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Condemned to Cooperate
One of several breakout sessions of cooperative leaders during an Open Space meeting at Hotel Montanna, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 2013
It was 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 26, 2013. About sixty of us were seated in a circle in a conference room at the Hotel Montana complex in Port-au-Prince. It was one of the conference rooms built after the main hotel was destroyed in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. Most were Haitian men, though a number of women were present as well.
The setting carried its own symbolism. Long associated with power and exclusivity, the Hotel Montana was now hosting a gathering designed to be open, participatory, and shared.
I had carefully prepared the room following Open Space practice. Large sheets of paper were posted on the walls, handwritten in Haitian Creole. They held the simple, demanding principles that guide this kind of work:
Whoever comes are the right people.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
When it’s over, it’s over.
Nearby were reminders of the Law of Two Feet, also known as the Law of Mobility, along with the phrase Passion bound by Responsibility. I had drawn, by hand, the image Open Space facilitators use to illustrate it: a butterfly and a bumblebee. Both move freely, guided by energy and purpose, neither obligated to remain where learning or contribution has ceased.
The circle itself was intentional. No podium. No hierarchy. No expert at the front of the room. Just people seated together, carrying experience, frustration, hope, and responsibility. Leaders of cooperatives from across Haiti had gathered to speak openly about their work and to learn from one another.
When it was time to begin, I handed the microphone to Saint Fort Dadaille, the representative of the Haitian government agency responsible for cooperatives. Poised and elderly, dressed in a suit, he walked into the center of the circle, looked slowly around the room, and paused.
“We are grateful that you have all come from around the country for this important gathering,” he began, speaking in Haitian Creole.
He explained that the day would be spent discussing the progress and challenges facing cooperatives in Haiti. Participants would propose topics themselves. Small groups would form. Notes would be taken and shared as part of a participatory evaluation.
Then he paused again.
“I want to begin with words that have been my mantra for decades,” he said. “We are condemned to cooperate.”
Nou kondane pou kowòpere.
He let the phrase hang in the air.
“With Haiti’s many challenges,” he continued, “we do not have a choice. If we wish to advance ourselves, we cannot work in isolation.”
He spoke of Haiti’s geography. Its history of brutality and exclusion. Environmental degradation, discrimination, and the barriers created by language and law. And then he returned to his central point.
“With all of this,” he said, “we do not have a choice.”
“We are condemned to cooperate.”
This was one of hundreds of Open Space meetings I facilitated over several decades in Haiti. As the day unfolded, participants proposed topics they felt mattered most, self-organized into small groups, and reported back with clarity and conviction.
As I write these words now, Haiti’s situation has grown increasingly precarious. The country faces a convergence of internal and external threats, and the future is deeply uncertain.
Yet while Haiti’s circumstances are unique, I have come to believe they also reflect something broader.
Haiti is not only a nation in crisis.
It is a mirror.
It reflects a world facing environmental collapse, political fragmentation, widening inequality, and a growing inability—or unwillingness—to cooperate across difference. Humanity, too, stands at a crossroads.
The statement is serious, even sobering.
And yet, if Haiti has taught me anything, it is this: collective work is often accompanied by joy. By laughter. By relationship.
Cooperation is not only a burden we must carry. It can also be a way of being human together.
Still, the truth remains as clear now as it was that day in Port-au-Prince.
We do not have a choice.
We are condemned to cooperate.
And that is why our moment is now.
What Now?
A Near-Death Moment and the Question That Refused to Let Go
“Grace is not a substitute for responsibility.”
— Dorothy Day
It was a normal Friday until it wasn’t.
It was Friday, October 14, 2016, at about 12:30 p.m. My coworker Reginald was driving our four-wheel-drive Nissan Patrol truck, and I was talking on my cell phone. Fridays are always busy at that hour in Haiti. School lets out early, and the streets quickly fill with students, parents, vendors, motorcycles, and traffic pushing in every direction at once.
We were driving through Pétion-Ville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. I was distracted, absorbed in the conversation, paying little attention to what was happening outside the passenger-side window.
We slowed at a crowded intersection. Then the truck jerked. The clutch was released too quickly, causing the engine to stall.
I remember thinking, What did Reginald just do?
Before the thought finished forming, he yelled, “Bese tèt ou!” (head down) and dropped down as low as he could. Instinctively, I pulled the phone away from my ear and turned toward the window.
