racing across the ice, laughing, and the next I was on the ground with a sharp, unmistakable pain shooting through my arm. The bone had broken clean through.

At the hospital the doctor set it carefully and then said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. He told me that once the break healed, the place where the bone had fractured would actually be stronger than it had been before. The body does not simply glue the pieces back together the way they were. It lays down new material, denser and more resilient than the original. The site of the injury becomes the hardest part of the structure.

I was too young then to understand how far that truth would travel beyond bones.

Years later I realized the same principle applies to the human heart. When our hearts break — through loss, betrayal, sudden tragedy, or the slow erosion of what we once believed permanent — the pain can feel final. Yet if we are willing to do the real work of healing, that broken place can become stronger than it ever was before. Not in spite of the break, but because of it.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway understood this. He wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” The key word is *afterward*. Strength does not arrive automatically. It comes only after the honest work of facing what happened, feeling what it cost, and choosing not to stay shattered.

I have watched this truth play out in the lives of people I love, and I have lived it myself. My grandmother Audrey Athey Sisler endured more broken places than most people could survive. As a young bride she watched her husband’s leg severed under a train. She buried a two-year-old son to an illness that antibiotics would later have cured. She lost nearly everything in the 1929 crash. Her teenage boy was killed by a drunk driver. Later she lost grandchildren in a fire, a son to suicide, another grandson to AIDS, and eventually her remaining sons. Any one of those losses would have been enough to harden a person permanently. Yet near the end of her ninety-four years she looked at me and said, with quiet certainty, “I swear, I still feel 18 inside.”

That was not denial. That was the result of decades of quiet, determined healing. She did the work. She grieved. She released. She kept choosing love over bitterness. In *The Science of Positive Thinking* I wrote about the measurable ways that kind of resilience reaches into the body itself — into hormones, immune function, even the protective caps on our chromosomes. Audrey lived the science before the science had language for it.

My own life has required the same work. The sudden losses that rearrange everything overnight. The long seasons of grief that do not resolve on a schedule. The moments when the pain felt larger than any capacity I possessed. In those times the temptation is always the same: to numb, to distract, to pretend the break never happened, or to stay broken as a way of honoring what was lost. None of those paths produce strength. Only the slower path does — the one that includes feeling the feelings all the way through, grieving without apology, and releasing what no longer serves the life still left to live.

In *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body* I explored how thought patterns and emotional patterns literally rewire biology. The brain and body are not fixed. They respond to the signals we give them. When we return to old wounds with honesty and compassion — whether through inner-child work, deliberate grieving, or the simple daily practice of telling ourselves the truth — we are not indulging weakness. We are participating in the same intelligent repair process that makes a healed bone stronger than the original.

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Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins has said that “the quality of your life is the quality of your relationships,” and that includes the relationship you have with your own past. If that relationship remains one of avoidance or unfinished pain, the broken place stays fragile. If you do the work, it becomes a foundation.

The work is not glamorous. It is rarely quick. It asks us to sit with feelings we would rather outrun. It asks us to forgive — others and ourselves — not because the injury was small, but because carrying it forever exacts too high a price. It asks us to believe that the heart, like the bone, is designed for intelligent repair.

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I have seen too many people remain stuck at the site of the break, believing that staying broken is somehow more loyal to what was lost. The opposite is true. The people who do the work — who feel, grieve, release, and slowly rebuild — become the ones who can later hold space for others. They become the ones whose presence carries quiet authority. They become stronger at the broken places, and that strength is not theoretical. It shows up in how they love, how they parent, how they keep going when the next hard season arrives.

A handful of years after I lost my wife, Stephanie, I had begun the work of rebuilding my heart. Of course, there would always be an empty place there, but my mother told me, “Life is for the living; she would want you to continue on.” Strangely enough, from that point on, whenever I encountered someone going through a similar loss, I seemed to find exactly the right thing to say to help them. This could only have been because I had begun to do the work of grieving, releasing, rebuilding.

In the prologue to my autobiography, I wrote that in the depths of winter we must find within ourselves that invincible summer. The broken place, once healed, is often where that summer is born. The fracture creates the conditions for denser, more resilient material. The heart that has been cracked open and then carefully mended knows something the unbroken heart cannot yet know.

This is why the work matters. Not to erase the past, but to refuse to let the past have the final word over the quality of the life still available to us. The bone does not heal by pretending it was never broken. It heals by accepting the break and then laying down something stronger. The same is true of us.

You are allowed to take the time. You are allowed to feel everything that needs feeling. You are allowed to ask for help. And when the healing has done its quiet work, you may discover that the place once marked by fracture has become one of the strongest parts of who you are.

That is not a small gift. It is one of the deepest forms of grace available to us while we are still here.

When you’re ready to do your own personal inner work, I can help you work through all of it. Click here to check out my positive mindset blueprint.

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I have always believed the body keeps more secrets than we realize. For a long time we accepted that certain parts of aging just happen. Tissues grow stiffer. Organs lose their give. The support structure around our cells slowly turns from helpful framework into something that traps and limits them. This shows up in the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, and the ovaries. Year after year the extra material builds up until normal function becomes harder.

A recent study questions that old assumption.

Researchers looked closely at aging ovaries and found that one inflammatory signal — a protein called interleukin-11, or IL-11 — plays a big part in the stiffening. When this signal rises, certain cells start laying down too much structural material around the living cells. A little structure is necessary. Too much turns soft, flexible tissue into something rigid. In the ovary, that rigidity traps the tiny follicles that should grow and release eggs. Fertility declines. The same IL-11 signal also rises in aging heart, kidney, lung, and liver tissue.

Here is the part that matters most: the process does not appear to be locked in place. When scientists blocked IL-11 in middle-aged mice and rats, the ovarian tissue became softer again. Measurements of stiffness dropped. More follicles survived. Hormone levels improved. Fertility that had already started to fade showed signs of recovery. Even more encouraging, the same approach worked when the animals were already aged. The stiffening that had built up over time responded to the change.

In simple terms, the body was still able to reverse something we once thought permanent.

Human tissue samples followed the same pattern. Ovarian stiffness nearly tripled between the late twenties and early fifties. Conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, damage from chemotherapy, and endometriosis produced stiffness levels that looked like ovaries decades older. The physical environment itself had become part of the problem.

This kind of finding belongs in the larger conversation I have been exploring in the Health and Longevity Mastery series. In *Stay Healthy, Stay Youthful – The Science of Living to 150*, I looked at growing evidence that aging is not one single, inevitable decline. It is a collection of processes — and many of them still respond to the right signals. In *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body*, I wrote about the remarkable ability of living systems to change when the instructions they receive change. The IL-11 findings fit that picture. An active signal was keeping the tissue stiff. Quiet that signal, and the tissue began moving back toward a younger state.

The biologist Lewis Thomas once said the body is “a self-repairing, self-regulating, self-aware system.” We are still learning how many of its repairs remain possible when we give it better conditions. David Sinclair has long argued that aging is better understood as a loss of information and control than as simple wear and tear. Discoveries like this one support that view. The information was still there. The control system simply needed a different message.

Of course, the work is early. The strongest results so far come from animal studies. Human trials will be needed to test safety, dosing, and lasting effects. IL-11 does other jobs in the body, so any treatment will have to be carefully aimed. Yet the principle itself is powerful. Tissue stiffness is not just a passive result of time. It is an active process that can be influenced.

If these explorations of emerging science and the practical hope they carry are useful to you, I invite you to subscribe to my free Substack.

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What moves me most is the wider possibility. The same inflammatory pathway that stiffens ovaries is elevated across several aging organs. If one target influences mechanical aging in the heart, kidney, lung, and liver as well, then we may be looking at a shared lever rather than a long list of separate problems. The ovary offered a clear testing ground because fertility gives a clear result we can measure. The next questions are already forming: Can similar approaches soften other aging tissues? Can we combine them with the daily habits, nutrition, and mindset practices that already support healthier years?

I have written often about the value of staying open to new possibilities. In *The Science of Positive Thinking* I explored how a forward-looking mindset itself influences biological outcomes. The science keeps giving us fresh reasons for that outlook. What once looked fixed is beginning to look, in certain cases, adjustable.

You can find all of my books on Amazon HERE

We are living in a time when the line between what aging must do and what aging can still change is moving. The scaffolding that once seemed permanent is proving, at least in these early studies, to be more responsive than we thought. That is not a finished answer. It is something better: a door that has opened a little wider.

The years ahead will test these ideas in people. They will refine the tools and show us the limits. But the direction is clear. The body still holds capacities for renewal that we are only beginning to map. And each new map brings us closer to the chance that more of us will reach later years with greater strength, clarity, and function than earlier generations thought possible.

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Forty-five years ago, on August 18, I stood inside a hospital nursery moving anxiously between two bassinets.

My daughter was resting peacefully, but I could not find my son.

A nurse led me to an incubator, where a tiny dark-haired boy lay sleeping. His lungs needed a little more time to develop. They assured me that he would be fine, but when you are a young father staring through the clear wall of an incubator, reassurance does not always reach the frightened places inside you.

Later that evening, a nurse placed my daughter into my arms.

I had just finished performing and was still wearing my suit. I looked into Rachel’s enormous, perceptive eyes and felt something almost impossible to explain. I knew her. More astonishingly, I felt that she already knew me—as if we were old friends who had finally found each other again.

When I returned to my son, technicians were holding his tiny arms and legs still for an X-ray. Afterward, I reached through the incubator and stroked him carefully with one finger.

“I’m your daddy,” I whispered. “I’m here. I love you, and I’ll never leave you.”

His little eyes focused on me.

We named him Maynard Lee Sisler III and called him Taddy.

On that day, Rachel and Taddy entered the world—and the direction of my life changed forever.

My wife, Stephanie, endured a difficult surgical delivery, and even through pain and exhaustion, her first concern was for the babies—especially when she learned that Taddy needed time in an incubator. As soon as she was able, she held Rachel tenderly and later cradled her little boy for hours, revealing the deep devotion that had already defined her motherhood.

Four Children and a Very Young Father

By the time the twins were born, I was twenty-three years old and already the father of four.

Regina and Kevin had accepted my love without reservation from the beginning. They never seemed concerned that I was still learning what fatherhood meant. Children often grant us grace before we have earned it.

I have written a simple sentence about those years that may be one of the truest things I have ever said:

Eventually, my children grew me up.

Before them, I was still searching for myself. I was trying to become a musician, make a living, understand love, and decide what kind of man I wanted to be. Suddenly, four children were watching me.

They did not need another dreamer.

They needed someone who would come home.

They needed food, clean clothes, school supplies, patience, safety, and a father who would keep his promises. I worked three jobs at times to keep the bills paid, but the more important work was happening inside me. Responsibility slowly turned ambition into purpose.

The twins also joined all of us together in a new way. Regina and Kevin were never “someone else’s children” to me, but after Rachel and Taddy arrived, I felt that our family had become one unbroken circle. I promised myself that I would watch over all four of them and help them become the best people they could be for as long as I lived.

Always Best Friends

During our year in Lake Tahoe, I watched Rachel and Taddy learn to sit, crawl, and walk.

Before they could walk properly, they held races up the long carpeted staircase from the front door to the living room. They would scramble upward, slide down, and begin again, giggling the entire time.

They were not merely twins.

They were best friends.

Rachel had the wild hair she inherited from me. Taddy was a beautiful, gentle little boy. Both were unusually observant and intelligent.

When they entered kindergarten, Rachel would march into the classroom holding Taddy’s hand. He was shy and often hid slightly behind her, smiling sheepishly. Their teachers eagerly told us that they were the most brilliant children in the class. Week after week, they also earned “Tommy Turtle” awards for being kind and well-behaved.

Even then, the essential parts of their personalities were visible.

Rachel moved forward and brought people with her.

Taddy observed quietly, absorbing far more than anyone realized.

And both possessed an instinctive gentleness that would become even more remarkable after life gave them reasons to become hardened.

Richard Bach once wrote, “You’re never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”

At twenty-three, my dream was not fame or fortune. Any dreams like that would have to wait.

It was keeping that family together.

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The Years That Tested Us

Our children did not grow up inside a perfect home.

They experienced their mother Stephanie’s emotional illness, alcoholism, periods of instability, and repeated attempts to recover. They watched the adults around them struggle with problems children should never have been required to understand.

Stephanie was beautiful, brilliant, intense, and capable of filling a room with energy. She possessed a remarkable ability to bring ideas, people, and opportunities together, but the role that mattered most was motherhood. Even during years when life became overwhelming and her emotional illness placed burdens upon all of us, she loved her children deeply, cared for them, guided them, and gave them the finest parts of her heart and spirit. Her struggles were real, but they were never the whole of who she was. Beneath them remained the gifted, loving woman I had fallen in love with—and the devoted mother whose influence still lives within Regina, Kevin, Rachel, and Taddy today.

