There are moments in life where there’s nowhere to hide. Something has happened in your life or your child’s life and you can’t quite put yourself back together just yet. You don’t have the energy to present a polished version of yourself that the world expects. Heck, you don’t even have the energy to hide your emotions. The best you can muster is to slump over and say, “I got nothing left.”

What a gift to have a safe space, a friend who sits across from you when you show up completely undone. Where the worst version of yourself isn’t a deal-breaker—it’s just another Tuesday. I am blessed by two or three of these friendships, but one has been present at the critical junctures of my life and in hers. She arrived at my mother’s funeral before I did.  I took her to the courthouse to secure the death certificate after her husband died. She took me to the Penguin Encounter after the judge declared me divorced. Wait. That was an odd choice we made. Penguins mate for life. Don’t they?

Anyway, you get it, with Anne Chen I don’t need to be anything other than exactly who I am, soaking wet and all. I don’t even have to apologize when our first walk failed to record. We got a do-over. 

Liz: I did a sit-down coffee with my therapist who explained to me why the walking part of this is so important because you don’t look at each other and your eyes dart. And that has a lot to do with revisiting emotional traditional places and unlocking them in a different way. And when you talk about it, you allow somebody to be a witness, and it makes it less triggering. I wish I understood it better. 

Anne: That’s interesting. I mean, I just feel like I can talk to you.

Liz: You can sit and look at me and talk to me.

Anne: I can sit and look at you and talk to you, and it would really be helpful for me.

Liz: You know, after I walked with Gregg Behr and I was completely soaked, we met for dinner. I dried off, and then I got completely soaked by my spilled water. There are probably – maybe just two – two people in this world that I would have been okay with all that happening in front of, and you’re one of them. When I feel like, okay, it can’t get much worse than this moment. There are only certain people you’re willing to just slump over and go, “Okay, pay for it. I got nothing left.”

But here’s the thing about that “I got nothing left” moment—it’s not actually the end. It’s this weird paradox where you think you’ve hit bottom, where every reserve has been tapped out, and then somehow, sitting there with someone who truly sees you, you find another gear you didn’t know existed. Maybe it’s because you’re not carrying the weight alone anymore, or maybe it’s because being witnessed in your lowest moment reminds you that you’re still here, still breathing, still worth fighting for. That determination doesn’t come from pretending I’m fine; for me it comes from being completely vulnerable. 

Anne: You started to say, When you say something to someone else, it makes it… I don’t remember what exactly…

Liz: That somebody bears witness?

Anne: Someone bears witness. Yes. I was thinking about manifesting the things you say… it’s one of the reasons people don’t like to talk about death and preparation for dying, because there’s a fear that if you speak it, you manifest it. But on the other hand, if you’re aspiring to something, you want to talk about it, at least I do, because then it makes me accountable. Like someone else has heard it, so now I have to f..king do it. So I guess two sides of the same coin.

Liz: There are things you and I talk about that I feel like, okay, I said it. Now I got to go do it.

Anne: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s actually important. I think it’s important to have that. It’s important to acknowledge it. It’s important to acknowledge that when you make a choice to say something to someone meaningful, or maybe even not that meaningful, it means that there’s part of you that needs to hold yourself accountable.

She holds me accountable. She also holds me up. As I do for her. Two sides of the same coin. We have been that way since we met on the fifth floor of Witherspoon on the Princeton campus in the late summer of 1985. At 58, our beliefs and values remain very similar, but the life experiences that got us here vary widely. What is interesting is how we find ourselves on similar professional paths now – not just bearing witness but adding to each other’s experiences as we boldly reimagine what comes next – building on a foundation of What if? by adding floors of Yes And.

Let me explain. Not only did she witness my grief and pain, she had a front row seat to bear witness to my big swing – translating a tutoring program to a virtual platform to serve students in Boys & Girls Clubs while incubating a math software to further support learning. She showed up. For every presentation I did in Pittsburgh, she arrived early. She made introductions to friends that led to foundation meetings. She joined zoom calls to offer a distinctive outside voice. She supported me, but she made me accountable to keep moving the idea forward.

Now it’s her turn. She has a vision of something new.

Anne: So I wanted to talk about… Can I talk about something that is making me so excited? So I think that the last time I talked to you, I mentioned this business that I’m pursuing with a partner with manufactured housing. So we have launched the business.

They started with a question.

Anne: How can we bring the housing units to market really quickly, affordably?

Anne is an architect. Perhaps you’ve seen the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh or passed by Steel City Squash. If you have been to my house, you’ve seen her work. She has a lens on the world that I don’t even have the vocabulary for. As she discussed the solution that she and her partner have envisioned, I asked sophomoric questions.

Liz: What’s the difference?

Anne: Manufactured housing is the descendent of mobile homes.

Liz: And what’s modular?

Anne: Modular is similar, but manufactured housing is almost fully built in a factory. They will then truck it over to a site and install it.

Liz: Assemble it? so paint by numbers?

Anne: And there’s very little that is done on site. The foundation is done on site. You bring in utilities. There might be a little bit of finish work that’s done on site. So when we think about modular or manufactured housing, mobile homes, we think about single wides, which are the least expensive way. That’s the least expensive housing unit. So they are limited in size, and right now, they’re very limited in size. When I started looking at this, it was like, “Oh, my God, this is the answer.” This is the thing that no one has done. Because I started looking… Is there manufactured housing in urban areas? Nope, nothing. You see them in suburban areas, you’ve seen them in the rural areas. Manufactured housing has now evolved so that there are multi-sections, so it doesn’t look like a… It’s not a single wide anymore.

