Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1.Pulchritudinous. Beautiful. Funny, such an awkward, and frankly not terrifically pretty word to say “beautiful”. A favorite for Bugs Bunny, I’m told that it is the longest word for “Beautiful”.

No reason. My buddy Ken told everyone at dinner they were pulchritudinous last night. Not sure if I’ll be able to work it in but the reactions he got make it worth trying!

2. Gathering. Every year there are two large national meetings in the world of my day job. This weekend I find myself in Los Angeles among a few thousand folks who do pretty much the same thing that I do for a living. While LA is not my favorite convention setting, the presence of so many people I know, repsect, and like makes the venue almost irrelevant.

Kinda like an annual family reunion in the town you couldn’t wait to leave.

3. Maya Angelo. “When someone shows who they are, believe them the first time.”

I have to admit, until I read this quote some time ago I thought Ms. Angelo was kinda soft. Digging just a tiny bit below the surface of her life, writing, and speeches and it is clear that I was wrong. Indeed, just this single, simple sentence is indicative of a person who has been forced to learn this lesson in some type of hard way, and likely more than once. It is a lesson worth learning, but as is the case with so many lessons, one that can be challenged by nuance.

You meet someone for the first time. Someone to whom you’ve never been introduced, with whom you’ve never spoken, but of whom you have heard. Perhaps your foreknowledge is mostly quite positive, or maybe there is conflicting information, not all of which is quite so laudatory. Has this intel gathered from third parties informed you of who the introductee really is? Or rather, are we to take Ms. Angelo at, a writer noted for the precision of her words, at her EXACT words? That is, when the person shows you themself who they are?

Not gonna lie, if I am introduced to a new someone by a trusted friend with nothing but good things to share during the introduction, I find it easier to take Ms. Angelo’s exhortation a little on the softer side. To extend a little bit of grace if my first impression is less positive for whatever reason. If my friend thinks highly of someone I am inclined to let this new person offer up a couple of efforts at telling me who they really are.

Funny, though. As I get older and meet more folks, it’s the ones I may have heard less favorable things about prior to our introduction to whom I am inclined to offer a bit of grace. For me at least, in these circumstances I tend to wait for the person to tell me who they really are themselves. To try as best I can to withhold my ultimate accounting of the person before me until I hear it from them.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and one could do much worse than taking a broader view of Maya Angelo’s advice. One can never have enough friends; waiting to meet one in person, rather than via third person, has brought me friendships I might have missed had I not done so.

4. Everything. My professional world is filled with intelligent and kind people blessed with extraordinary talents that they choose to share with not only their patients, but also with each other. Roughly half of them, other in the larger sense in and in my closer personal circles, are women. It has been my great privilege to be a various times best friend, big (or little) brother, confidant, and provider of counsel. As with so many other worlds, in my world of eye surgeons the women typically carry a greater workload, a larger share of life’s burden if you will, than we men do.

So it was that once again I found myself with a young friend, alone together in a large, noisy gathering, trying to help her maneuver through the maze of “everything” that confronts these women in my life. For our “conversation” here on “musings…” this morning it doesn’t matter who she is where she lives, of the granular details of her problem. Like so many others who have asked for at sympathetic ear she is extraordinary in every way. An accomplished, busy eye surgeon. An internationally recognized expert whose counsel is routinely sought by our professional organizations and industry partners. A wife and a mother. How could she possibly keep all of this going? How was she to handle the sense that she was letting someone down? What was she to say to that nagging voice in her head that everywhere she found herself, there was someplace else she was supposed to be?

“There’s no balance between my work and my life. What if I stop? What if I just step away from everything that takes me away from home? I can’t stop feeling that I am missing too much, that my kids are missing their Mom too much. Will people understand? Will they forget me?”

Seriously, it was heartbreaking.

Once again I return to the concepts my daughter Megan I and worked so hard on some years ago. There really is no such thing as “work/life balance” because there isn’t really a “/” between the two; work is simply a part of life. No more, no less. What we should be seeking is harmony between all of the aspects of our life. Our job, our family, and what it is in ourself that makes us who we are. The trap that my dear young friend has fallen into is the canard of “having everything” where everything is, well, literally every thing.

