How Full Is Your Soul?

 

Photo by 愚木混株 Yumu on Unsplash

Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby was just audible over the constant buzz of dozens of conversations blending together in the Salt Lake City International Airport’s A terminal.

“Did you see that couch on Facebook Marketplace…
Your mother’s been in the bathroom a long…
Why does an airport coffee cost…
I didn’t realize those were so…
Why don’t they load the plane from the back to…”

As I walked through the terminal, each sentence started with the purpose of communicating something but trailed off as the end was drowned out by something new hitting my ears. The voices overlapped with chaotic, layered disresolve, like pieces of different lives intersecting, just for a moment, before continuing on their individual trajectories. Travelers, moving through the terminal in a steady, uninterrupted current, each one headed somewhere specific even if the reason behind the movement or the moment felt less defined than wherever they were going.

Some were likely on their way to see a family member in a city that still felt like home even after twenty years away. Maybe others were chasing something a bit more abstract like meeting with investors that might validate (with money) an idea that had lived too long in the crowded spaces of their mind. It might have been the obligation to attend the fifth trade show that year blurred into the previous four.

Maybe they were going home.

Everyone was going somewhere with their digital boarding pass in hand, seat assignment waiting, yet it was hard to ignore the sense that fewer people could say in words what they were looking for, really, once they arrived.

That idea settled in my mind as I walked the 1km length of the “A” terminal. It wasn’t a philosophical conversation with myself. I save those for my long runs. This came because of a decision I had to make that refuses to rest calmly in my mind.

We had to realign some things with our team, which meant ending a few agreements earlier than expected with people who were capable developers and individuals I genuinely liked and respected. They are the kind of people you hope to work with for a long time. Their situation, however, was reasonable: time split between two companies and competing priorities that made full commitment to our team unrealistic. What I needed, and what our business requires right now, was a level of focus they couldn’t give consistently, and so the decision, well outlined on my sticky notes, carried a heaviness that didn’t dissipate once it was made.

I’m relatively new at being “the big boss.” I believe I handled it in the right way, or at least as close to “right” as these situations allow, without burning any bridges or exchanging harsh words. We parted on terms that preserved the personal relationship, I think, even as the work arrangement ended. It still hurt more than I expected. For me, it felt like something with real potential was interrupted before it could reach its natural conclusion. After everything was done, the team lead sent me a message that prompted this missive: “I don’t feel in the right to be happy, you know.”

Her thought stopped me. It was simple, honest, and familiar. I’ve sat with the same feeling many times in the last year and a half. Most of the time in business, we over-edit our emotions before we express them. Thankfully, she didn’t

This is another theme that’s recurred in recent years: where something settles outside long before you find internal resolution. The decision is made and there’s a seemingly clear path forward, but part of you still lingers behind, still trying to catch up to what just happened. Relief might be there, but maybe it’s fragmented; broken up by periods of regret. Relief and regret can share the same space as we remember what we had to let go or leave behind. Unfortunately, those two things can remain at odds for an uncomfortable amount of time. It is the real sense that you’re carrying more than one truth at the same time, even when the world around you moves on, blissfully ignorant that nothing is resolved.

It’s a bit weird to me that the unresolved tension of that decision reminded me of a scene from Home, where Oh is trying to attract the attention of the Gorg ship. Gratuity “Tip” Tucci uses the mirror she’d given to her mom to signal the Gorg Commander and point out Oh’s location before he’s crushed. The ship’s massive “claw” descends on Oh’s location while the sound fades away. For a minute, time stops for Tip; an outcome already decided. Then there’s the simple, absurd-sounding backup beep as the claw lifts. Oh emerges completely unscathed (except for the possibility of a number three). Tip, tears streaming down her face, runs to him, pulls him into a crushing embrace, and then immediately hits him, her reaction shifting from absolute relief to frustration in a way that feels so real. (I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve cried along with that part more than once.)

That moment captures something I think we all recognize but most can’t really describe. It’s when two fully formed emotions occupy the same space. They neither cancel each other out nor wait their turn to be felt. Life’s like that sometimes.

There are other times, however, where emotions aren’t additive because one overpowering emotion consumes all available space, leaving no room for distraction or background processing.

The day my mom died, the day I married my best friend, the day each of our children came into the world, and the day I found out my wife had cancer all exist in that category. There’s not a shared emotional “tone” there, but they do share the same kind of completeness and intensity. The emotions I felt those days swallowed whole all the awareness I had. They weren’t the kind of days when I could multitask my way through or compartmentalize until later. The feelings of those moments occupied everything, leaving no room for the low-level noise and distractions that usually accompany everyday life.

