Real Life Matters

My cousin, Kevin, recently digitized family slides and shared them with the family. Going through the collection, I kept coming back to pictures of my Swedish grandparents’ summer home in Spread Eagle, Wisconsin. It remains a veritable Shangri-La in our shared family history. The memories I have from time I spent in Spread Eagle, are sparse, but they are also quite vivid and magical.

My mom’s parents, Gunnar and Ruth Engblom, bought Spread Eagle in 1958. Gunnar sold the place in 1974 after Ruth died. I remember floating in an inner tube next to the dock on Spread Eagle as a boy, thinking: “This is it. This will be the last time I swim here – ever.” When Spread Eagle was sold, a beautiful chapter closed in life for all of us.

I’m not surprised that Gunnar and Ruth fell in love with Spread Eagle. The lake is very similar to the lakes around Grimslöv, Småland, the area in Sweden they left in the 1920s. They were among the 1.3 million Swedes that traveled across the ocean, looking for a better life in America. They were happy here. After arriving in Chicago via Ellis Island, Gunnar reportedly refused to speak Swedish out of respect for his new country.

I learned as a small child the wonders of life on a quiet lake, the smell of gasoline in the yellow boathouse, the thrill of riding in my grandfather’s speed boat or being pushed in a wheelbarrow down the driveway by him. I learned about coffee, which my grandmother served to me in a tiny cup with lots of cream and sugar, as any good Swedish grandmother would do.

I also learned how to savor every moment, knowing that things in life do not last long, which makes life precious. It all goes by very fast. We are here one day, and gone the next.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
– Robert Frost

“What lies behind us and what lies before us is nothing compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

My days now are quiet, which is how Freja and I like ’em. Jennifer is a different story. Her energy is boundless and her network of friends and colleagues seems to grow bigger every day.^[1]Was I like that before? I guess I was, and yet this seems so foreign to me now. Like a different version of me altogether – not better or worse, just a highly caffeinated version of me. I still … Continue reading Despite the quiet around me, my brain still keeps chattering away, like bees buzzing in and around their hive. I do my utmost to keep negative thoughts at bay, but this is easier said than done. The algorithms on social media have my number dialed in. I noticed the other day that the Instagram app on my phone now lacks a pause button, making it even more difficult to get away from scrolling. It just keeps going and going and going from reel to reel until I am able to stop after a while, look around and ask myself, “what in the heck are you doing?”

So much of the world now is dark and violent. I guess it should not surprise anyone that the channels we tune into now on our TVs for relaxation are also dark and violent.^[2]What did they say about art imitating life? It takes diligent, focused effort to find media of any kind with positive vibes. More often than not I am only able find positive material in the analog world of books and journaling by hand. Even then, my negativity bias wins out if I am not paying attention. The other day, I needed to put down The Stand by Stephen King and pick up The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. Fred Rogers was an amazing human, and reading this book is both calming and inspiring. Stephen King can wait.

In peaceful moments, I can only marvel at the millions of details and relationships that needed to align throughout my nearly 60 years of life, enabling me to arrive here in this moment, more or less intact. As a teenager, I almost flipped over a heavy tractor onto myself while mowing grass on a hill. I nearly mangled my legs in the water behind a moving outboard boat motor. I also nearly shot myself with a live round of .22 caliber ammunition,^[3]https://realifematters.com/2020/09/06/locked-and-loaded-ptsd/ not to mention almost breaking my legs attempting to zip line down a telephone pole wire. Call it dumb luck or providence, I am still here, alive and mostly well. In the words of Michel de Montaigne: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

When I was a young boy, I’m told that someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told them that I either wanted to be a minister or a dog. If I was a minister I would go to work with my dad, and if I was a dog I would bury bones in the yard with our dachshund, Andy.

I just walked down to the front room where Freja was sleeping in the morning sun. I told her about my boyhood dreams. I scratched the inside of her ears. She gave me a big stretch, and sighed. Dogs know about living life to the full, and I am joining her fully in this moment.