You can, indeed, have everything, but to do so you must carefully define what constitutes your own personal everything. Having done so it IS possible to have everything, with one very important caveat: you can’t have your everything all at the same time. In fact, most of the time you will find that harmony lies in only having a portion of your own collection of everything right then. It is only over time, perhaps even only over a lifetime that you will realize that you have had “everything”. Indeed, some parts of everything will only harmonize at a very certain point in time. Think Little League baseball or Junior Prom. The first tooth under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Easing your new associate into the practice.

Some stuff only fits into the symphony at a very specific part of the music.

It was a very quick chat. We only had a few minutes to share before the rest of the crowd noticed us. I hugged my friend and told her that she already knew the answers to all of the questions. If all she needed was for someone she trusted to say “yes”, to follow the music she was hearing, that I was there to help. How could anyone not understand? Who could ever forget such a wonderful, caring, loving person?

Just before we let go I told her I won’t.

Reserve. Every few meetings I run into my friend Mark. His story is extraordinary, and I love telling it. Here is a story of hearts with a deep reserve of love to give.

How much space do you have in your heart? We talk here about work capacity, but I’m wondering about the capacity to extend your heart to others. Let me tell you a story.

Some 40 years ago a young man was struck by a car and suffered a concussion. While he was hospitalized his mother became ill and died in another hospital. For reasons too complex to share here, the young man’s father was not capable of raising the boy and his older brother so they were taken in by their uncle, the mother’s brother, and his wife and 3 kids.

A little extra room in that house, but not really enough. Ditto money. What they did have enough of it turns out was room in their hearts for two boys suddenly without a family. Room it turns out to treat the nephews as if they were their own children. They sent all 5 children to college, and all 5 have graduate degrees if memory serves. All supported by a couple who found that they had enough room in their hearts to simply make enough room everywhere else.

Fast forward 30 years or so from that fateful day in the hospital. The brothers are sitting with the only parents they have (the father died long ago), celebrating the first day of school for a son. The aunt and uncle who took them in said they had but one regret, that they had not formally adopted the boys when they took them in. The boys, now men, had clearly learned the lesson of the untapped capacity in one’s heart. At age 40 and 45 and with the blessings of their cousins, they arranged to be adopted by the uncle and aunt who found room everywhere else when it was clear they already had room in their hearts. A next generation now officially has grandparents.

Each and every day we learn that our physical boundaries are artificial, self-made restrictions on our capacity. Indeed, the more we expand our physical capacities the more unbounded they seem to become. The lesson in my friend’s story, I’m sure, is that we have a similarly broad and probably untapped capacity in our hearts for love. Like that aunt and uncle, each of us has more room in our hearts than we imagine, just waiting like our broad fitness capacity, for that time when its needed.

With that much untapped capacity in our hearts I’m sure that somehow we, too, would find enough room for everything else.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Who. Why is the word “who” for some reason different from, like, every other vowel in the English language. I mean, aside from stupid spelling stuff (stough?) routinely ridiculed by writers of all ilks (see: “enuf”), this one just strikes me as some kind of combination of silly and wrong.

“Who’s” means “who is”, as in “who’s going to mass tonight?” Totally get that. Not unusual in the least. It’s the possessive that runs afoul of literally every other vowel I can think of at the moment (no bonus points for finding another example unless it’s in your own 1000 work weekly missive). “Whose”. Why? Why do we need another way to assign ownership when [‘s] works perfectly well for every other noun?

Who’s going to tell me whose dumb idea this was?

2. Semiquincentennial. The unabashedly awkward word for 250th anniversary. Yesterday was the 250 Anniversary of “the shot heard round the world”. 250 years ago the American Revolutionary War tipped off with the Battles of Concord and Lexington (Massachusetts). If my math is correct that means Paul Revere careened across the (then) verdant fields and deserted roads of Greater Boston crying out “the British are coming”, his historic ride ending with two lanterns alight in the belfry of the Old North Church.

The British would come by sea.

T’was a time when every person educated in America learned the story of Paul Revere’s ride in grade school. We all learned that he earned his living as a silversmith; everyone could tell you that it was “one if by land, two if by sea.” The concept of American exceptionalism was introduced in grade school, Manifest Destiny in Jr. High, and the American Dream that came of these was the collective pursuit of our lifetimes. Generation followed generation. Even the schism that was our Civil War became taught as a single narrative, one that became more and more singular across the nation as we moved through two World Wars.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s that folks began to question the narrative. Largely, it seems, in response to the Viet Nam War and the “question everything” mantra in vogue, especially in our universities. Veils were parted and we were privy to an unvarnished view of contemporary leaders and historical figures alike. Our history, and with it the mores and behavior of our historically important figures were reexamined. Initially this reexamination was simply in the revealing of more facts about these (mostly) men, facts largely un-recalled in the shared history books or our youth.