Those kinds of whole-soul moments are rare, but they are unmistakable when they happen because they stand in such stark contrast to how most of life actually unfolds. Most days aren’t defined by a single, consuming emotion that changes the orbit of everything else around it; instead, they are mostly fragmented, divided across responsibilities, conversations, decisions, and tradeoffs that, by their definition, can’t resolve in the way a Hallmark movie does. You move from one thing to the next carrying pieces of each moment with you, never quite setting anything down and also not allowing any one thing to take over completely either.

The airport scene is an interesting parallel for that kind of existence, where half-hearted conversations and unfinished thoughts blend together while people move with clear destinations but not always clear reasons. Everything keeps moving, whether you’ve processed it or not. And really, we can’t process it all. There’s too much to take in. A hard decision is followed by the next obligation or a profound realization gives way to something practical that needs your attention. Even relief can get interrupted before it has time to settle into something that lasts.

In that context, the statement “I don’t feel in the right to be happy” makes sense because it feels incomplete. It doesn’t account for other things—everything—that exists alongside it. Happiness, in that moment, doesn’t show up only because the thing is resolved. Relief, loss, uncertainty, anger, and a host of other emotions can exist all at once.

We tend to associate a “full soul” with intensity, as if the most complete experiences are the ones that stand above everything else. That idea starts to fall apart, though, the longer you sit with it. A full soul isn’t reserved for extreme moments, and it isn’t built on everything lining up the way you expected. It’s what happens when you stop turning away from what’s in front of you, whether it feels settled or unresolved.

Sometimes that means not interfering with what you’re feeling. It’s simply allowing yourself to “feel the feels” as my wife likes to say. It might also be the willingness to carry something forward for a while without needing it to settle in comfortably. You can feel relief and still feel the weight of what it took to get there. You can know a decision was right and still feel the cost of it.

Even when a moment feels full-souled, you often can’t simplify things into a single feeling. Most of the time, it doesn’t come together in a way that’s easy to explain.

An airport keeps moving whether people feel ready or not. People board planes, flights leave, and no one waits for the individual passenger to make sense of it all first. Life usually works out the same way. Most people move forward without having everything sorted out.

Most of the time, that’s the only way: to keep moving forward even when some things don’t make sense.

You don’t need to understand everything or have perfect resolution before you take the first step. Fullness isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about not pushing away parts of the experience just because they don’t fit together yet. Maybe some never will.

Most days won’t be whole-soul days. That doesn’t mean your soul is empty. It means you’re still carrying what matters.

The Longing to Turn Pain Into Something Beautiful

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

I, like most people, I think, treat pain like a problem to solve quickly. Isn’t it in our nature to escape discomfort when possible? Fix it, frame it, or file it away before anyone notices we’re struggling. For me, if I could turn the hurt into a lesson or a line in an essay or a reason to be stronger, I thought I could stay in control.

It’s not a bad impulse; not all bad, at any rate. Apart from seeking comfort, we’re also meaning-making creatures. We want our suffering to count for something.

But there’s an ache under that impulse. It’s a longing to turn pain into something meaningful or beautiful. It’s not just about surviving what hurts, but alchemizing it, justifying it, even redeeming it. Proving it wasn’t wasted.

That longing can be holy. And exhausting.

Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to a young poet in Letters to a Young Poet, said something that made me stop for a long time as I considered it. He wasn’t romanticizing pain or sadness. He was warning against the kind we perform for the crowd:

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

Unlived. Rejected. Lost.

I don’t think Rilke was saying “never be sad in front of people.” He was drawing out what happens when we use volume, busyness, or performance to somehow shortcut the grief instead of letting it move through us. Sadness doesn’t just vanish. It has a way of digging deep underground and compounding. (Busyness was my go to.)

Earlier in the same letter he offers the gentler, and harder, truth: the large sadnesses may have “gone right through you.” Maybe they changed you somewhere deep, in ways you couldn’t see while you were in the middle of them. Transformation is almost never a moment you remember like looking at a photograph. It’s almost always the slow work that you do as time passes.

That idea resonates well in an article written by John P. Weiss called “Let It Pass Through You.” In his elegant prose, he implies that sadness has to move through us if we are to deepen our connection with ourselves. If we repress it, we risk caging what he calls the bluebird, “that fragile and essential part of ourselves that longs to turn pain into something beautiful.”