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

“The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” – William Blake

One of the most adorable things that Malin did as a toddler happened at Christmas. Visiting grandma and grandpa in Nebraska, she removed the tiny wooden Jesus figure from grandma’s nativity scene, rocking it ever so gently in her arms and looking up to Jennifer, saying, “Mamma… Baby Jesus cry.” With her lisp, the “r” sound in the word “cry” was absent, making her observations even more adorable.

Almost all children, especially young children, are able to cry freely. Indeed, healthy infants are born into the world crying. Research also shows that children laugh about 400 times a day, but adults on average laugh only about 15 times.^[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6609137/

Raised in the 1970s in the Midwest as an American male, I learned early in life that it was not acceptable for me to show any kind of weakness – especially, to cry in public. Instead, I was taught to keep a stiff upper lip and let whatever was bothering me to roll off my back, like water off a duck. At least, this was the idea.^[2]In reality, of course, emotions that are denied are unable to be processed and accumulate in our system until they express themselves in other, less healthy ways. Like all of my friends and their brothers and fathers and uncles, I learned to practice the subtle art of denial when it came to dealing with any sad emotions. Picture Tom Hanks in A League of their Own: “Are you crying? There is no crying in baseball!“

In the winter of 1975 my sister Susie fell on my arm while we were playing on a huge snow pile in the church parking lot. When I started to cry, she scolded me: “Don’t be such a cry baby!” I finally relented and went inside, where nurse Ingrid appeared and knew instantly that my wrist had been fractured. The emergency room physician who fixed my wrist was impressed that I was able to be brave and not cry. He said, “Mrs. Anderson, you have a superb boy.”

The consequences of denying the expression of emotions, including sadness, on our emotional life are profound:

“When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia.

On my visit to Africa, I remarked to one woman that she had a lot of joy. Her response stunned me: “That’s because I cry a lot.” This was a very un-American sentiment. She didn’t say it was because she shopped a lot, worked a lot, or kept herself busy. Here was . . . sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude, side by side. It is indeed the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.^[3]Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow (pp. 110-112). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

I can’t remember the last time I cried, either sad or happy tears. But I am committed to allowing the limits of my usual emotions to expand, including re-learning how to cry. A life filled with more tears will make me a more complete human being.

“When death finds you, may it find you alive.” – African Proverb

“When people have . . . problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them . . . and time to start asking what happened to them.”^[1]Hari, Johann. Lost Connections (p. 140). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If you tell your physician that you are feeling anxious and maybe even a little depressed, there is a good chance that they will listen politely for a short while and then reach for their laptop. Big Pharma has done some amazing things to advance modern medicine. Promoting a more holistic and nuanced view of anxiety and depression is not, however, among them. Indeed, given the time pressure that insurance companies impose on physicians generally, it is often necessary for a physician to prescribe the latest SSRI than to try to get to the root of what’s happening in their patient that is causing them to be anxious and depressed in the first place. Medication has an important role in our health, but it would be wrong to expect that it can cure our sadness.

The truth of the matter is that many of us are anxious and depressed for reasons that are readily understandable. For example, you may need to deal every day with a difficult boss. You may be at a loss about how to handle a problematic family relationship. You may have a hard time saving enough for retirement or even putting food on the table. Like me, you may have a diagnosis for a chronic disease for which there is no cure. All of us are trying to figure out how to co-exist in a nation stirred up by the media and by leaders who profit from the chaos of our political differences, which seem only to be growing. We make things worse for ourselves when we feel bad about feeling bad – like there is something wrong to feel out of place in a world that has gone mad before our very eyes.

Turning off my phone, I lie on my back on the floor (my favorite place) and take deep breaths. I muster up as much courage as I can find within and lean into the grief and losses I have experienced on the path of life. I have learned the hard way that running from problems only makes things worse.^[2]Pain is necessary. Suffering is optional. Indeed, it is helpful for me to remind myself that all emotions need to be felt so that they can be moved gently through my mind and, especially, my heart.

