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.

When Your Inner Critic Learns to Whisper

 

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

I was in a meeting back in March, sitting across the table from a client as we mapped out a pricing strategy they wanted to implement. It wasn’t complicated, just complex. There’s a difference. I love this kind of conversation. It’s one of my favorite things to work on with clients: How do we price things in a way that makes sense for both the business and the customer?

Ideas were firing. I was talking fast, moving from one thought to the next. Pattern-matching in real time, connecting dots as fast as they came. I do this a lot.

It’s how my brain works. When I’m quiet, it’s ideas bouncing around inside my head faster than I can put them on paper. Out loud, it’s chaotic and sometimes noisy.

Frenetic is a word that comes to mind.

Partway through that conversation, abruptly, something inside me shifted.

I was suddenly aware of my own voice. It wasn’t what I was saying, but the way I was saying it. The speed, volume, and drive to keep talking. And then, like an opening just wide enough to slip through, I realized something else: I was trying to prove that I really knew what I was talking about.

That’s when I stopped. Mid-sentence. I apologized for the verbal onslaught. I let the silence sit for a moment and took a deep breath. Then I asked a question instead of offering another answer.

That’s what it looked like on the outside.

But on the inside, it was something different: the whisper of my inner critic, dressed up like helpful urgency.

Most people think of the inner critic as loud, obvious, blunt, and generally cruel. You’re not enough. You’ll never get it right. And sometimes, it is.

But over time, that voice evolves. It gets clever. It finds new disguises. It no longer screams. It suggests. “You should probably say a little more so they don’t think you’re winging it.” “They might assume you haven’t done your homework if you pause too long.”

It offers these thoughts like advice. Like realism. Like good leadership.

But they’re not neutral. They’re fear masquerading as strategy.

When I was younger, my inner critic was easy to spot. It told me I wasn’t good enough. It told me I’d embarrass myself. It made me second-guess every decision before I made it. It was loud, relentless, and predictable.

These days, it’s subtler. It’s learned to speak in my own voice. It uses phrases like “just being cautious” or “managing expectations.” It often tells me to work a little harder or prove I belong at the table. And not because I’m incompetent, but just to be safe. Just to be sure.

And that’s the trouble. The critic has learned to whisper.

That meeting in March didn’t go badly. In fact, it ended up going really well. But that moment of realization stuck with me because I noticed the story under the surface.

It was the story that says: You better say everything you know before they think you don’t know enough.

It sounds like a useful motivator. But really, it’s self-doubt in different Fruit of the Loom.

The hard part is that not everything the inner critic says is wrong. Sometimes it borrows real truths — yes, you should come prepared. Yes, it is helpful to be clear. But it’s the urgency behind the voice that gives it away. The push to prove, not to connect. The need to be enough, rather than to listen.

And if I don’t notice that shift, I end up rushing through the conversation instead of being part of it. I end up presenting instead of partnering.

Silencing the critic isn’t something I’ve mastered. Most days, I still catch myself mid-sentence. Or mid-email. Or mid-apology I didn’t need to make. The voice is still there, still whispering, still convincing me that it’s not doubt — it’s just pragmatism.

But the more I notice it, the more I can choose a different response.

I can stop talking, ask a better question, and trust that I don’t have to fill every silences to prove my value.

Confidence doesn’t mean never hearing the voice. It means knowing what to do when it shows up.

That kind of confidence isn’t loud. It’s quiet and patient; willing to pause and listen. Willing to let the room breathe without rying to own it.

That meeting in March reminded me that I don’t need to say everything I know in one sitting. I don’t have to prove I belong. Sometimes the most valuable thing I bring to the table isn’t my knowledge. It’s my willingness to stop talking when the moment calls for something else.

And that is enough.

The Temptation to Numb

 

Photo by Andrey Matveev on Unsplash

I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand and my eyes half-open. I’d been running on fumes for weeks—three and a half to five hours of sleep a night, if I was lucky. I could hear my wife reading a bedtime story down the hall to our youngest. I was waiting, and not doing anything important. I was just playing some dumb, flick-and-collect game on my phone that one of my kids probably downloaded. I couldn’t describe the game to you now if you asked me.

It wasn’t fun or interesting or useful. It was just… nothing.

Which, at that moment, was exactly what I wanted.

I wasn’t distracting myself from the present as much as I was trying to dull the future. I knew what tomorrow held: too much to do and not enough time to do it. So I played the game. I desperately needed sleep but I knew sleep meant starting over again in a few short hours.

I was tired. More than that, though, I was tired of being tired. In that moment, seated on the bed, playing that game, I was disappearing into something small, quietly, and completely meaningless.

And that’s what numbing is.

We don’t always notice it when it’s happening. It never looks like anything dramatic. Sometimes it’s scrolling. Sometimes it’s snacking. Sometimes it’s throwing yourself into work that doesn’t really need to be done just so you can feel productive.

Sometimes it’s a puzzle game you don’t even like.

In that moment, I wasn’t resting. I wasn’t being still. I wasn’t recovering. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just floating somewhere between exhaustion and avoidance, not wanting to feel what I knew was waiting for me.

It would be impossible to count the number of times that scenario has repeated itself.

It won’t be the last.

There have been long seasons of my life where “being helpful” was how I numbed. Solving other people’s problems kept me from facing my own. It felt good. It made me feel valuable. But it also became a way to avoid stillness. To avoid reckoning with where I was and what I needed.

