Monthly Archives: June 2025

An Uncomfortable Truth

Posted on June 27, 2025 | 5 comments

I published an article in The Smart Set in early 2024 titled, To Binge or Not to Binge: That Is the Question, and my friend, Sandi, responded by suggesting a couple of books by Michael Easter. Not wanting to binge (ha! not really, I have no excuse), I waited a year before finally accepting her excellent advice and recently finished, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. Now, I wish I would have read it thirty years ago (but since he published it in 2021, I can’t really beat myself up).

The opening lines inside the dust jacket frame the question that Easter seeks to answer: “In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many of our most urgent physical and mental health issues?”

I hate to spoil it for you, but the answer according to the author’s research is Yes. In the long arc of human history, no generation has had more tools in the Comfortable Toolkit than ours — and yet we don’t seem to be better off for it.

So, what to do? How do we live balancing a natural desire for (and immense pressure to experience) constant comfort with a realization that this is not in our best interest? Well, if you are open to further spoiling, Easter intersperses five practical themes along the way:

  1. Rule one: Make it really hard. Rule two: Don’t die.
  2. Rediscover boredom. Ideally outside. For minutes, hours, and days.
  3. Feel hunger.
  4. Think about your death every day.
  5. Carry the load.

I’ll make you work for it and read the actual book to get all the good stuff about each suggestion, but today I will share what is bouncing around my head and heart about each one:

MAKE IT REALLY HARD. DON’T DIE: I prefer the easy/fast/pleasant way. Like Goldilocks, I want everything “juuuust right.” From this moment on, I will remind myself that nothing worthwhile comes easy and choose to make “hard” a habit. Attempt things that scare me. Not succumb to cowardice. Embrace oppressive heat. Experience bitter cold. Test my limits. Chase the impossible. I want to keep at least one (non-fatal but crazy-challenging) life goal in the hopper at all times.

REDISCOVER BOREDOM. IDEALLY OUTSIDE. FOR MINUTES, HOURS, AND DAYS. I prefer entertainment. I like to keep busy. From this moment on, although the smartphone, laptop, and television are necessary evils in my world, I will learn to accept that necessary is the adjective and evil is the noun. I will turn the television off. Leave my phone in another room. Spend more time outside. Spend more time in silence. Go for long walks. Practice a Sabbath. I want to incorporate intentional boredom into my daily, weekly, and annual routines.

FEEL HUNGER. I prefer not hurting. I like the feeling of satisfaction. From this moment on, I will remember that there is also a positive definition for being “hungry.” I will grasp the difference between want and need. Learn to wait. Avoid the unnecessary snack. Practice portion control. Refuse the impulse purchase. Do without. I want to master the ability to feel hunger without resorting to instant gratification.

THINK ABOUT YOUR DEATH EVERY DAY. I prefer life over death. I like to revel in the illusion that I can emerge from all things unscathed. From this moment on, I will remember that I am a speck in a vast universe and not the center of it. I will acknowledge my mortality. Value each and every day. Not waste time. Live with intention. Worry less. Smile more. I want to (finally) learn how to appreciate and live in the present moment.

CARRY THE LOAD. I prefer traveling light. I avoid walking with a heavy load. From this moment on, I will emphasize getting strong. I will no longer make excuses to avoid strength training. I will challenge neglected muscles. Embrace pain. Experience soreness. Overcome weakness. Do my part. I want to be the best version of myself so that I can pull my weight.

I need to face the uncomfortable truth that being uncomfortable is necessary for a healthy life and that avoiding discomfort is, in fact, counterproductive. Accepting that truth will not be easy, but it will be worth it.

As Albert Camus once said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.”

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Lunch in Bismarck, North Dakota

Posted on June 14, 2025 | 5 comments
Sitting on a cliffside bench on the Maah Daah Hey Trail overlooking the Little Missouri River and the North Dakota Badlands

I am never short on plans and ideas, so when my wife mentioned that our youngest daughter invited her to fly to Europe to hike the last seventy miles of the famed Camino de Santiago with her this summer, I considered various options for my own solo vacation. Several came to mind, and when I asked my wife which sounded least interesting to her, she chose the road trip through North Dakota and into Eastern Montana. So that became my summer vacation. Jody wasn’t sad to miss out.

