Challenges – what a fool believes . . . .

Measured

I am, if nothing else, measured.

I think linearly. Deliberately. Some might even say ploddingly. When I gather data to make decisions I plug my emotions, shut them below deck even as they heave against it; they unbalance me from time to time, but I don’t let them get to full throat. I consider as many perspectives as I can, though that seems innate rather than something for which I can take credit. And I try to be generous towards other people in my assumptions about them.

In my head I know there’s a place in the world for me, because there’s a place in the world for everyone. Yet in my heart I have doubts.

The world of arts and letters is stuffed with talent. I haven’t chosen to write as much as I feel compelled to do it. But of what interest are my thoughts, my ideas, my observations compared with both the wide and the deep perspectives shared by other authors and artists, particularly those who come from places underrepresented in our collective narrative? My prose doesn’t soar or dazzle, and my themes are simple, universal. My advantages are an unflinching gaze and pleasingly straightforward expression. That feels meager.

The world of analysts is also full, and though I have the talent and the nerve for it I don’t have the fire. Analyzing for profit is a competitive market, and I lack the motivation to win. I’m curious and creative and unafraid of ideas, but I might be collaborative to a fault. I have no agenda other than understanding. It is how I’m wired.

So I have a compulsion to create where I won’t necessarily succeed, and where I can more likely excel I have little interest. The conundrum of my life, though one I don’t own exclusively. I know there are others with similar situations, people who want to do what they aren’t best-suited for doing.

So how do I measure my value in such a place?

I haven’t a clue.

I am testing that value. I’ve committed to a year of writing to see if my voice does matter, if there are enough people interested in what I have to share to make the dedicated effort worthwhile. I will always write – compulsion, remember? – but it might be more of a hobby than a vocation. It’s a beautiful dream for my writing to support me, and once in a while dreams do come true.

But if this dream remains just that, if there isn’t space for me in the world of letters, then I’ll need to make peace with that and try to return to the world of analysis. I don’t really know how that will work, however.

I’m older and definitely wiser, but I also stepped out of that world for quite a while. My business performance since I retired from corporate jobs is abysmal, though the covid pandemic is wholly responsible for that failure. And while I’ll probably be more at peace with a role back in the business world I will likely still lack the passion that a full commitment requires. Commitment is kind of important to those who would engage my services and pay me for them.

Perhaps I’m destined to close out my working days doing a collection of part-time jobs. Credit counseling. Tutoring. Perhaps even making coffee or stocking shelves. In other words, doing things I’m neither suited for nor driven to do.

And wouldn’t that be fitting for someone who couldn’t find his place because his head and his heart just weren’t aligned?

Agency

I believe in Agency.

Letting every person make as many decisions about their life as possible.

I draw the line at full Agency when a choice or decision hurts another person, but until then I want us all to have discretion about what we do with our time and our energies. Let us each create the life we want.

Agency is just a fancier word for choice. I use it a lot, maybe to sound smarter than I am, but it really is the foundational value on which everything else I believe is hung. It’s like freedom, but less static. Freedom to me is lack of controls, whereas Agency implies action. Freedom allows choice but doesn’t demand it. Agency requires action, the act of choosing.

I talk to my children about intention too. Choosing with intention. To me, that’s even more what what Agency is about: choosing consciously and with intent for an outcome. You may not get what you hope, but you increase your chances, and that ups the odds of living a satisfying life.

I’ve not always used my Agency. In fact, I’ve been pretty negligent until recently about taking action to achieve a specific goal. Most of that is because I haven’t set intentions, but it’s also true that I haven’t had the courage to try for the ones I did set. I trusted the universe to take care of me, and that is a sure path to an underwhelming life. The universe is ambivalent to each of us; it’s not malevolent, it doesn’t want to screw us to the floor, but it’s not going to care if we’re unhappy with our lots either. It will march on in step with that taskmaster Time, blissfully ignorant of our frustrations.