This is the tension I keep living in:

Passage (let it through, let it change you) and longing (please, let this mean something).

Both can be true. The trouble starts when longing becomes a demand for an immediate payout. When we need the pain to be beautiful now so we don’t have to feel it as pain.

For a year, I’ve been exploring this idea of carrying weight, about motivation that dries up, about the grace of starting small when life refuses to give you a cinematic breakthrough. Those pieces come from the same place as this one.

The longing to turn pain into something beautiful is related to the longing to be seen as whole. If I can show you a polished moral, a tidy thesis, or a brave face, maybe I won’t have to sit with the mess. Maybe I won’t have to admit how scared I am sometimes.

But beauty that skips the middle is often just “packaging.” It can even become a kind of cruelty, aimed at ourselves: You shouldn’t still feel this. You should have learned by now. Turn it into content and move on.

That’s nothing more than shame and hustle grief.

What, then, is the beautiful thing, if it isn’t instant alchemy?

Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s a song that has a way of naming what you can’t say out loud, don’t have the words for, but somehow still makes you feel less alone.

Or maybe it’s in relationships. Maybe it’s how the edge drops out of your voice when you remember, suddenly, what it feels like to be misunderstood. Maybe it’s the patience you extend because you needed patience once and didn’t get it.

Sometimes it’s quiet integrity or showing up when you’re not motivated or doing the dishes because you don’t want to wake up to a messy kitchen. It might be choosing difficult honesty in a conversation that you could have easily kept superficial.

And sometimes the “beautiful” thing is just the truth without theater: telling someone you trust, “I’m not okay today,” without needing to say anything more.

None of that requires you to monetize or glamorize your pain. It doesn’t require you to be impressive, and it might not even require you to understand what the pain means yet.

Here’s what I’m trying to practice, mostly imperfectly:

• Let the sadness pass through. You can’t drown it. You have to give it room. I do this (sometimes) by journaling without an audience. I run. I sit with silence that I don’t fill with a podcast just to avoid my own thoughts.
• Separate longing from deadline. The desire for meaning is human. The demand for meaning on demand is a recipe for shame.
• Holding the bluebird gently. (I just learned this one.) The part of you that wants pain to become beauty isn’t your enemy. It’s a indication that you believe life is larger than whatever caused the pain. Just don’t ask that part to do all the emotional labor on day one.
• Stay suspicious of performed healing. If your healing only exists to be seen, you might be feeding the very noise Rilke warned about.

The world will keep selling us fast redemption: three steps, five habits, take this pill or that supplement, one morning routine that fixes your childhood; your broken marriage. I’m not against tools, but I am against the lie that you’re failing if you still ache.

For me, Rilke’s line about sadness that becomes “life that is unlived, rejected, lost” reads like a diagnosis. Weiss’s line about the bluebird reads like a hope.

Those things don’t contradict each other. They describe a kind of sequence:

First, let yourself live life, even the parts that hurt.

Then, over time, something else can emerge (if you let it). It won’t always be pretty and it will rarely happen on your timeline. Sometimes, it will be beautiful in the way truth sometimes is: plain, stubborn, and real.

If you carry the longing, maybe the kinder goal isn’t to force pain into beauty on contact.

Maybe it’s to stay hopeful and faithful enough, for long enough, for beauty to find you on the other side of passage.

Further reading (as cited above)

• Rainer Maria Rilke, *Letters to a Young Poet*
• John P. Weiss, “Let It Pass Through You,” Weiss Journal

The Music Carries The Weight of Everything

 

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember, orchestral movie scories have just hit different with me. One random Tuesday afternoon, shortly after I started my own business, I was sitting at my computer working through a complex issue for a client. I decided to go looking for a fresh batch of movie scores that I could build a “coding playlist” around. I stumbled on the work of Hans Zimmer (and others) for the “Pirates” movies.

“My Name Is Barbossa” (written by Geoff Zanelli) was the first piece to hit me on my new playlist.

My hands dropped into my lap. I sat back in my chair, and closed my eyes as the swells of music transported me right onto the deck of the “Black Pearl” standing next to Geoffrey Rush’s character whose hat always stays on his head no matter the fierceness of the wind.

Music seems to know that it’s always welcome to take up residence in my brain, rent free, as often as it likes, and music has a way of telling me the truth about what I’ve been sidestepping.