For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon. We are told to “get on with it” and “get over it.” The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage, once again, to walk its wild edge.^[3]Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

Today, during the cold of winter, I walk on this wild edge of grief and loss. I seek to encounter the layers of meaning within my deepest, truest self.

Do you remember the Tasmanian devil from the cartoon Bugs Bunny? I used to spin and buzz around, leaving a cloud of dust like the Tasmanian Devil until I managed to achieve the next shiny thing on my list. Then, without waiting longer than necessary to identify my next target or obsession, I would move on. Fire! Ready! Aim!

Four years into my retirement, these days I move mostly in a state of calm from one small project to another. I’m not afraid to take naps. There is lots of quiet – in fact, my life now is mostly quiet. Like the tortoise and the hare, I just plod along every day.

With her many friendships and other relationships, her spiritual direction practice and now the Journey Center of Michigan, Jennifer remains in perpetual motion. It’s all good. We are simply in different seasons of life.

Moments of calm are balm to the soul. Silence at this season in life is mostly comforting, giving me ample space to savor the stillness. I can sit for long stretches of time, reading a book while Freja naps, occasionally chasing rabbits in her dreams. It is healing and therapeutic to just be.

“Nearly all habits that lead us to calm exist in one place: the analog world. The more time we spend in the analog world, as opposed to the digital one, the calmer we become. We best unwind in the analog world, acting in accordance with how our ancient brain is wired.”^[1]Bailey, Chris. How to Calm Your Mind (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

For the last few weeks I have managed to keep myself off of Twitter and TikTok and almost all news sites. I still look at NPR once a day, but I’ve stepped out of my addiction to the 24-hour media outrage machine. I avoid alcohol and most artificially sweetened foods. Strolling down the aisles of our grocery store, I am amazed by the Frankenfood I still crave. Instead, there are loads of berries and veggies in my cart. This phase may not last forever, but it feels great right now. The key is to keep junk food out of our house. If it is here I will eat it.

As a result of these changes, the micro surges of dopamine upon which I have been dependent, have faded. They have been balanced by more serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins. These are the calm, happy chemicals. I would be lying if I told you that all my anxiety about the future in particular is gone, but I don’t generally let it stew. Mostly I am able to make it go away by biking, running, and going to the gym.

Research suggests dopamine leads us to crave two things that compromise calm: more accomplishment and more stimulation.^[2]Bailey, Chris. How to Calm Your Mind (p. 77). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It has been awhile since I last posted to this blog. I am in no rush. And that’s the point.

I just finished the new Memoir, Spare, by Prince Harry. Once I picked up the book, I could not put it down. Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, is an outstanding writer.

Before going further, let’s press pause and consider whether it matters that Prince Harry’s memoir was actually written by a ghostwriter, and not Harry:

“Spare” provides a version of Prince Harry’s story, but getting access into his soul requires it being written in his own words.

Words create reality. God created the world through words: “and God said… and it was.” We are defined by our words. Our own words.

Whether you are a master stylist or a literary lion, you can only be truly known by others from the words you choose to create your personal identity. No artificial intelligence and no ghostwriter, no matter how great, can fully convey who you really are.

Which, in the final accounting, makes you the true – and only – real author of your life. And which makes the royal memoir sweeping the globe a mere ghost of what it might have been had Prince Harry actually been the author.^[1]https://aish.com/prince-harry-didnt-write-spare/

I can only imagine the pain and grief experienced by Harry. Because of his status as a royal prince, he has not had an easy life. No one is exempt from loss and trauma. Very few people – only two, in fact – have lived to see their trauma played out in the media, fueled by the untimely death of their famous mother, relentless paparazzi, and dubious backroom courtiers with nicknames like the Bee, the Fly and the Wasp.^[2]Harry, The Duke of Sussex, Prince. Spare (p. 365). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

One of Prince Harry’s biggest beefs is the spinning of falsehoods by greedy and abusive journalists. At the top of his list is, you guessed it, Rupert Murdoch.