No, it’s up to each of us to choose the life we want to live and then work to create it. Not one of us will get everything on which we set our sights – the universe seems petulant that way – but those who work most diligently and with clear eyes on their own prize will reap more of it than those of us who coast. 80-10-10 after all (80% of the time we get what we earn, 10% we get hosed, and 10% we get away with something).

We win at life when we don’t begrudge what we sacrifice for our choices, because instead what we gain with those very same choices fulfills us. We win when we make the benefit worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of foregoing other choices in favor of those that bring us the biggest returns.

My experiment in Agency is still in its nascent stages, and I am overwhelmed with doubts from time to time. But I have also experienced the exhilaration and excitement when I have a small success on the road to my larger intentions. Because I know that I made that little success happen.

I look forward to the rush I’ll get when I achieve one of my big goals.

Grace

Like many other things, grace is much harder in real life than in the abstract. I was reminded again during my recent flight from San Francisco to Denver.

I noticed the large young man in the gate area waiting to board. He was tall, wide, and he wore a hockey jersey, but what really distinguished him was his flouting of social norms. He listened to hip-hop music on his phone without earphones – he wasn’t blaring it, but I could still hear it clearly. He used the phone to speak to his mother, answering her questions in the annoyed, impatient tone that all young people use with their parents. He told her in great detail about his trip to the airport and his struggles getting through TSA. His voice was loud, penetrating, impossible to tune out.

As I lined up to board the flight he passed completely from my attention. I settled into my window seat near the back of the plane, then closed my eyes and enjoyed the respite between my rush to the airport and the flight to come. I would have forgotten him had that insistent voice not trashed my calm as he stood in the aisle, asking someone which seat was his, window or aisle.

It was the window seat. And it was directly behind mine.

My seat felt like a buoy on the ocean as he pushed, pulled, and jostled while squeezing himself into his seat. Oblivious to the people around him, he began talking loudly to the unfortunate man sitting next to him, detailing his trip to the airport and all the things he had to manage in preparation for the flight. Bad enough the middle seat, but what is worth this extra penance?

Our man spoke about his preference for window seats. He asked his seatmate to hold his coffee while he rummaged through his backpack for food. And when the seatmate, realizing his very bad luck, feigned sleep, our oblivious traveler got on his phone and called a friend.

The conversation – or at least the half of it that I overheard (truthfully, it was more like 80 percent, because our guy dominated it) – could not have been more banal. It covered his TSA experience again, his travel plans for the day including flight times and layovers down to the minute, his recipe for carnitas, and his delight in getting frozen shrimp for less than $8 per pound thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free promotion at the grocery store. The conversation, all at volume, lasted at least 20 minutes. All the while he fidgeted, bouncing me around in my seat. In short, I could not ignore him, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to do anything but stew in my own aggravation.

When he finally ended his phone call, he still could not sit still. So I continued to fume, piqued that my calm had been disrupted, that the bubble I cast around myself when I venture into the world had been pierced.

And then I heard it. A soft grunt. Almost a hum. Then another. And another. Every twenty seconds or so. Like clockwork.

The guy I consigned to inconsiderate jerkhood has a compulsion. I don’t know the condition – autism, Tourette Syndrome, some other neurological issue – but I realized that he couldn’t control the internal energy he generated. He was disrupting me, not out of malice, not out of apathy, but out of need. It’s just how he’s wired.

Which reminded me that whenever we enter the public sphere we will encounter people different from us. People with different behaviors, different backgrounds, different perspectives. Usually those differences are minute, hardly noticeable, but sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes, like on my flight, they are large and prominent. They can’t be ignored. And that’s when we feel uncomfortable.

We won’t always be comfortable in the public sphere. But, aside from personal safety, we don’t have a right to demand that others conform to our expectations when we’re sharing public spaces. We all have a right to be ourselves, and while we owe each other safety we don’t owe each other comfort.