When Regina temporarily left the household during one terrible period, Rachel and Taddy had just turned ten. Regina had always been an important source of security to them. Kevin, suddenly thrust into the role of oldest child at fourteen, responded with calm strength. Rachel was recovering from a broken ankle, and Kevin and Taddy helped her clean the room where she now slept alone.

They were not simply siblings living under one roof.

They were holding one another together.

Then, in 1995, Stephanie died unexpectedly at thirty-seven.

There is no gentle way to describe what that did to us.

The world we had known ended in a single day. The four children and I held one another and cried until we were emptied of everything except love and disbelief.

In the years that followed, we made a promise: we would never abandon one another.

That promise did not prevent disagreements, distance, pain, or the ordinary complications of adulthood. But beneath everything else, the bond remained. Regina, Kevin, Rachel, and Taddy grew into kind, functional, compassionate adults because they kept choosing love when bitterness would have been easier.

They survived tragedy together.

And they helped me survive it.

Finding Their Voices Again

Grief changes children differently.

Taddy withdrew into himself. Rachel remained close beside me, but she was carrying her own sorrow.

When the twins entered Palm Springs High School, both enrolled in drama. Rachel also joined choir. Their teachers understood what they had endured and gave them space to recover.

Then one evening, Taddy appeared in The Crucible.

Rachel and I were sitting together in the audience when he charged onto the stage, speaking his lines with force and conviction.

I began crying uncontrollably.

I held Rachel as we watched her shy twin brother reclaim a part of himself we had feared might be gone forever.

Every step toward wholeness is progress. That performance was one of those steps.

Years later, Taddy and Kevin began developing films together. Their short Christmas comedy, ’Tis the Season, was filmed partly at my home and went on to win awards at short-film festivals. Watching my sons work together creatively reminded me that the brotherhood formed during their difficult childhood had endured. To this day, they work together and with Taddy’s lovely, supremely talented Astrid on amazing projects.

Rachel pursued psychology and became the first of my children to earn a college degree. At her graduation, I told myself I would remain composed. Then “Pomp and Circumstance” began, and I started sobbing before the graduates had even entered.

After everything our family had endured, there she was—walking forward with her head held high.

I knew Stephanie would have been proud.

Rachel’s Greatest Battle

In early 2024, Rachel—now a mother of three—was diagnosed with breast cancer.

No matter how old your children become, part of you still sees the child you first held in a hospital room.

I wanted to protect her.

I wanted to trade places with her.

I wanted to make the entire nightmare disappear.

But Rachel had to walk through the surgery, the double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, the loss of her beautiful long hair, and the private fear that accompanies a life-threatening diagnosis.

Once again, she amazed me.

She cried in the darkest moments, because courage is not the absence of tears. Yet she continued showing kindness to others. She held onto faith. She cared for her children. She endured one treatment, one appointment, and one difficult day at a time.

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I wrote that I did not know how I would have survived witnessing her ordeal without drawing strength from her courage.

The father was leaning on the daughter again.

She had grown me up once more.

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The Circle Grows Wider

Then came the grandchildren.

Regina gave us Whitney, Makayla, and Aidan—three entirely different lights in our family constellation. Whitney’s birth brought joy into one of the darkest seasons of our lives. Makayla’s musical talent blossomed into remarkable performances. Aidan grew into a charming young actor and musician with his own wonderful personality.

Rachel gave us Giorgio, Stefani, and Claire.

When Giorgio was born, I held him and experienced the same powerful recognition I had felt when I first held Rachel and Taddy. Here was another soul I somehow already knew.

Stefani arrived almost sixteen years to the day after her grandmother Stephanie died. Her name carried remembrance into new life. I watched Giorgio see his baby sister for the first time and understood again that God—or life, or love—sometimes soothes an old scar by placing something beautiful beside it.

And Claire completed Rachel’s beautiful trio, bringing another voice, another personality, and another source of laughter into all our lives.

Watching Rachel with Giorgio, Stefani, and Claire has given me the joy of seeing love move through generations. The little girl who once held her shy brother’s hand now holds her own children’s hands and leads them forward.

Forty-Five Years Later

On August 18, Rachel and Taddy turn forty-five. That seems bizarre to me because I still feel like I’m 30!

I still see the babies.

I see Rachel’s wide, knowing eyes.

I see Taddy inside the incubator, focusing on the sound of my voice.

I see two toddlers racing up the stairs.

I see Rachel taking her brother’s hand in kindergarten.

I see Taddy charging onto the stage.

I see Rachel walking across the platform to receive her Master’s degree.

I see four siblings gathered after terrible loss, promising without words that none would be left behind.

And now I see adults who have lived, loved, struggled, created, raised children, endured illness, and remained connected to one another.

Life did not spare our family.

But it did give us one another.

That turned out to be enough.

Happy 45th birthday, my darling Rachel and Taddy.

You entered my life together, and together you helped teach me how to become a father, how to survive grief, how to keep going, and how love can expand without ever dividing.

You grew me up.

You kept me alive.

And you continue to make me prouder than I could ever properly express.

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I can still hear my grandmother Audrey’s voice.

She was an old woman by then, ninety-something years of life behind her, but when she talked to me there was still a sparkle in her that somehow had survived everything.

And I mean everything.

Audrey Athey Sisler was born before the turn of the twentieth century. She belonged to a generation that did not have the luxury of believing life was supposed to be easy.

As a young bride, she watched her husband fall beneath a train and lose a leg.

She buried a two-year-old son from an illness that, a generation later, antibiotics probably would have cured.

Then came 1929, and the family lost nearly everything in the crash.

But life was not finished testing her.

Her teenage son Bennett was running home late for dinner when a drunk driver struck and killed him. My father told me that Audrey’s dark hair turned gray during that terrible summer.

Think about that for a moment.

Not figuratively.

Gray.

The grief had traveled all the way through her.

And still, there was more.

She would eventually endure the deaths of grandchildren in a fire, a son who died by suicide in the aftermath, another grandson lost to AIDS, and, one by one, the passing of a total of 4 of her remaining sons.

If anyone had earned the right to become bitter, Audrey had.

If anyone could have looked at life and said, I have had enough, nobody would have blamed her.

Yet near the end of her ninety-four years, she looked at me with that familiar light in her eyes and said:

“I swear, I still feel 18 inside.”

I have carried that sentence with me for most of my life.

Because she was not denying what happened to her.

She remembered every loss.

She loved the people who were gone.

She had scars.

What she refused to do was allow the scars to become her entire identity.

That is something very different from positive thinking as it is usually sold to us.

It is reframing.

And I have come to believe it may be one of the most important choices we ever learn to make.

You Don’t Have to Pretend It Didn’t Hurt

Positive thinking gets a bad name when it is reduced to slogans.

Just smile.

Look on the bright side.

Everything happens for a reason.

Think happy thoughts.

I don’t believe any of that is enough.

I have lived too long for that.

I have known grief that rearranged my life in a single day. I have watched people I loved suffer through things I desperately wished I could take away from them. I have had surgeries and physical setbacks that forced me to stop when everything in me wanted to keep moving.

And, like almost anyone who has spent decades working with other human beings, I have known professional frustration.

Office politics.

Egos.

People keeping score.

Someone turning something simple into something unnecessarily difficult.

A colleague who seems more interested in positioning than accomplishing.

A person who decides that your success somehow threatens theirs.

In my early career, I got what I thought was the “job of a lifetime”. The managers of Harvey’s, the legendary casino in Lake Tahoe, came to see me and decided to build an entire room for me at the casino, and advertise me on the front page of the papers next to Dean Martin and Jimmy Buffet. It was an extremely high-profile gig, but working in a corporate environment was different than in nightclubs.

I’ve seen it many times since. A new hotel general manager will come in without a clue of what you’ve built, and how hard you’ve worked to fill a room with enthusiastic audiences. He’ll mention something in passing to his subordinate, and the younger person, only thinking of climbing another step on the corporate ladder, will gladly throw you and your hard work “under the bus” to gain favorability, and soon, you’re given your walking papers. It didn’t happen that time because I saw the writing on the wall and found a stronger gig elsewhere, but that’s the story of the politics of a job.

You can lose enormous amounts of your life fighting those battles.

I know, because I have been tempted to do it.

You replay the conversation driving home.

You compose the devastating response you should have delivered.

You tell the story to somebody else, then tell it again, and every retelling makes you angry all over again.

The other person may have forgotten the entire incident by lunchtime.

Meanwhile, you are still carrying them around in your head at midnight.

That is an expensive way to live.

At some point, you have to ask yourself a difficult question:

How much of my peace am I willing to surrender to something I cannot control?

That is where reframing begins.

Not by saying the wrong was right.

Not by pretending the betrayal did not hurt.

Not by becoming passive.

But by deciding:

This happened. It matters. I will learn from it. But I will not let it occupy the rest of my life rent-free.

What We Rehearse Becomes Part of Us

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I explored something that fascinates me more the older I become: our thoughts are not floating somewhere outside our physical lives.

The mind and body are not strangers.

Stress has consequences.

So does connection.

So does gratitude.

So does the ability to recover emotionally after something knocks us down.

In The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body, I went deeper into the way repeated patterns of thought and behavior can influence the way we experience our lives.

And that word—repeated—matters.

One positive thought will not transform you.

One morning of gratitude will not erase thirty years of resentment.

One act of forgiveness may not make an old wound disappear.

But neither did the negative pattern appear in a single day.

We rehearse ourselves into ways of thinking.

We can also practice our way toward something better.

That is why I no longer think of positivity as a personality trait.

I think of it as a discipline.

Some people are naturally sunny.

Others are not.

That is almost beside the point.

The real question is what you do when your mind hands you the old story again.

I always fail.

People always disappoint me.

Nothing ever works out.

It’s too late now.

I’ll never get past this.

Do you automatically believe it?

Or can you catch yourself somewhere in the middle of the sentence and say:

Wait. Is that actually true?

That little interruption can change a life.

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The Hardest Battle Usually Happens Afterward

The difficult event is often not the only thing that hurts us.

Sometimes the greater damage comes from what we do with it afterward.

We replay it.

We enlarge it.

We build a philosophy around it.

One person betrays us, and we decide nobody can be trusted.

One business fails, and we decide we are failures.

One relationship ends, and we decide love does not last.

One terrible season arrives, and we quietly conclude that the rest of life will look the same.

That is how an event becomes an identity.

My Grandparents, Audrey and George

Audrey somehow understood the difference.

She could grieve Bennett without allowing Bennett’s death to destroy every remaining day she had been given.

She could remember what she lost without forgetting what remained.

That may be one of the strongest definitions of resilience I know.

Not forgetting.

Not denying.

Remaining available to life.

The Workplace Is a Good Place to Practice

Some of the greatest tests of mindset do not arrive as dramatic tragedies.

They arrive Tuesday morning.

An email.

A meeting.

A difficult colleague.

A boss who does not understand what you are trying to accomplish.

Someone else receiving credit.

A decision you believe is ridiculous.

A personality that simply rubs against yours every single day.

There is a practical wisdom in deciding early what you will and will not carry.

Do excellent work.

Tell the truth when truth needs to be told.

Stand your ground when principle requires it.

Walk away from pointless conflict when it does not.

Do not confuse silence with weakness, and do not confuse constant confrontation with strength.

Forgive small slights before they become large resentments.

Protect your peace the way a good gardener protects the soil.

Because whatever you continually pour into that soil eventually grows there.

Bitterness grows.

So does gratitude.

Suspicion grows.

So does trust.

Fear grows.

So does courage.

You get to decide what you keep watering.

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I Am Still Learning This

I wish I could tell you I mastered all of this years ago.

I didn’t.

I can still become frustrated.

I can still replay something longer than I should.

I can still allow another person’s behavior to disturb my peace.

There are days when I am considerably less philosophical about human nature than I am while sitting calmly at my keyboard writing about it.

But perhaps that is the point.

This is not a destination we reach.

It is a choice we keep making.

The old story comes back.

We notice it.

We question it.

We choose again.

There is a line in the Optimist Creed that I have always loved:

“To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.”

I am not there.

I’m not sure anybody is.

But I know which direction I want to walk.

And direction matters.

My Grandmother Audrey with My Sister Judy

The Story Is Not Finished

When I think about Audrey now, I do not think first about the tragedies.

That surprises me.

There were so many of them that they could easily dominate the story.

Instead, I see my sweet, caring, lovely old grandmother looking at me and telling me she still felt eighteen inside.

Somewhere beneath the wrinkles and losses and decades, there was still a girl.

Still curious.

Still alive.

Still looking forward.

Life had taken many things from her.

It had not taken her willingness to live.

Maybe that is what I have been trying to understand—and teach—in one form or another throughout my own long climb.

Your past deserves honesty.

Your pain deserves respect.

Your disappointments deserve to be acknowledged.

But none of them deserve unlimited authority over your future.

You do not have to pretend everything is fine.

You do not have to forgive everything today.

You do not have to wake tomorrow morning transformed into some relentlessly cheerful version of yourself.

Just catch one thought.

Question one old conclusion.

Release one resentment you no longer need.

Notice one thing that is still beautiful.