They are good quality homes, two bedroom, maybe two baths or one and a half baths with sustainable features so that there are going to be low energy costs and require no subsidy. The reason that no subsidy is so impactful is not just because you can deliver it faster. It’s that when you sell to the owner, they get all the equity. So oftentimes, when you have a subsidy, the owner is limited when they sell it. They can only sell to low-income buyers, so they don’t realize the equity. And so they don’t have the power of upward mobility… and that’s huge.

This was not anywhere on my agenda or strategic plan, although I was thinking about it. When I quit GBBN, I had been telling them for three years,  I’m not really happy here. Then after you’ve been saying it for so long, you just got to do it. It’s that accountability piece. 

There’s a profound liberation that comes with stepping away from the endless cycle of doing what’s expected—the corporate ladder, the predetermined milestones, the status quo. It’s like finally exhaling after holding your breath for years. 

But the real rush isn’t walking off the well-trodden path—it’s in the pivot toward creation. There’s a fundamental difference between thinking outside the box as an intellectual exercise and actually laying the groundwork for something that didn’t exist before. One is theoretical; the other is transformational. When you move from “what if” to “what now,” you shift from being a consumer of other people’s visions to an architect of your own.

What amplifies this excitement exponentially is when your bold leap serves something bigger than yourself. There’s an alchemy that happens when personal fulfillment meets community need—suddenly your work isn’t just about you anymore, it’s about the ripple effect you can create. You’re not just building a business or pursuing a passion project; you’re addressing real problems that real people face every day. Your success becomes intertwined with others’ wellbeing.

This kind of purpose-driven building creates a different quality of energy.

Anne: The gap between people who own homes and who rent has just gotten bigger and bigger. Home ownership still is a means by which people build wealth. And the fact that it has been denied to the people at the lower end of the… I mean, 80 % AMI is like, $86,000. I mean, those are people who are working. They still can’t afford them. 

You know it really is this static framework that has prohibited this from being seen, from even being identified as a solution. And if we can just push to walk through all of those obstacles, which frankly, they’re not… that big. I think we can really make a difference.

Liz: So it’s trusting systems thinking that limits you from seeing opportunity. 

Anne: It is really about having someone new come in and say, wait a second, why is no one doing this? And then to have the persistence to do it and the resources.

I started some conversations with a bunch of manufacturers. The key is finding the right one. 

Liz: What else makes it the perfect manufacturing partner?

Anne: They just have to get it. I don’t know. I think they just need to be able to deliver within budget what we want. They need to be relatively close by because of the fuel charges, the freight charges can get up there. I don’t know. I think it’s just the right person. You have to have the right person with the decision making authority to be able to say, “Hey, factory, let’s do this.”

Liz: I’m pushing you on what makes the right partner. And I think you hit it when you said they have to get it. They had to have an open mind. They had to be willing to see a gap in the market and not just the formulaic, which is what we’re talking about when we talk about health care and government and everything else. You have to see beyond the formula. It’s just got to be for those people…

Anne: …people who are willing to be creative. 

Liz: Like finding the right partner. Yes, and. 

Anne: Not everyone is going to be willing to do it. You have to accept that. 

Liz: And not everyone should.

Trust me, there’s something electric about that moment when you realize you’ve stumbled onto something real—a genuine gap in the market that’s been hiding in plain sight. 

Anne: He (her partner) was like, “I’ve never been the first to do something”. And I said, “Really? This is really this big of an opportunity?”

It’s a “baited breath” feeling where every conversation, every brainstorm session, every “yes” and even “no” seems to build momentum.

What makes it even more powerful is finding the right partner to explore it with. There’s this beautiful “yes, and” energy that emerges—where one person’s idea sparks another’s, and suddenly you’re not just adding thoughts together, you’re multiplying them. The accountability keeps you grounded while the brainstorming lifts you up.

It’s that rare combination of complementary skills meeting untapped opportunity. You know you could probably tackle it alone, but together there’s this amplification effect—you’re both better versions of yourselves when you’re building something that feels genuinely needed in the world. I could just as easily be describing my partnership with Luke Hladek as I am the interactions between Anne and Jeremy. Quickly, my own breath is once again bated. I am reliving those early days of recognizing what’s possible. It is electric and contagious.

Anne knows complexity will creep in…but there’s something intoxicating about being in that sweet spot where market need meets personal passion meets partnership chemistry. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle. 

Liz: The baited breath of, “I think this can work” …it starts to feel like a snowball, doesn’t it? It does.

Anne: And it is so important. He was saying, I work better with a partner, and I do, too, because there is this accountability.

Liz: But the brainstorming, the bopping of… I’m going to say it again. Yes, and.

Anne: Yes, right. I mean, the things that I bring to it… they’re really complementary. And I know we’re in the honeymoon phase. And at some point, if this gets going, and it will…it’ll get more complicated. But really to get this… I could do this by myself, but I wouldn’t do it as well.

Liz: I believe we’re right back to stepping through the door, being prepared when the opportunity presents itself.

Anne: I mean, that really was it. I was telling Xing recently, you have to set goals for yourself. And then when you achieve that goal, you don’t just say, oh, great, I did that. You set your bar a little higher.

Liz: Set a new goal. Or maybe it’s a tangential path. 

Anne: Exactly. Maybe it’s taught you something that tells you, yeah, it’s a tangent. It’s this other goal that you’re going to try..

Liz: And you can follow the path too long, and that’s not bad either. 

Anne: Well, it’ll teach you something. As long as you are willing to pay attention to what you have experienced, what that journey has taught you.

Looking back on this journey—from those raw moments of showing up alone on a college campus to witnessing the electric spark of new possibility—I’m struck by how much this friendship has taught us about the architecture of becoming.

