A new day breaks. You rise, your head full of plans—the project(s) you’ll (hopefully) start, or (finally) finish: the new fitness routine that will (hopefully) get you into trim shape; that attic space you’ll (hopefully) clear up and reclaim for much-needed bookshelves; the invites you’ll send to a half-dozen good friends, setting a firm date (finally) for that informal drinks-and-chat get-together you’ve been talking about forever on Facebook. The morning’s sunny. The sky’s blue. It’s a day to savor and act!     

… By nightfall, you’re beating yourself up with all you had hoped to accomplish, but didn’t finish, or maybe didn’t even get to start. The water pipe in the basement broke and you spent the morning scrambling for a plumber. Then there was the incorrect medical bill that took ninety minutes to straighten out as you were bounced from one AI-powered bot to another—oh, for a real person to talk to! And when you started dinner, you realized you didn’t have the carrots the recipe required, so you took a quick run to the grocery, but that still devoured a half hour…

The day feels a failure. Like too many days perhaps. You woke up looking forward to the day. You fall asleep castigating yourself for not doing more.

We humans are very forward-looking creatures. Always making plans. Dreaming BIG. Certain we’re about to overcome those hurdles blocking our path. And just as easily shattered when those plans and dreams don’t materialize as expected. Trust me, I am writing about this because I know this struggle so well.   

Yes, it’s easy to look at all you haven’t done, but perhaps we might do better to pause regularly and consider everything we have accomplished.   

The Daily Check-Up

You planned to finish mulching the front and backs gardens today but you’ve used up the four bags of red cedar you bought last month, so you run out to the garden center to buy two more bags. Now, you don’t have the time to lay down the mulch. And it’s almost August!

You hoped to finish another chapter on the rough draft of your novel, but it turned out to involve more research than you expected, so by the time you did your googling, arranged your notes and jotted a rough outline, it was 3:30. Time to pick up the kids from school.

You were determined that today you would finally finish painting that dining room wall—the one that’s been sporting large swaths of mesh tape and joint compound since the carpenter repaired all those hairline cracks (“tired plaster” they call it—ah, the joys of an 1890s house!) …but that tooth that’s been signaling distress off and on the past two weeks? Today, distress turned to unignorable AGONY which led to an hour at the dentist, which led to an emergency root canal at the endodontist—an inconvenient half-hour drive from the dentist. Nothing got done.    

In each of these scenarios, you’re left feeling bummed. Nothing accomplished. But hold on a minute.

That’s not quite true.

In the case of your garden, you now have the mulch you need to control weeds, conserve ground moisture, prevent erosion, and—time saver!—reduce maintenance.

Regarding your novel, you can’t proceed on the writing until you do the research, and now you have! All systems go. That’s progress. And perhaps the research even inspired an idea for a new character, a wonderful, dastardly villainy-villain!

The plan to paint the dining room wall that was scrapped by the emergency root canal, yes that day is kaput. Over. But you can rest happy tonight knowing the tooth is taken care of—it won’t mess up tomorrow.

Gaining a Better Perspective: The Have-Done List 

We tend to set ourselves up for disappointment and distress by planning days that make no allowance for the frequent intrusions of real life. But life has always contained a large quantity of must-do-nows, can’t-avoid-any-longers, and oh crap! surprises. During the 1,500 years it took to build Stonehenge, surely there were numerous days when boggy weather put the kibosh on moving those gigantic Sarsen stones, via rolling logs, through the muck and mud.

Our dreams and projects must take into account the mundane and the unexpected. We do have to accept reality and go with the flow, but that doesn’t mean we have to drown in despair and frustration. 

Instead of focusing on what you didn’t accomplish on your wish list today, jot down—as you go—each thing you did achieve. A Have Done list. As with all projects, it’s the accrual that counts. That “tired plaster” repair I mentioned? That’s one from my own list. As I write, it’s a third-done (it actually involved three rooms, a hallway and a ceiling). It wasn’t a broken pipe or root canal that stopped me—temporarily. It was climate change. Painting in 95-degree weather, not advisable. But the temps are starting to cool now. I’ll soon be up on that step ladder, paintbrush in hand. Meanwhile, the world continues to spin. The sky hasn’t fallen in.

Tracking in real time the progress you make on each of your projects and goals sets you up for a sense of success and well-being at the annual reckoning.

The Annual Reckoning

This end-of-year review—and that year might run from June to June or September to September, whatever—is when you get a better sense of all you truly have accomplished despite the pesky disruptions of real life.

Remember that novel you were convinced would never get written? Now, the rough draft is long done and you’re well into the second revision. A final polish after that and you’re ready to write a synopsis and search for an agent. Or skip the agent and approach indie presses. Or self-publish. Or simply write another novel if that’s what makes you happy.  

Perhaps you updated and improved your resume this past year. Maybe started interviews for a job you hope will use more of your talents, challenge your creativity. You might even have found the perfect gig!

