Yum. There was a time in my life when a cup of coffee was just something I drank to get the day started. Or to keep it going. When I was in the Marine Corps, I remember sitting in a small van jammed with radio equipment, listening to static, drinking cup after cup to make it through the night. Or later, when my kids were newborns and sleep was constantly disrupted by cries for a bottle or a clean diaper. The only way to get through the endless series of conference calls the n

And Pleasure Doesn't Have to Feel Pleasurable At least a few days a week, I like to sit quietly with a cup of coffee and write in my journal. Sometimes a topic comes quickly and naturally. Other times, I ask an AI for a prompt. Monday morning was one of those days. Unlike most of the prompts it offers, this one seemed rather lighthearted. Easy. Or at least that's how it started. "What do I genuinely enjoy that doesn’t need to mean anything?" My answers came easily and quickly

The journal prompt was, "What in my life am I still doing because it once mattered to me, rather than because it matters to me now?" It was an interesting question that had me stumped at first. So, as I often do with such prompts, I rambled along, waiting for the seed of an answer to appear. The first word that came to mind was structure. I wrote about how I like structure. I like things organized. I like knowing where things are and, preferably, where they're going. It's

What if the voice in your head isn't telling you the truth? A drive through Montana, a neuroscience podcast, and years of living with vision loss led me to a simple but life-changing realization: we are not just characters in the stories our minds create. We also have the power to become their author.

How music, language, and the stories we tell ourselves shape meaning, purpose, and the way we experience retirement and everyday life.

A forgotten psychological assessment from 2015 forced me to confront a question I thought I had already answered: Who am I? What began as a reflection on leadership and self-confidence became a deeper exploration of identity, change, backpacking in the Rocky Mountains, and why the better question may be, "Who am I becoming?"

I first met my retinal specialist, Dr. Geeta Lalwani, on August 5, 2013. It was a day I thought would define the rest of my life. In the thirteen years since, my annual eye exams have come to feel more like visits with an old friend. They usually follow a familiar script. "Nice to see you, Chris." A warm smile. A careful examination. A few quiet minutes as she studies the scans her technician has taken of my eyes. Then the familiar conversation about another promising treatme

I was maybe fourteen when my cousin Tom and a friend rode their motorcycles from their home in New Jersey to Florida. They spent the night with us at our house in Yorktown, Virginia. I can still picture the bikes. Choppers. Front wheels stretched way out on long forks. Ape hanger handlebars. They were the coolest motorcycles I had ever seen in real life. And my cousin was riding one of them on what felt like an endless road trip. Decades later, after owning several motorcycle

On memory and the narratives that shape our lives For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a novel with the working title Begin Again. But recently, I’ve started questioning what I call it. In What If the Truth Was Never the Point?, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be changing as I moved deeper into the second draft. Or perhaps more accurately, my understanding of it was changing. That’s the strange thing about stories. We tend to think we are shaping them,

A handwritten note from his young daughter slips out of an old passport after years of business travel, leading one father to reflect on emotional inheritance, fathers and sons, and the language of love men are often never taught to speak.

On writing, validation, and the quiet pull to be seen A few days into being on Substack, I realized something that should have been obvious. I’ve spent far too much time thinking about where to publish, and not enough time asking what I actually want from my writing. My website sits in a quiet corner of the internet. It never drew much attention. But the people who did find it felt like my people. Mostly people I knew, or people adjacent to them. Substack feels diffe

On validation and the quiet pull to be seen. I spent much of the last couple days setting up a Substack. That may not sound like much, but for a visually impaired guy like me, it was far from trivial. I have a pretty technical background, but these days even simple technology tasks can test my skills, not to mention my patience. Most interfaces are designed for how things look, not how they’re navigated. That makes sense. The vast majority of people don’t have vision issu

A reflection on the choices we make, the ones we avoid, and why life’s defining moments aren’t doors, but turnstiles.

How Meaning, Memory, and Belief Shape Our Lives The Chasms That Divide Us I am well into the second draft of my novel, and I have found something surprising happening. Something I did not expect. I spent three or four months planning the story before I ever wrote the first word. I developed the characters, built the plot, and laid out the structure. It was clear in my mind where the story was going before I typed the first word. Now, eighteen months into the project, the

Confronting the fragility of mind, body, and certainty. It was dinner time when Marilyn pulled our RV up in front of our home in Colorado. The sun was already slipping behind the foothills, and after eleven and a half hours on the road from Sweetwater, Texas, the familiar outline of our house felt almost unreal. It marked the end of a two-and-a-half-month, forty-five-hundred-mile adventure that had carried us from winter in Colorado to the warmth of Florida and back again.

Finding Home in What Persists. “Where are you from?” It’s a simple question, one most of us have heard a hundred times. For me, it’s one of the hardest to answer. There is no concrete answer, at least not in geographic terms. By the time I reached second grade, I had already lived in three states and one foreign country. That’s the life of a Navy family. Later, the Marine Corps and a career in high tech kept the motion going. By the time I was fifty, I had lived in mo

I love Colorado. I have since the first time I visited more than thirty years ago. I remember thinking, I’m going to come back here someday , and I did. After sixteen winters—five after I stopped skiing—it felt like time to try something different. Marilyn, who had spent even more winters there than I had, agreed. So we loaded up the RV and headed to Florida. Twenty-five hours of driving and four days later, we arrived in St. Augustine. I began this essay sitting inside t

An essay on neuroscience, perception, and memory, examining how the brain simulates experience, why certainty is fragile, and what that means for how we understand ourselves and others.

A reflective essay on identity, certainty, and change—why the self may be less solid than we think, even when we polish the mirror carefully.

A reflection on how dance lessons revealed the different ways my wife and I learn, and how shared effort brought us closer than the steps themselves.