Give one person another chance.

Give yourself another chance.

And when the road becomes steep again—as it eventually will—remember that you are still the one deciding what the climb means.

The hard thing happened.

But it does not have to become the whole story.

Reframe the story.

Guard your peace.

Stay available to life.

And keep climbing.

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The last time I saw my father, we sat together outside his home in Kennett, Missouri, looking across cotton fields that had begun to turn brown beneath the autumn sky.

It was October 2011. The St. Louis Cardinals had just won the World Series, which delighted him. My grandmother Audrey had loved the Cardinals, and that love had passed to her son as naturally as his green eyes, quick mind, and peculiar sense of humor.

My father was physically failing. His once-commanding hands trembled. I held one of them as the sun descended over the fields.

Then the twinkle returned to his eyes.

“I’ve gotten to the point in my life,” he told me, “where any damn fool thing I say, they think it’s wisdom!”

Maynard never lost his humor.

On the morning I left, I held his head in my hands and kissed his forehead. We both sensed that this was probably goodbye. After I returned to California, we spoke every day. He would report the temperature, the wind speed, or the condition of the cotton fields surrounding his house. His body was failing, but his extraordinary mind remained alive. I continued learning from him until almost the final moment.

On this day, August 12, my father, Dr. Maynard Lee Sisler, would have been 103 years old.

Some fathers are given to their children once.

Mine had to become my father twice.

The Boy the Depression Could Not Defeat

Maynard was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1923, into a family that carried generations of American history, hard work, faith, pride, and human frailty.

During the Depression, after the stock-market crash, his father’s alcoholism grew worse. My grandfather would order my grandmother Audrey to take the boys upstairs and beat them for small infractions. She would take them out of sight, strike the bedpost with his belt, and tell her sons to scream so their father would believe she was obeying him.

She protected them in the only way she knew.

The family was poor, but my father would later insist that his childhood had been happy. He said he never knew they were poor because he had what he needed. He remembered milking cows, homemade butter and ice cream, and churning the ice cream because he believed it would give him muscles like his older brother Bill.

Both memories can be true.

A child can experience love and fear in the same house. He can remember laughter while carrying wounds he does not yet understand.

Those wounds do not excuse what he later did. But they help us understand the complicated soil in which his character grew.

Maynard would also endure the loss of brothers he loved. His older brother George, a World War II correspondent who later became a reporter and minister, died of cancer. His younger brother Jack was a gifted architect and veteran whose two children died in a terrible house fire. Crushed by guilt and grief, Jack later took his own life. My father was devastated.

Long before anyone spoke openly about trauma, Maynard had already accumulated enough of it for several lifetimes.

The Young Medic at War

In early 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, my father enlisted in the United States Navy at eighteen.

While swabbing a deck one hot day, he looked through a porthole and saw a pharmacist’s mate—the Navy’s equivalent of a medic—sitting comfortably with his feet on a desk, drinking coffee.

Maynard promptly decided that looked better than swabbing decks.

It was an amusing beginning to a medical career that would last more than fifty years.

The work itself was anything but amusing.

He was deployed to the South Pacific and survived four bouts of malaria. As the only medically trained person aboard his ship, he learned surgery during battle because men would otherwise die.

During one attack, he followed a shipmate up a stairway. The other sailor went right; Maynard went left. The man on the right was struck by an explosion. My father rushed to him and held him as the young sailor looked into his eyes and asked, “I’m going to be all right, Doc, aren’t I?”

Maynard held him while he died.

His ship later received some of the earliest supplies of penicillin. There was so little that sailors attempted to recover it from the urine of treated patients so that another critically ill man might receive what remained.

On Christmas Eve in 1942, the men stood on the deck of a lonely ship in the South Pacific as Bing Crosby’s brand-new recording of “White Christmas” came through the loudspeaker. These were battle-hardened sailors, but there was not a dry eye among them.

After three years of war, Maynard’s ship entered Tokyo Harbor and docked near the USS Missouri on the day Japan formally surrendered.

My father rarely discussed those experiences when I was young.

Today, I believe he carried untreated post-traumatic stress for years. They called such men “shell-shocked,” told them to be strong, and sent them home. My father was brilliant and charming enough to conceal what was happening inside him—until alcohol gave his buried trauma a voice.

The Physician and the Man

After the war, Maynard married my mother, Elaine, and pursued medicine.

He worked full-time as a laboratory technician, cleaned a morgue at night, attended medical school, and supported a wife and four daughters while the family lived in the Chicago projects with almost nothing.

During his internship and residency at Cook County Hospital, he carried his black medical bag into impoverished neighborhoods within the slums of Chicago, delivered babies, treated stab wounds, performed emergency triage, and worked twenty-four-hour shifts to feed his family. He discovered that he was ambidextrous in surgery—able to use a scalpel with his left hand and suture with his right.

Sir William Osler is credited with saying, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

That was the physician my father eventually became.

He returned to the Navy, specialized in internal medicine, taught young doctors, and rose to become Chief of Medicine at the enormous Army-Navy hospital in Corpus Christi. He later took me on his rounds, where I met young veterans missing arms and legs and aging admirals whose bodies had finally begun to surrender after lives of service. He taught me patriotism—but also taught me to hate what war does to human beings.

He was a historian, a reader of classics, a writer of sonnets and prose, and a man capable of arguing either side of a question so effectively that I never knew which position he actually believed.

Much of the historical spirit behind my latest book Flames of Freedom came from those debates. I dedicated that book to Maynard Lee Sisler, M.D., F.A.C.P., Captain in the United States Navy and a decorated World War II veteran.

FLAMES OF FREEDOM is available on Amazon here.

But intellectual brilliance does not protect a family from addiction.

The Father Alcohol Took Away

When my father drank, he changed.

The sober Maynard could be kind, generous, funny, principled, and compassionate.

The drunken Maynard became angry, cruel, frightening, and sometimes violent.

Alcoholism damaged my mother, terrified his children, and eventually destroyed our family. One night my mother woke me, screaming that my father had come home drunk and might kill us. We pushed a dresser against my bedroom door and waited while he pounded outside.

The next morning, he knelt beside my bed and asked me to forgive him.

“Say a prayer for me,” he said.

“I always do,” I answered.

Those words became ours.

Alcoholism is a disease.

But calling it a disease does not make the damage imaginary.

Understanding is not acquittal. Forgiveness is not amnesia. The child who was frightened still deserves to have his fear acknowledged.

My father’s addiction separated him from my mother and alienated him from his children. For a long time, I carried anger toward him—not only because of what he did, but because of all the things a father should have done and did not.

Yet Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

My father still had a future.

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The Long Road Back

Maynard eventually entered Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking.

Sobriety did not immediately repair everything. In the beginning, he protected his new life by withdrawing from much of the old one—including, painfully, his own children.

But he stayed sober.

He moved to Kennett, Missouri, and fulfilled a dream he had carried since childhood: becoming a country doctor. Some patients were so poor that they paid him with chickens or watermelons. The sophisticated scholar who had commanded Navy hospitals gradually discovered the wisdom and dignity of the people he served.

For more than thirty years, he helped transform the local hospital. He served patients, taught medical professionals, administered programs, chaired the board, and continued working well past the age when most people retire.

At eighty-two, he was still pulling twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour emergency-room shifts, sleeping in the break room between trauma cases. He had practiced medicine for fifty years when age and the cost of malpractice insurance finally forced him to stop. He was devastated. Medicine was not simply what he did. It was how he made amends to the world.

For the final thirty-five years of his life, he remained sober.

He could not rewrite our childhood. But he wrote different final chapters.

As I later observed, redemption comes gradually, through a series of small acts of goodness.

Becoming Best Friends

Our reconciliation did not happen in one dramatic moment.

It happened through Christmas visits, road trips, telephone conversations, history debates, meals, laughter, and time.

In his later years, my father came to stay with me in San Diego. I cooked breakfast and dinner for him. He sat in my studio and watched me produce music. We talked for hours—about medicine, history, family, faith, mistakes, and the strange turns a life can take.

In 2011, when he grew too frail to travel, I went to Kennett.

He became incontinent, and I helped wash him in the shower. At the time, I found the task difficult. Looking back, I consider it one of the holiest things I have ever been allowed to do.

The hands that had once held me were trembling.

Now I held him.

He showed me old photographs and letters from Sandra, the wife who had helped protect his sobriety. As he touched each keepsake with shaking fingers, he wept because he knew the life he had built was ending.

By then, he was no longer merely the father who had frightened and disappointed me.

He was an aging soul who had struggled, failed, risen, served, loved, and tried to make something worthwhile from the life he had left.

He was my friend.

In fact, he had become one of my best friends.

“Say a Prayer for Me”

In March 2012, my father could no longer swallow. Doctors inserted a feeding tube. When he awoke, he asked for coffee, and they told him he could not have any.

Coffee had been our shared addiction since he first made “little boy’s coffee” for me when I was small.

My sister Suzanne was beside him. When a nurse came to begin physical therapy, my father smiled at Suzanne and raised his middle finger toward the nurse.

Maynard remained Maynard.

On March 7, with Suzanne sitting quietly beside him reading, he took his final breath.

At his funeral, he received full military honors. A bugler played “Taps,” and the folded flag was presented to Suzanne.

The people of Kennett came in great numbers. Many regarded him almost as a saint. My sisters and I knew a more complicated man.

Before his death, Dad had asked me to deliver his eulogy and tell the truth—warts and all.

So I did.

I spoke of the brilliant doctor, the warrior, the alcoholic, the father who had caused terrible pain, the sober man who spent decades healing others, and the human being who ultimately found a form of redemption.

I cried repeatedly. When I finished, there was not a dry eye in the mortuary.

I ended with the words that had followed us from my frightened childhood into the final chapter of his life:

“Say a prayer for me.”

“I always do.”

Scripture says, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

My father’s fight was not graceful.

Neither is most of life.

He carried wounds. He inflicted wounds. He saved lives. He broke hearts. He rebuilt himself. He served thousands of people. And, somehow, across all those broken years, we found our way back to one another.

That is the miracle I celebrate on his 103rd birthday.

Not that he was flawless.

Not that the past disappeared.

But that love survived long enough for a father and son to meet again—not as frightened child and troubled parent, but as two imperfect men who finally understood each other.

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When I was five years old, my father left for several months on a Navy assignment. I adored him, and his absence left a hole in my little world that I did not yet possess the words to explain.

One day, I began to cry.

My oldest sister, Suzanne, took me to the window and pointed outside.

“Do you see that red bird?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Every time you see a red bird, it is a sign of hope. It will remind you that everything is going to be all right.”

From then on, whenever sadness entered our family, someone would say, “Remember the red bird.”

And somehow, I did.

Suzanne did not change my circumstances. She did not pretend my father was home. She helped redirect my frightened little mind toward hope—and, just as importantly, she stood beside me while I found it.

All these years later, the emerging science of happiness is bringing us back to that window.

Three recent social-media threads prompted me to look more deeply into the newest research. One examined what time in a forest can do to the human body. Others explored happiness as the result of repeated habits and small human choices: calling your parents, protecting your energy, continuing to learn, celebrating another person’s success, apologizing quickly, helping someone without expecting repayment, and refusing to postpone your life until the weekend.

None of these ideas is revolutionary by itself.

Taken together, however, they point toward a quiet revolution in our understanding of happiness.

There May Be No Universal Formula

For years, happiness research tended to ask broad questions:

Does money make us happy?

Do relationships make us happy?

Does work provide meaning?

Does better health improve life satisfaction?

A major 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour followed more than 40,000 people across five countries, in some cases for more than three decades. The researchers concluded that the forces influencing happiness are far more personal than population averages suggest. Work satisfaction may strongly affect one person’s life satisfaction, while family, health, finances, friendships, or personal freedom may matter more to someone else.

In other words, science is moving away from the assumption that everyone must follow the same road.

That is liberating.

Happiness for one person may be building a company. For another, it may be teaching a grandchild to play piano. One person comes alive in a room filled with people. Another recovers by walking alone beside the ocean.

The question is no longer simply, “What makes people happy?”

A better question may be:

“What repeatedly brings this particular life into greater harmony?”

Happiness Has a Body

The thread about “forest bathing” drew attention to research led by Japanese physician Qing Li. In several small studies, participants took slow, multi-day trips through forest environments. Researchers reported increased activity among certain natural killer immune cells, lower adrenaline levels, and effects that remained measurable after the participants returned home. Similar city trips did not produce the same changes. The researchers proposed that reduced stress and airborne plant compounds called phytoncides may have contributed.

That does not mean trees cure disease.

It means the environment enters us.

The sound of wind moving through leaves, the smell of pine, the rhythm of our steps, the absence of electronic noise, and the simple act of looking farther than the nearest screen may change what is happening inside our bodies.

Happiness is not merely a thought floating above our physiology. It is connected to sleep, movement, sunlight, stress, nourishment, breathing, relationships, and the places in which we spend our lives.

The same is true of human connection.