A gun was pointed at my face, inches away.
I ducked.
The shots came immediately.
The glass exploded. The sound was sharp and concussive, louder than I could fully register in the moment. Bullets tore through the windshield and the passenger-side window, fired from more than one direction. Another man stood in front of the truck, slightly to the left, shooting toward the driver’s side. I caught a glimpse of him in the split second I was going down.
Our windows were tinted, common in Haiti for security reasons, and required special permission. A vehicle with tinted windows is often assumed to carry armed occupants, which likely explains why they fired so many rounds so quickly. If they hesitated, if they waited to see who was inside, they might be shot first. Their assumption was incorrect. No guns in our truck.
Earlier that day, I had been at the bank. This attack was a consequence.
After what felt like seven or eight shots, the gunfire stopped. An eerie stillness followed. My head was pressed down near the emergency brake, my body instinctively trying to disappear. That’s when I noticed blood dripping onto the console.
I asked Reginald, “ Ou pran bal ? ” Were you hit?
“Non.” Thank God he wasn’t.
It didn’t make sense. I didn’t feel pain. Why was I bleeding? I wondered if I was in shock. I stayed low, waiting, unsure what would happen next.
Then the passenger door opened.
A man stood over me, gun pointed directly at my face, shouting in Haitian Creole, “Ban m sak la ! Get manman ou!” Give me the sack! F**k you! His voice was thick with rage.
I thought about the bag. Inside was the thousand dollars I had just withdrawn to pay an Argentinian man who had spent a month training our team to make handmade paper from natural fibers. My passport. My laptop. My work documents. Receipts. Years of effort and identity compressed into one bag.
I remember thinking, I don’t want to give this up. Surely someone would intervene. The police. The UN. Another armed person. Surely this would end quickly.
Then another thought cut through the noise. Over the years, I had heard too many stories of people who were robbed and killed because they refused to give what was demanded.
You stupid idiot, I told myself. Give him the bag.
I pushed it out the door. The sound of my laptop hitting the asphalt made my stomach tighten. They grabbed the bag, jumped on their motorcycles, and sped away.
Slowly, cautiously, Reginald and I lifted our heads. The danger had passed. The world seemed frozen. People stood in every direction, staring. No one moved.
I stepped out of the car. My face was covered in blood. A bullet hadn’t struck me, but it had shattered the glass, sending fragments into my face and leaving shallow wounds that bled freely.
People watched in silence. No one rushed forward. Perhaps they were afraid. Perhaps they thought I had done something to deserve this. In Haiti, public violence is often assumed to have a personal backstory. Whatever they believed, they stood still.
Then a well-dressed, fit man, perhaps in his mid-forties, ran into the intersection.
“Come with me,” he said. “Let’s get the car off the street.”
He moved with calm authority. Once the vehicle was safely parked, he took us into his office directly across the intersection. His staff brought hot tea, a customary response in Haiti after something traumatic. They brought towels and washcloths and gently cleaned the blood from my face.
They called the police. The UN. The embassy. These people we didn’t know stepped in with loving care. The grace that just spared our lives was still with us.
As I sat there, another man entered the office slowly and looked at me for a long moment before sitting down.
“I watched everything from my office window,” he said. “I saw the gunmen fire multiple times at head level into your truck. I was sure whoever was inside was dead. Then I saw one of them open the passenger door with his gun raised, and I thought, If anyone is still alive, they are about to be killed.”
He paused.
“I can’t believe you’re sitting here,” he said. “It wasn’t your time. You have work to do.”
The businessman’s name was Patrice. We were in capable hands. He arranged to have our truck secured on his property and offered to drive us wherever we needed to go. He told me his vehicle was bulletproof and that I had nothing to worry about.
I told him I needed to pick up my two young children from school.
We returned to the busy streets, moving slowly among pedestrians, motorcycles, and cars. The school was only a short distance away. When we arrived, a staff member walked my children through the gate and helped them into the vehicle.
They were confused. Why were we in someone else’s SUV? Who was this man driving? Why did their father have cuts all over his face? They could sense that something frightening had happened.
I hugged them and tried to reassure them, explaining that something unexpected and scary had occurred, but that we were safe and everything was going to be all right.