“It was around this time that I began to think Murdoch was evil. No, strike that. I began to know that he was. Firsthand. Once you’ve been chased by someone’s henchmen through the streets of a busy modern city you lose all doubt about where they stand on the Great Moral Continuum.” ^[3]Harry, The Duke of Sussex, Prince. Spare (p. 199). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

After years of being harassed, I can imagine it being hugely cathartic to punch back at the paparazzi. Also, I can see Harry wanting to get his side of a very dysfunctional family story out there, setting the record straight after years of feeling stifled by his family and minders. Perhaps he is hoping that the energy behind his personal story will dissipate through publication, like air after a lightning strike. Harry will have taken back his life, and spared his beloved Meghan from a repeat of history involving a fatal car chase and the paparazzi.

It is easy to empathize with Harry. The release of Spare into the wild will, however, only stoke the fire. It’s Newton’s third law. For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction.^[4]https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/newtons-laws-of-motion/#newtons-third-law-action-reaction Indeed, the King of England has now asked Harry and Meghan to vacate Frogmore Cottage. Disgraced Prince Andrew will be moving in – in case there is any doubt about where Harry and Meghan fit in the new royal pecking order.

Please don’t read this as being critical of Prince Harry. Spare seems to be a vital step in his chosen grieving process. Through the passage of time, I trust and pray that the next steps will eventually make themselves known to Harry. He may then be invited to set down his pen and sword and rest upon the higher power of grace, surrender and forgiveness.^[5]God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

I don’t pretend for even one minute to understand what turmoil Prince Harry has experienced. But I suspect that freedom and peace lie on the other side of his personal mountain of pain and grief.

“Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie

“Grief is like a stream running through our lives, and it is important to understand that loss doesn’t go away. It lasts a lifetime. It is our relationship to a particular loss that changes. It won’t always hold the same intensity for us, or take the same expression. But the grief as a natural human response to loss will remain, and our resistance to it will only intensify the pain.”^[1]The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
https://a.co/hUwsEbc

It is sometimes a challenge for me to remain engaged and optimistic. When I’m feeling blue, my mind seems to gloss over the progress being made every day in the field of neuroscience research. I allow the parade of horribles in, marching freely around the darkest corners of my mind. My mind tends to ruminate on two topics: (1) the various mistakes I have made in the past; and (2) my fears about the progression of my Parkinson Disease in the future. I recognize that both of these things are totally outside of my control. But that does not stop me from trying to control them anyway. My tendency for perfectionism is relentless, even if it is knowingly pointless.

It is easy to fight and resist – to ruminate and isolate. These approaches, however, get me nowhere:

“In death and in life, should we “hope for the best” or “expect the worst”? What if instead, we cultivated a non-judgmental attention and commitment to being with the truth of whatever is present? Suppose rather than choosing sides, we developed the mental clarity, emotional stability, and embodied presence to not be swept away by the cycle of ups and downs, of hopes and fears? Balanced equanimity gives rise to a resilience that is fluid and not fixed, trusting, adaptable, and responsive. Perhaps we might accept our past, ourselves, others, and the continually changing conditions of our lives “as is” — neither good nor bad, but workable.^[2]The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
https://a.co/agOhuct.

I would love to become resilient, trusting, and adaptable instead of resistant, guarded and stuck. I can choose to stop resisting, and accept what is.

We tend to protect ourselves from the experiences and situations we don’t like. But there is a sense of liberation and confidence that gets built up within us when we do the opposite, when we push away nothing.^[3]The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
https://a.co/a5H4Jib

And thus we get to the point of this post:

An integral part of healing is letting go. But there is no letting go until there is letting in.^[4]The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
https://a.co/4Xcwda1

I am learning every day to make peace with my situation, and to not fight it. Indeed, I do not want people to say at my memorial service someday – hopefully many, many years from now – that I battled Parkinson Disease. Rather, I want to be remembered for how – in my best moments – I allowed this disease to change me into a better, more loving and accepting version of me. I want people to remember that I did my level best to let the wild energy and chaos of my brain be transformed into peace, and acceptance – love, and rest.