A newly published global study examined meal sharing in 142 countries and territories. People who ate more meals with others generally reported greater life satisfaction, more positive emotion, and less stress and sadness. Meanwhile, the researchers found that Americans have been eating alone increasingly often; by 2023, roughly one-quarter reported eating all their meals alone on the previous day. The study found association rather than proof of causation, but its message is difficult to ignore: the dinner table may be doing more for us than we realized.

When my wife Stephanie died unexpectedly at only thirty-seven, my four children and I clung to one another. We promised that we would never abandon each other. We could not eliminate our grief, but our bond carried us through years that might otherwise have broken us. I later wrote about this in The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body because family and community are not pleasant accessories to life. They are part of our emotional and physical survival system.

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Happiness Is Something We Practice

The science does not suggest that we can command ourselves to feel wonderful.

Actress Emma Stone has spoken openly about childhood anxiety, saying, “I had massive anxiety as a child.” Her later confidence did not prove that her early fear was imaginary. It demonstrated that honest support and inner work can help a person develop a different relationship with fear.

That distinction matters.

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I emphasize the difference between healthy optimism and toxic positivity. Toxic positivity denies pain. It tells a suffering person to smile and stop complaining.

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Healthy optimism looks directly at reality and says:

“This is difficult. It hurts. I may need help. But I still believe there is a way forward.”

Psychologist Carol Dweck summarized the growth mindset beautifully: “In a growth mindset, you look for what you’ve learned.”

My friend General Colin Powell put it another way:

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”

Optimism multiplies the usefulness of our intelligence, discipline, relationships, and opportunities. It does not replace action. It gives action somewhere hopeful to go.

Long-term studies have also found associations between greater optimism and longer life, including better odds of reaching advanced ages. These studies do not prove that cheerful thoughts alone create longevity. Optimistic people may build stronger relationships, recover more effectively from setbacks, follow healthier routines, seek help sooner, and remain engaged with life. Still, the connection is meaningful enough that optimism deserves to be treated as part of health—not merely personality.

Scripture tells us, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Science is beginning to explain why.

My grandmother Audrey endured the death of children and grandchildren, financial ruin during the Great Depression, family alcoholism, and losses that could have hardened anyone. Yet she remained loving, interested, generous, and filled with life. She lived to ninety-four and repeatedly told me:

“I swear, I still feel eighteen inside.”

She was not happy because tragedy spared her.

She was happy because tragedy never completely possessed her.

Perhaps that is the most important development in happiness science: happiness is not a permanent mood, a perfect life, or a prize awarded after every problem is solved.

It is the practiced ability to return.

Return to gratitude.

Return to purpose.

Return to nature.

Return to the table.

Return to the people who love you.

And when the world feels uncertain, look out the window.

There may still be a red bird waiting there.

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The Sheraton Oasis Hotel in the 1960s

Last week, I ran into my old friend Bill McWethy, and in a matter of minutes we were standing together in Palm Springs in the 1980s again.

Bill owned the Sheraton Oasis Hotel then, and he also ran Hank’s Café, a nightclub designed in the spirit of the Bogart movie bar. It was a hoppin’ place—crowded, noisy, alive. There were two stages on opposite sides of the room, and bands played back-to-back so the music could continue all night.

I performed solo during the early cocktail hour. Later, my band worked one of the stages, rotating throughout the week with Bobby Craig’s terrific 1950s and ’60s revue and the Craig Eaton Band.

Bobby Craig

Bobby Craig had already been a desert favorite for years. Craig Eaton was another gifted piano player, brought down from the Northwest with a first-rate group that included bassist Gilbert Hansen and guitarist Rick Cowling. My friend Jay Lewis played drums for Eaton’s band.

The manager, John, admired Eaton’s talent and style. But Craig Eaton was experiencing serious personal problems, and one night, with the club packed, he failed to show up.

His musicians did what real professionals do.

They played.

They covered the missing parts, protected the engagement, entertained the audience, and completed the night. The owner was understandably upset and gave Eaton an ultimatum: one more no-show and the band would be fired.

A couple of months passed.

Then Craig Eaton failed to appear again.

The owner intended to keep his word. But the musicians went to John and Bill and pleaded their case. Most of them had been transplanted from the Northwest. They needed the work. Their leader had failed to honor his responsibility, but they had shown up and done everything they could to preserve the engagement.

Would the club allow them to add another musician, adopt a new name, and continue?

Fortunately, John had a soul.

He gave them a chance.

It was the first actual musicians’ mutiny I had ever witnessed—but it was not a mutiny born of greed or ego. These musicians cared about one another. They refused to allow one person’s collapse to destroy every life connected to the band.

They renamed themselves the Palm Springs Rockets. Rick Cowling’s extraordinarily talented teenage son, Rick Cowling Jr., stepped into the lineup to replace Craig. Gilbert Hansen added an extraordinary element to the band with his raspy vocals and funky, bluesy style. The group became remarkably successful and continued performing in the desert for more than twenty years, including a long residency at Cecil’s on Sunrise.

Jay Lewis

Jay Lewis, already a strong drummer and great singer, continued on to be a first-call performer for stage and recording sessions up to this day, and I am blessed to be able to call him a lifelong friend.

But the story did not end there.

The Teenager Who Was Ready

Rick Cowling Jr. was very young, but he was prepared when the opportunity came.

He did not merely help the Rockets survive a difficult transition. He went on to build the kind of career young musicians dream about.

Rick Cowling, Jr.

Rick later played guitar for Kenny Loggins from 2007 through 2009 and went on to become his bass player. He performed keyboards, guitar, and vocals with Ambrosia. As a producer, he worked on music for radio and television and with artists including Bobby Womack, Harold Payne, Bonnie Raitt, Laura Branigan, and Melissa Manchester.

Think about that for a moment.

The night Craig Eaton failed to appear probably felt like a disaster to everyone involved. The band might have disappeared. The musicians might have scattered. The club might simply have hired someone else.

Instead, a door opened for a gifted teenager.

What looked like an ending became an entrance.

Rick Jr. still had to possess the talent, discipline, attitude, and courage to walk through that entrance. Opportunity means very little when preparation is absent. But when preparation meets adversity, an entirely new future can emerge.

Kenny Loggins once described the songwriting process this way: “You can’t force it. You just keep at it and trust that you’ll get it eventually.”

That applies to considerably more than songwriting.

Staying Power Is Not Stubbornness

Craig Eaton eventually got himself together. He continued working for many years in the desert with duos and trios before he passed away.

I am glad his story included another chapter.

Everyone deserves a second chance. Sometimes a third.

But a second chance may not return you to the exact position you lost. Grace may meet you on another stage, with different people, playing a different kind of music.

The Lord knows I’ve needed and gotten my own share of second chances, and I thank Him every day for new opportunities. Every new day is a new opportunity to reinvent yourself.

Staying power does not mean pretending nothing happened. It does not mean protecting destructive behavior forever. It means refusing to believe that failure must become anyone’s final identity.

The musicians deserved their chance because they had remained responsible.

Craig deserved an opportunity to rebuild because a human being is always more than his worst season.

Rick Jr. deserved his opportunity because he was ready to carry the responsibility placed before him.

Those are three different kinds of second chances.

Calvin Coolidge famously said, “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” But persistence without reflection can become stubbornness. Persistence must include the humility to learn, adjust, apologize, change direction, or accept that the old arrangement can no longer continue.

The Stoics understood that we do not control every circumstance. We control the quality of our response.

Sometimes never giving up means holding on.

Sometimes it means letting go of the form your dream once took so that its deeper purpose can survive.

The People Beside You Matter

Gilbert Hansen, the Rockets’ bass player, became one of my closest friends. We shared the stage many times, and over the years I recorded his bass on approximately a thousand songs in my studio.

Gilbert Hansen

Gilbert was not merely a strong player. He was dependable, musical, bluesy, creative, and good to have in the room. He eventually became my first call for electric bass. I cried when we lost Gilbert earlier this year. He was a very special man.

That matters more than many people realize.

A brilliant musician with a corrosive attitude can exhaust an entire band. A talented employee who makes everyone miserable can damage a company. A gifted partner who cannot be trusted can turn every success into tension.

Attitudes and emotions enter the music.

They enter the workplace.

They enter the family.

They eventually enter everything our hands touch.

Over the years, I learned to choose musicians not only for their talent but for their reliability, temperament, generosity, and ability to contribute to the whole. My autobiography records how I gradually learned to move away from great performers who were unreliable or carried destructive attitudes and toward a core group of extraordinary people who made one another better.

Sometimes working with someone compatible will take you farther than working with someone spectacular who constantly brings you down.

Keep Moving—Even When the Step Looks Small

My life has rarely resembled a straight climb.

That is why I called my autobiography It’s a Long Climb to the Middle. I have been knocked back several rungs and, more than once, fallen all the way to the bottom. Persistence became my primary weapon. I also came to believe that attitudes and emotions shape our destinies in ways we seldom recognize while we are living through them.

There were seasons when I was digging ditches in the desert heat. Then I became a busboy. Then a waiter. Eventually, I learned the restaurant business and became a manager. No single step looked impressive. Each one kept me moving.

Later, I performed poolside in temperatures reaching 127 degrees, hauled equipment back and forth across a sprawling resort, played for five hours, changed clothes in a restroom or van, and went directly to another engagement at night.

Then I got up and did it again.

That was not glamour. It was staying power.

Martin Luther King Jr. offered one of the clearest instructions ever given: “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl.” His final command was simply to keep moving.

Your next step may not resemble victory.

Take it anyway.

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The Inner Work of Endurance

In The Science of Positive Thinking and The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body, I explore how repeated thoughts, emotional patterns, and daily choices begin shaping the person we eventually become.

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Positive thinking is not pretending everything is fine.

It is the decision that difficulty will not be given permanent control over your identity.

Dolly Parton expressed the idea with memorable simplicity: “If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

Scripture offers the deeper instruction: “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

Not immediately.

Not always in the form we expected.

But in due season.

The Palm Springs Rockets did not endure because the original plan worked. They endured because it failed—and they found another way forward.

Craig found another way to make music.

The band found a new identity.

Rick Cowling Jr. found a doorway into a remarkable career.

Gilbert and Jay became lifelong friends and creative partners.

And all these years later, Bill and I could stand together remembering a crowded room, two stages, continuous music, and the night an apparent disaster quietly changed several lives.

That is staying power.

The stage may change.

The people may change.

The arrangement may change.

The dream itself may mature into something you could not have imagined at the beginning.

Keep showing up.

Keep your heart open.

Do the right thing for the people who depend upon you.

Give another chance when wisdom permits it.

Accept another chance when grace offers it.

And when the music changes, keep playing.

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I am a San Diego Padres fan. That is not a secret, and it is not the point of this piece. Living in the same division as the Los Angeles Dodgers means I watch, year after year, as one of the wealthiest franchises in sports stockpiles talent the way a collector stacks rare coins. The envy is real. But envy is not the story. The story is what happens when a game that once belonged to every city begins to belong only to a few.

Decades ago, Wellington Mara of the New York Giants Football Team looked at professional football and saw a future that terrified him. Large-market teams could simply buy the best players and win every year. Small-market teams would wither. Fans would stop caring. The sport itself would die of boredom and resentment. So Mara and others fought for a system of competitive balance — the draft, revenue sharing, structures that gave every franchise a real chance. Football became America’s most popular sport largely because it chose fairness over raw power.

Baseball is now living the crisis Mara saw coming.

The Dodgers operate with a payroll that approaches or exceeds a billion dollars when deferred money is counted. Their ownership group and television market give them resources most clubs cannot touch. Shohei Ohtani’s contract is the purest example. He signed for $700 million over ten years, yet receives only $2 million annually while he plays. The remaining $68 million each year is deferred until after the contract ends, paid out from 2034 to 2043. For luxury-tax purposes the deal counts far less than its face value, freeing the Dodgers to keep spending. Other stars have similar arrangements. The result is a roster that can absorb almost any free agent it wants while smaller clubs watch from the sidelines.

The Competitive Balance Tax — the so-called luxury tax — is supposed to restrain this. In practice it has become a cost of doing business for the richest teams. They pay the penalties and keep stacking talent. Meanwhile, the collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of 2026. Owners are pushing for a hard salary cap and floor. Players are resisting hard. The real possibility of a lockout after this season hangs over everything. Another work stoppage would not just interrupt games. It would further erode the trust of fans who already feel the sport is slipping away from them.

I write this not as an economist but as someone who grew up with the game in his blood. My great-uncle, George Sisler, was one of the original Hall of Famers, inducted in 1939. Ty Cobb once called him “the nearest thing to a perfect ballplayer.” Sisler hit .407 in 1920 and .420 in 1922. He set a single-season hit record that stood for more than eighty years until Ichiro Suzuki broke it in the early 2000’s. He played in an era when the game still felt democratic — when a great player could appear in a small city and the entire country paid attention. That feeling is harder to find now.