We drove up the mountain toward home. Patrice pulled into the driveway of our home and guesthouse and walked with us up the steps to the front patio, where Merline met us. She immediately knew something was wrong.
We hugged. I shared what I could. We cried.
Patrice embraced us and told us to let him know if we needed anything. I will never forget how he came to our rescue at a moment when Reginald and I were so vulnerable.
That afternoon, holding my children and watching Merline’s tears, I felt an overwhelming gratitude I didn’t know how to contain. We cried because we were alive, because we had almost not been, and because the world around us carried wounds that rarely make headlines. I prayed for Reginald and me. I prayed for Patrice and his brother, Allen. I prayed for the men who fired into our truck, not to excuse what they had done, but because something in me could not stop seeing their humanity beneath the violence.
As the hours passed, the shock softened into something quieter. Relief settled in. I was still here. I would sit at my table again. I would hold my children again. And alongside that relief was a collective sorrow, because none of what had happened belonged to me alone. Patrice carried the memory of his wife’s kidnapping. My family had brushed up against a grief that almost became permanent. And somewhere not far away were two young men whose lives had likely been shaped by a hardship I can barely imagine.
Poverty is violent. It wounds the human spirit until violence begins to feel like a language.
As the day came to a close and the ordinary tried to return, I didn’t feel driven to explain what had happened or why I had been spared. I felt called to pay attention. A question remained, steady as a shadow, following me home and refusing to disappear:
What now?
Choose Life
A Near Ending That Became a Beginning
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver
Wooosh.
A bottle tore through the air inches from my face, missile-fast, then shattered somewhere behind me. A pickup truck roared past, three young men laughing, their empty bottle turned into a joke at a hitchhiker’s expense. They didn’t slow down. They didn’t look back. They disappeared into the Alaskan dusk.
I stood frozen on the shoulder of a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. It was August 1983. I was nineteen years old, six thousand miles into a hitchhiking journey that had begun in Hershey, Pennsylvania, wound through Los Angeles, and was now carrying me north toward Fairbanks.
The fear spiked and then drained just as quickly. I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t in danger anymore. But the adrenaline lingered, buzzing through my body, reminding me how close I’d come to not standing there at all.
I decided not to go any further that night.
The air was cool but gentle. Mountains rose in quiet silhouettes all around me. I walked a good distance from the road while there was still light, found a flat patch of ground, and rolled out my tarp and sleeping bag. No tent. I felt safe enough. I opened a tin of sardines with a bent spoon and ate slowly, staring up at the sky, replaying the moment.
Two inches the other way, I thought. Two inches, and none of this would exist for me.
Lying back in my sleeping bag, I watched darkness arrive late, the northern sky filling with stars brighter than any I’d known. I tried to imagine how long their light had traveled to reach my eyes, whether some of those stars even still existed. A speck on Earth. Earth, a speck in the universe. And somehow, here I was.
Why am I here?
Not in Alaska. On Earth.
Does life have meaning?
If so, what is mine?
This journey had made me acutely vulnerable. Nearly every day, sometimes for hours, I stood with my thumb out, trusting strangers to stop. At night, I slept under open skies, guessing where safety might be found. I’d left home with about three hundred dollars, no credit card, no phone. Why did the image of mountains inspire this kind of boldness? Why did movement feel necessary? What was I running from—or toward?
As I lay there, still shaken, another memory surfaced.
A year earlier, under a different starry sky, I had sat on a grassy hillside in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, listening to Tony Campolo speak to thousands of people gathered for an outdoor Christian festival. His booming voice carried humor and urgency in equal measure. At one point, he described a sociological study—at least, that’s how I remember it—in which people over ninety-five were asked what they would do differently if they could live their lives again.
Their answers, he said, fell into three themes.
They would have taken more time to reflect, to live consciously, appreciating their relationships with others and other treasures in their lives.
They would have taken more risks in pursuit of their dreams.
They would have invested more in building something that would outlive them and improve the lives of others.
I never read the study. I don’t know if it even existed. It didn’t matter. Those three regrets lodged themselves somewhere deep inside me. They followed me now, lying under the Alaskan sky, humming beneath the questions I couldn’t shake.
And then my thoughts drifted to something closer. Much closer.
Five weeks earlier.
I was lying on the concrete floor of my father’s garage. The car was running. The garage door was closed.