Eventually, though, through the application of present day customs and mores to actions taken by individuals hundreds of years ago in worlds that bare only glancing resemblance to our modern societies, we have begun to forget just how singularly unique this American Revolution was at the time, and quite frankly for more than 150 years thereafter: we were the first people to shrug the yoke of imperialism in revolt, and to resist re-cloaking ourselves in anything that resembled it for 250 years. Unlike England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), or Latin America (too many to mention), America did NOT slide back into dictatorship.

And yet, over the last 75 or so years we seem to have forgotten that ours is a nation that has continued to grow closer and closer to achieving Jefferson’s famously declared rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather, we have seem to have chosen to emphasize failures of our forebearers to live up to both the written principles on which our country was founded, and our more modern interpretation of those principles. Ours is progress that has hardly traveled a straight line toward success. Time and again from the founding of our country until today we learn of the hypocrisies of our leaders. Washington, Jefferson, and even Franklin were slave owners. Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Clinton and Trump, all serial philanderers. Our quest for racial equality has hardly been a straight line race from the Confederate South to the present.

Here is Allen C. Guelzo in yesterdays WSJ: “But the failure to live up to principles is a common human failure. It may be precisely the loftiness of the Revolution’s principles that gives us high expectations of ourselves and then triggers a woe-is-us sense of disgusted resignation when we fall short.”

But principled progress we have had, and principled progress we seem to be destined to have. We need not ignore historical hypocrisy or mistakes. Indeed, we most assuredly should not forget or ignore either. We should rather acknowledge the inexorable history of success, however crooked the timeline has been, and use this as enduring fuel to drive us over the next 250 years. It is the principles of our nation’s founding, the principles that drove Paul Revere on his ride, the principles that gave fire to those first patriots in Lexington and Concord that should drive us through the haze of invective and rhetoric of our day.

We should be listening to the echo of that fateful shot 250 years ago, and directing our gaze to the trigger of its source.

3. Easter. A friend posted a very funny video of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show beseeching his fellow Jews to “step it up” in the battle between Easter and Passover for the hearts and minds of children. Look for it. It’s just full of funny lines. For example, Stewart laments that Christians can count on luminaries such as (former) NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to spread the word, while there has yet to be a superstar Jewish NFL quarterback. As an aside, as a Catholic, I would reply that Mr. Stewart’s people are killing it in the comedy realm vs. Christians, but you get the idea. He lays down his trump card right at the beginning: chocolate vs. matzo. Coulda dropped the mic right there.

There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious days of course. The death and subsequent ascension of Christ is the single most significant aspect of the Christian faith: humans are saved and a path to Heaven is opened through the miracle of Christ rising from the dead. Passover is also a story of salvation, albeit a less ephemeral, more concrete one: God, through Moses, leads his people out of slavery through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Both stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. Both religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow either religion are asked to believe that the stories are factual.

Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses the AP news accounts of their day? Or are they allegorical, fables meant to teach the underlying principle of a kind and gracious God who awaits us at the end or our days? Here, I would say, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are poor, powerful, or somewhere in between, because it is the viewpoint that matters, not necessarily the facts. You either believe in something that came before and will be there after, or you don’t. The facts, in this case, don’t really seem to matter.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

On this day when Christians join in worship to celebrate an empty tomb while Jews gather around a table with an empty chair in the hope that Israel will join them, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in both Easter and Passover, a hope that there IS a God, and that there IS something to come. Faith, though, is not limited to the Christian or Jewish religions, nor is it limited to these highest of holy days. The religious have faith 24/7/365, right? So, too, do those of faith who are not necessarily religious in the Judeo-Christian sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, Islam, or the other great religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like. In all there is a deeply felt faith that there is more, in the end, than 3 squares and a place to lay your head.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. I’ll see you next week…

1. Blogviate. To bloviate via a blog.

Today is the 16th anniversary of this silly blog. I’ll circulate the original post this week. Launched on this day in 2009 for the sole purpose of emptying out my “internal hard drive” so that I could refill it with more drivel. It’s been a great ride!