My father, as a nine-year-old boy during the depths of the Depression, somehow watched his own father scrape together enough money to take him to a Washington Senators game. That afternoon he shook Lou Gehrig’s hand. Think of that for a moment. A child living through the hardest economic times in modern American history stood face to face with the Iron Horse. Generations of baseball greats are not as far removed from today’s heroes as we sometimes imagine. The same game that put Gehrig’s hand in my father’s small one later put George Sisler’s name in Cooperstown, and still later put Trevor Hoffman’s changeup into the hearts of San Diego fans (and Trevor, too, in the Hall). The chain is unbroken if we choose to keep it that way.

Me and my friend, MLB Hall-of-Famer Trevor Hoffman

Baseball lovers understand something the metrics sometimes miss. We can sit through a 2–1 pitcher’s duel and feel the tension in every strike. We can also rise to our feet in a 12–9 slugfest and love the pure chaos of it. The game rewards patience and sudden beauty in equal measure. It is slow enough for conversation and sudden enough to stop the heart. It is the only major American sport where the defense controls the ball. It is played on grass and dirt, under open sky, with no clock forcing the action. Those are not minor details. They are the reasons the game still lives in so many hearts even when the business side feels broken.

I am fortunate to know Trevor Hoffman as a friend. His pitching style was pure artistry — that devastating changeup that looked identical to the fastball until the last possible instant, leaving hitters frozen or swinging at air. But what made him great was never just the numbers, even though 601 saves still rank among the highest totals in history. It was the quiet class he carried every day, the way he treated the game and the people around it with respect. Hoffman never needed to shout. He simply showed up, competed with dignity, and left the sport better than he found it. Players like him remind us why this game still matters. They prove that excellence and character can live in the same uniform.

Watch my Telly Award-Winning video JOURNEY TO AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE free on YouTube here, including comments from Trevor Hoffman.

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In *Flames of Freedom* I wrote about the American experiment as a living promise that must be renewed by each generation. Competitive balance in sport is a small version of the same idea. When the rules allow the strongest to become permanently stronger, the contest loses its meaning. The same principle that kept the early NFL from collapsing applies here. Without some form of genuine parity, the regular season becomes a formality and the postseason a coronation for the richest clubs.

FLAMES OF FREEDOM is available on Amazon HERE.

There are solutions. Stronger revenue sharing. Real limits on deferred contracts that currently let teams kick enormous obligations down the road. A luxury tax with teeth that actually changes behavior rather than simply collecting checks. A collective bargaining agreement that prioritizes the health of all thirty franchises instead of protecting the advantages of a few. None of these are easy. All of them are possible if the people who love the game — owners, players, and fans — decide the game itself is more important than any single advantage.

I still believe baseball is worth saving. Not because it is perfect. It has never been perfect. It is worth saving because it remains one of the few places where a quiet afternoon can still feel like belonging to something larger than yourself. Because a child can still watch a player from a small market rise and dream. Because the crack of the bat and the smell of the grass still carry the memory of summers that shaped us.

George Sisler played for the St. Louis Browns, a team that no longer exists. Yet his name is still spoken with respect. That is the strange power of this game. It outlasts the teams, the owners, and even the eras. It can outlast this crisis too — if we choose to keep it fair enough for every city to believe again.

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Something important is shifting in the world of medicine. For most of human history, aging felt like a one-way street. Damage piled up, cells slowed down, and the body simply wore out. This week, three separate teams of scientists showed that pieces of that damage can be repaired, cleaned up, or blocked. The progress is still early, but the direction is clear: age reversal is moving from theory into real experiments on human tissue and living animals.

This week you may recall I talked about the engineered enzyme that can remove a stubborn chemical scar called CML from proteins. In donated human skin, that enzyme brought the aging markers down to levels normally seen in 31-year-old tissue. In a 75-year-old artery, it cut the same damage by more than 70 percent overnight. That single result still stands as one of the cleanest demonstrations yet that some forms of molecular aging can be reversed rather than merely slowed.

Now two more advances have arrived that widen the picture.

The first comes from a major paper published in the journal *Science*. Scientists discovered that as we age, certain clean-up cells called tissue-resident macrophages stop doing their job properly. These macrophages are supposed to remove old, worn-out immune cells known as senescent neutrophils. When the clean-up fails, the leftover cells create chronic low-level inflammation that harms the brain, muscles, heart, and other organs. The researchers found that a single signaling pathway (called EP2) is largely responsible for the failure. When they dialed that pathway down in aged mice, the animals kept better memory, stronger muscles, healthier hearts, and lower inflammation across the body. Even a drug that blocked the pathway restored the youthful clean-up process. In other words, a key part of organ aging is reversible if we restore the body’s own janitorial system.

The second advance is quieter but equally useful. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute found that senescent “zombie” cells stockpile large numbers of fat droplets inside themselves. These droplets appear to help the damaged cells survive and keep pumping out inflammatory signals. When the scientists activated a natural energy sensor in the cells (AMPK), the fat droplets shrank. This gives drug developers a new target: instead of only trying to kill senescent cells, we may be able to starve their harmful behavior by changing their internal metabolism.

Taken together, these three findings form a pattern. One approach repairs chemical damage that has already happened. Another restores the body’s ability to clear out problem cells. A third weakens the problem cells from the inside. None of them is a complete solution yet. All of them are still in the laboratory or early animal stage. But they sit inside a larger wave of research that is accelerating faster than most people realize.

In *Stay Healthy, Stay Youthful – The Science of Living to 150*, I explored exactly this kind of multi-front progress — the idea that aging is not one single process but a collection of repairable failures. The same hopeful thread runs through *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body* and *The Science of Positive Thinking*: when the science moves, our mindset has to keep pace so we stay open to what becomes possible.

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Great thinkers have long sensed that the future would look different. The physician and writer Lewis Thomas once said that the greatest discovery of the twentieth century was the discovery of the depth of our ignorance. Today that ignorance is shrinking in the most practical way possible. The geneticist David Sinclair has repeatedly argued that aging is a treatable condition, not an inevitable fate. And the philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer reminded us that “the purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” Extending healthy years is one of the purest forms of that service.

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What excites me most is not any single enzyme or pathway. It is the growing sense that we are entering a period when multiple independent approaches are beginning to work at the same time. Repair the chemical scars. Restore the clean-up crews. Starve the zombie cells. Support the body with better nutrition, sleep, movement, and mindset. Each piece reinforces the others.

We are still early. These discoveries need years of careful testing before they become safe treatments people can use. Yet the direction of travel is unmistakable. The question is no longer whether parts of aging can be reversed. The question is how many parts, how safely, and how soon.

I believe the next decade will surprise even the optimists. The long climb toward longer, healthier lives is no longer a lonely path walked by a few researchers. It is becoming a broad highway with many lanes opening at once.

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My best friend Eddie remembers a night from more than forty years ago that I might have forgotten had he not preserved it for me.

We were young men, still trying to figure out who we were. We stopped at the apartment where I was staying with my friends Kurt and Janet. They had already gone to bed, so we left the lights off and spoke in whispers.

The only illumination came from a porch light filtering through the curtains. In that dim room, Eddie could make out the shape of an upright piano.

I sat down and quietly began playing an Elton John song.

Then I sang.

There was no audience. No stage. No spotlight. No applause.

Just two young men in a dark apartment and something inside me that needed to come out.

Eddie later wrote that I sang from someplace deep inside myself—and that he could feel it.

That young man who sat down to play had no idea what was coming.

He did not know that one day Frank Sinatra would stand beside his piano and sing a few bars. He did not know that a granddaughter would someday walk onto some of the largest stages in the world. He did not know that he would find peace with two complicated parents before losing them. He did not know that grief would one day seat him courtside beside Magic Johnson. And he certainly did not know that after decades of loving, losing, rescuing, rebuilding, and occasionally making an absolute mess of things, he would finally discover what reciprocal love felt like.

Life rarely announces its most important moments.

It does not send an itinerary.

It simply opens a door and asks whether we are awake enough to walk through it.

These are five doors I never saw coming.

1. I Never Expected Frank Sinatra to Notice Me

Before Frank Sinatra ever spoke to me, I was a young musician playing piano at Patti Z (now The Purple Room) in Palm Springs.

One night, I was singing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” when Mr. Sinatra rose from his table and began walking directly toward me.

I kept singing, but inside I was panicking.

This was one of his songs. He knew every breath, every turn of phrase, every place where an inexperienced singer could get lost.

He stopped beside me and said:

“Tough bridge on that tune, huh? Good job, kid.”

Then he continued on to the bathroom.

That was it.

A few words.

But when you are young and still wondering whether your talent is real, a few words from the right person can stay with you for the rest of your life.

Not long afterward, his wife, Barbara, asked whether I wrote music. I played an original song called “You’re My World.” She loved it and asked me to make a recording for Frank.

I was broke. I did not have access to a proper recording studio. I made a cassette, listened to the quality, became embarrassed, and never gave it to her.

That remains one of the great regrets of my career.

Perhaps nothing would have happened.

Perhaps everything would have happened.

I will never know.

Then an old Sinatra associate named Eddie King offered to get me a private engagement playing for Frank. There was only one condition: I had to bring Eddie a case of Acushnet golf balls.

I searched practically every golf shop in the desert. Nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. Finally, an elderly man in a tiny Cathedral City store laughed and showed me a box of ordinary Top Flite golf balls.

They were manufactured by the Acushnet Golf Company.

Eddie had sent me on a wild-goose chase to see whether I would keep my word and figure it out.

I did.

The first party I ever performed for Frank Sinatra was held at the home of Danny and Natalie Schwartz in Rancho Mirage. Ambassador Walter Annenberg and his wife were among the guests. I had imagined bringing in my equipment and performing, but Mrs. Schwartz told me to bring in nothing. I was simply to sit at the piano and play background music for a room filled with some of the most powerful and recognizable people in America.

So I did.

Frank was kind to me that night. He came over and spoke to me at the piano. I was called back for more events, and sometimes he would stand near me, sing a bar or two of whatever I was playing, or talk about the song and the people who had created it.

The thing I remember most was not his fame.

It was his generosity.

At that time, there was no larger star in the world. Yet he treated me as if my talent mattered. He understood that a sincere compliment from him could change the way a young musician saw himself.

Greatness did not make him too important to notice the person sitting at the piano.

That was the lesson.

Sometimes a person reaches the highest room and immediately starts looking for someone below him to impress.

The truly great person looks around for someone to encourage.

Years later, I understood how extraordinary it was that Frank Sinatra recognized whatever spark existed in me. I had played a tiny role in his world, but he had played a lasting role in mine.

I also learned something more difficult:

When a door opens, do not let shame convince you that you are unprepared to enter.

Send the cassette.

Make the call.

Take the chance.

You may never be perfectly ready. Life is not always patient enough to wait.

2. I Never Expected the Brightest Stage to Belong to My Granddaughter

By the time my granddaughter Makayla auditioned for America’s Got Talent, I had already spent nearly forty years in music.

I had performed for presidents, governors, entertainers, athletes, business leaders, and some of the most famous people in the world.

None of that prepared me for watching my granddaughter walk onto that stage.

In March 2018, at the age of 15, Makayla stood before Simon Cowell, Mel B, Howie Mandel, and Heidi Klum and sang “Warrior.”

Her performance earned Heidi’s golden buzzer and sent her directly to the live shows.

We knew what had happened, but the program would not air until July. For four months, the entire family had to keep one of the biggest events of our lives a secret.

That was torture.

Wonderful torture, but torture nevertheless.

Makayla advanced through the quarterfinals and into the semifinals. Robin and I attended the quarterfinals with family and friends at the Dolby Theatre. When Makayla made it through, I cried like a baby.

I was not crying because I understood the television business.

I was crying because I remembered the little girl.

I remembered her mother, my daughter Regina, working tirelessly to drive her to auditions and performance opportunities. I remembered her father, Todd, working hard to provide for the family. I watched Makayla’s older sister, Whitney, stand beside her as her greatest supporter, and her little wide-eyed brother Aidan, there always to support her too.

And, because I cry at everything my kids and grandkids do. Always did.

For one astonishing period, Makayla’s first performance accumulated more than ten million views, and she briefly became the number-one trending person on YouTube.

I joked that I had worked with Frank Sinatra, but from that moment forward I would be known simply as “Makayla’s grandfather.”

And I was perfectly happy with that.

Then life added one of its peculiar twists.

Shortly before the semifinals, the retina in my right eye detached. I underwent emergency surgery and was left with a gas bubble in the eye. For ten days, I had to remain almost completely still, lying on my left side roughly ninety percent of the time.

I am not a person who enjoys remaining still.

It was excruciating.

Makayla was performing at the Dolby Theatre, and I could not be there. Robin went without me while I remained home, unable to move, trying to protect what remained of my vision.

That was not how I imagined experiencing my granddaughter’s great moment.

But perhaps there was another lesson in it.

Love is not diminished when we cannot stand in the room.

Sometimes love watches from a hospital bed.

Sometimes it waits beside a telephone.

Sometimes it cheers through tears from miles away.

