A buddy of mine recently told me that a friend of his – a bit older than us, maybe in mid- to late 60s – claimed that the only real priority he has left is “to take care of his health and his friendships.” Wow. That really made me think. That statement has been on … Read more
A hop skip and a jump and I will turn 60-years old. Well, in a few months I will turn 59. But that is close enough. I have a lot more in my rear view mirror than in front of me, for sure. But it allows me to pause and look back a bit. What … Read more
It must have been sometime during the summer of 2017. I was driving south on the 5 Freeway through Camp Pendleton on my way to San Diego to visit a college friend I had not seen for years. I remember it was during the summer. Beyond that the exact details are blurry. But I remember … Read more
Struggle is the way. Difficulty is not a problem but the point. One struggles and one grows. It is an active process, not a passive one. One needs to wrestle with a thorny problem. School should be where one learns to do this. Cheating has always been a problem in school. The Pandemic and remote … Read more
I have always thought – and said out loud – that I did not really think someone like baseball player Shohei Ohtani or tennis superstar Carlos Alcaraz were really all that big a deal. So one can pitch and hit a baseball supremely well, and the other covers the tennis court like a gazelle and … Read more
Patience. It is such a small word. But there is a lot in it. Our relationship to time, and our ability to endure it, changes drastically across a lifetime. It seems like forever from your seventh to your eighth birthday. Time moves slowly. Everything is intense. Impatience is all. By the time one enters middle … Read more
Often a reader of this blog might remark that while one gains a good glimpse of what I might think about fatherhood, politics, literature, or whatever, one does not get a good up-close inspection of myself and my daily surroundings. Much is abstract and ephemeral, little is concrete or immediate. I will try to remedy … Read more
Way back on January 1, 1995 I sat down with my good friend Brent Burns at the Marine Room Tavern in Laguna Beach, California and we penned our resolutions for that new year. (Here is the document.) I hoped we might make this a tradition. We could hold each other accountable for trying to become … Read more
There are plenty of consolations for aging. But the physical decay of your body is not one of them. It is this simple: everytime I see a present day photo of my face, I am unhappy with what I see. And then when I see that same photo five years later, it looks a lot … Read more
What is more important? Having a career which is a good fit? Valuable work that pays well and which you enjoy? An engaging job? Professional success? Wealth and power? Or a happy marriage? A spouse with whom you get along? Fulfillment at home? Children and grandchildren? Hobbies and friends? It can seem like a choice: … Read more
So I just turned 57-years old. I wish I were 58. Or 61.5 years of age, more specifically. Speed up the years! Why? Because I could retire then. I am in the final full flush of my career: meshing decades of hard won experience while still being young enough to put in the exhausting work … Read more
I have been coaching high school tennis for four years now. I do this because my daughter was on the team, and I wanted her team experience to go well. So I became the coach. “If you want a job done well, then do it yourself,” I thought to myself. After all the isolation of … Read more
In his biography Open the tennis champion Andre Agassi said the following, “A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.” This is a way of saying that we respond more powerfully to a negative stimuli than to a … Read more
NOTE: A good tennis buddy Julio Cabral and I are both approaching retirement age as public school teachers. We are trying to help each other transition from the world of work to the mindset of the retired. I have done considerable research on this, and I know it can be difficult. Change, even positive and … Read more
Back in 2017 I was with my friend Chris Prewitt at the Indian Wells Tennis Tournament with our ten year old daughters. We had just entered the sprawling complex, and there were people everywhere. Among the throngs of spectators crowding around us, Chris warned our daughters the following: “If we for some reason get separated … Read more
There is the concept of what some job might – or should – be. There is the noble idea of a vocation – or a calling to do some job professionally and help make the world a better place. Through your life’s work you can contribute to the collective, rather than merely taking away from … Read more
“Daddy, she is a social media influencer! Wow! She has millions of followers!” In 4th grade my daughter told me this, making a person with millions of followers on social media out to look like the second coming of Jesus. A social media influencer! Wow. I was not impressed. My daughter made this Internet “celebrity” … Read more
I spend a lot of time looking at young people and sizing them up. My children and their friends, my students former and current – I get a good look at so many. And some of them struggle. Well, many of them struggle. Hell, all of them – all of us, young or not – … Read more
Is this blog of mine a diary of sorts? An online space where I can process what happens to me? A place to work out the psychic and emotional issues of my day? A sort of therapeutic tool? CBT in progress via prose? Sure. Is it a place where I can strive to make sense … Read more
Every year for one day I allow a Marine Corps recruiter to come talk to my high school seniors. I debrief my students the very next day about the presentation. I say to them, “Everything that guy said yesterday is true, but you should also keep this in mind…” I explain to them the other … Read more
I was sitting there reading the newspaper two days ago around 5:15 pm. The school day had ended, tennis practice had concluded, and at last I had a moment to myself. So I was grabbing a bite to eat and communing with the newspaper. And then I saw a former student of mine entering the … Read more
So last week I lost a tough doubles tennis match in a super tiebreaker. My partner and I were the better team on paper, but that does not always matter in sports. On any certain day, the lower ranked team can win. It just didn’t seem like our day last week. Our shots were a … Read more
Luckily it was only a ricochet, so it didn’t hit me with full force. But it stung, and I felt as if I had been kicked high up on my left thigh – like someone smacked me with a stick, very quickly but not deeply. I hopped around with my jaw dropped. “Ouch!” I was … Read more
So I received the announcement today that my blog received its 100,000th visitor. That is visitors to my blog, not my website. The number of visitors to all the pages of my site in the past 26 years would be a much larger number. But still. It gives me pause. On the one hand, if … Read more
Some ten years ago my father told me that his first wife – my mother – had confided in him that she very much regretted losing her temper and yelling at her young kids. My mom felt as if she had done damage to us by screaming. My father never repeated the story, but I … Read more
A few days ago I wrote an essay reflecting back on my older daughter’s 16th birthday. Then I read and reflected about an essay I wrote a few days after this daughter’s birth 16 years ago. Wow. How the time has passed. I won’t say the time passed quickly. There were hard years of childrearing, … Read more
It was approximately 3:17 pm when we arrived at Adolfo Camarillo High School with my boys high school tennis team. Our team arrived in two vans, with the name of our school on it; it was obvious who we were and why we were there. But the security guy at the guard checkpoint at the … Read more
Ah, the written word. How I love it. How I crave it. My brain drinks the words in. I remember having flunky post-college jobs where I would be doing some mindless-rote tasks, and I would be bored and seek out intellectual nourishment. I would work as a bartender at the Olive Garden restaurant, for example, … Read more
A journalist approached me last week and asked, “What is it you love about yourself?” I was taken a bit by surprise, as she pushed a microphone towards me for my response. “I don’t love anything about myself…” I stammered. Immediately I felt as if I had answered wrong. “Does anyone else say they love … Read more
One of my mantras is the following: ‘“It is a good year when you don’t have to see either a doctor or a lawyer.” Yesterday I dealt with both lawyers and doctors. Why did I break my rule? And in the same day? Let me explain. Firstly, I served my day of jury duty. I … Read more