Possibly, you made all the arrangements for your dream trip and it’s about to happen—literally, you are going to circle the globe! New York to Italy where you’ll sail the canals of Venice in a gondola, visit the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and marvel at the art in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery before flying on to enjoy the beaches of Goa and the grandeur of the Taj Mahal in India. Then it’s off to Japan to see the shrines and temples of Kyoto and the Peace Memorial Park and Museum in Hiroshima, followed by a long weekend with old college friends in San Francisco before returning to the East Coast. You thought you’d never get it all put together—the flights, the accommodations—but you have. Bon vogage!

A year is a long time. Three-hundred and sixty-five days to make progress on those projects and dreams. That old trope—life is like a river, it just keeps moving—is true, so we must go with the flow. There’s really no deadline (other than the one nature finally imposes on us all). So, when you’re feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, put that distress on pause for a moment, step back, and consider all you have accomplished in life so far. 

The Tally of a Life So Far  

You artwork isn’t (yet) hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art or The National Gallery or The Louvre, but you’ve participated in dozens of local and regional shows, sold over a hundred paintings, and received some very positive reviews in the media.

You’ve taught first grade for a decade now, in which time more than 250 children learned to read and write because of your skill, dedication and patience. Thank you. America needs all the thoughtful, educated citizens it can get.  

You never had the time or money to get your law degree, but through your work as a paralegal for the ACLU, you’ve made vital contributions assisting attorneys in critical cases regarding voting rights, free speech and gender discrimination. You’ve helped to protect our constitutional rights and made life better for thousands, perhaps millions of your fellow human beings.

You haven’t (yet) found an agent for your novels, but literary magazines have grabbed up every short story you’ve submitted.

You raised a child, or two, or three. And given those children the belief that they are worth loving and the assurance that they are truly cherished. This is no small thing.

As I said upfront, we humans are a forward-looking bunch. Too often taking for granted all we’ve accomplished and focusing solely on what we haven’t yet achieved. But true perspective involves taking the long view. And those days when everything seems to conspire against your hopes and dreams? On those days, take a cue from songwriter/singer Jimmy Buffett: “Breathe in, breathe out, move on.”

Our memories are made up of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotional feel of a moment in time. And, of course, the presence—or absence—of people around us. A sunny day at a beach with a group of friends is a very different experience than a solo moonlit stroll along a deserted stretch of shoreline.

One of my most powerful—and enduring—memories takes me back to an evening more than fifty years ago. A sleepout on the shore of Lake Michigan on a warm July night at Girl Scout camp. Two counselors and thirty-some girls collecting wood and building a fire, roasting marshmallows and singing songs to the strumming of one of the counselor’s guitar, our faces rimmed in firelight, until we crawled into our sleeping bags, where I lay mesmerized by the hundreds of stars overhead, so many, many more than one can see in a city or even a small town, eventually drifting off to the rhythmic slap of the waves and the counselor’s song about a girl becoming a woman, a line from it—it’s given with pride, it’s given with joy—forever with me, etched in the memory of a summer’s evening, its hours among the most peaceful I’ve ever spent on the planet.  

I was fully present in the moment.

Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing

Fully present in the moment. Being where you are. When did we lose that? The question first arose for me at The National Gallery in the year after The Plague. The “natural” flow of art galleries up until then tended to be two or three people pausing before a painting, reading the posted info card about the painter/the subject/whether it was on loan or part of the gallery’s permanent collection, then taking some time to LOOK at the actual work. To consider the painting’s perspective and the artist’s technique—the colors, textures, shapes—the emotional impact of the whole. If the connection was powerful and the number of people waiting to view the painting not too pressing, one might linger a little longer, relish the brilliant golden light inviting us to take a seat beneath the twinkling stars in Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night.  

Our last several visits to The National Gallery and other art venues at home and abroad revealed a disturbing trend. Art appreciation has become photo accumulation.  Everyone rushing through, snapping pics with their cellphone of each painting and its accompanying card before dashing on to do the same with all the other paintings. They view the painting through their camera lens but never raise their eyes to the actual work. Two-to-three seconds per painting. No pausing to marvel at the rich depth of Van Gogh’s wheatfields or the heat generated by the intense reds and oranges of Degas’ Combing the Hair (La Coiffure). No moment given to the grief and the injustice, the brutality and heartbreak of Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Gray where the innocent, blind-folded 17-year-old queen of just nine days gropes the air to find the chopping block where she will be beheaded, guided by the Lieutenant of the Tower with much tenderness and sorrow, while her maids swoon, weeping, in the background scant minutes before this travesty is carried out. The best of art is meant to make us FEEL.

There are over 2,300 paintings in The National Gallery. It is not possible to view them all in one visit, or even several visits, just as it’s not possible to listen to all the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky in one evening. And to sample a few bars of each, flitting from one to the next, or more aptly in this case, to record a few bars of each on a cellphone, would be to miss them all. Their brilliance, their heartbreak and joy, their deathless beauty and power to move us, generation after generation.   

And I can 99.99% guarantee you, those zillion quickie snaps of artworks and the snippets of symphonies—they will never be viewed or listened to again. Life moves on. Be where you are.

Not Now, I’m Busy

Imagine a lovely summer’s day, sunny, a light breeze blowing. Eight friends—young women in their twenties—gathered around a table outdoors in the courtyard of a local bakery, drinking coffee and munching on delicious muffins and cookies. You’d expect the conversation to be flying fast and furious, punctuated by plenty of laughter.