Barbossa’s theme does that for me every single time. So does “Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho.” In Barbossa’s theme, he strides into the frame like he owns the horizon, but the music gets there first. I don’t have the right words to describe it. The music carries the whole tragic majesty of his life—salt, shadow, greed, regret, sacrifice—and lays it all at his boots before he opens his mouth. He doesn’t have to explain himself. The score does it for him.

“Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho” closes “At World’s End” with Jack Sparrow sitting in a small dingy, his faithful compass pointing first at his rum then the place of the fountain of youth. Then, roll credits. That particular movie is jam-packed with powerful music, but the most incredible of all is relegated to the closing credits. I’ve written about this before. The whole sequence between 3:30 and 4:30 in that track blows my mind. I describe it to my wife as “music that breaks the heart and lifts the spirit.” I literally cried the first time I tried to explain it to her.

Then there’s Maverick—older now, and called on once again to do something impossible. There’s nothing mechanical about the way Captain Pete Mitchell flies. “Don’t think. Just do.” The music rises into something mythical. The instruments don’t highlight a moment; they tell you this is a man finishing a lifetime. A touchdown and a farewell in the same held breath. It’s strange. It’s the kind of music that convinces you that it’s okay to fly and fall apart at the same time.

It’s amazing how music does that! Words can circle something forever and still never get close. A chord hits and suddenly your whole soul remembers a story you didn’t realize you were carrying. I’ve spent months writing about emotions, but a few seconds of Hans Zimmer make all my essays look like they’re just getting started.

I’m not sure why this kind of music gets to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been drawn to people who arrive with more presence than volume. The ones who move through a room like their own theme is playing at a frequency only a few people pick up on.

I’ve met people like that. They’re the ones whose advice always comes softly, and whose example I often don’t appreciate until years later. They didn’t have swagger. They didn’t try to sell me their wisdom in pre-packaged courses for the low, low price of… whatever. They just lived in a way that made me rethink my own pace. I never knew what to call that quality until I realized they had their own kind of soundtrack. Not the big, heroic kind. More like a steady undercurrent you only notice when you choose to be quiet enough.

It makes me wonder if part of adulthood is learning to hear themes you used to miss.

I think about the way certain movie cues hit me. My brain remembers the feeling long before it remembers the scene. A piece of music rises and suddenly I’m not the age I am. It’s like I’m every version of myself at once. The kid who wanted to be brave. The teenager who didn’t know how to grieve. The young dad pretending exhaustion wasn’t catching up with him. The man trying not to break under a storm he refused to name.

Music doesn’t care about your timeline. It just tells you the truth.

And maybe that’s why these scores stay with me. They carry the weight I don’t have language for. They let me sit inside moments I’ve outgrown but never resolved. They remind me of who I wanted to be without scolding me for who I became.

Some days, when I don’t know what to feel or how to say it, I put on a soundtrack and let the strings sort it out. Zimmer does more for my emotional life in four minutes than I can do in a week of thinking.

I still don’t fully understand why certain notes undo me. Or why a fictional pirate can make me feel more human than a motivational podcast ever could. Or why the right chord progression makes everything in my chest line up like a flock of birds figuring out where to fly next.

But maybe I don’t need to understand it. Maybe the music knows the weight I’m carrying before I do. Maybe it holds it for me for a minute, long enough for something inside to settle.

For now, that feels like enough.

Do I Want to Die?

 

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash

I’m lying in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling tiles while I wait for the surgeon.

Metabolic disease stole my feet first. At least, that’s what the doctor called it. Neuropathy and poor circulation were the culprits. Except they weren’t. It was a slow cascade of small, ignorable decisions that compounded over decades. Now they’re deciding how much of my left leg, already dead below my knee, they’ll have to take.

I’ve carried oxygen with me everywhere I’ve gone for almost ten years. The tank sits idly on a chair in the corner while I listen to the constant hiss of the hospital oxygen supply coming from the cannula that irritates my nose and ears.

The last time I went to dinner with my family, my body wouldn’t fit between the bench-back and the booth table. The waitress, showing embarrassment on her face for me, moved us to a table in the center of the dining area. I set the oxygen tank in the chair next to me.

The chair where my wife used to sit.

She’s not there anymore. She sits alone in a memory care center, unable to remember any of the people she loves or who love her except for her father who has been gone for almost forty years. She cries for him every night like a small child frightened of the dark.

I’m waiting for the surgeon.

Except I’m not.

I’m 47 years old, sitting in my home office, drinking a diet soda while “Angelica” from “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” plays in my headphones. I’m not in a hospital bed. I have both legs, and I’m not on oxygen.

