When the Echo Quietly Lingers

 

Photo by Guillermo Naranjo Pérez on Unsplash

Yesterday, I shared some reflections on the echoes I hope to leave behind. Today’s piece picks up with the ones I wish I hadn’t carried at all.

The words left my lips before I even realized what I was saying: Why don’t you use your brain?

The second I heard it, I heard him. And I wished I could take it back.

I wasn’t even that angry, and definitely not the kind of angry that phrase implied. One of my kids had made a mistake, and not a big one. Just the kind of everyday misstep that happens when you’re growing up and trying to figure out how the world works. I overreacted. Big time. I let frustration speak for me. And what came out wasn’t mine.

It was his.

I was probably thirty the first time I heard it said that way. I’d been asked to present in front of every manager in the company I worked for — sixteen people seated around a conference room table built for exactly that number. I was head of IT and inventory, and the company was on its way toward $30 million in revenue. We were doing well. Margins were healthy. I’d spent months building a plan to improve inventory flow — running the numbers, shaping the model, double-checking every scenario I could think of.

I remember exactly where he sat. At the far end of the table, across from the projector screen. I was mid-sentence, explaining a point I’d practiced at least a dozen times before, when he cut me off.

“That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you use your brain?”

Just like that. No warning. No curiosity. Just a slap across the face, dressed up as feedback in front of every manager and admin in the company.

I had to stop myself from throwing the slide clicker across the room at him. And I remember thinking, I’m way smarter than you.

Which, honestly, I probably was. But that wasn’t the point.

What made it worse was that I respected him. Deeply. He’d built a company from nothing. Spun a department out of Micron and sold it to a Japanese conglomerate as the sole shareholder. He had real-world success behind him. And in that moment, he used all that weight to crush a thirty-year-old trying to make something better for his company.

I lost a lot of respect for him that day. But what I didn’t fully see — at least not then — was that something from that moment stuck with me. Not in a way that derailed my career or filled my nights with regret. It just… lingered. A low hum in the background. A subtle shift in how I spoke. How I responded when I felt disrespected or caught off guard. I didn’t repeat his cruelty, not often. But I didn’t forget it either.

He wasn’t just my boss’s boss. He was the one everyone watched for how to behave. And when someone in that kind of position lets cruelty stand in for leadership, the damage spreads wide and quickly. What he said to me echoed for everyone else. “If you disagree with the owner, expect that kind of response.”

That’s the thing about echoes. Some arrive with so much force, you brace for them. But others come quietly, reshaping the contours of how you think, how you react, how you move through the rooms that matter.

It wasn’t until I heard myself say it to one of my own kids that I realized it was still in me.

What honestly haunts me most is that I didn’t say it in anger. I said it in shame. My shame. Because I’d attached that phrase to failure, to embarrassment, to the feeling of being exposed in front of people who had power over me. And in that moment with my son, I passed it on, and not because he’d done anything terrible, but because I didn’t know what to do with the emotion that had crept up behind me.

I caught it, but I didn’t apologize until later. I had the chance to say what I wanted to say in the first place: “It’s okay to make mistakes. Let’s figure this out together.”

But the echo still lingers. Years later, that same phrase came out of his mouth aimed at his little brother.

Echoes that linger mostly don’t shout, though. They wait, and often show up in the way I sometimes overcorrect small things. They also show up in the tone I use when I think I’m being firm but really I’m afraid of being disrespected.

Thankfully, I started softening a long time ago. I rarely speak in anger anymore. I try to make space for grace for most people. There are still some that I judge too harshly, not that there’s ever really room for judgment. I’m learning to listen more than I used to. But none of that erases the echoes I haven’t fully dealt with. The ones that taught me how to flinch. The ones that shaped how I carry shame.

Some pain doesn’t stick because it breaks you. It sticks because it shapes you. Quietly and without asking permission. Long after the moment has passed.

And maybe that’s why I write these things down. Not to fix them. Not to tidy them up. Just to name them. To make sure I don’t pass them on without realizing it. To remember that healing is mostly not about forgetting, but noticing.

So I’m noticing.

When I speak sharply, I pause. When I feel heat rising, I try to cool it before it lands. When I get it wrong, I say so.

I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to pay attention.

And that is enough.