But it wasn’t. Instead, everyone was busily engaged with their cellphones. Texting, texting, texting. In the half-hour Ed and I sat at the next table, none of these women spoke a word to the others. Or acknowledged each other’s presence in any way. I recalled all the afternoon and evening outings with my college friends—the chatter, the laughter, the feel-good camaraderie of those precious hours shared with the dozen or so women who made my college years fabulous and unforgettable. 

And it’s not only the young—those who have grown up with a cellphone in hand, as if it were a surgically-welded enhancement—that ignore the real people around them. Couples in their 40s, 50s, 60s out for a drink or dinner at a nice restaurant spend the evening on their phones! Are they indifferent to one another? Bored by each other?  Ed and I, having earned our living in the years since we first met by writing and editing—in other words, working from home—spend virtually all our days together, but we have never run out of conversation. There’s always something new—new in the world, new in our individual projects, a fresh idea, an amusing anecdote—to share, to talk over, to laugh about.

But, to my mind, the saddest example of cellphone addiction is to be found on playgrounds and in parks, in coffee shops and cafes, wherever parents take their young children to play or enjoy a snack. I’m not talking toddlers on cellphones. I’m talking parents! Parents scrolling and texting while their toddler begs, “Look at me, Mommy/Daddy!” Or crumples straw wrappers and doodles on napkins in silence.

I witness this sad phenomenon regularly in the café where I go to write several mornings a week. There’s a preschool center next door, so parents often pick up their kid and come to the coffee shop for a snack. They could be asking the child about their morning—what did they do? What games did they play? Did they learn any new songs or paint a picture? Did the teacher read them a story? But they almost never do. And by the time the child’s five, the parent and kid are both on phones.  

As a mom who relished walking with my kids, sharing meals at home or in restaurants with them, who cuddled up with them to read stories, who delighted in taking them to the local university’s horse barn with a bag of carrots to make the “horsies happy”, who got down on the floor and played with them daily—as a parent, I cannot imagine missing all that joy, that love, for what? Effing endless text sessions?  And as a former first-grade teacher, I know how deadly it is for a child’s social, emotional, and intellectual development to be deprived of that early parent-child interaction.                                                       

Our phones have become a shield, a way of avoiding each other. For our own sake and theirs, we must be with those we purport to love—our children, our partner, our friends. Human connection, face to face—if there’s anything that can save us, that can save this world, that’s it.

I Can’t Hear You—And I Don’t Want To

I live in a beautiful town that banks along a river. Hills and mountains rise majestically in the distance. On a clear summer’s day, one of my favorite bike rides crosses a disused rail bridge that carries me over the river, through rolling farm fields and woodland, the breeze lifting my hair, cooling my face on even the hottest days. It’s a feast for the senses. If one is paying attention. But it seems we have added yet another layer to those high-tech distractors that shut out the world around us: Earbuds.

In the past year, the number of people sporting those little white ear-stoppers has increased substantially. Well over half the people I see on the bike path are wearing buds, cycling in a world of their own. Some are jabbering on the phone, but many are silent, listening to Spotify perhaps or tuning into the latest podcast. Completely tuned out, they could be anywhere. No need to bike the scenic backroads or enjoy a drink at a café with friends or family. No need to stroll the streets of New York or hike the mountains of Vermont. The people I’ve encountered with earbuds seem to want this disconnect. Passing them on the bike path or downtown, they stare straight through everyone with never a smile or even a nod to acknowledge the existence of others. Their silence speaks loudly: Leave me alone!

But in public spaces—the bike path, crowded city streets, busy intersections—there is no alone. Tuning out the world could prove fatal, not just for those who sport earbuds, but for the innocent others their “deaf to the world” puts at risk. When passing people on the bike path, cyclists are supposed to call out “On your left!” so other cyclists and walkers know to stick close to the right side. But the earbud cyclists don’t hear the warning. They may drift left at the crucial moment and badly injure, even kill someone, including themselves.

The Only Moment We Ever Have

I’m always looking for hope in the world and during a recent bike ride, I was happy to observe several moms who were cycling with their young children, talking them through the ride in a warm, loving way. Teaching them how to travel the bike path safely and responding when the child pointed out various things that caught their attention—a flat rock placed as a settee along the path that someone had decorated with colorful painted cats. Parent and child were engaged with each other and the larger world. They were fully present in the moment.

And what is life but a succession of moments? Blink and the moment is gone. Go through the days with earbuds embedded, staring at a screen, and your life…is gone. The only moment we ever have is this one. Don’t miss it!

One of my great loves is the theatre, so when Ed and I visit London, I spend an entire weekend several months before, sifting through the city’s 241 theatres for “what’s on”: dramas, comedies, musicals and, always, “The Bard”—my beloved Shakespeare. Generally, this means a trip to the Globe Theatre (to which I donated £5 toward its reconstruction nearly fifty years ago when I was a poor student and £5 was a lot). This May, however, I was delighted to find not one but two of Will’s works on stage: Romeo & Juliet at the Globe and Richard II at the Bridge Theatre.