Thanks for coming along.

2. Adumbrate. To report or outline. Not at all what I was expecting.

Seems to me the “dumb” in the middle should have more influence. You know, like the “reporting” you’ve found here.

3. Healthspan V. Connection is the last piece of the Healthspan puzzle. Originally noted by the researchers of the Harvard Happiness study that followed the Class of ’55 through their post-collegiate lives, close personal connections are strong predictors of health and happiness as we grow older. This remarkable study was later combined with an equally wonderful cohort of young men from the public high school in nearby Revere, and subsequently has been expanded to include their spouses, children, grandchildren, and so on.

Through all of these generations the results have been consistent: the presence and maintenance of close personal relationships is strongly associated with an increase in happiness, and a delay in the onset of the effects of chronic disease and aging. The conclusion of the original Harvard study was very specific: happiness and its effects were present if one of the men had 3 or more close personal friendships. Interestingly their wives did not count toward the 3 (Note: I could find no mention of same sex partners). As the study expanded and examined the health and happiness of all family members it became clear that ANY close personal relationships counted, the more the better.

It should be noted that the most recent reportage in the book “The Good Life” reviews data that includes only the first few years of our new age of “remote connection” through the various tools of the internet. The influence of these relationships is therefore predicated on proximity: they took place “in real life” as we now say. The relationships that show a beneficial effect on Healthspan take place side-by-side and face-to-face. Perhaps the addition of our myriad new modes of communication enhance this proximity effect. It remains to be seen if our very new world with all of its “together while apart” connections will have a similar effect.

For now the final key that unlocks our Healthspan potential is creating and nurturing close personal relationships with family and friends. That this should be so seems obvious. Nonetheless, it is fascinating and more than a bit comforting to see it objectively confirmed over 4 generations.

4. Next. Consistent with this, Beth and I made a quick trip to Cincinnati last weekend to see our friends Bill and Nancy. Outside of our siblings and their spouses they are the couple with whom we have had the longest continuous friendship. We met in grad school, and for almost 30 years lived less than an hour apart as we raised our families and marched through our careers. Those families shared something like 28 or 29 consecutive Christmas night dinners. Married a month apart, the four of us have celebrated most of our anniversaries together; this year we will travel to Italy for our 40th.

So much of what we’ve experienced together has occurred pretty much on schedule. “What comes next?” was almost as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Kids were born, went to school, and fledged. Mostly on schedule. Both couples became empty nesters at about the same time. Bill and I went through the phases of our surgical careers, again, mostly on schedule. Each of us made one very major change in our practices here in Cleveland, and we expected that our glide paths to retirement would also be fairly similar. Bill opted to step off the practice carousel in favor of a medical director job with one of the big industry players in early 2020, but even so, it appears that we are still running side-by-side as we come to the finish line.

And so it was that we four found ourselves returning again and again to the question of what comes next. None of our parents really asked themselves that when they still had some control over the answer. Only Bill’s Mom is left of our 8 parents and sadly she was not any more receptive to the entreaties made by Beth and Nancy to the other parents that they proactively decide what the last third of their lives might look like. “Big Red” has channeled Beth’s parents and my Mom, digging in her heals and insisting that she is completely capable of handling life on her own in the family home. It was a hard landing for all of our folks, and terribly difficult for the rest of us to watch.

What about us, then? We have watched our parents fail to plan for what inevitably comes next. Retirement, for example, just happened. Even my father-in-law, so fixated on retiring at 55, spent very little time thinking about what that would mean and what comes next after retirement. More problematically, he also failed to effectively communicate whatever he may have been thinking with my mother-in-law. She never really made clear her desires or plans, leaving them in separate row boats, adrift on the same ocean, miles apart.

I don’t think this is really the case with either Beth and me or Bill and Nancy. From our discussions with one another last weekend it is clear that both couples are intensely engaged in the back and forth necessary to be in the same row boat headed toward the same beach. After a couple of days chatting and a week or so to digest the conversations, it appears that we have all learned the lesson so painfully taught by our parents’ endgames. The decisions we must make are all fairly obvious; make the decisions you must make when you still have the ability to make them for yourself.

