This was supposed to help. Rather than thinking all-or-nothing, just make the next best choice. I love peanut butter. Like truly love it. And I eat a lot of it. Every so often I admit that I’ve been eating too much and decide to cut back. For me, peanut butter is all-or-nothing. When I travel I don't eat any, because I don't buy it. So, I temporarily break my peanut butter habit. That usually lasts until about a week after I get home, when I take one spoonful. Within a week,

Who knew balancing a dowel could reveal so much? I used to excel at pushing my limits. It was not a secret. The pastor at our wedding even joked about my driven nature, and everyone laughed. Just as I was driven, I was also afraid of sharing my limitations, for fear of not stacking up or letting others down. I think of the countless late-night drives home after a long op, pulling over multiple times to stretch and get air so I could make it home safely. The times I was comple

Moats. Now we kayak them. But they were built for one thing: keeping the threat out. (Ross Castle, Ireland, 2022) Stationed in Germany, I was part of a running group called the Hash House Harriers. It’s an international social running club where a "hare" lays chalk trails through the countryside and the rest of us chase them down. There are silly traditions, songs, and no roadways allowed. Discovery was a key point. In Germany, that meant forested hills, hidden trails, and ar

A Kosovo traffic jam. And gratitude. I was escorting a National Geographic film crew for a day. I’m not sure if this scene made the final cut, but the crew was as uplifted by our reception as were we. I was checking on some soldiers who were manning a checkpoint at JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center) in Fort Polk, LA. We were there to do our final pre-deployment validation before we deployed to Kosovo the following month. The soldiers had been preparing for this deployment

Not quite 100%. One of the few times reaching that makes a big difference. (Almost total solar eclipse, August 2017, Boise, ID.) I was a Yearling (sophomore) at West Point, standing in an engineering class while my professor reviewed problems we had written on the whiteboards. West Point used something called the Thayer Method: you got the content ahead of class, studied it independently, and arrived with a basic understanding. It was self-directed learning, building problem-