What’s All the Excitement About?

The Bridge Theatre always puts on great shows, but this production was on my absolutely-not-to-be-missed list for two reasons: 1) it was the only Shakespeare play I had never seen and 2) it had achieved a kind of notoriety in its day among Queen Elizabeth and her court for the scene where Henry Bolingbroke deposes King Richard II and has him imprisoned for life after Richard does a lot of bad stuff, including stealing Bolingbroke’s inheritance and banishing him from England. Bolingbroke then seizes the throne as King Henry IV.

The political intrigues and issues of the day are too numerous to go into here. Suffice it to say that there were many who would have been happy to see Elizabeth deposed, or worse. The queen, herself, was recorded as saying, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” The scene containing Richard II’s forced abdication was banned by the Master of the Revels—a royal official who acted as a censor in Elizabeth’s reign—and stricken from all printed copies.

If all this 16^th century intrigue seems like so much long-ago mumbo-jumbo, let me put it in contemporary terms: A movie written now that showed Elon Musk deposing Trump and seizing the Oval Office—how long do you think it would run? How many heads would roll?

I ordered the tix straight away.

The Clock Starts Ticking   

6:15 The Evening Begins in High Anticipation

I like to get to the theatre comfortably early, say 7:00 pm for a 7:30 curtain. Stroll up to the bar, order a drink, and relax in a setting often decorated with photos from past theatre “biggies”—Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, Harold Pinter. I calculated it would take us about 35 minutes to get from our flat to the Bridge Theatre—a simple three stops away on the Tube (London’s subway) with one transfer—and added 10 minutes for good measure. A 6:15 departure for a 7:00 arrival. No sweat. I could practically taste my gin-and-tonic!

What I hadn’t figured into the mix was the chaos we encountered at the Holborn tube station. A platform jam-packed with hundreds of people. Not just 100 or 200 people but more like 500 to 600. The entire Central line was in an uproar, running only a fraction of the usual trains. And the station was reporting major delays everywhere.

Okay, I know the London tube map pretty much like the back of my hand. Plan change: We would take the station’s other line, the Piccadilly, down two stops to Leicester Square, then transfer to the Northern line from there down to Waterloo and walk the south bank of the Thames to the theatre on the far side of London Bridge. It looked very doable—if we hustled.

6:45 As The Crow Flies NOT!

Getting off at Waterloo station, my plan was to walk along the Thames to The Globe Theatre—an unmissable half-way mark—then continue along to the Bridge Theatre, also fronting on the river. Roughly, a tad more than a mile as the crow flies according to my London AtoZ map. Should take us about 20 minutes. Twenty-five max. A quickie pre-theatre quaff still seemed possible.

Only the crow didn’t fly, not straight anyway. Leaving Waterloo station, I was shocked at all the construction work we encountered and its attendant paraphernalia—bulldozers, cranes, stacks of materials and a host of temporary structures to shelter the smaller machinery and tools—which in turn, had given rise to half a dozen food stands to feed the glut of workers. All this stuff obscured our view, making it impossible to see a clear way to the riverbank. It’s not easy to lose something as large as the Thames River but it took more than a few minutes to get our orientation straight. Okay, forget the pre-theatre drink.

We started off, squeezing through gaps wherever possible to follow the Thames. After three or four detours, and now in the waning light, it was difficult to be certain just exactly where we were. I paused every hundred yards or so to look at the “You Are Here” maps displayed on lamp posts. No mention of the Bridge Theatre on any of them. My American cellphone was useless. It doesn’t have internet overseas unless I’m in a shop or café with wifi. But I’m an optimist. Surely the Bridge Theatre would show up after we passed the Globe.

7:00 Where Oh Where Has My Theatre Gone?

Okay, we got to the Globe after forging our way through the crush of Friday night revelers on the riverbank beneath the Millennium Bridge—constructed in 2000 to celebrate, you guessed it, the Millenium!—and continued on through several shopping arcades until I spotted another “You Are Here” poster. Miracle of miracles, it featured the Bridge Theatre! Now all I had to do was find Tooley Street where the London Bridge tube station stood—the station we would have gotten off at ages ago if the mess with the Central Line had never happened. But it did happen, so now we had to wend our way through the streets until we found Tooley.

But oh, what a wending way was there, to paraphrase (quite liberally) the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Again, as the crow flies, it was less than half a mile. Again, the crow failed us. Created through the centuries—the first roads were actually laid down by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago—London streets have a tendency to twists and turns and whimsical name changes mid-road. After we returned to the States, I got the Google map directions for the jaunt from the Globe to the Bridge Theatre. They included eight left turns (one denoted as “sharp”), four right turns, and twelve street or place names with a lot of “continue onto” directives where a street bent or changed names. The last time we had gone to the Bridge Theatre was May 2022 to see Ralph Fiennes in “Straight Line Crazy.” I would have given anything for a straight line that evening, but alas…

7:15  Almost There But Not There        

As we drew closer to London Bridge, I continued checking my AtoZ in the near dark—where the hell was Tooley Street? After a few more twists and turns, we came to a wider road with shops and offices on both sides—a throughfare of sorts. I paused at every corner to check the buildings for the street name, something that is usually posted wherever two roads intersect. Five blocks along, I still had not encountered such a sign. During World War II, the Brits had removed the street-name signs in London to confuse the Germans should they invade—well, as a tactic, I can vouch for its success.