Echoes That Shape Us

 

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

A few months ago, I stumbled across an old recording of my mom. She’s been gone nearly 32 years now. I was ten days shy of fifteen when she died.

The voice on the recording didn’t sound like the voice I remember in my head, but that didn’t surprise me. Sound doesn’t age well in memory. Still, hearing her again knocked the wind out of me. You’d think I’d remember exactly what she said, but I don’t. I was hanging on every word, but it wasn’t what she said that mattered. It was the sound of her. Like brushing up against my childhood. I was back on the edge of her bed, massaging her bald head in the last days before cancer took her from us.

She laughed a lot, even when things were hard — especially when things were hard. There were tears, too. And fear. But she met most days with a kind of stubbornness and light that made people feel like maybe things would be okay even when they weren’t.

She made friends easily. Gave more than she had. Got frustrated fast, too, but I’ve always given chronic pain the blame for that. As a kid, I didn’t know how to make sense of it all. I didn’t have words to describe my mom. I just knew she filled every room she entered with life and light. She was the person who made everything feel safer… until she wasn’t there to do it anymore.

When she died, my world got quieter. I got louder to compensate. As if turning up the volume on myself might bring some of her sound back.

At some point — I don’t remember when — a thought struck me that’s been with me ever since: Would she be proud of me for this?

It’s not about chasing approval. Or maybe it is. Either way, that question, an echo of my mother, has become one of the clearest internal compasses I have. I don’t think she expected perfection, but I know she wanted me to live a life defined by decency, kindness, and purpose.

That echo shows up in unexpected ways.

My mom was a hugger. I’ve told myself my kids don’t really want that from me — not like they do from their mom, who expects it. I’m more of a sit-and-listen dad. I tell them I love them. I try not to downplay what they’re going through, even when it feels small against my own lived experience. I rarely raise my voice, but when I do, I circle back and own it. And I still try to make people laugh in hard moments because she did, and it helped.

She also spoke her mind. I think deep down, she knew her time was limited, and she didn’t see much point in leaving things unsaid. That’s one echo I haven’t followed as well. I’ve spent most of my life softening my words — being polite, agreeable, careful not to rock the boat. I’ve told myself it’s about keeping the peace, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s something else too. Maybe it’s caution. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s a habit I picked up without knowing it, and one I’m just now learning to put back down.

And then there’s the buzz. That low-level hum of guilt that creeps in anytime I stop moving. I spent the better part of two and a half decades overcommitting; believing that my worth was tied to output. The late nights. The skipped vacations. The laptop glowing in the corner while my kids played on the floor. I told myself it was for them. For us. For our future.

Some of that was, and is, true. Some of it was a story I needed to believe to avoid confronting what I didn’t know how to stop.

Even now, with more balance in my schedule and a clearer sense of what matters, that hum is still there. I can be sitting next to my wife, watching a Hallmark movie, and my brain will whisper, you should be doing more.

I’m learning not to answer back.

There are good echoes too — ones I hope will reverberate through the walls of our home long after I’m gone. Every time I say “love you” to my wife or kids. Every time I help a neighbor and don’t expect anything in return. Every time I take a deep breath before reacting, because I’ve learned that grace is more useful than judgment.

Those things don’t happen by accident. They’re the residue of a hundred thousand moments — some joyful, some brutal, most completely ordinary and mundane. Habits that grew into character. Words I didn’t realize I’d absorbed until I heard myself saying them out loud.

Echoes are funny that way. We don’t always know we’re carrying them. We don’t always mean to pass them on. But we do.

Lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to the kind of echoes I want to leave.

Not just the legacy stuff: the big-picture, obituary-worthy milestones. I mean the little things. The way I show up when someone’s struggling. The tone I use when I’m tired. The stories I tell. The way I treat people when no one’s watching.

I think about my mom a lot. I’m 7 years older now than she lived to be. I wonder what kind of echoes she hoped to leave behind but couldn’t. I wonder if she knew how deeply the ones she did leave would stick. I wonder what mine will sound like someday.

I hope they include the laughter of bedtime stories. The courage to say, “I was wrong.” The trust that love can and must outlast frustration. I hope my kids hear echoes that remind them they were loved, deeply, in every season of their lives, even the hard ones.