Makayla did not reach the finals, but something had already changed. The world had seen her. More importantly, she had seen what was possible inside herself. In 2020, Makayla went on to become a top ten performer on American Idol. In the middle of that season, the “top 40 whittled down to top 20” performances were held at Disney’s Aulani resort in Oahu, and Robin and I flew in for the event. Imagine my pride and surprise when the ABC executives asked me, her grandfather, to dance on the beach with her in a moment that would make it onto the national TV feed. Makayla was brilliant as always, and continued on to the finals, even though COVID hit and the remaining season would force the kids to sing in their own homes. She still almost made it all the way!

Her success reminded me that whatever love, wisdom, discipline, or encouragement we give our children does not end with them.

It travels.

It may reappear in a granddaughter standing beneath stage lights we could never have imagined.

That is legacy.

Not merely having your name remembered.

Seeing the best of your life rise again in someone who came after you.

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My Parents When They Were First Married

3. I Never Expected to Find My Parents Again Before I Lost Them

My relationships with my mother and father were complicated.

That is the polite word.

They loved me, but they were also wounded people carrying pain they did not know how to contain. Their marriage was passionate, volatile, and finally destructive. My father’s alcoholism shaped our family. My mother’s anxiety and despair shaped it in other ways.

As a child, I worried constantly about both of them.

For much of my life, I tried to understand how two brilliant, talented, loving people could cause so much damage to themselves and to everyone around them.

I could have carried only the anger.

For a while, I did.

But something happened as we all grew older.

The sharp edges began to soften.

In January 2005, I went to see my mother after church. She had not felt well enough to attend, so I picked up Chinese food and groceries and brought them to her condo.

She was still in her pajamas. She had little appetite and was cold, so I shut the kitchen window.

Then, without either of us realizing how important the moment would become, she began telling me about the night I was born.

She remembered asking a nurse to open a window because she was so hot. She remembered seeing me for the first time.

We talked about my childhood and her life.

Then I thanked her.

I thanked her for helping me when I was young, for co-signing on cars, and for giving my family furniture when we had very little.

“The furniture which disappeared!” she said.

I reminded her that it had already survived twenty years with her and another twenty years with my children.

We laughed.

I hugged her, kissed her, and promised to return the following Sunday. She stood in the doorway, leaning on her walker and waving as I drove away.

It was the last time I saw her alive.

My mother died a few days later while I was performing during my first set at Red Tracton’s. My sister Judy called me, crying. I drove two hours to the hospital, weeping most of the way.

The nurses allowed my mother to remain in the room until I arrived.

Her face held a serenity I had rarely seen while she was alive.

I stroked her hair, kissed her cheek, and told her I loved her.

Seven years later, I lost my father.

But before he died, another miracle occurred.

After his wife Sandra passed away, my father began calling me almost every day. I visited him in Kennett, and he came to stay with me in California. We ate together. I cooked for him. He sat in my studio and watched me create music. We talked for hours.

One day he asked me:

“Do you still hate me for what I did to you when you were young?”

I told him the fifteen-year-old inside me still carried pain. But I had become a parent myself. I had made my own mistakes. At fifty-two, I understood human weakness in a way I could not have understood as a boy.

I told him I had forgiven him.

Those conversations healed something in both of us.

At his funeral, I delivered the eulogy he had asked me to write—his story, “warts and all,” but told with love. I ended it with the words we had exchanged for most of our lives.

He would say:

“Say a prayer for me.”

And I would answer:

“I always do.”

I was fortunate enough to become best friends with my father before he died.

I never saw that coming.

Forgiveness did not erase what happened.

It did something more useful.

It stopped the past from owning everything that came after it.

My mother left me her talent and her refusal to stop moving forward. My father left me his intellect, wit, language, and curiosity. Both left scars. Both left gifts.

Eventually, gratitude became larger than the wounds.

That may be one of the greatest victories available to any human being.

4. I Never Expected Grief to Seat Me Beside Magic Johnson

Frank Hamblen was far more than an NBA coach to me.

He became part of our family.

Frank had spent more than forty years traveling with professional basketball teams. After he retired from the Lakers, he moved to San Diego. He was quiet, selfless, dryly funny, and often more comfortable watching a game from home than receiving attention at the arena.

Frank had been a head coach and an assistant coach under some of the greatest figures in basketball. He had 7 NBA championship rings, stories, knowledge, and the respect of people throughout the NBA.

But in our house, he was simply Frank.

He came to Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas Eve parties, birthday gatherings, and Super Bowl events. Robin created the kind of warm, uncomplicated home that made him comfortable. He did not need to perform there. He did not need to be a famous coach.

He could eat, relax, laugh, and belong.

When Frank died, we did not merely lose a friend.

An empty chair appeared at every gathering.

On the exact one-year anniversary of his passing, the Lakers played a preseason game in San Diego. Veronica Lawlor came down, along with Frank’s nephew Andrew Mardis. Frank’s girlfriend Jane was there, along with Ron Zagami, Lawson Brown, Michele Ebbert, Robin, and others who had loved him.

Somehow, I found myself sitting courtside on the bench beside Magic Johnson.

There I was, close enough to one of the greatest basketball players in history to carry on a conversation, surrounded by people I would never have known had Frank not entered my life.

But the evening was not really about Magic Johnson.

It was about the invisible man sitting among us.

Frank’s sister Susan had become our close friend. His nephew was there. His friends were there. The lines between his family and ours had disappeared.

As I wrote in my autobiography:

Frank’s family was now our family. It was as simple as that.

And then came another truth:

Friends make you rich in spirit.

Loss takes a person from the room.

Love keeps rearranging the chairs.

Sometimes grief does not close the circle. It makes the circle larger.

I did not expect that.

I once thought the great moments of life would come through achievement: the important stage, the famous person, the prestigious room.

But that night, sitting beside Magic Johnson, the famous man was almost incidental.

The true gift was belonging.

5. I Never Expected Love to Feel So Calm

For much of my life, I confused being needed with being loved.

I was drawn to people I wanted to rescue. I had grown up worrying about my parents, trying to hold together situations no child could control. That pattern followed me into adulthood.

I loved deeply.

I also endured chaos, addiction, illness, betrayal, grief, and relationships in which affection and crisis became nearly inseparable.

Then Robin came into my life.

She was strong, independent, hardworking, generous, and emotionally steady.

She did not need me to save her.

She chose to stand beside me.

There is an important difference.

Early in our relationship, I broke my leg badly while trying to install a television in her home. Robin helped me, cooked for me, and took care of things while I could not walk properly.

Then, after a few days, she placed a stool beside the sink and reminded me that I was perfectly capable of doing the dishes myself.

She was right.

That was Robin.

Compassion without helplessness.

Love without drama.

Support without surrendering common sense.

After years of relationships defined by emotional upheaval, I discovered that peace was not boring.

Peace was beautiful.

When we began living together, I moved from solitude back into a lively family home. Children and grandchildren came and went. There was always someone in the revolving guest bedroom. Robin supported my work, encouraged healthy choices, and gave me something I had searched for without understanding it:

A person who was not merely behind me.

She was beside me.

We had both survived difficult relationships. Neither of us wanted another life built on conflict. We wanted compassion, serenity, laughter, family, and ordinary kindness.

The most surprising thing about finding the right relationship was how little it resembled the dramatic love stories people tell.

It was not built from constant declarations.

It was built from daily acts.

A meal.

A ride to the doctor.

A hand on my shoulder.

A family gathering.

A stool beside the sink.

Someone who knows all of your history and does not use it against you.

Someone who loves you while still expecting you to stand on your own feet.

The heart can break more than once and remain capable of love.

But first, it may have to learn the difference between being rescued, rescuing someone else, and finally walking together.

What the Unexpected Taught Me

These life experiences appeared to have little in common.

Frank Sinatra stood in rooms filled with power and fame.

Makayla stood beneath the lights of national television.

My mother, Elaine, stood in her doorway waving goodbye.

My father, Maynard, asked whether I still hated him.

Frank Hamblen’s memory filled an empty courtside seat.

Robin stood beside me and stayed.

Yet they all taught variations of the same truth.

1. Be ready when the door opens

Opportunity may arrive before confidence does.

Do not let embarrassment, fear, or the belief that you are not good enough make the decision for you.

Send the cassette.

2. Your greatest legacy may carry someone else’s name

The world may forget some of our own accomplishments.

Then a child or grandchild steps forward carrying a piece of our love, discipline, humor, music, or courage.

That is not being replaced.

That is being continued.

3. Say what needs to be said while there is still time

Thank the person.

Ask the question.

Offer forgiveness.

Make peace where peace remains possible.

None of us knows which goodbye will become the final one.

4. Measure wealth by the people who remain

Famous rooms are interesting.

Faithful friends are priceless.

A person who keeps showing up through illness, grief, family trouble, and the passing years has given you something no title can equal.

5. Do not mistake chaos for passion

Love does not have to injure you to prove it is real.

The right relationship may feel quieter than the wrong ones.

That quiet is not emptiness.

It is safety.

In The Science of Positive Thinking, I explore how our interpretation of life shapes the way we experience it. In The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body, I return to the powerful relationship among thought, emotion, behavior, and physical life.

These and all my other books are availalbe on Amazon HERE.

But books contain explanations.

Life supplies the proof.

I once believed the important moments would be the ones I pursued—the next performance, project, recording, connection, or achievement.

Now I understand that many of the most important moments came looking for me.

A few words beside a piano.

A granddaughter’s name announced from a stage.

Chinese food at my mother’s kitchen table.

A father asking for forgiveness.

A basketball game played in a dead friend’s honor.

A woman placing a stool beside the sink because she loved me enough not to let me become helpless.

Those moments did not arrive with trumpets.

Even the ones involving Frank Sinatra and Magic Johnson were not ultimately about celebrity.

They were about being seen.

Being forgiven.

Being remembered.

Being supported.

Being loved.

The long climb to the middle is not a consolation prize for failing to reach the top.

It is life itself.

It is the place where most of us work, worry, create, raise families, lose people, forgive reluctantly, laugh unexpectedly, and receive gifts we never knew to request.

Some of the best things that will ever happen to you may already be approaching quietly.

You will not recognize all of them at first.

Stay awake.

Keep your heart open.

And when the improbable arrives, do not stand at the doorway arguing that it must have the wrong address.

Let it in.

Please feel free to share this article or my Substack feed with anyone who may find meaning in these stories of unexpected grace, family, forgiveness, friendship, and lasting love.

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Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a wonderful and fulfilling life.

I remember when I was 10, sitting alone at my father’s desk after he left our home.

He had moved across the country, and the house that had once been filled with arguments, fear, laughter, music, anger, and the constant unpredictability of his alcoholism had suddenly become quiet.

Too quiet.

My father had left behind a bottle of his cologne. I would unscrew the wooden cap, breathe in the familiar scent, and cry.

I felt abandoned. I felt betrayed. I missed him terribly, even though living with him had often frightened me.

That is one of the confusing truths about life: the people who hurt us may also be people we love deeply. A situation can be wrong for us and still break our hearts when it ends.

I did not know it then, but I was beginning a lifelong education in finding my way back.

Not once.

Again and again.

I have never believed that strong people are untouched by fear, sorrow or doubt. Strong people are wounded. They become discouraged. They question themselves. Sometimes they collapse completely.

What distinguishes them is that, eventually, they reach for the next rung.

Here are five experiences from my life that taught me what that reaching looks like.

Experience One: Growing Up Before I Was Ready

My parents’ marriage slowly disintegrated under the weight of alcoholism, resentment, betrayal and unresolved pain.

As a boy, I worried about my mother’s safety. I worried that my father would hurt himself or someone else. I often felt responsible for adults who were supposed to be responsible for me.

Children in unstable homes become skilled observers. They learn to read footsteps, facial expressions, the sound of a door closing and the precise emotional temperature of a room.

They also learn to disappear.

Part of me became careful, responsible and serious far too early. But another part found refuge in music.

At the piano, the confusion had structure. A melody moved somewhere. A chord resolved. Even sadness could be made beautiful.

Music did not change what was happening in my family, but it reminded me that chaos was not the only thing inside me.

There was also creation.

There was also possibility.

Experience Two: The Audition I Was Too Afraid to Take

As a teenager, I attended a summer music program in Idyllwild. There was a coveted vocal solo, and I planned to audition for it.

Then I heard some of the other boys sing.

Their voices sounded mature, powerful and certain. Mine suddenly felt small.

I became so intimidated that I did not audition at all.

That failure stayed with me—not because someone rejected me, but because I rejected myself before anyone else had the opportunity.

Someone else sang the solo beautifully. I left Idyllwild determined to become a better vocalist and a better person.

That experience taught me something I would have to relearn many times:

Sometimes the greatest obstacle is not the closed door.

It is the voice inside us that says we have no right to knock.

I could not go back and sing that particular audition. But I could practice. I could develop my voice. I could step onto the next stage and the one after that.

Eventually, the frightened boy who could not complete an audition became a professional performer.