What’s next for us is retirement. When and then where. In all likelihood “when’ will be the kicker; where can be changed at almost any point. Both Bill and I have toiled in worlds where our work has brought us great measures of respect. Indeed, if anything our results have continued to improve over time, and the respect accorded us therefore not simply due to our longevity. We have remained relevant, contributing to the continued development of our respective fields, even at this later stage of our careers. Interestingly this actually makes it harder to retire. Meaningful relevance and the respect it brings is heady stuff, no matter what kind of work you do. How else to explain the Jamie Dimon’s of the world, let alone the Buffet’s and the octogenarians shuffling in the halls of government?

When to retire seems to be the first of a series of “whens” awaiting, and perhaps the easiest. Neither one of us wants to stay beyond the point when we are no longer relevant or, Heaven forbid, discover that we have stayed too long. After that comes the hard parts. When do we leave our homes? When do we accept help in the basic blocking and tackling of daily life? When do we relinquish our agency? Having seen the end of our parents’ journeys will we have the perspicacity to decide when it’s “when”? Will we have the courage?

In the end “next” always arrives, we just don’t know when.

I’ll see you next week…

It’s Masters weekend in the golf world. Today, for one day of the year, I will allow myself to want.

You see, golf, like baseball and other games, is woven into the fabric of certain families. Taught either game by our fathers, we are filled with memories of times spent in and around our game. Mileposts are tagged with golf-related markers for the men in my family. Some are from outings of our own, and some from trips to watch others play. Most simply revolve around the simple act of watching a tournament together on TV. Fortunate are those who have something like this.

My Dad was very generous with his sons when it came to golf (one sister took up the game after she grew up and got married). Generous with access (club, equipment) and generous with his time. The golf course was the one place where we knew he’d be OK with us. Oh sure, our shenanigans and occasional tantrums provoked every bit of his Dickensonian parenting style, but still, the golf course was where we eventually bonded as 3 adult men. Joined by my sister’s husband we made up a very special foursome, indeed. We 3 younger men repaid my Dad for his generosity by taking him on epic golfing boondoggles, and by sharing that space in front of the TV as often as we could.

What does this have to do with ‘want’, you wonder. Alas, no one needs to play golf, save perhaps for a few hundred pros of course. Over the years our family foursome was buffeted by the economic winds of life, just like all other families, but we were able to sail through and continue our odyssey. We all wanted to play, and our respective families wanted it for us, too. In time, at least for two of us, our bodies failed and what it would take to play impinged on true family needs. Worse, my Dad’s mind has failed him as well, and the memories that tie this story together are as lost to him as the proverbial duck hook into the woods.

There, in a nutshell, lies the ‘want’. I’ve long since lost the desire to play golf, and I can honestly say that I do not miss the game itself. I’ve played thousands of rounds; I’ve had a good run. The game of golf owes me nothing. No, it’s not the act of playing that I miss, the physical aspect of the challenge that I allow myself to want on this one day. What I want, of course, is one more round with my Dad, my brother Randy, and my brother-in-law Steve.

On this one day I allow myself to want the surgery that would return me to the game regardless of all the needs that would suffer because of it. Just for one day. I pretend. I imagine the joy on Steve’s face as he shoots even par on the the back nine of the hardest course we ever played together, winning the family grudge match. I can see the evil grin on Randy’s face as he gets deeper and deeper under my skin and beats me for the 1000th consecutive time, his game as flawless as ever. I hear my Dad cackle as he drops yet another long birdie putt on top of one I’d just sunk, sure that I’d beaten him this time, cringing at the thought of him telling and retelling the story for years to come.

In the end that would be enough, I think. When I call my Dad late today and we “watch” the back nine of the Masters together it would be enough to know that he remembers. We’ll talk about our adventures with Randy and Steve, and we’ll pretend that he remembers those times when we marked our journey by the exploits of the golfers on TV. Jack’s putt on 15. Tiger’s improbable chip in on 16. Ben sobbing on the 18th. Pretend that he remembers laughing at me after dropping that putt on top of mine, that one fine day when all we wanted was to play golf together.

Today…just today…club in hand, phone to ear…I will want.

A note from 2025: This year is like every year since I first wrote the above. Have I returned to the game? Meh. Hardly. I walk the course with club in hand and play at playing golf, solely for the pleasure of the company of men who feel about golf the way my Dad, Randy, and Steve did and do. I will want this weekend as I have wanted since my Dad fell ill. Of that I am sure. Perhaps my sister Kerstin’s husband Jimmy will join the family foursome, and we will make new memories together. I do miss the company of golf.

I do want to experience that again.