What strikes me most is how vulnerability and vision aren’t opposites—they’re dance partners. Those “I got nothing left” moments didn’t diminish our capacity for dreaming; they deepened it…  we have to be the person who can’t stop dreaming….there’s too much fear and too little dreaming. Especially now when America is afraid of its own shadow.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson is this: the path rarely looks like what we expected when we started walking it. From Princeton dorm rooms to divorce penguins to manufactured housing breakthroughs—the beauty isn’t in the predictability of the journey, but in our willingness to keep setting new goals, to pivot when we learn something that changes everything, and to trust that sometimes the most important step is simply being prepared when opportunity presents itself.

For all of it—the mess, the manifestation, the moments of pure possibility—I am deeply, endlessly grateful.

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In the 100 days of May, time stretches like taffy with the weight of expectation before that starting pistol signaling summer freedom.  When the calendar turns to June there is a collective sigh of relief from teachers and administrators that can be heard across every neighborhood. What is it like for children? Hollywood would have us believe that doors explode open and students are launched as if from a confetti canon with the accompanying screams of jubilation.

Are they all swept up in that triumphant swell of celebration?

Picture the quiet fourth-grader who started mentally crossing off calendar days back in April, white-knuckling through each math class, each teacher interaction, each morning announcement—just desperate to reach the finish line. Imagine the third-grader with dyslexia who has spent months watching classmates effortlessly decode words that, for her, remain stubborn puzzles on the page and will have to pull a chair up to that desk all summer long.  And what of our classroom enthusiasts—those front-row sitters whose hands shoot up like fireworks before the question is fully formed? Do all children count down to summer break? Is there something to the promise of unstructured discovery that they need more of? What would they tell us?

We educators craft elaborate theories about what children need, want, and feel, but have we stopped to truly listen? What revelations might emerge if we gathered around in that final circle time and simply asked: “What does learning mean to you?” The answers might revolutionize not just how we end our school years, but how we design them from the start.

I asked Palmer, age nine, what she wished teachers knew about learning. 

Liz: So when you learn, who’s doing the talking?

Palmer: Our teachers. And us, too.

Liz: That sounds a little problematic to me. If when you’re learning, the teachers are doing the talking, how do I know you’re learning? Do you ever sit in a classroom where a teacher is talking and you’re not learning anything?

Palmer: I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that. Usually, I learn, but… Wait, that’s a tough one. How do you know that you’re learning? A teacher is talking. Usually, you know by… If you pay attention enough and… Wait, wait. This is a tough one.

Hazel, a second grader, couldn’t agree more when I asked her who was talking, she explained…

Hazel: Mostly the teacher and some of my classmates because they do talk during lessons.

Liz: If your teachers are the ones talking, how do you know you’re learning? 

Hazel: Well, because they’re explaining something, and that’s going to go into my long-term memory. This one’s a hard one. It’s a hard answer. If they’re talking and you’re learning, then I’d…

Liz: You know what? What? I bet it’s a hard one for your teachers, too.

Hazel: If the kids are talking, but you’re talking the most, then how are you learning?

I have a hero when it comes to education. Sir Ken Robinson inspired me throughout my career to focus on learning. In his Ted Talk: How to Escape Education’s Death Valley, he puts it this way.

“Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you’re not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.”

He tells the story of a philosopher who “used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. It’s a very good example. There he is. He’s dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really.

Teaching is a word like that. You can say, “There’s Deborah, she’s in room 34, she’s teaching.” But if nobody’s learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.

The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That’s it.”

When Robinson concludes that “the role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That’s it,” he’s not diminishing the teaching profession but rather elevating it. Facilitation involves creating conditions where learning can flourish—designing environments that spark curiosity, building relationships that foster trust, asking questions that promote deeper thinking, and adapting approaches based on learners’ needs…such as “Castle Rock,” a simulation of global politics inspired by the work of John Hunter. In my experience this was masterfully constructed by educators who placed the focus on experience and not lesson planning.

Liz: So let’s pivot to the positive, as I like to say. Of all the years you’ve been in school, can you name one or two activities where you’re like, Wow, I really learned something doing this? 

Palmer: There is one where it’s in fourth grade. Okay. It’s Castle Rock.

Liz: Castle Rock is a history game that you play. What did you learn?

Palmer: In Castle Rock, Coach Joe usually gives us a quote of the week every time we play the game. And usually I learn from those quotes. I think one of the quotes was, Don’t fight first. Talk. 

I couldn’t help myself. I had to fact check her accuracy. The actual quote from Sun Tzu was “He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.”

Palmer: I think those quotes go hand in hand with the game because it’s usually something that you have to think about while you’re doing it. It’s not like a random quote that you would find on the internet. It’s not like, “You should do this, you should do that.” It’s more of like, “Keep this in mind while you’re playing it.”

Preston: I was the arms dealer. I was excited because that was a job that I basically crossed my fingers, crossed everything on my body for.

Liz: Why did you want that one?

Preston: Well, I love the job. Making people… Well, not making people rage. 

Liz: If it’s supposed to be about peace, why is there an arms dealer?

Preston: It’s a real simulation game. Just to make people not fall in for any rage or anything. That’s most likely my best guess. The only thing, the only real goal, well, is to, one, make sure no country is obliterated into nothing, and two, to have at least one cent higher than you had at the beginning.

Liz: So the threat of the weapons keeps people from raging. Is that what you mean?

Preston: Sort of. I mean, it’s there just in case… so no one falls into any rage. What if you just saw a nuke right there and your enemy was a country’s leader, and you’re really mad at that person. That’s what the arm dealer is just there for, temper rage, so people can’t buy nukes and kill each other, which is not supposed to happen.