If you wonder, a road trip across North Dakota and into Eastern Montana allowed me to cover states number forty-four and forty-five on my bingo card, and it also provided the opportunity to add a few epic runs (and photos) to my growing collection, which included the Lake Wobegon Trail (Minnesota), Maah Daah Hey Trail (North Dakota), and Makoshika State Park (Montana). Adding states and running trails were the reasons I had the trip in the hopper.

But it turned out to provide much more.

It also introduced me to the North Dakota Badlands, which is a giant miss for globetrotters unaware of such a breathtaking place. And I discovered the Medora Musical, an outdoor production that is both fun (e.g., wonderfully talented performers in a spectacular setting) and strange (e.g., cheesy mascots and regular voice-overs from the deceased creators of the show sixty years ago) and simply too much to truly put into words. And it led me through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where I encountered majestic bison wandering down the highway, a zillion adorable (maybe?) little chirping prairie dogs, and stunning wild horses posing on hillside pedestals.

I crossed the Mississippi River, the Missouri River, and the Yellowstone River. And I stayed in sketchy hotels and dined in country restaurants and ate raspberry sorbet in front of a tiny new ice cream place that can never make enough money to survive even though I tipped well. It was my own version of a special two-thousand mile roundtrip.

It also provided a moment far less magnificent but much more meaningful.

On the first leg of my journey home, I stopped for lunch at a Chick-fil-A in Bismarck, North Dakota. Other than the chicken, of course, there is nothing very special about stopping for lunch at a Chick-fil-A in Bismarck, North Dakota. But as I sat there alone in a crowded restaurant, I had an unexpected personal moment. For some reason, I thought of little me growing up in Arkansas, who even with quite the imagination never pictured that I would someday be eating a fast food lunch in Bismarck, North Dakota. I’m not sure I can adequately describe how that realization struck me.

I get that you might find it sad, this man in his mid-fifties eating his grilled chicken tenders alone. Others there probably felt that way about it, too. I, on the other hand, found it deeply satisfying. Of all my own personal critiques of my life, one of my favorite parts is the large number of unexpected places that my journey has led. That was the sweet thought that occurred to me there: Who would have thought that I would ever be in that place at that moment? I know that I didn’t, and that is exactly what made it special.

I don’t know, maybe that’s just a definition of wanderlust. Regardless, that moment made the entire trip worthwhile.

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Portfolio in Pictures

Posted on June 2, 2025 | 6 comments

I saw Doc Hollywood in the movie theater way back in 1991, but it stuck with me over the years. In fact, I have repeated its storyline many times now, but it wasn’t until a year or so ago that my Malibu buddy, Dillon, recognized that it is basically the same storyline as the 2006 Disney Pixar movie, Cars. Must be a pretty good yarn to generate two popular movies.

I share that storyline often because a particular scene generated a personal tradition that I maintain on the back of my office door. In the original movie, the young arrogant doctor arrived at the embarrassing epiphany that the old crotchety doctor knows much more than he suspected. It was a hard and surprising lesson. Later, after learning that truth, the wise old doctor opens an antique armoire in his office to show pictures of the hundreds of babies that he had delivered over the years in that small town that were pasted inside that piece of furniture. The old doctor explained, “Well, this is my portfolio.”

For good reason, although I don’t remember the specific occasion, I remembered that scene during the 2012-2013 academic year, my second working in higher education, and my first in a major administrative role. It occurred to me then that my personal portfolio — what truly matters — would be comprised of each student that I have the honor to serve and see grow into their respective futures.

At the end of that academic year, I made a poster of a collage of pictures taken with students over the course of that year together. And in a sort of homage to Dr. Aurelius Hogue in Doc Hollywood, in place of an antique armoire, I taped my poster to the back of my office door. I told myself that I would look at it from time to time and remember what truly mattered.

I have looked at it more times than I can count, and I now have eleven additional posters taped to the back of my office door for each of the years that followed. Twelve posters for twelve years at three institutions, all filled with precious people and special memories. And I just received my thirteenth in the mail from my first year at Ripon College. If all goes as planned, there are many more to come.

Old Dr. Hogue told young Dr. Stone (aka Doc Hollywood) during his shameful epiphany, “I doubt you’d know crap from Crisco.” But later, discovering a suddenly willing protégé, he taught him gently that it is the people that matter more than anything. The people — “. . . this is my portfolio.”

That’s what the back of my office door says to me.

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