But I’m heavier; thirty-five pounds heavier than I was fifteen months ago.

For a while, I blamed the company I was working for. It sucked my will to live while I worked the kind of hours not even two separate shifts would cover. Then I left and started building something I love. A company with my name and fingerprints everywhere on it. A company that feels alive.

It also wants more, so I give.

In 2022, Tufts University published a study titled, “Only 7% of American Adults Have Good Cardiometabolic Health.” Researchers evaluated blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, adiposity, and cardiovascular disease. Only 6.8 percent of adults met optimal levels across all five markers as of 2017–2018.

I can’t imagine the numbers are better in 2026.

There’s nothing abstract about that to me. It’s directional. For most of us.

The question isn’t whether I want to die. It’s whether I am living in a way that makes decline the default.

There was a time when my body felt like an ally—like my best friend.

One morning, I remember looking down at my Garmin Forerunner 245 and seeing 20 miles logged for the day. I realized, in that moment, that I didn’t actually know where I was. I looked up and oriented myself. I was seven miles from home.

Somehow, while I was lost in my thoughts, my body carried me over twenty miles.

That month, I ran more than 200 miles. That day, I logged 27 miles. There were two 15-mile days tucked into that same stretch of thirty-one days. My lungs were powerful, and my stride was automatic. I didn’t need to negotiate with myself about whether to go. I just went.

I wasn’t reckless either. I was strong; in the best shape of my life at 45 years old. That’s why these thirty-five pounds feel so much heavier than they really are.

It’s stark, frightening contrast.

When you’ve experienced your body at full capacity, mediocrity is betrayal.

Here’s what makes this so uncomfortable to admit. I didn’t wake up wanting to destroy my health. I don’t fantasize about oxygen tanks, amputations, or being too large to fit in a restaurant booth. I love my children. I’ve already seen two of them get married and the three younger ones are growing up just as fast. I want to run with my sons. I want to sit at dinner tables without hissing machines next to me. I want to get down on the floor and play with my grandchildren when they come along.

But my calendar tells a different story.

6 am to 7:30 pm workdays. Saturdays included. The travel season is almost upon me again. There’s stress and diet soda instead of water. Meals inhaled between calls with clients and team members. Runs postponed because there’s “just one more thing” or soul-crushing anxiety.

The company I’m building needs structure, leadership, and clarity. It needs someone willing to retire old versions of himself so it can grow.

But there’s an uncomfortable parallel. You can escape one unhealthy system only to create another. This time, I created one with my name on the door.

The previous company drained me. This one inspires and energizes me.

But both can take everything if I let them.

That’s where the undramatic, crisis-free erosion lives.

The hospital bed isn’t some kind of prediction. It’s a projection of my own momentum.

If I continue to trade sleep for output, movement for meetings, water for caffeine, margin for urgency, what exactly am I expecting the end result to be?

Our bodies are not ideological. My body doesn’t care that I’m building something meaningful. It responds to inputs, consistently and over time.

Calories. Stress. Movement. Rest.

I tell myself I’ll fix it later; after the next product launch; after this round of new hires; after this funding round; after this next season of intensity.

Later is a comforting word.

And a lie.

And trajectories compound.

When I was running 150+ miles a month, I didn’t wake up and decide to run 150 miles or more. I laced up my shoes and ran that day. And then the next. And the one after that. Small (or large) inputs. Repeated.

The current trajectory is built the same way.

Do I want to die?

No, but there’s a more subtle question under that.

Am I living in in a way that suggests I actually want to die the way I described above?

Indifference is one of the best, most patient negotiators.

• You deserve that soda.
• You can skip exercise today.
• The business needs you more than your body does.
• You’ll get serious again next month.

I’ve proven to myself that I can endure 27 miles in a single day. I’ve proven that I can work for 15 weeks straight with little more than 3 hours of sleep per night. I’ve proven I can build a company from scratch. I’ve also proven I can survive environments that leave most people hollow inside.

The question now is simpler and so, so much harder to face.

Will I choose the kinds of inputs that make the hospital scene improbable or likely?

This isn’t a vow to return to 150-mile months. That season may be gone for me. My body’s changed and my responsibilities have multiplied.

But decline doesn’t have to be the accepted default.

I don’t want oxygen tanks, amputations, or to sit across from my children as a diminished version of myself, explaining that the work seemed urgent at the time.

I want breath, strength, and life.

The hospital bed is fiction, but the trajectory isn’t.

And trajectories can be changed.