Of course, not every echo is kind or useful. Some I’m still learning to name. Some I’m only just beginning to hear.

I’m watching more closely now. Listening more carefully. Trying to notice which echoes belong in the room and which ones don’t.

And that is enough.

The Power of a Pause

 

Scanned photo from our wedding day, June 29, 2001

June 29, 2025–24 Years

In early 1997, I was eighteen and sitting in a small auditorium when I first really noticed her. She was seated at a piano, playing a song she’d written. Over the melody, she recited a passage most of us had heard a dozen times, but something about the way she paired the two made me stop and listen.

That night I wrote in my journal, “There’s something special about that girl.”

We hadn’t even been on a date. In fact, she had a strict rule: she would never marry a “high school boy.” I used to joke that she’d made a list of fifty guys she’d consider marrying, and I didn’t even make the cut.

I was a loud, often socially awkward kid in high school. I got pulled into a group of friends she was part of, but I rarely ventured outside my comfort zone to make new connections.

Right after graduation, I did manage to go on a date with her, but only because I’d exhausted a bunch of other options first. I already knew how she felt about high school boys.

After that day in the auditorium and our first date, life moved forward. I eventually went to Guatemala, and she went away for school.

And then, as it often does, timing did something curious.

I’d just come home from two years away. On a whim, I decided to track her down. She had just broken up with someone. She was transferring to the same university I was attending. I asked her out, not knowing any of that.

She said yes.

Our second date, more than two years after the first, was at Lagoon, a local theme park. It was July-in-Utah hot, and out of nowhere, it started pouring. A full-on, the-sky-is-falling kind of storm. And instead of running for cover, she just laughed.

We weren’t even at the hand-holding, awkward-kiss stage of the relationship yet. It was only our second date. But I remember watching her in the rain and thinking, I hope I get to marry that girl someday.

Over the next few months, we went on a few more dates. One Sunday afternoon as fall approached, I asked her to go on a walk. I told her how I felt about her. She didn’t feel the same.

We stopped spending time together. I tried to move on.

But something changed.

A few months later, we were sitting together again — this time talking until past 2:30 in the morning. Deep, existential stuff.

The next day, we got engaged.

Technically, I think we went on maybe five dates before I asked her to marry me. I had already spent years chasing things I thought I was supposed to be chasing. But then I paused. I paid attention to what mattered.

And I saw her.

Not just the girl at the piano. Not just the girl in the rain. I saw the person I wanted to spend the rest of forever with, figuring out this crazy thing called life.

We were married on a perfectly pristine day in June 2001. I still remember waiting for her to change after the ceremony, eager, anxious, excited to walk out and meet our family. When our eyes met, I had this completely overwhelming feeling — the kind that would definitely cue violins and a Hallmark choir: I didn’t know love could feel like this. It was so much bigger than I had imagined.

That moment, so simple and unassuming, has returned to me again and again. Especially during the hard seasons. When we’re tired. When life is complicated. When the noise makes it hard to hear each other clearly.

Over the last 24 years, I’ve forgotten how to pause.

I’m learning again.

I’ve slowed down recently. It doesn’t feel natural yet, but I’m working on it; slowing my pace and posture on things. And because of that, I’ve started to see more about myself, our kids, and the shape of our life together.

A few weeks ago, I got home late from a long work trip and just stood in the kitchen for a moment, watching her move around the house she’s filled with so much light. And I thought, how did I get so lucky?

We’ve lived nearly a quarter century in this life we’ve been building together. It’s far from perfect, but it’s honest, steady, and filled with love and laughter.

Sometimes, I watch my wife sit outside with her eyes closed, meditating, as the early morning sun warms her face.

She’s taught me, especially of late, that pausing is a lifeline.

It’s how you remember what you love before it slips into the background. It’s what turns survival into memory. Years into meaning.

And today, I’m letting that pause be more than enough.

Who(m) Is Training Who(m)?

 

Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

This is a serious departure from my more reflective pieces, but I read a great article about the absurdities of the AI Witch Hunt and just couldn’t help myself. Okay, I probably could have but why would I do my regular job when I can write something I think is funny instead?

I never remember when or how to use “who” versus “whom,” and I fancy myself something of a writer — a paid writer, even. I enjoy grammar-policing people, and I actually love it when people grammar-police me. Nothing contributes to writer-humility like having a 14-year-old call you out for a typo.