I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t angry. I was exhausted. Hollowed out by a weight I didn’t know how to name.
That weight had been building for years.
My grandfather—whom we all adored—had died suddenly of a heart attack when I was twelve, just as my parents’ marriage began to fracture in ways that would stretch on for years. My mother eventually moved in with her own mother, taking my three younger siblings with her. My older sister had already left home at fifteen, after years of conflict that were heart-wrenching for all of us. I stayed with my father. What had once been a noisy, imperfect, loving family became something divided and unstable, held together by obligation and strained communication.
I didn’t know what to do with the sadness, the anger, or the confusion. So I learned how to numb it.
From ninth grade on, drugs and alcohol became a way to manage pain I didn’t yet have language for. There were multiple brushes with the law—underage drinking, selling marijuana, repeated meetings with police and detectives. I kept working. I kept showing up. I kept functioning. And I kept getting lucky.
Had I been Black, or poor, or unknown to the authorities, I would certainly have been sent to a juvenile detention center. Instead, I was given chance after chance. I was protected by privilege I hadn’t earned and didn’t yet fully understand.
By the time I was seventeen and eighteen, I had settled into a strange balance. I had friends I loved, I held down two steady jobs at a time, and detailed cars on the side. I stayed out of trouble. I was in a serious relationship that was both grounding and volatile. I rode my 1966 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide across the country twice. Motion helped. Work helped. Distraction helped. None of it healed what was underneath.
When that relationship finally ended, one of the last things holding things together gave way.
I knew, intellectually, that I was fortunate. I knew others had it far worse. But emotionally, I felt empty. I couldn’t see a future worth moving toward. The pain felt endless, and I wanted it to stop.
I had a plan.
As the garage filled with exhaust and the air grew heavy, something unexpected happened. A sudden, vivid image broke through the fog: mountains. Vast, majestic, soul-stirring mountains like the ones I’d seen as a boy on a family trip out west, and again as a teenager crossing the country on my motorcycle.
The image grabbed me.
Go. Go see them.
It wasn’t a voice, exactly. More like a knowing. I had a couple hundred dollars. I knew how to travel cheaply. I had friends in Colorado who would take me in. A future—however uncertain—snapped back into view.
That moment—call it grace, instinct, or sheer stubborn will—saved me.
Within days, I was on the road. Rides came easily. Colorado in two days. California, not long after. In a friend’s place, I saw a poster of Mount Denali and felt the pull again. Alaska. Now. I packed my bag and stuck out my thumb.
Somewhere in Canada, a man picked me up and ended up driving with me for over a thousand miles. Along the way, we stopped at a commune delivering supplies. Families lived there together with their children, bound by shared responsibility and purpose, helping one another survive harsh winters. It struck me how much strength came from belonging, from choosing community over isolation.
Now, lying under the Alaskan sky, I realized I was living inside the very vision that had pulled me back from the edge.
And then the sky began to move.
Green and violet waves rippled across the darkness, dancing above the mountains. The aurora borealis. I sat up in my sleeping bag, stunned. The bottle. The truck. The near miss. All of it fell away. This light—this impossible beauty—was mine to witness.
I felt peace. Wonder. A quiet sense of power. Purpose, not yet defined, but unmistakably present.
There’s a reason I’m still here, I thought.
The world holds immense suffering. Cruelty. Injustice. Grief that breaks people open and leaves them searching for ways to numb the pain. I knew that intimately. But it also holds beauty. Healing. Possibility. That night, under moving light and ancient stars, I began to understand something demanding and straightforward:
We all carry power.
The question is whether we’ll pay attention when life asks us what we’re going to do with it.
Pay Attention
An excerpt from a book in progress, Our Moment Is Now
I grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a place so safe and orderly it sometimes felt shrink-wrapped. People called it The Sweetest Place on Earth, and in many ways, it lived up to the name. Streets were clean. Schools were well-resourced. Hospitals were modern and bright. Most families lived somewhere between modest and comfortable. Needs were met. Childhood unfolded predictably.
And yet, even there, something didn’t sit right.
No one I knew had guards, walls, or locks beyond the ordinary.