Sometimes we must endure discomfort, so that we can all live in freedom. Freedom to share what’s communally ours, even if we’re not wired to notice other people’s cues. And so while my incredibly disruptive travel companion banged my seat all the way to Denver, I tried to move past my annoyance and find grace.

I wish I’d been able to do it without the reminder, but perhaps I’ve become complacent. I am, after all, an older, affluent white dude, which puts me atop most social orders. I am the norm, or at least the model around which we’ve organized our social norms. So forgive my short-sightedness when I’m inconvenienced.

I don’t begrudge the test. I just wish I had passed without the help.

New Year, New Home

2023 will be one of significant change for me (I hope).

Change in how I spend the bulk of my working day. How I earn a living. Where I earn that living. With whom I share my time. Yet as we turn the page into the new year my thoughts are with my parents, who will make just one significant change (I hope).

They are leaving their 4-bedroom home with its huge patio and multi-terraced garden in favor of a 2-bedroom apartment in a senior independent-living complex. I’ve been staying with my parents while waiting for my post-divorce life to begin, and though I was initially opposed to their move – they love their house, and my father is an enthusiastic gardener – I’ve come to see the wisdom of the move. They just don’t have the stamina they once did. My father is 87, my mother 82, and keeping up with the house and garden takes more energy than they want to give them. The reason for the move makes eminent sense. And I get it.

So they are not leaving their house kicking and screaming.

And yet it’s still not without stress.

Odds are that this new apartment will be the last place they live together. If – really, when – their health fails, it’s unlikely it will afflict them at the same time and in the same way, so even if they are in the same facility they may not be in the exact same place. And while we don’t talk about it, I think it’s clearly on their minds. How could it not be?

Mortality is the tie that binds us all. We all come face-to-face with it eventually, with varying degrees of grace. And this move for my parents is the most tangible evidence to date that they are approaching that point of their lives when their deaths are real possibilities. Not likely, but definitely possible, and more possible than it’s been before.

My father faced prostate cancer a few years ago and kidney cancer last year. He had moments of fear during each scare, but the information he got from his doctors in both cases was encouraging, and there were other options for treatment if the procedures didn’t succeed. We are eternally grateful that they did succeed. He was also in a small-plane crash in Tanzania 28 years ago, but that happened so fast he didn’t have time to reflect on his risk.

My mother has age-related macular degeneration, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Those illnesses erode her quality of life and hint of struggles to come, but none of them are currently life-threatening.

But moving into a smaller apartment with no yard to maintain is a tangible admission from them both that the scope of their remaining time is narrowing. My friend Jim’s parents lived in a retirement community that talked about the go-go years (where people were able to do anything they wanted), the slow-go years (where they could still do some of the things they wanted to do), and the no-go years (where they were limited to things in their residence). My parents are still enjoying their go-go years, but the end of that freedom is in sight, and the implications for what’s ahead are sobering to them.

And they are feeling it.

They’ll still make the move, but settling into a new community will include living with a new awareness, that, after a lifetime of moving about in the world, they might finally be in the last home they will see.

Loss and My Friend John

I saw my good friend John yesterday.

John is a man who delights in his family. He revels in their company. His wife and daughter are always – and I do mean always – in the forefront of his mind. He feels very close to his sister, and he relished his relationships with his parents until they recently passed away.

Every weekend, every vacation, every spare moment he has available he wants to spend in the company of his family. He chooses them first. Every single time. And his devotion isn’t forced. It comes from a heart filled with love and gratitude for having people to care about.

John has hobbies – he enjoys sports, both playing and watching – but even those interests he shares as much as possible with his loved ones. I can think of no one who gets more fulfillment, more satisfaction from spending time with his family. His unadulterated joy in their presence just radiates from him in big, happy waves.

Which is why the death of his son earlier this year is simply the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen.

John’s son was 19, in his freshman year of college, and he was killed by a quick and sadly painful illness.