Ed, walking ten paces behind, informed me it was 7:20. Ten minutes to curtain.

At last, I saw a man dressed in some sort of city-employee type garb standing in a doorway. I asked him if this was Tooley Street. Yes, he said. We cranked up the pace. Several hundred yards on was the sign I’d been looking for—Potters Fields! A small side street, more like a walkway, Potters Fields led us through a large green space where we trailed several dozen people heading down to… the Bridge Theatre! O happy day! I hustled as I’ve seldom hustled—and I’m a fast walker under even the most relaxed circumstances. But, alas, we arrived—I kid you not—one minute after curtain, and so had to wait in a room adjacent to the auditorium, where we watched the play on a large screen until we could be seated after the first act. About 15 minutes in all.

If we had swum the mile down the Thames instead of walking, we could have covered the distance in 35 minutes, according to Google, but one does not wish to arrive at the theatre soaked to the bone.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Yes, Will Shakespeare had a line—or a play—for pretty much every human situation, and he often used his writing to address the perilous times he lived in. The harassment and murder of Catholics, the torture and imprisonment of those who aided them, the machinations of the queen’s scheming—and greedy—privy council, the quickie trials that mostly favored the prosecution, and the Bubonic Plague.   

We in America face a daunting number of our own challenges at present, those of us who champion democracy and the Constitution, who believe all peoples, whatever their skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity deserve respect, healthcare, housing, food, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and the freedom to speak their minds. In a nation of such immense wealth—albeit much of it hoarded by the greedy few—anything less is an abomination.

But if we persist. And persist. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, demand something better from our elected leaders—and elect different, better leaders—we just might make it.

Ed and I agreed that Richard II was worth the hassles and frustration. As great as Shakespeare is, though, how much more precious and worth the effort is our democracy?

Well, as I’m off on another trip to London, I’m leaving you with a post penned after my trip two years ago to that wonderful city. And a very salient post it is. A post about those who bravely fought for freedom in the face of fascism. Who put themselves at risk to save the lives of their fellow human beings. I found their stories incredibly uplifting. I hope you will, too.

During my recent trip to London, I saw a new play, Glory Ride, about a remarkable Italian cyclist, Gino Bartali, two-time winner of the Tour de France. But it wasn’t Bartali’s athletic achievements that made him remarkable. Or worthy of the tribute this play bestows. It was something far more significant. Courage. Bartali cycled thousands of miles across his native Italy during World War II, smuggling falsified ID documents that enabled Jews and other persecuted peoples to flee the country, escaping certain death at the hands of the Nazis.

Courage. Google’s English Dictionary defines it as the ability to do something that frightens one. We celebrate those who can summon such bravery, who literally lay their life on the line for their principles. And wonder if we would come up to the mark in the face of such a daunting challenge.

Courage. One stands at the crossroads at a moment in time, without any assurance of the outcome, and commits to this: Do or die. In those fleeting minutes, when a decision must be made, what factors determine the path we will take?

Because We Possess The Ability

Gino Bartali, a native Florentine, won his first Tour de France in 1938, the year Italian dictator Benito Mussolini began to enforce antisemitic legislation based on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. When Italy entered World War II on the side of the Fascists in 1940, Bartali was called up to serve, but an irregular heartbeat saved him from combat duty. Instead, he served as an army messenger, bicycling across Italy to deliver military missives. This not only allowed him to continue training and racing, it made him the ideal candidate to carry secret documents that would save hundreds of lives, the majority of them children.  

The Cardinal of Tuscany, Elia Dalla Costa, approached Bartali in 1943. The Jewish families and children he was hiding in various Franciscan convents needed forged travel papers to escape. His friend, Giorgio Nissim, a Jewish accountant, could produce the documents, but he needed photographs of the fugitives. Could Bartali regularly bike to Assisi, under the guise of training, to collect the photos, bring them back to Nissim, then deliver the finished docs to the escapees?

Now, having won the Tour de France, Bartali was a beloved son of the Italian people, but it had not escaped the authorities’ notice that he was no fan of Mussolini or Hitler. German troops were not anxious to incur the riots his arrest would arouse, but they were keeping a close eye on him. And the cardinal’s request would bring certain death were Bartali’s real mission discovered.

In the play, Bartali has his moment of wishing that the cup might pass from him, that he be spared this choice. We cannot know what he actually experienced, but he was a healthy 29-year-old, recently married with, as they say, everything to live for. Still, he understood the situation: Many innocent people would be savagely murdered without his help. So, he figured out a way to hide the photos, the forged ID cards, the exit docs inside the frame of his bike. And off he rode. Day after day.