I know there’s a rule involving subjects and objects, and maybe something about i before e, but the minute I try to apply it, my confidence collapses faster than a two-year-old who’s just dropped their ice cream cone in the dirt. (Does the ten-second rule apply?)

So, like any rational human-type person living in 2025, I asked ChatGPT.

The AI responded kindly — because it always does, unless you provoke it with Excel macros or engage Monday GPT in a highly satirical conversation. (Which, by the way, is perhaps one of the greatest inventions of the modern age. Few things make me smile more than having an AI insult my intelligence no matter how clever I think I am.)

Seriously, though. I tend to be a sarcastic person — friendly, but still sarcastic. I love the banter with Monday GPT.

But I digress. Back to the ChatGPT response.

“It’s who is training whom,” it said, even outlining that who is the subject and whom is the object. Ah yes, subject-object: grammar’s most persistent, yet somehow most forgettable, personality test.

There’s an irony there — I used AI to teach me proper human grammar rules… again. And honestly, I have every intention of doing it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. And probably twice on Sunday.

At this point, ChatGPT (and other AIs) feels less like a writing assistant and more like an overqualified English teacher I can text at 2:00 a.m. because I can’t remember if a dangling participle is okay or if the grammar police are about to cut up my writer’s card.

But let me be clear: I am (re)learning. Sometimes. Other times, I’m just outsourcing entire trains of thought to the machine and congratulating myself on being “efficient.”

I recently had to write a batch of SOPs for my company — Standard Operating Procedures, for those blessed souls who’ve never had to wrangle them. Or read them. Instead of staring into the Word doc void and praying for revelation, I fed the AI a few bullet points. Fifteen minutes later, I had some pretty solid drafts. They weren’t perfect — ChatGPT didn’t have enough domain experience — but they cut my workload by two-thirds.

Smart and lazy at the same time: that’s my signature move.

So now I’m wondering: Who is training whom? Or, as I styled the title, Who(m) is training who(m)? — parentheses added for comedic ambiguity and to hedge against internet pedants. (Pedant, noun: a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.)

Because while the machines have definitely learned from us, and continue to do so, we’re also learning from them. And not just grammar. I’m picking up clues about better pacing, tone control, emotional honesty (an unexpected benefit), and stronger paragraph structure. These are things I learned about in high school. Then promptly forgot when the AP tests were over. I mean, c’mon! We’re not memorizing subordinate clause rules anymore like they’re needy tagalongs that can’t function without their grammatical babysitter? (That sentence is courtesy of OpenAI’s Monday GPT. Go use it. Right now.)

Is it possible for an AI to help us be “more human?”

Cue the existential loop.

How to Be a Good Person in a Storm

 

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

When I was seven or eight, a good friend of mine took a blow to the face so hard it made me cry.

It’s been almost forty years and I can still see the scene. My friend was sprinting across the playground. We were playing tag and he was being chased. Recess was almost over but there was always time for one more round. Another kid came down the slide just as my friend reached the bottom, and my friend tripped hard over the other kid. He couldn’t catch himself and his face met the pavement at full speed.

He jumped to his feet, screaming. One of the recess aids came running over and pulled his hands away from his face. One of his eyes was already swelling shut. It ballooned so fast that I thought something inside him was going to burst. I’d never seen anything like that, much less happen in real time. I honestly believed his eye was going to pop out of the socket any second.

The aid whisked him to the office as fast as she could go, and I held it together until I got home. Then I sat on my mom’s bed, laid my head on her shoulder, and cried. I couldn’t explain why I was so wrecked about it. He was one of my close friends, but I barely understood what had happened.

I just knew that I hurt watching him hurt.

That’s my earliest memory of recognizing, even if I couldn’t frame it in these words, that I care deeply about the pain of other people.

There’s no heroic origin story there, though perhaps a hero complex was born. I didn’t become a doctor. I’ve never run into a burning building to save someone’s cat. That day, though, I learned something about myself: other people’s pain — their storms — affect me, often more than my own.

That tendency has followed me — sometimes as empathy, sometimes as a burden, and sometimes as a complicated desire to “fix” things I was never asked to fix.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that being a good person, especially a man, meant being a protector; a calm-in-the-chaos presence. I started to see myself as someone who needs to step in, absorb the tension, and make things right.