Confidence did not arrive first.

The work came first.

Experience Three: When the Future I Expected Disappeared

When I was eighteen, I thought education would lead me along a predictable road. For a time, medical school had been presented as a possibility.

Then that road disappeared.

I had people depending on me. I needed money. I worked long days in restaurants—sometimes eighteen hours—handling inventory, schedules, employees, lunch service, dinner service and hundreds of meals in a single evening.

I did not feel heroic.

I felt frightened, overworked and desperate to survive.

Years later, a man who had worked with me during that period told me he had never seen someone so young with such determination and work ethic. I laughed when he said it.

That was not how I remembered myself.

Inside, I had felt uncertain and overwhelmed. From the outside, he had seen someone moving forward.

This is worth remembering when you are struggling:

You may feel terrified and still be courageous.

You may feel lost and still be making progress.

You may believe you are barely surviving while someone else sees strength being forged before their eyes.

My formal education became an education in hard knocks: performing night after night, learning production, studying recording equipment, composing, managing events and teaching myself emerging technology.

The road was nothing like the one I had imagined.

It was still a road.

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Stephanie, with Our Twins, Tad and Rachel

Experience Four: The Year Everything Fell Apart

The bleakest period of my life followed the death of my wife, Stephanie.

My children were grieving. I was grieving. The business we had built was in financial trouble. We owed musicians more money than we had coming in, and I had no savings to rescue us.

My reputation—something I had spent years building—was in danger.

I owed friends thousands of dollars. Every time I earned an extra hundred dollars, I paid someone another hundred. It took years, but I paid every musician back.

During that period, we moved into a home with a roof that leaked badly. One night, water poured into my son Taddy’s room like a little waterfall. Someone had also destroyed a treasured Star Wars collection his mother had given him before she died.

He cried.

I did not have the money, wisdom or power to repair everything that had broken in his world.

So I held him until he fell asleep.

That moment contains almost everything I know about overcoming adversity.

You do not always defeat darkness with a grand plan.

Sometimes you answer it by paying the next hundred dollars.

Making the next phone call.

Repairing the next leak.

Holding the person who needs you.

Getting up tomorrow.

I could not give my children their mother back. I could not erase our grief. I could not restore my finances overnight.

But I could try to be the best father I knew how to be.

I could protect my integrity.

I could keep going.

Me and My Sisters Judy and Betsy When We Were Young

Experience Five: When My Sister Judy Died

My sister Judy was one of the calmest voices in my life.

We had become especially close in our later years. She listened without judgment and carried a deep spiritual wisdom shaped by her life, her nursing career and her connection to Native American traditions.

In the summer of 2013, she became suddenly ill after a tick bite. The correct diagnosis and antibiotic came too late. Her organs failed, and she died within days.

I was devastated.

There had always been five of us siblings. I thought of us as five fingers on one hand. No matter what happened in our childhood, we had one another.

Now one finger was gone.

Before Judy’s memorial, I walked toward a park in Cardiff shortly after sunrise. Birds were singing everywhere. In my grief, their calls seemed to form her name:

Ju-dy.

Ju-dy.

Perhaps another person would have heard only birds. I heard comfort.

At her memorial, we laughed and cried. We gathered at the beach. We placed some of her ashes into the Pacific Ocean.

Judy’s first granddaughter was born about two weeks after her death.

There it was again—the great circle of life. Unspeakable sorrow beside new promise.

Grief did not end. It changed shape.

Faith did not require me to pretend I was not heartbroken. It allowed me to believe that love remained larger than death. And I had to call on that faith once again when my beloved sister Betsy died suddenly in a car accident in 2023. Same grief, same agony, same love… larger than death.

Five Lessons I Carried Back With Me

Lesson One: You Do Not Need to See the Entire Road

When life becomes overwhelming, we often demand a complete answer:

How will I recover?

How will I pay everything?

How will I heal?

How will I begin again?

Usually, we are not given the whole road.

We are given the next honest step.

Take it.

Then take another.

Lesson Two: Self-Belief Is Often Built After You Act

People talk about confidence as though it must arrive before action.

My life taught me the opposite.

Practice creates evidence.

Work creates skill.

Keeping promises to yourself creates trust.

You do not wait until you believe completely in yourself. You act while doubt is still present, and your actions slowly give belief something solid upon which to stand.

Lesson Three: When Everything Else Is Gone, Protect Your Integrity

Money can disappear. Careers can change. Relationships can end. Reputations can be damaged by circumstances you did not entirely create.

But you can still decide who you will be next.

Pay the debt.

Tell the truth.

Keep the promise.

Apologize when necessary.

Do the right thing when nobody is applauding.

Integrity is one of the few foundations upon which a life can always be rebuilt.

Lesson Four: Let Love Pull You Outward

Pain turns us inward. We become trapped in questions with no satisfying answers.

Why did this happen?

Why did they leave?

Why did I fail?

Why wasn’t I enough?

Love asks a different question:

Who needs me now?

The night my son cried beneath a leaking roof, I could not solve my entire life. But I could hold him.

Sometimes service becomes the rope that pulls us out of our own darkness.

Lesson Five: As Long as You Are Alive, Your Story Is Still Moving

One of the most dangerous conclusions we can reach is that the worst chapter is the final chapter.

It rarely is.

Years after I was afraid to audition, I completed four decades as a professional performer.

Years after financial and personal collapse, I built new music, publishing and production ventures. And yes, I lost again, and built again, repeatedly. I’m alive. That’s what you do when God gives you another day.

Years after believing parts of my heart had died, I found reciprocal love, expanding family, grandchildren and work that continued to give my life meaning.

This is not because every wound disappeared.

It is because I remained.

In my autobiography, I wrote a simple sentence:

Without hope, we have nothing.

Hope is not pretending that everything will work out exactly as we wish.

Hope is the decision that, whatever comes, we will look for the next rung.

We will reach.

We will climb.

We will believe—not because life has always treated us gently, but because we have already survived days we once thought would destroy us.

When life looks the bleakest, you may not find your way back all at once.

Begin with the next right thing.

A prayer.

A phone call.

A walk outside.

A promise kept.

A hand extended.

A single note played in a dark room.

Then another.

And another.

Until, one day, you realize that you are no longer standing where life knocked you down.

You are climbing again.

Please share this article with someone who may be struggling to find the next rung. You can also share it through the Substack feed so its message reaches someone who needs to remember that their story is not over.

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I have spent a lifetime learning that the darkest nights do not last forever, but they do require something stronger than willpower alone. That something, for me, has always been faith.

When I look back across the pages of my own story — the one I finally put into words in *It’s a Long Climb to the Middle* — I see five moments when faith was the only thing still standing between me and the edge.

The first was the brutal murder of my sister Kimberley in 1993. The violence of that loss tore a hole in our family that never fully closed. In the months that followed, I felt the full weight of posttraumatic stress, the kind that steals sleep and rewrites the way you see the world. What kept me from disappearing into that darkness was a stubborn, almost defiant belief that love still mattered more than the cruelty that had just been shown to us. I clung to the conviction that the God who allowed such pain also gave us the capacity to protect the living and to keep moving forward. Without that faith, I would have stayed on the floor.

The second came with the death of my wife, Stephanie. Becoming a completely different person before and after her passing is not an exaggeration. The grief was so complete it rearranged my identity. Yet even in the thick of it, I kept returning to a simple truth I had been taught as a boy and had tested as a man: in the depths of winter you must reach deep inside yourself and find the invincible summer. Faith was the only map that still made sense when every other landmark had been erased.

The third arrived in a series of eye surgeries and retinal detachments that threatened the gift of sight itself. Lying still for days with a gas bubble in my eye, forced to surrender the constant motion that had defined my life, I found myself studying the intricate design of the human eye and realizing how impossible it was that such complexity could exist without a Master Planner. Gratitude for the remaining vision became a form of prayer. Faith turned medical crisis into a deeper relationship with the Creator.

The fourth was the sudden losses of my sisters Judy and, years later, Betsy. Each death knocked the entire family sideways. We climbed the ladder of maturity through those absences, grabbing for one another’s hands. Faith did not erase the pain, but it kept us from believing the pain was the final word. It reminded us that those we love do not simply disappear; they move ahead and wait.

The fifth came in the quieter but no less real valleys — the repeated falls back to the bottom of the climb, the professional setbacks, the moments when it would have been easier to stop believing in anything at all. Every time I was knocked down, the same quiet insistence rose again: as long as you are alive, you can make a difference. Persistence without faith is just stubbornness. Persistence with faith becomes purpose.

These five experiences taught me that faith is not a feeling that appears when life is easy. It is the decision you make when life is hardest.

If you haven’t already, I invite you to subscribe to my free Substack.

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Why does this matter for your life, right now?

First, faith gives you a place to stand when the ground disappears. Without it, every loss becomes final and every setback feels like a verdict. With it, even the worst chapters become part of a longer story still being written.

Second, faith protects your mind from the corrosive acids of bitterness, envy, and despair. In *The Science of Positive Thinking* I explore how daily habits of hope and emotional resilience actually add measurable years to a life. Faith is the deepest of those habits. It trains the nervous system to return to calm instead of remaining locked in fight-or-flight.

Third, faith multiplies the power of forgiveness — both the forgiveness you extend to others and the forgiveness you finally give yourself. Without it, old wounds keep bleeding. With it, the same wounds become the places where wisdom enters.

Fourth, faith turns ordinary persistence into something larger than yourself. In *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body* I write about reprogramming the mind and genes for strength and vitality. Faith is the original reprogramming language. It tells the body and the spirit that the climb is still worth making, even when the middle feels like the top of the mountain.

You can find ALL of my books on Amazon HERE.

Fifth, faith connects your personal story to a greater one. When I worked with the legendary trumpeter Steve Madaio on *Reflections in the Key of Life*, and later, on the Telly Award-winning documentary *Journey to an Extraordinary Life*, I watched how a life steeped in music and meaning outlasts the individual notes. Faith is what allows ordinary people to leave something that continues after they are gone.

Watch JOURNEY TO AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE free on YouTube HERE.

The great voices across history have said the same thing in different languages. C.S. Lewis observed that faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. The Apostle Paul wrote that we walk by faith, not by sight. And Abraham Lincoln, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, admitted that he had been driven to his knees by the overwhelming conviction that he had nowhere else to go.

I do not pretend that faith removes suffering. It does something better. It refuses to let suffering have the last word.

If you are in a season where the climb feels longer than your strength, know this: the same faith that carried one ordinary man through murder, loss, medical crisis, and repeated falls is available to you. It does not require perfection. It only requires the willingness to keep reaching for the invincible summer that still exists inside the winter.

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Peter Diamandis recently said, “Aging is the accumulation of damage—molecular disruptions in the structure of tissues and organs—leading eventually to impaired function and increased vulnerability to death. I believe that science will be able to reverse this deterioration for otherwise healthy people.”

I was talking with a friend not long ago who mentioned how his joints and skin just don’t bounce back the way they used to. “It’s like the years leave marks you can’t erase,” he said. Most of us know that feeling – the slow stiffening, the little changes that add up over decades. We’ve been told some of that wear and tear is simply part of getting older and can’t be undone. But a powerful new discovery is rewriting that story in a way that feels truly hopeful.

Over time, sugars in our blood can latch onto proteins in our bodies in a slow process a bit like the browning that happens when food cooks. These stuck-on compounds are called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs for short. One of the most common troublemakers is something called CML. It builds up on long-lasting proteins like collagen and elastin in our skin, arteries, and even the lenses of our eyes. The result? Tissues get stiffer, inflammation stays quietly active, and everyday functions start to feel the strain. Until now, scientists largely believed this kind of molecular damage was permanent – once it was there, it stayed.

That belief just shifted. Researchers created a specially designed enzyme they call CMLase. Think of it as a tiny, precise repair tool that snips the CML off the protein and restores the protein to its original, healthier state. In careful tests on actual tissue taken from a 75-year-old donor, this enzyme lowered the damage to levels you’d normally see in someone around 31 years old. In arterial tissue the reduction was over 70 percent. In skin it dropped more than 55 percent – bringing it below what’s typical for much younger tissue. This isn’t prevention. This is genuine reversal of molecular aging that had already happened.

Aaron Cravens, one of the scientists behind the work, put it plainly: we spend 50 to 70 years at body temperature slowly building up the same kind of compounds we get from cooking food quickly at high heat. The body has no built-in way to clear them. Now we have an engineered enzyme that can cut them away. Another researcher noted that these modifications had long been viewed as “rock solid” and impossible to remove. Yet here they are, being undone in real human tissue.

What makes this so profound is that it moves us beyond just slowing aging or stopping more damage from forming. For the first time, we have clear evidence that some of the harm already locked into our proteins can be repaired. That changes the conversation from “how do we age more slowly?” to “how much of aging can we actually turn back?” Imagine skin that regains more of its natural elasticity, arteries that stay more flexible, or eyes that hold up better over the decades. These aren’t distant dreams anymore – they’re the logical next direction this kind of repair technology points toward.

