Optimism & Resilience

Some of you may have heard me talk about the advice I was given: live every day as if it’s your last. I understand the spirit of it, but in practice, it filled me with a kind of frantic pressure—an insistence that every moment be meaningful, every family dinner special. It began to feel like a kind of existential claustrophobia—no room for the... See more

After my accident, one lesson arrived with unusual force. When circumstances are genuinely bad, survival does not come from pretending everything is fine. It comes from noticing what still works and building from there — the people who love you, the routines that remain, the small evidence that movement is still possible. I did not know the phrase... See more

“I guarantee you that at some point everything is going to go south on you. You're going to say this is it, this is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin” (Mark Watney, The Martian