His death is devastating to everyone who knew him. But depriving his father of his presence, the father who pulled limitless joy from his son, feels so despicably merciless and mean. And John is shattered. His infectious energy is now subdued. He looks so very sad.

I have hope for John though.

Perhaps it is merely wishful thinking, but I can’t think so. Relegating my good friend to this level of suffering indefinitely is inconceivable for me. How could anyone withstand it? I don’t know how I could cope if one of my daughters died now, and I don’t know how John has been able to function at all these past few months. I fervently wish I could heal him somehow, make him whole again, but he will never be whole again while he walks this earth, and I can’t offer anything that will help him through this trial.

Still, John has two advantages that not everyone in his situation can claim.

First, as he has given his complete devotion to his family, they have returned it to him in full. His wife and his daughter and his sister and the rest of his family loves John like he loves them. The enormous hole left when his son died won’t ever be filled, but the relationships he shares with his other loved ones will continue to grow and deepen as the days and weeks and months and years pass by. They won’t erase his loss, but their love will fill him nonetheless.

Second, he is a faithful man. He believes – strongly – that God exists, that He is benevolent, and that He cares for his flock. I don’t claim to understand faith (I don’t have that tool in my toolbox) but I can see that John, despite his overwhelming grief, believes that the death of his son serves a purpose, inscrutable as it may be. John has found occasional peace and some solace in his prayers and meditations, and as skeptical as I usually am about spiritual things, I believe him in this: his son may be physically absent from his life, but John experiences him in any number of ways that prove to me that his son is very much present. I am far beyond my depth in all things spiritual, but given my own admittedly limited experiences I believe that there are dimensions we don’t understand that nevertheless touch us. And again, maybe I’m naive or simply willing something to be that isn’t, but that’s not how this feels to me.

I grieve with my friend John, even as I can’t fathom the depths of his loss. I also acclaim his humanity, his faith, his stalwartness to move forward in the face of such complete devastation. And I pray – in my own way – that he finds comfort and meaning and relief in his family, including his late son, so he can heal from this wrecking blow. And that no other parent ever has to face something so calamitous.

Benevolence and Local Politics

I have two friends who have won seats on our city council in the last two elections. Watching their campaigns from up close (I helped with social media for both), it’s clear to me that a benevolent public servant is essential, especially in local government.

Very few people pay attention to local political offices, and so election winners are determined more by name recognition than by political platform or priorities. An appalling (to me) number of people don’t pay attention to political offices in general – hence our embarrassingly low voter turnout numbers for all elections – but this myopia is especially pronounced at the local level.

I’m parroting my betters when I say that most people are more affected by decisions made by their city councils or boards of supervisors than they are by decisions made by the US Congress or President, yet the interest in the races for those offices are inversely correlated. The conditions of our city streets, the interactions we have with our city police officers, the demands of the city’s planning department all have more immediate impact on me than decisions about funding the military, managing relations with the European Union and ASEAN, or establishing rules about interstate trucking and immigration.

I’m not saying public healthcare policy isn’t vital or that passport services aren’t necessary or that the National Guard is irrelevant, but I am saying that my daily walk with the dog through my neighborhood park affects me far more frequently than what the federal government decides about broader issues. Both elections are important, but the local election directly affects me to a greater degree, and so it should have a proportional share of my attention and energy. Yet very few people can name any members of their local government (and, sadly, only a few more can name their federal representatives). I have to admit that absent friends of mine serving on the city council I might very well not be one of them.

And so benevolence becomes imperative, especially at the local level. We need public servants who will put their self-interest aside and do the best for their communities, because they won’t be held accountable at the ballot box if they don’t. And the meltdown of professional journalism that might act as a check on corrupt local officials doesn’t help our cause either.

So if you’re voting in local elections, please get informed about the candidates. Not about their policies, although that matters, but about their character. And if you have to choose between character and policies, choose character.