Return to “He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.” It seems like a quote we could ask our global leaders to study in real time.

If you happen upon the students during this simulation, you will question if you have encountered a class or free time. Children are huddled in groups except when they send an emissary to negotiate with another party. There is more engagement with the activity than distraction from a teacher’s lesson. Honestly, I have had teachers describe it as chaos. I’ve only ever regarded it as the smartest social studies class ever. Thank you, John Hunter.

Robinson’s insight that “if there’s no learning going on, there’s no education going on” places learning—not teaching—at the center of education. This might seem obvious, but as he notes, many educational discussions focus extensively on teaching methodologies, classroom management, curriculum design, or assessment without adequately addressing how learning actually occurs. Learning is the core of education… and children are the heart of it.

But what of those hearts? How does the process of learning weigh on them? The process of learning includes humbling oneself to learning something new. So I wondered what learning has been like for children.  While Palmer has a hard time pinpointing an example of learning in school, she can easily discuss it within her world of dance.

Palmer: If you don’t know how to do the trick, don’t do it. It’s not something that you just think about in dance. It’s also something that you can think about in school. If you don’t know how to do the trick, don’t do it, or it’s something that you don’t understand.

Liz: So in dance, how do you learn to do the trick? When you first learned to do an aerial, tell me how that happened. 

Palmer: There was someone that was helping me. She was spotting me.

Liz: Did she actually touch and lift you at first? 

Palmer: And then they usually start by saying, I’m going to do it lighter, and you’re going to help me through that. And then you would do it. And then the process gets easier and easier as you do it. And then finally, you get more comfortable doing it. And then they’re going to say, You don’t need my help right now. I’m going to back off… let you do it first. Usually, you would say, If you’re not actually comfortable with the trick, I would say, I would probably start by saying, Can we do one more before I want to do it by myself?

Liz: So you know how to self-advocate that way? And when you do it by yourself the first time, there’s a really good mat there. Are you afraid of failing?

Palmer: I despise failing because it makes me upset, but there’s a world full of opportunities that can happen.

Liz: You got to say more – What do you mean there’s a wealth of opportunities that can happen?

Palmer: Usually when I fail at something, I get upset about it, but then I’m like, I always have another shot of doing it.

Liz: I love that. 

There is a pedagogy of “I do, we do, you do” that many teachers use. The teacher solves the equation, writes the sentence, or shows cause and effect first. Then the teacher and class collaborate – we do – before a student is asked to show what they know independently. While similar, it is not the same as being spotted for a trick in dance. No one begins a new trick by talking.

Liz: I have a question because you said when you learn to do the new stunt, you practice it over and over and over again until you can do it. But you told me in math, you don’t like being asked to do problems over and over and over again. Yeah. Wait.

Palmer: At school, instead of taking it slow, they’ll give you a math sheet, and it’s like, do this. And then there’s always seven math sheets after that. After the third or second math sheet, I get frustrated if I don’t know a problem. I usually go back to that problem, but then my mind starts to shut down after I do seven or eight problems on the second or third math sheet.

Palmer despises failure. She admits that. Is the frustration she experiences a precursor to failure or a necessary phase of learning? The frustration she articulates points to something else. Her zone of discomfort leads to her mind shutting down. The child who self-advocates in dance class does not transfer the skill to the classroom. She doesn’t ask, “Can we do one more before I do these myself?” She shuts down when she doesn’t know a problem.

Liz: How do you feel when you make a mistake?

Hazel: If it’s a small one, I’m like, Okay, I’ll just fix this. But if it’s the entire thing, I’m like, Come on. But if it’s in front of the class, which they are most likely already done with, I’m like, Great.

Liz: So you don’t like being not done when everybody else is done?

Hazel: Well, I just don’t like being not done, personally. Because they get to read, and I really like reading.

Hazel’s comments point to learning equaling being “done.” Checking off morning work as an item on a to-do list rather than practice to learn something new. Have we inadvertently put the emphasis on the wrong part of the educational process? Kids figure out the game of school pretty quickly.

When we hand out worksheets with neat little boxes to fill in, when we check assignments with a quick “complete” stamp, when the highest praise is “all done,” we’re teaching them something unintentional but powerful: learning equals completion.

So children adapt. They learn that education is a series of finite tasks with clear endpoints rather than an ongoing process of discovery. They internalize that being a “good student” means finishing things efficiently, not necessarily understanding them thoroughly. Their natural question shifts from “What does this mean?” to “Is this what you want?” and eventually to “Will this be on the test?”

And we wonder why, when summer finally arrives, they seem so eager to forget everything we taught them.

I am not sure we ever help students reflect and celebrate the joy of learning something new. I am also not sure we ever reflect on the possible suffering of not learning it. At 10, Parker can help us understand a different take on academic anxiety.

Liz: What does it feel like to learn something?

Parker: It feels really good and just leaves all the stress behind. I don’t know.

Liz: So is there stress before you learn it?

Parker: Yeah, because you’ve never seen the problem or things before, and then you actually just do it.

Liz: So the “doing it”  takes the stress of that?

Parker: Yeah.

Liz: Oh, that’s really interesting. Okay, so let’s go back to the teacher talking. If the teacher is talking and you’re not doing anything, is that stressful?

Parker: Sometimes when they just talk for two hours and then we have to do a paper.

Liz: So while the teacher is talking, before they let you do whatever it is you’re learning, you can be stressed by it? 

Parker: Yeah. 

Liz: Oh, wow. I never thought about that. 