In July 1944, disaster struck as the organization the Jewish accountant Nissim worked for was rounded up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Only Nissim escaped arrest. He immediately went to work rebuilding the network. Soon after, Bartali himself was hauled in by the Germans. Why was Bartali riding all over Italy? They demanded. The war had cancelled virtually all cycling races, so what exactly was he training for? Why should he not be killed here and now?

Bartali admitted nothing. Not the photos or the forged travel docs. Not the dozens of Jews he’d driven to freedom in the Swiss Alps, stowed away in a secret compartment of the small wagon he claimed to pull for “strength training.” Nor the Jewish family—old friends—he was hiding in his cellar.

We will never know whether his silence would have bought him more time or been the last straw that prompted some Nazi officer to pull the trigger then and there, because that day, one of the men among Bartali’s interrogators was his former army commander. They had been friends of a sort during Bartali’s service and the man convinced the Nazis that the cyclist was innocent.

Bartali would go on to save some 800 lives during the war and win a second Tour de France (1948) before dying peacefully at age 85.

Because We Are In The Right Place

When Miep Gies set up an interview with Otto Frank for a position in the company he managed, she had no idea what the job would one day ask of her.  

It was 1933, and Frank himself had just moved to Amsterdam from Germany to run the new Dutch arm of Opekta, a pectin and spice company. Adolf Hitler had come to power, the Nazi movement was growing rapidly, and Frank, a Jew, desperately wanted to get his family out of their native country, a goal he realized the following year when his wife and two daughters, Margot and Anne, joined him in the Dutch capital.

For five years, the plan worked, but then World War II exploded and eight months later the Germans invaded the Netherlands. They began rounding up Dutch Jews and shipping them to Nazi concentration camps. Though Miep was not Jewish, the Nazis took her passport after she refused to join the Nazi women’s association, and she was told she would be deported back to her native Austria (which had been annexed by Germany in 1938.) Determined to remain in the Netherlands, Gies and her Dutch lover, Jan, decided to marry so she would be granted Dutch citizenship. They were wed in July 1941.

It seemed disaster had been averted. Until the following June, when papers arrived for Margot Frank, Anne’s sister, ordering her to report for forced labor in Germany. To save their elder daughter, the Frank family, along with the family of Otto’s business associate and a local dentist—all Jews—hid themselves in an attic apartment adjacent to the Opekta operation. Their survival would now depend on help from others who would also risk arrest—and worse—if discovered.

What could Miep do? Otto Frank had been good to her. They had been neighbors, too, before the Franks were forced to hide. And she hated everything the Nazis stood for. She was scared, but everyone was scared. She and Jan, along with three other Opekta employees put their own lives on the line, smuggling food and other supplies to the secret apartment. For the next two years, Miep made multiple shopping trips daily, sourcing food from different places, delivering her supplies only after the Opekta workers had left for the day—not everyone was unsympathetic to the Nazis or willing to risk their lives. As the months became a year, then two years, the tension must have been exhausting, but Miep never wavered.

And then the hammer fell. On August 4, 1944, a Gestapo officer stormed into Miep’s office, waving a gun. Someone had tipped him off about the Jews hiding in the apartment. The Franks and their friends had been arrested. The officer now arrested Miep and two of her co-workers who had been assisting the family. Miep recognized the officer’s accent—he was Viennese. When she told him she, too, had been born in Vienna, he took pity on her and let her go. It was a one in a million chance, but it saved her from prison and the labor camps.

As soon as the Gestapo left, Miep rushed to the Frank’s apartment to rescue Anne’s diaries—the ones Miep knew she had been keeping throughout their confinement. The Franks were sent to Auschwitz. Later, Margot and Anne would be sent on to Bergen-Belsen. The only one to survive the war was Otto Frank when Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 by Soviet soldiers. On his return to Amsterdam, Miep gave him his daughter’s writings. These would become the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, a book that would be translated into more than 70 languages and sell over 30 million copies. It remains one of the most widely-read non-fiction books in the world.

Because There is No Other Choice

As noted up top, courage is about acting when the stakes are high but the outcome of our effort—at great personal risk—uncertain. Will we be able to change anything about the situation, or are we potentially sacrificing ourselves for nothing when we might have escaped the ordeal altogether? But let’s ratchet up the stakes another notch: What if there is no possible escape, only a temporary postponement of the inevitable if we don’t find the courage to act?     

That’s the question Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov faced on May 4, 1986, just days after one of the four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing radioactive fallout 400 times more deadly than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. Two of the plant’s workers died instantly. Another 28 would succumb from acute radiation syndrome by month’s end, and 350,000 people from the surrounding area had to be evacuated.   

Within six hours of the explosion, all the fires had been extinguished. Everything seemed under control, the damage contained. But then it was discovered that the water firefighters had pumped into the reactor had also flooded the basement beneath. That water was now radioactive. And the Unit 4 reactor was continuing to melt down, burning its way through the concrete slab that divided it from that radioactive water. If the melting reactor came into contact with the water, the resulting explosion would wipe much of Europe off the map for the next half-million years. The stakes don’t get much higher than that. Nor does the risk.