I am reminded often of the rueful slogan some wags in Louisiana wrote in 1991 during the gubernatorial election between the incorrigibly corrupt Edwin Edwards and the stunningly racist David Duke (former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan): “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Sometimes it’s not about policy, it’s about decency and fairness and earnestness, about people who do the work of listening and thinking and empathizing and stepping outside their own circumstances. And sometimes the crook is the clearly better choice.

Character will be our communal salvation, and its lack will be our undoing.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

Divorce

My wife and I are divorcing.

We’ve been married more than 32 years. There’s no precipitating event. No outburst. No affair. No abuse. No addictions.

So why are we divorcing?

I don’t think we’ve ever been well-suited for each other. She wears her heart on her sleeve, sharing her thoughts and feelings broadly. I am very private. She tests ideas out loud, working through her thought processes verbally. When I speak, I’ve already decided. She seeks validation, and I am parsimonious with feedback. She lives spontaneously, changing her mind frequently. I make a plan and stick to it.

Early in our marriage we invested the time to resolve our conflicts and differences. And then, as time passed, we stopped trying. Cracks developed. And, unresolved, the cracks widened into fissures, the fissures into gaps, the gaps into chasms. Dawn made more of an effort than I did to fix what was happening in our marriage, but I didn’t have the emotional awareness to deal with our problems. Or the will to find it.

And so we find ourselves after 32 years not strangers but friends.

But not more than friends either. We are divorcing amicably, as you’d expect of friends, even friends who share children.

We have wounds. We don’t trust each other with our emotional well-being. I have hurt her by rejecting her (her version); she has hurt me by not following through on commitments (my version). Both have merit. Neither is the full story. As with most things between married couples.

In spite of our wounds, we don’t harbor ill will. Or at least not enough of it to complicate our dissolution. In fact, because of lower expectations with the transition from spouses to friends our relationship has been smoother. I hope it continues. I expect that we will remain friends, though it will likely be at a distance, at least until grandchildren pull us back into the same orbit. Among our differences are weather and social preferences: she likes active social scenes and cooler weather, while my ideals are warmer temperatures and few but meaningful interactions with others. Funnily enough, I’m likely to head to colder climes while she makes a go of it in the hot valleys of northern California.

Our daughters are taking the split well. We don’t blame each other, so they don’t either. And they do love us both after all. Damaging our relationships with our daughters is a worst-case scenario, and we are thankful that at least we made a very effective parenting team.

We’ve set intentions to treat each other both kindly and fairly, and we are walking that path. We have a long distance yet to go, and there are potential stressors related to our financial situations that could still roil the waters. We have engaged professionals to help us untangle our emotional wounds, handle the legal process, and counsel us on finances, so I hope that they can help us navigate those potential pitfalls (to mix a lot of metaphors!).

In our latest session, our divorce therapist asked us how we were feeling about our divorce and to what we were saying goodbye as we split. Dawn feels the loss keenly, though she fully believes it’s the preferrable outcome. I am not sad or grief-stricken but rather optimistic that we can have a more emotionally satisfying relationship once we say goodbye to the stress and tension that marked a lot of our married interactions.

Time will, of course, tell the tale. As it always does.

But I am hopeful.

Emotions

My favorite movie is Casablanca. My favorite song is I’ll Be Around by the Spinners.

Why?

They’re both sentimental. Maybe even maudlin. But I come from a long line of people who use sentimental props to release a little emotion without the threat of really losing control, so that fits.

They’re also about losing in love. Losing, but recognizing it, accepting it, and choosing to stand aside as gracefully as circumstances allow.

That has great appeal to me.

But I’m afraid it’s not for the nobility, the dignity of accepting your lot, even when it hurts. I mean, I tell myself that’s how I want to behave, and maybe there’s a little of that in me, but I’m afraid the deeper truth is simply that I’m an emotional coward.

I’m not very comfortable with emotions. I find them all difficult to confront.