Learning is supposed to be challenging – that’s how our brains grow. That productive tension we feel when tackling challenging material helps encode information more deeply and creates stronger neural pathways. Here’s the thing about learning: we’re SUPPOSED to get things wrong sometimes. When the success rate drops below 70%, though, that’s when productive challenge can turn into “why am I even trying?” territory unless provided the right guidance or scaffolding – like having a spotter for a new trick. The brain literally can’t process effectively when panic sets in. Research in educational psychology points to something called the “Zone of Proximal Development”—that sweet spot where material is just challenging enough to promote growth but not so difficult that it overwhelms learners who start experiencing anxiety that interferes with cognitive processing. It’s the gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with “a spotter” supporting them.

So how much stress is too much? The answer varies by individual, but when stress begins to trigger avoidance behaviors, or lead to naming the anxiety butterfly in your stomach because it’s been there so long – you’ve probably crossed the line.

Don’t get me wrong, failure is not fatal. I can’t even type those words without hearing Reno DiOrio’s voice echo them although they are truly attributed to Winston Churchill. And failure has its place in learning. Even at age 11 Preston can tell you that his favorite learning experience came with his greatest failure. What was that experience?

Preston: Lego Robotics. I was a team captain and a main programmer. My programs were perfect until the day of the competition where they all got bugged. So we got second to last place.

Liz: No. Talk to me about that. How did that feel?

Preston: Absolutely horrible. We were the best team by far. We were done with our (robot) building first. Our programs were perfect. Even the main teacher of the class said, ‘I don’t know what happened with this group. They were perfect.’ And then next thing you know, we ended up getting 45 as a high when the winner got 145.

Our emotions really didn’t show. We were fine, but really, that was probably the worst possible outcome to have from there. 

Liz: And yet it was a favorite class? You didn’t let that outcome change that? 

Preston: No. 

Liz: How did you manage that? 

Preston: Simple. Because all the great teamwork I had, and all the fun it was being the main programmer 

I don’t know what happened at the end. Our programs looked the same, but they bugged our car. They wouldn’t do full turns or do anything. We probably crashed into seven buildings. Yeah, it was bad.

Liz: How heartbreaking. I love that day. I used to call Lego Robotics my favorite day on campus.

Preston: Yeah, it really was. It was the best day.

Failure is part of the equation of learning. When a child struggles through a math problem using three different approaches before finding one that works, she has learned more than the classmate who followed the formula correctly the first time. Her neural pathways are richer, her understanding more flexible. The gift comes when a child can recognize mistakes as information… when failure is a necessary part of the bigger picture… but our grading systems with our red pens rarely capture this. We measure the destination, not the journey. 

Liz: How will you know at the end of the day if it’s been a successful day of learning?

Hazel: Well, the kids will probably be pretty happy, and I will look at all the papers that I still have. I look at them and be like, We got some success. Because if most of the kids had a good score, then I’d be like, Okay. Okay, that’s good.

Liz: That’s a good day. Yeah. Yeah.

Hazel: Because most of the kids are learning, which is a really good thing because you want the kids to learn as a teacher.

Liz: How many is most? If you have 20 kids in your class, how many is most? When you say, If most of them are learning, it’s a good day.

Hazel: It’d probably be like there’s 15 kids that… 15 kids that would have gotten some problems, which if they’re small problems, I mean, I’ll still count it as a pretty good score. Okay.

Liz: You really want it to be 20, don’t you?

Hazel: Yeah, I want it to be 20 kids that have learned everything because I have 20 kids in my class.

Liz: But that’s hard, huh?

Hazel: Yeah, because if they’re not listening.

Liz: Oh, right. Because like you said, learning isn’t just about teaching. It’s about the kid, too.

This particular walk has meandered through so many important tangents about learning. There is so much to learn from listening to children…so many seeds to plant as to ways we might engage with students. Before I turned off the mic, I had to know.

Liz: What makes one teacher stand out as somebody you learn from.

Preston: One thing that I believe I have, a good sense of humor. And yes, a good sense of humor would make a great teacher. Another thing, instead of just doing worksheets all the time, have creativity in what you’re teaching.

Liz: Clearly, coaches don’t make you do worksheets.

Preston: Clearly, they don’t.

Liz: I would hope not.

Preston: That would just be random.

Liz: What would a good coach be like?

Preston: A good coach would be not commanding and screaming at their players. Let’s see. Diversity in what they’re teaching. You don’t need to do… For example, in baseball, you don’t need to do the same batting practice every time. You could do fielding or something else. And also it doesn’t… Well, I mean, this is an obvious one, but… Don’t be a dictator. Don’t be a dictator. Yeah.

Liz: So do you feel like from the people that you consider the best teachers and coaches, were you able to have a voice?

Preston: Yes.

Liz: How so?

Preston: Well, instead of the coaches not letting you talk, you have to tell the coaches what’s wrong … what’s happening with you.

Parker: A good teacher, if someone’s doing something they’re not supposed to, just slightly walk over to them and tell them, “Can you please stop doing this?” Instead of just yelling at them to stop or embarrassing them in the middle of class. If they’re trying to answer a question and they get it wrong, just like, “Nope, you’re wrong.” 

Liz: What does that feel like?

Parker: It feels really weird sometimes because you never knew it was coming or you never knew she or he was going to yell at you like that.

Liz: I’m going to make an assumption here. I assume it would be pretty hard to do your best when you’re feeling like that.

Parker: Yeah.

And what would a good teacher make school look like?

Hazel: We’d start off with a little bit of unpacking and a little bit of free play time.

Liz: What do kids learn about life when you’re doing unpacking? What’s important about that?

Hazel: Staying organized. Knowing what is where.

Liz: Knowing what’s where. I like that. And then play. Why is it important to play early in the day?