The only hope was to find the valves in the flooded basement and manually turn them off, thus draining the toxic pool of water beneath the reactor before the concrete slab was breached. Ananenko, Bespalov, and Baranov did not know what they would find in the basement, the extent of the damage, or whether their efforts could affect the outcome, but dressed in wetsuits, wearing respirators, and carrying flashlights, down they went, with assurances their families would be looked after if they perished. It was not reassuring.

The water was not deep, but the basement was a dark, twisting maze of pipes and valves. Seconds stretched to minutes—each minute bringing the molten reactor core closer to burning through the slab. Where was it—this one valve that would prevent total disaster if they could only find it in time?

Well, obviously, they did find it. Turned it off. Saved a significant portion of the world. And all three lived to tell the tale. In recent years, Ananenko, asked to recall the moment, has tended to downplay the heroics of what they did. We were doing our job, he has said.

In my book, that’s still courage.     

Because We Can No Longer Remain Silent

Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan in 1997. When she was ten, the Taliban seized power in her section of the country. By 2009, they had outlawed education for females and blown up more than a hundred girls’ schools to make their point. Malala, who had dreamed of becoming a doctor, was furious. Her father, Ziaudin, empathized with his daughter’s anger at this huge injustice. As a teacher, he had founded a co-educational school. It was his vision that every woman who wanted an education should have one. He deplored illiteracy. Hated the idea that women should be hidden from the public eye, trapped at home to cook and clean for their brothers, fathers and, eventually, husbands. He wanted more, much more, for Malala.

“Speak out,” Ziaudin told his daughter. So Malala began taking her crusade to the people. “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education,” she declared in 2008, during a speech to the local press club in Peshawar. The newspapers and TV stations ate it up. Soon after, BBC Urdu, a digital TV station covering India and Pakistan, came looking for a school-age girl to blog anonymously about her life under the Taliban. Their Peshawar correspondent got in touch with one of the local teachers—Malala’s dad, Ziauddin. Did he know any female students who would agree to be their blogger? Ziauddin asked around, but the girls’ families were fearful. Too risky, they said. And that was how Malala began blogging for BBC Urdu. She wrote notes under the pseudonym Gul Makai and gave them to a BBC reporter to post. As she penned her first post in January 2009, her school has just been forcibly shut down:    

I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 out of 27 pupils attended the class… My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.

It was an amazingly courageous act for a girl still shy of her twelfth birthday, but it was just the beginning of Malala’s public campaign. The year 2009 saw the Pakistan Armed Forces wage a protracted battle to drive out the Taliban. Spring became summer as the fighting continued. Many local people had fled the area, but Malala and her family remained. She became a peer educator for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting’s “Open Minds Pakistan” youth program, working with local students to help them engage in thoughtful discussion, via journalism, discourse and public debate, on the issues they faced. That same summer, a New York Times’ correspondent, Adam B. Ellick, made a documentary, Class Dismissed, about Malala’s life and work. Her public profile mushroomed. No more hiding behind a pseudonym. Now, Malala gave interviews in print and on TV. Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and she was awarded Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize.

The Taliban, suppressed but not eradicated, watched in fury from the sidelines. Lessons of History #1: Armies may be defeated (for a time), but ideas do not die. Just as there are those who will always champion democracy and a just world for all people, there are those who will always promote fascism and a fierce tribalism. On October 9, 2012, fifteen-year-old Malala was riding the bus on her way home from school when a member of the Taliban forced his way onto the vehicle and shot her in the head. She was airlifted to a hospital in Peshawar, then moved to an intensive care unit in Birmingham, England for surgery. For a while, it was touch and go as to whether she would survive, but Malala pulled through.

The attempt on her life brought an immediate and global wave of support for her and condemnation of the Taliban. Some two million people signed a petition, leading to the ratification of Pakistan’s first Right to Education Bill. The Taliban threatened a second assassination attempt to “finish the job”, but Malala was not deterred. Nine months after the shooting, she gave a speech before the United Nations urging world leaders to champion the rights of women, especially their right to an education. She and her father launched the Malala Fund, an international non-profit org to fight for this goal. In 2014, Malala became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. A year later, the Malala Fund opened a school in Lebanon for Syrian refugee girls ages 14-18.  

Malala finished high school in England and went on to earn a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, but she has not forgotten the millions of girls around the globe who are prevented from making their own choices and determining the course of their lives. She continues to speak out for their rights.    

Because It Is The Right Thing To Do

All the heroes in this account were born “ordinary” people. Even Gino Bartali, who gained renown as a cyclist, was born a poor man’s son and worked the fields alongside his family. What they did possess in common was an unshakeable sense of right and wrong—what is fair, what is just—and the determination to act on their beliefs. That is what made them extraordinary.

One stands at the crossroads at a moment in time, without any assurance of the outcome or guarantees for their personal safety, and commits to this: Do or die. Leaving unspoken the most pressing question: If not me, then who?

  

Forty years ago, when I was a young twenty-something, I wrote a poem that began with the question: What motivates one man to build a bomb while another plants a garden?

The question was not meant to isolate a gender. Man could just as easily have been person. Nor was it confined to the activities of weapons-making and horticulture. I might have asked what motivates one person to start a private equity firm that systematically destroys the livelihood of tens of thousands of workers, while another person creates a non-profit charity that has fed hundreds of millions of people in crisis worldwide?