I find confrontation very difficult for that matter, largely because of the emotional danger inherent in it. I don’t like being called out one bit – it embarrasses me, angers me, even frightens me – and I believe most everyone else feels the same. Confrontation is emotional.

Love isn’t confrontational. At least not usually. And yet it terrifies me as much as anger, grief, jealousy. Vulnerability makes me very, very uncomfortable. Is it because I don’t trust others? Probably. But I am quite convinced that sharing my emotions will just end up with me being completely flayed, which will break me, change me into someone different than who I am, and make it impossible to reclaim the person I am now. And I really like who I am now.

I’m not a physical coward. I can be physically uncomfortable without (much) complaint. I’ve finished many marathons and an Ironman triathlon. I’ve lived on a mountainside at 13,000 feet elevation in winter without indoor plumbing. I recently had a gall bladder attack that was excruciatingly painful. But while unpleasant, I didn’t shy away from any of it.

I’m not a spiritual coward, mainly because I’m just not spiritual. I don’t feel connection to the universe or to the earth or really to people I don’t know personally. I don’t think that makes me immoral or even amoral – I believe, strongly, in helping others. I think the point of life is joy, and that the greatest joy comes from experiencing life with others, in community, caring for and being cared for.

I’m not an intellectual coward. Ideas don’t scare me at all. I relish discussion, even about topics that are highly-charged for others, and I don’t feel anxious or intimidated about discussing any subject objectively.

Make it about me, however, and I will recoil. Irrational, certainly. It is a purely emotional reaction, but that fear of being permanently injured strikes me clear to my core. And so I protect myself by keeping my emotions locked up.

Except for the safe release sentimental moments afford.

Adulting

My daughters are going through the change.

Not menopause. (At least I hope not – I don’t have grandchildren yet!)

Their change is from learning to doing, from studying and practicing to working and producing. My oldest graduated college a couple years ago, my youngest will graduate in a few months. Their transition to full-time contributors to our society is going about as well as expected. Which is to say they are confused, anxious, and highly stressed.

Like most of us who have gone through it.

I don’t know that we’re failing our young people as they move from school into working, but I do think we’ve not been able to articulate a path that illuminates what will be different and how they will be able to successfully manage it. Which is weird, because the answer(s) seem simple.

First, find work that fills a deeply-felt purpose. If the goals of your work align with your values, then you can stand doing the boring stuff you’re going to have to do as the noob, because you know it moves the ball forward on things that are super important to you. And you don’t have to make a lot of money, because A) you don’t have a lot of expenses, and B) you’re not going to make a ton more money in another entry-level position this side of Wall Street. So embrace your ideals and find work that results in something that feels important to you.

Second, tend to your health. That’s health writ large. Get daily exercise. Pray. Journal your feelings. Meditate. Do puzzles. Eat regularly. And for God sakes, get enough sleep every night. When you keep your physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual selves in balance, you can manage the ebbs and flows of your life much more capably.

Third, tend to your relationships. Your partner. Your family. Your friends. Your colleagues. Text them. Go to lunch and dinner. Have coffee or beers. Invite them over for game night. Go for a hike or a run together. Call them on their birthdays. Share what’s happening with you, and take interest in what they’re experiencing. The more vibrant your network of people is, the more enriching your life will be, and the more support you can pull from it in your times of need. And there is always times of need. When you are present for them, they will be there when you need help too.

And that’s really it.

If we helped our young people – and ourselves – concentrate on these three ubertasks, then this whole adulting thing wouldn’t be so intimidating. There’s plenty of distractions out there to dull our focus – our phones, TVs and streaming services, booze and pot and other consciousness-altering temptations – and those are among the reasons we struggle with this transtion, but I think if we could present these simple steps in a way that resonates as truth, perhaps my daughters and their peers would heed them and save themselves a lot of agony. And just maybe this transition wouldn’t feel so daunting.