Of course, we know that we can’t control the storms of life. We only get to control how we stand in them.

Years ago, I had a friend who understood that better than I did.

We were both only nineteen. We’d been asked to meet someone, a much older man, who was going to be mentoring and working with my friend. Circumstances were a bit odd, and we had to meet the guy at a specific place and time. We arrived right on time, or at least when we were told we needed to be there.

When the man arrived, late based on what we had been told, he jumped out of his car already red-faced and loud, wondering where we had been — why we were so late. He didn’t try to confirm any details. He just tore into us for not being where we were “supposed to be,” for “wasting his valuable time,” and for “making him late for more important things.”

I remember feeling my jaw clench and my blood pressure rise. I was ready for a fight, and I wasn’t even the one who had to work with the guy.

My friend just stood there, completely unfazed. And when the man finished his rant, my friend reached out his hand, and without any sarcasm or anger, calmly introduced himself with an “I’m glad to meet you” as the silent exclamation point that demonstrated how much more mature my friend was than the 60-year-old man in front of us.

I think about that experience all the time when I’m getting fired up about something that probably doesn’t matter.

My friend had genuine humility and… stillness.

He had a personal mantra: “No regrets.” What I’ve forgotten, at times, is that doesn’t usually mean doing big things or taking big risks. That experience with my friend taught me something completely different, though. He didn’t want to look back and regret acting out of anger. He didn’t want to add any fire to the situation just to prove he was “strong” too.

His calm didn’t make the storm go away. The older man didn’t apologize, but his posture did change. The edge dropped from his voice. The man stooped to pick up my friend’s bag and they walked to his car without another word.

I’ve wondered about the conversation in the car as the two of them drove away. I lost touch with that friend after that experience.

I’ve wondered, as well, how many times I’ve made a bad situation worse because I’ve believed that being strong required standing my ground instead of softening it.

And that’s why I come back to that moment so often.

I have tried to live like that friend. I’ve failed more times than I could ever count. The older I get, the more I realize that my version of “being good in a storm” often looks like trying to control the storm.

Especially when it comes to people I care about.

Watching people suffer, particularly people I feel responsible for, hurts me. My wife. My kids. Women in my life who’ve been hurt by stupid people. My impulse is to swoop in, fix the problem, and absorb as much of their pain as I can.

I do it because I genuinely care about people. I used to joke all the time that I went into computers because I didn’t have to deal with people, but the truth is I love people.

A hard reality to accept, however, is that sometimes that urge to protect crosses over into an attempt to control situations and outcomes, so carefully masked as compassion that I often don’t see it for what it is.

There’s a fine line between caring and rescuing and just helicoptering; between showing up for someone in the right way versus shielding them from the very thing that might help them grow.

I think about how many times I’ve stepped in when I wasn’t asked. How often I’ve made a hard moment about my role in it, rather than about the person actually experiencing it.

That’s one of the storms I’m in now. It’s not an external one. I’m trying to figure out what it means to still care deeply without letting that translate into trying to orchestrate the outcome. To be present without being controlling. To believe that other people can survive hard things without me steadying their ship.

Sometimes, the most “good” I can do in a storm is not stepping in to manage it. Just being near. Calm. Not escalating. Not explaining. Not fixing.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of honest reflections about identity, meaning, and building a life you don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here: https://books.by/aaronpace

I’m learning that real strength is mostly quiet. It’s hard to imagine, but real strength mostly doesn’t rush in. It also doesn’t need to be right. And it doesn’t take away a person’s opportunity to grow just because it’s hard.

Real strength remembers what others are enduring and how sometimes all you can do is be scared for them, cry when you get home, and be glad with them when they show back up with a black eye and no lasting damage.

I suppose I’ll always have a protector’s instinct. I’ll still struggle with the desire to intervene, absorb the impact, and reframe the story for someone else. I don’t always know where the line is between love and overreach. I don’t always trust that things will work out if I don’t steer.

But I’m learning that sometimes, being a good man in a storm just means staying grounded. Letting people feel what they feel. And being someone who doesn’t make it worse or take away their opportunity to learn.

And that is enough.