Greed vs. Generosity

In this case, the first person is Mitt Romney (former Utah senator and one-time presidential candidate who lost to Obama in 2012), co-founder and former CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought up companies in trouble for cheap, in deals that then loaded up those companies with more debt, resulting in many of the businesses being stripped down for parts, and the assets sold off at a profit—a profit for Bain—not infrequently leaving workers without jobs, healthcare coverage, or the pension funds they’d earned, as Romney and his partners reaped millions.

The second person, the “gardener”, is José Andrés, born in Spain where he trained as a chef before coming to America at the age of 21. Soon after settling in Washington, DC, Andrés began volunteering at DC Central Kitchen, an org whose mission states: We believe that hunger is a symptom of the deeper problem of poverty, and that food is our chosen tool for changing individual lives while addressing systemic failures. Andrés credits DC Central Kitchen with inspiring him to do philanthropy on a BIG scale. In 2010, he started World Central Kitchen in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Haiti, bringing in supplies and making huge vats of food for the many people who had lost everything in the disaster. That was Andrés’s first foray into charitable work on a global scale but not his last. WCK has kept right on feeding hungry, destitute millions around the world in areas decimated by natural disaster or war for fifteen years. Last year, alone, Andrés and company provided more than 109 million meals in 20 countries. 

Destroying vs. Healing

I could also have asked:

What motivates the CEOs of Big Oil to continue exploiting Earth’s fossil fuels, knowing from their own research, from their own scientists, that climate change is real and that the continued burning of these fuels will cause—is causing—severe damage to the planet? To then bury that research and create a counternarrative, a wildly dangerous lie, to confuse people and block climate action by Congress…      

While Alaskan paramedic-turned-nurse Teresa Gray and her team of licensed medical volunteers travel the globe to provide free medical care to victims of natural disasters and political upheavals. Mobile Medics International, as Gray’s nonprofit is called, even went to Romania to treat some of the 4.6 million Ukrainian war refugees forced to flee their homes in what the United Nations has called “the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II.”

But poetry demands an economy of words, a concise symbolic representation of a larger concept: evil versus good, greed versus generosity, a disregard for those who suffer versus a desire to work for the common welfare.       

Four Traits of the Kindhearted

So, the real question my poem asks could be posed thus: What motivates one person to be grasping and greedy, heedless of who they hurt or how, while another person seeks to alleviate suffering wherever and to whomever it occurs? From observation and experience, I believe the person who feels no need to crush others, no need to “outdo” them in wealth or power, who is generous with their time, resources, and talents—I believe that person possesses four key certainties or traits:    

1. They know what is enough. That if you have a safe place to live, three square meals a day, access to medical care, and some income, you have enough.
2. They know what truly matters. Life matters. People, the health of the planet—its oceans, forests, lakes, rivers, and all its living creatures. These are what matter, not the money or the power to rape the planet and crush others.
3. They know the real source of joy. Family, friends, neighbors, community.
4. They know they are enough. They don’t need to provoke envy—look at me!—or diminish others to make themselves appear more powerful, more important.

In gathering examples of generosity and avarice, I came across a definition of greed and its causes I believe hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head: Greed is the desire to have everything for yourself and to prevent others from having a fair share. And just below that: Causes of greed include egocentrism, insecurity, and individualism.

Yep, that about sums it up, but it begs the question: How do we, as individuals, grow up to be the destroyer or the nurturer? Are we hard-wired from Day 1 to be grasping or generous? It’s a question psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in, and as brain research has advanced in the past decade or so, we are starting to get some answers.

When All Is Said And Done

In researching that question, I waded through about a zillion pages of findings on the subject—for example, The Neuroscience of Generosity: Synchronization of specific brain regions predicts generous behavior in monkeys. This Yale University study shows the marked suppression of neural synchronicity between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex in monkeys when they engage in selfish and antisocial behavior. Generous behavior occurs when these same regions of the brain show synchronization. Reflecting on the findings, senior author and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Yale, Steve Chang, observed: “We all know there are individual differences in levels of generosity. Maybe Scrooge did not have high levels of synchrony after all.”

And this insightful tidbit from the study, A neural perspective on when and why trait greed comes at the expense of others, where co-authors Patrick Mussel and Johannes Hewig write: “Here, we show that trait greed predicts selfish economic decisions that come at the expense of others in a resource dilemma. This effect was amplified [my emphasis] when individuals strived for obtaining real money, as compared to points, and when their revenue was at the expense of another person, as compared to a computer.” 

It’s fascinating stuff, but at the risk of running to thousands of words here, I will close this post with two observations I believe get to the heart or, rather, the heartlessness of the matter:

#1 Big Oil knows what fossil fuels are doing to the planet, the threat they pose to all living creatures. They simply don’t care.

#2 I believe Dr. Seuss [Theodor Geisel], in his beloved children’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, nailed the root of the problem in words any five-year-old could understand regarding why the Grinch hated Christmas and all the happy revelers down in Whoville: 

“It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”

Thank you, Dr. Seuss, for the answer to my poem.