I remember a great quote from visionary/inventor Ray Kurzweil: “Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.”

In my book *Stay Healthy, Stay Youthful – The Science of Living to 150*, I explored exactly these kinds of breakthroughs in longevity science – ways we might actively address the molecular signatures of aging rather than simply accepting them. The same ideas of daily habits and emotional resilience I wrote about in *The Science of Positive Thinking* matter here too: when real progress like this arrives, it gives us fresh reason to stay hopeful and engaged with our own health. And in *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body*, I looked at how we can work with our systems to support greater vitality – this enzyme feels like a scientific partner helping do some of that deep-level repair work.

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This is still early work – a proof-of-concept done in the lab on tissue samples, not yet a treatment ready for people. But it opens a clear path forward. Scientists are already thinking about how to deliver enzymes like this safely into living bodies, how to make them even more effective, and how to create similar tools for other types of accumulated damage. Earlier research had shown smaller steps toward reversing these compounds in simpler settings. This study takes it much further by working directly on human tissue and restoring proteins so dramatically. The coming years will likely bring animal testing, refined delivery methods, and eventually human studies focused on skin health, blood vessels, and other areas where this damage shows up most.

The bigger truth is that aging is no longer just something that happens to us. We’re learning we can meet it with repair. That shift feels deeply hopeful. It reminds us that the body has more capacity for renewal than we once assumed. As the old saying goes, “The only constant is change” – and now change can work in our favor at the smallest, most fundamental level.

This kind of advancement doesn’t replace the choices we make every day – the movement, the nourishment, the mindset that supports long-term vitality. It adds to them. It gives us more tools and more reason to believe that the later chapters of life can be strong, clear, and full of possibility.

Another great quote from Ray Kurzweil: “By roughly 2032 when you live through a year, you’ll get back an entire year from scientific progress, and beyond that point you’ll get back more than a year for every year you live, so you’ll be going back into time as far as your health is concerned.”

So, buckle up! Let’s live longer, healthier, together, and
stay with me on this journey for more updates.

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I once read an article about Joe Torre, the great New York Yankees manager who guided the team to multiple World Series titles in the late 1990s. He spoke candidly about the showers of awards, affection, and glowing press that came with those winning seasons. But Torre was quick to note that much of the credit belonged to the extraordinary group of players he had the privilege to lead. Earlier in his career, when he managed teams that lacked that same talent and cohesion, he was often labeled a mediocre manager. The contrast was stark, and it got me thinking: How much does a coach—or manager, or leader—really matter in the end?

In baseball, studies have shown that a manager’s in-game decisions can swing a team’s record by roughly four wins (or losses) over a 162-game season. That’s meaningful, yet it’s still only a fraction of the picture. The rest comes down to the players themselves—their talent, their preparation, and perhaps most importantly, their attitudes and the chemistry they create together. I’ve seen it time and again: even the most talented rosters can collapse under the weight of a few toxic personalities. One or two players with bad attitudes can act like a cancer in the clubhouse, spreading negativity that no amount of strategy can overcome. Most of life, in sports or anywhere else, really does boil down to attitudes and emotions. They shape everything.

Derek Jeter, who played under Torre for years, captured this perfectly when he spoke about his former manager. “He’s like a second father to me. He’s like a second father to all of us,” Jeter said. “He’s the reason why we’re here today. He gave us an opportunity… He trusted us when we were younger and gave us an opportunity to play. So we all wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.” In another tribute, Jeter added that Torre was “more than a Hall of Fame manager. He is a friend for life… His class, dignity and the way he respected those around him—from ballplayers to batboys—are all qualities that are easy to admire, but difficult to duplicate.” Torre himself put it this way: “Competing at the highest level is not about winning. It’s about preparation, courage, understanding and nurturing your people, and heart. Winning is the result.” And he lived it: “I always try to call on something that would bring a positive spin to what we were doing… trying to get the most out of each and every player every single day.”

The same dynamic plays out across sports. Many people point to Bill Belichick’s long run of success with the New England Patriots and credit it almost entirely to Tom Brady’s excellence at quarterback. There’s truth in that—Brady was transcendent. But Belichick brought something irreplaceable too: a deep, almost obsessive knowledge of the game forged from childhood. His father was a coach who made him read every book on the subject and coached him relentlessly as a boy. Belichick later apprenticed under other great head coaches like Bill Parcells before taking the reins himself. When the Brady era ended, Belichick never quite recaptured that same magic, yet his foundational understanding of football never disappeared. It was always there, waiting for the right combination of players and timing.

Belichick himself has been clear about the partnership. “I learned so much from Tom. He saw the game through a quarterback’s eyes; I saw the game through a coach’s eyes. Together, I think we learned a lot from each other,” he said. Brady, in turn, has called Belichick “the best coach to ever coach in the NFL” and “one of the greatest motivators,” noting, “There are so many things that are uncanny about his coaching style. He had such high expectations for us, and he never let off the gas.” Brady also reflected, “There was always a great respect for each other… There was no coach I would have rather played for.” Belichick often emphasized the bigger picture: “Players win games… I’ve been fortunate to coach a lot of great players through the years.”

Frank Hamblen and Me

I saw this truth up close through my dear friend Frank Hamblen, who earned seven championship rings as an assistant coach with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers under Phil Jackson. Frank was widely regarded as one of the greatest defensive minds in NBA history. But when another head coach abruptly left and Frank stepped in as interim head coach for a losing season that was already slipping away, he was miserable. The role didn’t suit him. He thrived in the collaborative, behind-the-scenes work of building schemes and developing players—not in the solitary pressure of the top job. The team responded to him with effort and respect, but the season’s fate had already been sealed. Frank’s story reminds me that even the most brilliant assistants can struggle when thrust into the spotlight, and that greatness often lies in knowing exactly where you fit and what you do best.

Phil Jackson himself spoke of Hamblen’s impact. When the Bulls won in 1997, Jackson recalled, “MJ got up before the team and said to Frank, ‘We won this one for you, Frank.’” Kobe Bryant later posted a tribute: “Thank u Coach Frank for your deep understanding of the game, your patience and for challenging me to defend @ the highest level.” Hamblen himself had a wry take on the interim role, once joking, “Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be interim coaches.”

Great coaches come in many forms. Vince Lombardi took over the Green Bay Packers when they were a laughingstock and turned them into a dynasty through sheer force of discipline, clarity, and an unyielding belief in fundamentals. John Wooden built UCLA into a powerhouse not just with X’s and O’s, but with his Pyramid of Success—a framework that emphasized character, teamwork, and personal growth long before those ideas became fashionable. Phil Jackson, of course, wove mindfulness and the triangle offense into a philosophy that unlocked greatness in Jordan, Bryant, and countless others. These men didn’t just draw up plays; they shaped cultures. They understood that talent without the right attitude and cohesion is like an orchestra without a conductor—full of potential, but unlikely to produce harmony.

What does it really take to coach a winning team, in sports or in business? Strategy and preparation are essential, of course. So is the ability to read people, to motivate without breaking spirits, and to adapt when circumstances change. But the players must bring their own gifts to the table: raw talent, relentless work ethic, trust in one another, and the emotional maturity to put the team first. Chemistry isn’t something a coach can manufacture alone—it emerges when individuals commit to a shared purpose and check their egos at the door. The best teams I’ve observed, whether in sports or in life, succeed because everyone understands that individual brilliance shines brightest when it lifts the whole group.

It’s like the meme that says, “There is no I in TEAM, except in the a..hole.”

Success, though, can be fleeting. Even dynasties eventually end. The stars align for a season or two—great talent meets great leadership meets the right moment—and magic happens. Then the window closes, players move on, and the cycle begins again. That’s why the lessons endure longer than any trophy. In my book *The Science of Positive Thinking*, I explored how our daily habits and emotional well-being can profoundly shape outcomes, not just for individuals but for the teams and communities we belong to. The same principles apply here: when leaders foster positive mindsets and emotional resilience, they create environments where excellence becomes sustainable.

You can find ALL of my books on Amazon HERE.

In *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body*, I wrote about reprogramming our thoughts and habits to unlock greater strength and vitality—qualities every great coach tries to instill in their players. And in my Telly Award-winning documentary *Journey to an Extraordinary Life*, I’ve seen how ordinary people achieve remarkable things when they combine clear purpose with disciplined action and the support of those around them. The same threads run through great coaching: vision, persistence, and the courage to bring out the best in others. Frank Hamblen is featured in that video.

Watch JOURNEY TO AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE free on YouTube HERE.

The best coaches remind us that leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about creating the conditions where others can thrive. It’s about holding people accountable while lifting them up. It’s about recognizing that every great achievement is a collective effort, even when one person’s decisions carry extra weight.

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I stood on the deck of our home in Encinitas not long ago, watching the Pacific stretch out under a clear California sky, and thought about how much the world my grandchildren will inherit is already being written. My father, a Navy physician who survived the South Pacific in World War II, used to remind me that progress is rarely gentle. It arrives whether we are ready or not. Today, that truth feels more urgent than ever.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln

Throughout recent history, storytellers, authors, and historians have tried to imagine the near future. George Orwell’s *1984* captured the nightmare of a surveillance state with chilling accuracy, even if the year itself was off. Stanley Kubrick’s *2001: A Space Odyssey* gave us sentient AI and routine space travel that didn’t arrive on schedule, though recent leaps in both fields make parts of it feel eerily close. *Back to the Future Part II* boldly projected 2015 with flying cars and self-lacing shoes — entertaining, but wildly optimistic in timing. Ridley Scott’s *Blade Runner* painted a neon-drenched, dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 that didn’t materialize, yet its themes of artificial beings and corporate power echo in today’s headlines. And who can forget *The Jetsons*, promising a carefree world of robot maids and sky-high living that still feels just out of reach.

Yet something is different this time. The combination of quantum computing and artificial intelligence is doubling human knowledge at a pace our ancestors could scarcely imagine. Ray Kurzweil has long spoken of the singularity — the point where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Elon Musk has warned and inspired in equal measure, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible while reminding us we must steer these forces wisely. As a Stoic might say, we cannot control the winds of change, but we can adjust our sails.

By 2031, America will not look the same. Air taxi infrastructure is already being built in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Companies like Archer Aviation have been named official providers, with vertiports planned near SoFi Stadium, LAX, Hollywood, and other key sites. What once sounded like science fiction — hopping across the city in minutes by eVTOL aircraft — is becoming preparation for a new era of urban mobility. New York is following similar paths. Transportation as we know it is shifting under our feet.

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” — John F. Kennedy

Then there are the robots. Tesla’s Optimus humanoid is moving from prototype to mass production, with ambitious targets for thousands of units in the coming years and scaling dramatically after that. These general-purpose machines are designed for factories first, but the vision extends to homes, elder care, and labor shortages across industries. Imagine a world where repetitive, dangerous, or physically taxing work is increasingly handled by capable companions rather than exhausted humans. The economic and social ripple effects will be profound — reshaping everything from manufacturing to daily family life.

Medicine stands at an even more personal threshold. In *Stay Healthy, Stay Youthful — The Science of Living to 150*, I explored the cutting-edge research on reversing aspects of aging. Those ideas are no longer theoretical. Advances in cellular reprogramming, senolytics, and personalized therapies promise not just longer life, but stronger, more vital years. Combined with breakthroughs in gene editing and AI-driven drug discovery, we are approaching a time when many age-related diseases could become manageable or even preventable. In *The Unlimited Power of Your Mind and Body*, I wrote about reprogramming our biology through mindset, habits, and emerging science. That future is arriving faster than most realize.

Two other transformations will reshape daily American life. Quantum computing is moving from laboratory curiosity to practical tool, accelerating everything from materials science to cryptography and logistics. And the explosion of AI agents — systems that don’t just answer questions but act on our behalf — will transform work, education, and creativity. Routine tasks could be delegated, freeing human energy for higher pursuits, while entirely new industries emerge around human-AI collaboration.

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” — Helen Keller

Of course, change this rapid brings real challenges. We will need to guard our freedoms fiercely, as I explore in *Flames of Freedom — America’s Resilient Dream and Why It Is Humanity’s Last Hope*. The Constitution was written for exactly these kinds of moments — times when technology races ahead of our institutions and wisdom. We must ensure these tools serve human flourishing rather than erode the principles that made America possible. *The Science of Positive Thinking* reminds us that mindset matters now more than ever. How we respond — with courage, ethics, and clear purpose — will determine whether this new America lifts all boats or leaves too many behind.

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In the end, I remain hopeful. The same ingenuity that put men on the moon and mapped the human genome is now turning toward longer, healthier lives and more capable tools. Air taxis overhead, helpful robots in our homes, medicine that rewrites what aging means — these are not threats to the American dream. They are invitations to live it more fully. My grandchildren may grow up in a country that looks very different on the surface, but if we hold fast to the values that have always defined us — liberty, responsibility, ingenuity, and love of neighbor — the heart of America will beat stronger than ever.

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we help build, one wise choice at a time.

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