Hazel: To get your brain started.

Play. Play to get your brain started. Isn’t that why they are so excited to burst through those doors on the last day of school…so they can have time for unstructured play? Years ago I asked, “Why can’t school be more like Creek Week camp in the summer?” From that question came Lego Robotics, Castle Rock, a Weather Balloon, Zoology and more creative ideas when teachers used their classrooms to incubate innovative ways to learn.

As I listened to 5th and 8th grade students talk about learning during graduation speeches, such were the classes they recounted. Those and of course the teachers who sacrificed personal time to provide the scaffolding to turn failure into learning in reading and in math. 

If we really did gather a group of children or adolescents in a circle and asked about learning that sticks, the answers might not revolutionize a system that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, but we might just design a lesson or adjust a reaction for the better… if we listen. Learning is the core of education… and children are the heart of it. Are we listening to them?

Liz: When I was leaving last year, you gave me two dolls.

Palmer: It’s because I actually admire you as a leader

Liz: But why the dolls?

Palmer: The dolls? I don’t know. Those dolls are very special.

Liz: They are. They sit on my desk. I look at them every day.

Palmer: Those dolls are a meaning of gratitude towards you and all you do.

Liz: When I look at those dolls, I think about the fact that I’m still walking with children, that in what I do, the child next to me is still the most important part. And I don’t know if you realize that. So when I look at them, I see you and me, and I’m grateful that you took the time to make them and give them to me and what that meant. But I also look at it as marching orders that I have to keep children in mind and what I can do to make things better for them. Yeah. That’s pretty big inspiration, just so you know.

Palmer: Just so you know, I stole those dolls from my mom’s classroom.

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In a world where we walk with eyes down, either scanning the ground to avoid eye contact or scrolling on our phones, there’s something beautiful about those rare moments when strangers offer unexpected kindness. Perhaps it’s the extended napkin when you spill a drink, the steadying hand when you stumble off a broken shoe, or the bent knee of one helping to gather scattered papers. Such fleeting intersections between lives reveal our shared humanity. These examples are moments from my life – all of which caught me off guard. Historically, as my former colleagues can attest, if offered help, I’d respond, “I got it” as I sherpa countless items. But these recent unexpected moments of kindness pierced through my carefully cultivated self-sufficiency.  Sitting in that restaurant booth drenched, lying on that concrete scratched and scraped or stretching to gather papers embarrassed, I was vulnerable. My instability happened quickly. In accepting the outstretched hand, I gained better balance in my life.

Years ago I was sitting in another restaurant exasperated by the emotions of the day and the events of the week. Disconnected from the person across from me, I felt very alone. While I don’t remember his words, I recall vividly the way they cut me.

Liz

I started to cry pretty hard. We’re sitting in the corner, couldn’t figure out what to do, and just really felt like I was drowning. And you came to the table with what I consider your calm equanimity and your vibration of positive energy. And you just stood next to me, and you saved me. You just held space in the moment so that neither one of us… And maybe because you don’t want to… When somebody walks up to your table, you don’t keep having the conversation you’re having…You just gave us pause.

Tabatha

In the restaurant, I always interrupt conversations, and I try to do it in the most non-abrasive way. Sometimes I come up on hard conversations, and I always reflect back on that stuff, and I just really… I don’t know. I send some energy their way because sometimes it’s really hard to make it through the day. And I don’t know what anybody’s going through, let alone with my energy. So I always try to keep my energy positive and calm because. I am very sensitive to that. And that’s very profound.

I don’t say this lightly. She saved me. That was almost a decade ago and yet I remember it as if it were yesterday. 

This exchange between strangers requires us to appreciate stillness amid motion. At that time and for the years that followed, I was fortress-like. I raced through my days, shoulders hunched beneath budgets, deadlines, and demands. My mind ran three conversations ahead and three behind whenever I tried to sleep. A friend said he always thought of the word, fortitude, when he thought of me. Those two words – fortress and fortitude – both have the root word fortis for strength. I saw it as a compliment. I wanted to print the word on a t-shirt and wear it proudly. Truthfully, that supposed strength was nothing but exhausting. If you don’t believe me, think of how easily I was brought to tears in the middle of a restaurant. Have you been there? 

I see now the importance of a balanced life where achievement coexists with awareness, where efficiency makes space for empathy. By slowing our pace we develop the receptivity to notice how a stranger’s kindness punctuates our day. Eyes lifted from screens long enough to witness the smile offered across a waiting room, ears attuned enough to hear the genuine question “You ok?” amid the noise in a parking lot, or the presence of someone suddenly standing next to you in a restaurant. 

While we think we are charting our individual courses, we navigate life in shared waters. Our actions ripple into the lives of others…and if we are not careful their actions into ours.

Liz

How are you good about leaving their negative energy there at the table and not taking any of it away with you?

Tabatha

I sit in silence for a while in the car. I have a really good partner that also allows me time, and we communicate really well so that if I need more time by myself, he leaves me be. And it’s one of those hard things to learn.

Balance creates white space. Whether it’s the empty areas on a page, the quiet moments in our car, or the pauses in conversation—white space is full of potential. Without margins in our thinking, everything blends together in a noisy mess. But with deliberate empty spaces, patterns emerge that weren’t visible before. Innovation happens. The most important creative insights often appear not when I’m actively working, but in the shower, in the flower garden or …on a walk. Of course I’d include that.

Tabatha learned the pause from her mother. What is the magic?

Tabatha

Just pause and wait. I would always have to with her coming home. And so I learned that way. Because my mom, being an educator, always needed that time. She instantly would come home and start on chores and make dinner and all of that stuff. 