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.” – Lao Tzu

Fresh into our new life as empty nesters, Jennifer and I are on a mission to re-organize. We have been discarding lots of stuff that we no longer want, or need. What remains goes into into stackable, 65 quart Sterilite latching boxes. These fit perfectly on our storage shelves. We affix to each box a simple numbered label. We then add the number, contents and location of each box to a spreadsheet.

So far, we have filled and labeled 90 boxes, which does not even include the stuff in our offsite storage unit. Yikes. We have a lot of stuff! The self-storage industry in the U.S. generates $39.5 billion annually. Looking at things positively, we are doing our part to keep the industry on track to meet its 2023 revenue targets. A tiny house is definitely not on our bingo card, though the appeal of a tiny house is something that has always resonated with me. I am sure I am not the only one.

Taking away stuff from our lives is inherently challenging. The human brain finds it much easier to add stuff than to subtract it. Science bears this out:

[M]y team embarked on tens of thousands of hours of research. We experimented, discussed, wrote, presented, and repeated. And we discovered that humans overlook subtraction. People don’t think of the other kind of change, even when subtraction is obviously the better option.^[1]Klotz, Leidy. Subtract (pp. 16-17). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.

For the first time in years, we are now able to fit both of our cars in the garage for the winter. Mari Kondo was right – there is something magical in keeping what brings us joy and discarding the rest. Indeed, the process of discarding, and then re-organizing what we have, has been deeply satisfying.

If you are feeling an urge to tidy your world, either a lot or a little, Kondo offers an approach that reduces potential friction in the process:

It is crucial not only to tidy by category but also to follow the correct order, which is clothes, books, papers, komono (miscellany), and finally, sentimental items.^[2]Kondo, Marie. Spark Joy (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) (p. 6). Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed. Kindle Edition.

Jennifer and I came across several boxes of old photos and albums needing to be sorted. Reviewing these photos quickly brought to the surface powerful emotions buried deep inside of me. It is impossible to look at old photos without being pulled into the rich mystery of the past. My heart overflows with gratitude, reverence and awe. I thank everyone whose life has touched mine along the twisting path of time. Each of you has a place in my life. Even if we have not seen each other, or spoken in years, none of you can, or ever will be, taken away from me.

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” — Albert Einstein

Every six months I visit my neurologist. I am always a little surprised during these visits, hearing myself say things out loud that I am often reluctant to acknowledge. During my most recent visit, we discussed my life’s pace, which has slowed dramatically since I stopped working in 2019. On one level, this is discouraging. As each month passes, however, I have grown to get used to moving through each day at a slower, more measured pace. If I breathe deeply and pay attention, I can experience things that would otherwise be out of reach, like the joy of watching a Sanderling running up and down the beach on Lake Michigan at sunset in late September.

The Sanderling starts life in the high arctic tundra, and migrates south in the fall. Exactly how this tiny creature finds its way from the arctic to the south across thousands of miles, and back again, is a mystery:

It now appears that birds may visualize the earth’s magnetic field through a form of quantum entanglement, which is just as bizarre as it sounds. Quantum mechanics dictates that two particles, created at the same instant, are linked at the most profound level—that they are, in essence, one thing, and remain “entangled” with each other so that regardless of distance, what affects one instantly affects the other. No wonder the technical term in physics for this effect is “spooky action.” Even Einstein was unsettled by the implications. Theoretically, entanglement occurs even across millions of light-years of space, but what happens within the much smaller scale of a bird’s eye may produce that mysterious ability to use the planetary magnetic field. Scientists now believe that wavelengths of blue light strike a migratory bird’s eye, exciting the entangled electrons in a chemical called cryptochrome. The energy from an incoming photon splits an entangled pair of electrons, knocking one into an adjacent cryptochrome molecule—yet the two particles remain entangled. However minute, the distance between them means the electrons react to the planet’s magnetic field in subtly different ways, creating slightly different chemical reactions in the molecules. Microsecond by microsecond, this palette of varying chemical signals, spread across countless entangled pairs of electrons, apparently builds a map in the bird’s eye of the geomagnetic fields through which it is traveling.^[1]Weidensaul, Scott. A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (pp. 8-9). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Navigating thousands of miles from the arctic each fall is just the beginning of the mystery surrounding migratory birds:

Researchers have found that in advance of their flights, migrant birds can bulk up with new muscle mass without really exercising, something humans would love to copy. Because a bird’s muscle tissue is all but identical to a human’s, the trigger must be biochemical, but remains a tantalizing mystery. They also put on so much fat (in many cases more than doubling their weight in a few weeks) that they are, by any measure, grossly obese, and their blood chemistry at such times resembles that of diabetics and coronary patients—except that they suffer no harm. Nor do birds flying nonstop for days suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation; they can shut down one hemisphere of the brain (along with that side’s eye) for a second or two at a time, switching back and forth as they fly through the night; during the day, they take thousands of little micronaps lasting just a few seconds. Researchers have found dozens of similarly extraordinary ways in which a bird’s body copes with and overcomes the stress of long-distance travel.^[2]Weidensaul, Scott. A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (p. 9). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Each of us is on a unique migration through life. Like everyone else, my own migration is shrouded in mystery. How quickly will my Parkinson’s disease progress? What treatments for Parkinson’s are on the horizon? Will these treatments be available to me? When will a cure be discovered? If a cure is found, will I even be able to take advantage of it?

These questions are profound, and, most of the time, too much for me to handle. So instead of dwelling on the overwhelming, I break up my flight on most days into small, manageable bites. Completing a daily journal checklist, I am prompted each morning to set a single priority at the beginning of each day.^[3]One thing each day does not seem to be a lot until you factor in that there are 365 days in a year, which translates to an impressive list. Thanks for the inspiration, MacSparky!

I pick a priority each the morning and write it down. Today, my priority was to finish this blog post.

I stretch my wings and join the Sanderling in flight over the horizon and into the unknown.

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” – Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

In high school, I studied trumpet with Alvin Belknap. He played trumpet in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I loved having him as my teacher. But he didn’t love having me as a student – at least at first. One day, I arrived for my lesson and went down to his basement studio to warm up, as usual. He came down a few minutes later, crossed his arms and said: “Tim, I can tell that you have not been practicing. I don’t need your money and I really don’t need you to waste my time. So, I’d like you to put your trumpet in its case, get in your car and go home. You can call me in two weeks, and I will think about giving you additional lessons.”

Mr. Belknap knocked me right off my pedestal. For those who knew me then, it was overdue. I had been skating by in life without really trying. The tough lesson I received from Mr. Belknap changed me forever. I went home and practiced like crazy. I called Alvin Belknap in two weeks and he kindly agreed to continue teaching me how to play the trumpet. It was as if our difficult conversation had never happened. This time, however, I focused and did my very best to be the best trumpet player I could possibly be. My interaction with Mr. Belknap was a watershed moment.

While studying at North Park College in Chicago, I played in the orchestra and our conductor, Thom Wilkins, inspired me to do my very best. To this day, he remains an inspiration to many.^[1]This recent speech by Thomas Wilkins is excellent. While at North Park, I was also able to take private trumpet lessons with Luther Didrickson, a professor of trumpet at Northwestern University. I simultaneously feared and admired Mr. Didrickson. He was a legend.^[2]http://www.hsutrumpets.com/luther-didrickson/.

Many of us need at least one teacher who cares enough to demand the very best that we are able to offer. Great teachers intervene at just the right moment, changing the trajectory of our lives forever. Less enlightened teachers can cause terrible emotional damage. It should be no surprise that the most demanding teachers are the ones we remember. Their impact persists long after they are gone from our lives. Indeed, they never truly leave us.

At this stage of my life, I do not have a music teacher looking over my shoulder, inspiring me to practice every day. My trumpets now rest in their cases in our basement. My guitars live in our storage unit in the dark. Nevertheless, the lessons I learned with these instruments carry on within me as a legacy to where I have been, what I have learned, and who I am today.

“Storytelling is the fundamental currency of medicine.” — Suzanne Koven