If there was deep poverty, it stayed mostly out of sight. Still, I caught glimpses. A few classmates came to school in dirty clothes, carrying an odor that marked them before they spoke. I remember how other kids teased them. I remember how that made my stomach tighten. I didn’t yet have language for injustice, but I felt its presence. Something was off. Something wasn’t fair.
Just twenty minutes away, in Harrisburg, I sometimes saw people sleeping on sidewalks. That troubled me deeply. I couldn’t understand how life could be so easy for some and so unforgiving for others. That confusion didn’t go away. It settled in quietly, like a question waiting for words.
My parents married young. My mother was still in high school when she became pregnant with my sister. They were in love and did what people then called “the proper thing.” They married, worked hard, and started a family that eventually grew to five children. I was number two.
Both of them had been raised in steady, church-going homes. They weren’t perfect, but they believed in showing up. In helping out. In making room. That belief shaped our household more than any rule ever could.
Our small hobby farm outside of Hershey became a kind of waystation. Sometimes people who were down on their luck stayed with us for a while. Friends came and went. So did animals. We had a goat, a burro, barn cats, 50 chickens, dogs, sheep, and sometimes ducks, as well as a half dozen cows. Plus, and a big garden that demanded attention whether we felt like giving it or not. On summer nights, the smell of cut grass and manure drifted through open windows, and kids from the neighborhood convened at our house for games like kick-the-can.
I still love watching the old home movies my grandfather filmed. He captured birthday cakes and picnics, church volleyball games, and potlucks. My parents appear young and vibrant, teasing each other while hanging laundry or loading the station wagon. Teenagers from church are everywhere, spilling into our house on Sunday evenings for youth group. Our home was over 120 years old, and my parents were gradually improving it, little by little. My dad would often joke about them killing 42 mice in traps the first night they slept in it. My sister Jodie and I were two and four years old when we first moved there. Jaynee, Jesse, and Justin came in the next five years. It was a two-story with small bedrooms. Downstairs normally felt full. Lots of activity. It was alive.
Looking back, I’m struck by how much generosity lived there despite limited means. We were living pretty close to paycheck to paycheck, but compassion seemed to be my parents’ default setting.
One of our regular family outings took us to a place most families avoided. On Sundays, we visited a halfway house for men recently released from prison. My parents called it “visiting friends.” We sat together, shared food, and listened to stories. As a child, I didn’t think of the men there as criminals. They were people who had made mistakes and were trying to begin again. They joked together and treated us like we mattered. They enjoyed entertaining us kids and making us laugh.
Those visits left an imprint. They taught me early that dignity isn’t earned; it’s extended. Or withheld. And that choice says more about the one who withholds it than the one who receives it.
When I was ten, our family opened its door again, this time to two strangers from the other side of the world. Chinh was twenty-three. His sister, Nhu, was twenty years old. They were Vietnamese refugees, survivors of a war that had dominated the news throughout my childhood.
I remember their arrival clearly. The hesitant smiles. Their several possessions in a plastic bag. They left their country with nothing. The unfamiliar aromas when they cooked. The government had asked families and churches, and other groups to sponsor refugees. My parents didn’t hesitate.
Chinh and Nhu became part of our household. We ate, worked, and played together. Through them, suffering ceased to be abstract. They told stories of poverty, loss, and terror. Of fleeing by boat. Of leaving family behind. I couldn’t fully grasp what they had endured, but I felt the weight of it. Their presence widened my world.
Those months and then years changed me. They planted seeds of empathy and responsibility that would continue to grow long after they moved on. Even then, I sensed something important: comfort carries obligation. Privilege isn’t a prize. It’s a call.
Faith ran quietly through all of this. We prayed before meals and before bed, but prayer also filled the spaces between. I learned to talk to God the way I talked to a friend. Thanking. Questioning. Sometimes arguing. That sense of companionship, of being accompanied even in uncertainty, has stayed with me ever since. But the mystery of it has grown even as a steady faith remains.
Hershey gave me security. But it was the contrast between sweetness and suffering that gave me direction. I didn’t yet know what to do with what I was seeing. I only knew I couldn’t unsee it.
Those early years taught me something essential, even if I couldn’t have put it into words at the time: before you can change anything, you have to pay attention. To people. To systems. To the quiet ways dignity is affirmed or denied. To the stories that don’t make headlines but shape lives all the same.