Liz

So you actually learned the pause by being the child of someone who used it?

Tabatha

Yes, because I knew that she needed that so much. And yeah, I definitely learned to do that. 

Liz

So when I would put Grace and Ella in car seats, when they were really little, I needed the pause. I would always buckle the one who was behind the driver’s seat first and then the other one, because I needed the moment to just take a breath by myself from closing that side car door and walking around to the driver’s side. And you feel guilty because by some definition of motherhood, you’re not supposed to need a break from your kids.

Tabatha

But that’s just malarkey. 

Liz

I think we’d all be better off if we learned the pause.

Tabatha

Yeah, I definitely agree.

Liz

Even in conversation, maybe especially in conversation.

Tabatha

Yes, definitely. The reaction to things shouldn’t always be so instant because most of the time it doesn’t come out right, at least in my case.

Taking a pause is about finding balance… and balance is something Tabatha can teach us all. In her unassuming way, Tabatha has mastered what most of us merely aspire to—that elusive equilibrium between doing and being. Watch how she moves through the restaurant with intention rather than urgency, creating pockets of silence between activity. 

She understands intuitively what took me decades to glimpse: balance is a continuous recalibration, a thousand tiny adjustments made daily. When Tabatha listens, she listens completely, her attention a gift unwrapped in real time. When she works, she works with focused presence, neither rushing toward completion nor dragging her feet in procrastination. And perhaps most tellingly, when she walks, she notices the world around us that others overlook – a chipmunk, mushrooms, a flower growing between the sidewalk cracks.

It fits then that she wanted to experience even more of life from very new vantage points.

Tabatha

Vinnie and I were seeing different things about traveling, and we really wanted to in a minimalistic way. And we started to look at vans …and finally found one… then COVID hit. And so we were like, “Okay, well, this is cool. We’re going to take this pause and get all of our gear that we need and all of the things that we need to do for the van.”

Oh, a chipmunk. Like the fan, all of our batteries and electric system, the stove, the sink, and just random household things that you wouldn’t think of. I had to get the flooring in, and the soundproofing and the sheep’s wool for insulation. That was fun.

We have a Pro-Master. So a Ram Pro-Master with a high roof. 

Liz: So you can stand up inside? 

Tabatha: Totally stand up, even with my tall bun. So there’s five, six inches of clearance maybe above me. We can stand up and we can sleep in there, queen-size bed, everything. That was another preparatory thing of getting the mattress and cutting it into pieces so that it can fit in our little bench area.

Liz

So what was the first trip?

Tabatha

Oh, the first trip was… Oh, shoot. We went all the way up to Maine, and did New Hampshire, and did all of that area, Vermont, New York, the Finger Lakes up there. 

Liz

I assume that means they announced the Pope because it’s an off time. That is weird. It’s 1:26.

Tabatha

They Must have.

Liz

I just had to mark that. That we can hear that in the background while we’re having this conversation.

Tabatha

We very vaguely map a route, and then do a bunch of research about which hikes or where we want to go and visit. And from there, it’s willy-nilly. So I have crazy lists of all the things that I want to do, and then Vinnie adds to it as well. And then we just revise, condense, and not get too worked up about anything.

Everyone… Oh, mushrooms…everyone has such a cut and dry vacation, and I’m just very thankful to not have that, and we can just wander about and not feel the weight of time restraint, because both of our jobs require quick, quick, quick. You have to hurry, hurry, hurry. And I love whenever I can just relax and not rush.

I understand we all need money to live. We work to pay bills, unfortunately. And I get it. It’s like this never-ending circle of grief, in my opinion. 

Liz

Say more about that.

Tabatha

I just feel like so many folks are stressed out that you have to have a lot more money to sustain your lifestyle or a lot more money to do this or buy this. I guess I never really understood that bit of it.  Why can’t you just enjoy your job… be frustrated by it certainly, but enjoy it. The weight of money management is so heavy for folks. I just never understood.

I shed all the extra stuff. I definitely have way too many shoes and way too many clothes. Do I need those things? And whenever we moved into the van, because we lived in the van for four years it made me realize I don’t need any of these extra things. My belongings are in the van, and we’re safe. We’re well-fed. I didn’t need all the extra. I don’t need to watch TV every night. I would rather read books, and I would rather sit and meditate. I would rather be outside. And those are the awesome trade offs to what my lifestyle is, and amazing reminders that that’s what I needed. And it definitely fills me up.

Liz

Did you know all of these things about yourself when you set out to do this, or did you learn some of them along the way?

Tabatha

Always learning, for sure. Always learning. I’m very proud of us that we can just roll with it.

Liz

I’m living a gap year, which I never thought I could do. And I had no idea that I needed. But you also can’t, and I’m sure you have to agree with this, you can’t really articulate to someone else what it’s like to make the choice you’re making, because they have a very clear… I call it the treadmill. You’re supposed to do this, then supposed to do that. Did you have that? 

Tabatha

Right out of college with an ex that I dated through high school and college… we were supposed to get married. We were supposed to buy the house. We were supposed to have the kids. And I felt all of that.

Liz

And the white fence?

Tabatha

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Life ends. 

Liz

No, I said the white fence. But you’re right, too.

Tabatha

But that’s what it felt like for me. It was like, then my life ends because I was supposed to do X, Y, Z, and the white fence.  I didn’t like that feeling. And I asked myself, why does it feel like that for me? Obviously, it’s not going to serve me and make me happy for the rest of my life. And I definitely felt that. For sure. But thankfully, I listened to myself and found people in yoga and surrounded myself with different ideas. And it was lovely. It took a while to come out of it.