The temptation to numb doesn’t always show up in the things we label as “bad.” Sometimes, it hides inside our strengths. The things people admire in us. The ways we show up, go the extra mile, stay busy, stay strong.

But numbing isn’t the same as coping.

And avoidance isn’t the same as rest.

The hardest part about numbing is that it usually works just well enough to keep you from changing. You don’t spiral. You don’t break. You just get… stuck.

Stuck in this state of half-rest and half-feeling.

Stuck in habits that dampen the noise without actually bringing peace.

And that’s what I was doing on the edge of the bed. Choosing stuck over sleep. Numbness over rest. Not because I’m lazy or careless. But because sometimes the weight of everything (family, work, expectations, fear) feels too heavy to hold all at once. And numbness, for a brief moment, lets you pretend you’re not carrying anything at all.

But here’s what I’m learning: that moment doesn’t last. The weight returns. The noise comes back. The game ends, or doesn’t, and nothing’s really changed.

And beneath it all, my body still needs rest.

My mind still needs clarity.

My heart still needs care.

The thing I reached for didn’t meet any of those needs. It just pressed pause.

I’m not trying to demonize the small comforts we reach for. Some of them help. Some of them remind us we’re still human. But when I consistently reach for things that delay the discomfort instead of helping me heal, I start living in a shallow version of my life.

And I want more than that.

I want real rest, not just escape.

Presence, not just distraction.

Peace, not just quiet.

That night, I eventually set the phone down and slid under the sheets and fell asleep within seconds. I don’t remember what time my wife came to bed. I just remember waking up hours later, still tired, still behind, but a little clearer.

The temptation to numb doesn’t disappear, but I’m getting better at recognizing it sooner.

And that’s something.

I don’t always know what to do with the weight I carry. Some days I still reach for the easy thing, the soft thing, the thing that lets me forget for a few minutes. But more and more, I’m starting to notice when I’m doing it. And noticing changes things. Not all at once, but slowly.

And that is enough.

The Quietness of the Truly Important

 

Photo by Bastien Jaillot on Unsplash

I don’t remember what time it was. It was dark, and I had been awake for hours.

I was standing in the living room of our small Sugarhouse apartment, bouncing up and down with our infant son tucked against my chest. He had colic and was slightly malnourished, though we didn’t know it at the time. He cried constantly, sometimes for hours, and nothing seemed to settle him except the slow, relentless rhythm of being held and moved.

So I bounced.

Back and forth across the living room. Sweat running down my back. Legs aching. Arms trembling from holding the same position too long. He would fall asleep eventually, and when he did, I had a system: I’d sit on the couch, support my arms with pillows, and angle my body just enough to doze off while still holding him. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t easy. But it worked.

And I could make it work night after night.

My wife and I were both working full time. I was still in school. Life was more pressure than margin back then. But I remember feeling something close to proud in those moments. Not because I was doing something heroic. Just because I knew my wife could sleep. That mattered to me. If she could sleep, even for a few hours, I could endure the rest.

For the first four months of our son’s life, we didn’t realize he wasn’t getting enough to eat. My wife was trying to nurse, and we assumed, naively, that things were going as they should. He was small. Too small, in hindsight. But we were new parents, doing our best.

When we finally started supplementing with formula, his body responded quickly. Our skinny, often inconsolable baby began to fill out. He slept more. Cried less. Caught up. And today, at 22 years old and six foot three, he’s doing just fine. But I sometimes look back on those early nights with a strange kind of tenderness.

Because I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of learning how many truly important things in life are also quiet.

There was no applause. No measuring stick. No one saw the hours I spent bouncing on tired legs in the dark. I wasn’t building a resume or crossing off a to-do list. I was just holding my son and hoping he’d sleep.

And somehow, that’s still one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done.

We don’t often talk about the things that live in silence.

We talk about achievement, momentum, and ambition. We notice the loud things. But some of the moments that shape us most don’t make noise. They don’t draw attention. They’re just there in the corner of a dimly lit room, while the rest of the world sleeps.

Back then, one of my superpowers was functioning on very little sleep. That season didn’t last, but I’m grateful for it now. Not just because it got me through, but because I think I needed to learn that there is strength in stillness, too. Strength in presence. Strength in showing up for someone else with nothing to prove.

The world is so loud now, favoring volume, certainty, and acceleration.

But some of the most essential things, the ones that matter long after the moment has passed, happen in quiet repetition. In patience. In sweat and silence and unnoticed love.

That season with my oldest son taught me that being tired doesn’t mean you’re failing. That holding someone through the night is enough. That doing the same thing for the hundredth time without recognition still counts. It all adds up, even if no one’s keeping score.

Especially if no one’s keeping score.

These days, my life is louder. Busier. Full of projects and deadlines and people who count on me in different ways. But I still come back to that apartment. To that living room. To that exhausted, twenty-something version of me bouncing a fussy baby until sweat ran down my face, and then figuring out how to fall asleep without dropping him.

That wasn’t ambition. That wasn’t strategy.

That was love. And it was enough.

Sometimes, we look for meaning in big breakthroughs or public wins. But I’ve learned that what’s truly important is often quieter than we expect. It’s what happens when no one’s looking. It’s the care you give that no one applauds. The faithfulness that never makes it into a photo album or gets posted online.

That kind of quiet can feel invisible at times. But I’ve come to believe it’s where most of the good things in life begin.

The bouncing. The waiting. The holding. The choice to stay.

It doesn’t need to be loud to matter.

And that is enough.