I carried those lessons forward without realizing it. They traveled with me into my teenage years and beyond, showing up as restlessness, curiosity, and a growing hunger for meaning. I didn’t yet have answers. I only had questions, and a sense that life was asking more of me than comfort alone could provide.
I was learning to pay attention.
Be Useful
An Invitation to a Larger WHY
A barn-raising in Lancaster County
A reflection on how the simple idea of “being useful” has influenced my life, my work in Haiti, and a growing invitation to serve in new ways
There’s a simple phrase that has stayed with me for decades, long before I ever saw it on the cover of a book:
Be useful.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger chose those words as the title of his latest book, and I heard him describe what he meant by them, it immediately resonated. Not because the idea was new to me, but because it echoed something I had been learning my whole life—that real fulfillment and success don’t come from self-absorption or personal optimization, but from moving beyond self-interest toward contribution and service.
I first encountered Arnold long before I understood any of that.
I was twelve years old when I started lifting weights and buying muscle magazines. My father encouraged it, but never pushed it. He helped me buy a weight set from Reading Barbell, contributing to the money I had saved. He also encouraged me to play sports, which became a meaningful part of my life for many years.
My father’s own upbringing shaped his perspective. Raised in Lancaster County by parents influenced by the Mennonite tradition, sports were viewed by his father as a form of entertainment—and therefore not something to pursue.
My dad went against the grain and played football in high school anyway, even though his father never came to the games.
While my father departed from that upbringing in many ways, some values remained firmly intact: hard work around the house, gardening, maintaining a small farm, building things, digging, putting up fences. I don’t remember him ever joining a gym. Physical labor wasn’t something to outsource if you were able to do it yourself. It was the most practical way to stay strong.
That ethic stayed with me.
I’ve only joined a fitness club a couple of times in my life, and each time was short-lived. Not out of opposition, but preference. I’ve usually opted for long-distance running (before my knees wouldn’t tolerate it), as well as calisthenics and some weights at home. I strive to embrace hard work when it comes to house maintenance and lawn/property work. Cleaning, I’ve discovered, is an excellent way to burn calories. Even today, my wife Merline and I do our own cleaning at our Airbnb as well as our home. As my kids will tell you, I take particular satisfaction in hand cleaning our ceramic tile floors. It’s my form of yoga.
Over the years, I’ve also been shaped by people who embodied usefulness in far deeper ways.
I recall once asking Dr. Rodrigue Mortel, a distinguished Haitian-American physician whom we deeply loved and admired, whether he had ever played golf. He looked at me as if the question itself missed the point.
“I don’t have time for that,” he said.
Dr. Mortel, a member of the prestigious Horatio Alger Association, devoted his life not only to medicine but also to creating educational opportunities in Haiti. His legacy wasn’t leisure. It was impact—an impact his wife and daughters continue today with creativity and determination.
For the past thirty-five years, I’ve experienced profound meaning and fulfillment devoting my life to the mission of helping Haitians change Haiti through education. It has been a privilege to support Merline and the all-women leadership team at the Children’s Academy & Learning Center as they carry out demanding, courageous, and deeply fruitful work. The progress being made by the children, staff, and families—even amid unimaginable hardship—continues to humble me, as does the generous and faithful support of our donors.
Nine years ago, Merline and I moved back to the United States after I was robbed violently and nearly killed. Over time, and especially as the world has felt increasingly fragile, something began stirring in me. Not a desire to abandon my commitment to Haiti, but a sense that I was being invited to grow my WHY—to be useful in additional ways.
That stirring has led to a season of listening, searching, and gaining clarity about how I might serve beyond, and in conjunction with, my role as Co-Director of Haiti Partners. This website, johnengle.com, reflects that unfolding.
It’s not a declaration of arrival. It’s an invitation.
An invitation to reflect on purpose, legacy, and what it means to live—and eventually die—well. An invitation to explore how our lives can be oriented less around accumulation and more around contribution.
If any part of this resonates with you, I invite you to browse the site. And if it feels right, you’re welcome to book an exploratory conversation with me.
After all, we’re all still learning what it means to be useful.
P.S. In honor of Arnold’s reminder to be useful, I’m writing this with a cigar in hand. Even some Amish in Lancaster County enjoy tobacco. Discipline and enjoyment, it turns out, don’t have to be enemies. That said, no alcohol for me tonight—I’m participating in Dry January.