So many of us have become captive to life’s relentless treadmill—running faster and faster, hearts pounding, breath shallow, going nowhere while digital dashboards track our supposed progress and clock our steps, but leave us right where we started. Tabatha regularly steps off that mechanized march to wander forest paths where time is measured by shifting shadows and bird calls rather than notification pings. She still has goals of “doing a fourteener in Colorado.” She is not without ambition. But the pause she takes gives her greater purpose. She has learned that there’s more wisdom in a single hour of moving at nature’s pace—feet meeting earth—than in days spent sprinting on civilization’s conveyor belt chasing an elusive carrot. 

From Tabatha, we learn that balance requires courage—the courage to recognize our limits without shame, to sit with discomfort and learn from it, to leave spaces unfilled and questions unanswered, at least for a time. In a culture that glorifies perpetual motion, Tabatha’s balanced minimalist approach feels almost revolutionary—a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of too much.

Liz

So the van is a she. Does she have a name? 

Tabatha

Iris.

Liz

Iris. Why is she Iris?

Tabatha

I don’t know, to be honest. Whenever I think of that and how it happened, I think of my grandma, my dad’s mom. But I don’t know why I decided on Iris. It was my decision. Vin supported it. But yeah, I don’t know why. It just felt right.

Liz

You glossed over whenever that happened, I think of my grandma. What do you mean?

Tabatha

She just always had so many wild flowers, or I think she had hydrangeas, and she had irises, and they were big and just always reminded me of new beginnings because they don’t last very long, right?

But my grandma Hawthorn, she was a super strong lady and got a divorce when the divorce was not okay. So I don’t know, strength, maybe. The strength of that.

The strength to start over. The courage to continually recalibrate to keep your balance. The decision to leave room for white space in your day …or in Tabatha’s case months of white space… or in my case a year of it. Afterall, where are we rushing to? The finish lines we sprint toward keep dissolving the moment we reach them, replaced instantly by new urgencies, new deadlines, new versions of success that shimmer just beyond our grasp. 

Tabatha

I feel like people rush through so many things in life just to get through it. And I don’t like that at all. It makes me really sad, to be honest.

Liz

I have found a trend that I wanted to walk with people who I realized are just pure light, and you’re a part of that.

I held on to that stranger whose kindness offered me a glimpse of the best of humanity. She is truly the embodiment of pure light. And I will forever appreciate our shared white space.

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For some, walking is not just about moving from one place to another; it is an interactive experience. The act of walking can be a canvas for creativity, providing both the physical and mental space to explore new ideas. For Eric Hersey, founder of Strong Minded and a self-proclaimed nerd, a walk was never just a walk. It was a time to take photographs for a Google Local Guide or listen to a podcast… or write a blog. In his case his walks led to a myriad of creative pursuits and fueled the birth of an entrepreneurial journey.

Eric: I had to give myself a task…something to do. It was very difficult for me just to walk for the sake of it, although it’s the most therapeutic thing that I can do.

Liz: What is?

Eric: Walking. I’m a busy body, so I have… I’m not supposed to call it nervous energy, but I have nervous energy.

Liz: Why aren’t you supposed to call it that?

Eric: I don’t remember why. The therapist told me to call it something else, and I don’t remember why.

Liz: Oh, because when you call it nervous energy, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re naming it.

Eric: Right. Well, for me, it was just a matter of like, I’m the key person who needs a fidget spinner. I don’t take notes when I’m talking to people, but I doodle. And it’s not that I notice anything that I’m doing. It’s just that’s how I pay better attention. It’s like I’m always on three cups of coffee.

Liz: But you’re not.

Eric: Most of the time I am, so that would be the equivalent of six. It’s probably not good for me. 

Such a mind operates in perpetual motion, constantly generating ideas, making unexpected connections, and exploring possibilities that others might overlook. This restless quality serves as an internal engine, pushing such a creative person forward even when facing obstacles or setbacks.

Eric’s mind excels at divergent thinking— he doesn’t settle for obvious answers, but considers alternatives that might seem impractical or bizarre to others but often lead to breakthroughs. The combination of creativity and nervous energy creates a natural resistance to stagnation. 

Liz: So this high frequency you live at, that’s what gives you your hustle to create your own business?

Eric: No, I think maybe. I think I had a conversation with my brother as if it’s a superpower, is ADHD or whatever I deal with a superpower? I think it is in a way because just walking around I’m taking pictures of stuff. Kennen and Kennen have most of their pictures on their Internet because I walked by it so many times. That’s part of the hustle – I always have something worth doing and something I plan on doing. Sorry, sharp turn.

Liz: That’s all right.

Eric: But it drives me in a way because I always have a task. I always have 20 different things that I want to do, and it excites me, and it gives me purpose. But it’s also quite a burden.

I equate it to… If you had a superpower and you could fly, that’d be really cool. Everybody out there would be like, “Man, I’d really like to have that superpower.” But the guy who has to fly all the time, that has to save the people out of the burning buildings all the time, can’t sit down and watch a movie because they have this burden that they can always fly. I equate it like that.

Liz: I can’t imagine that work isn’t play for you.

Eric: We try. I try. That’s been the biggest struggle I’ve had over the last couple of years. For me, I always said I needed enough FU money to tell a client to F off. I never wanted to work for the man because I got out of that for a reason. That’s why I wanted to do this and been very fortunate and blessed to run across people to help me along the way. But as you bring on employees and stuff, you lose a little bit of the FU money, which means you have to do stuff you don’t necessarily like to do or want to do. And that’s the most difficult thing I deal with now. I want it all to be fun because it’s a design agency. It should all be fun. We get to make videos, we get to make websites, pictures and stuff. And that’s what I did for fun. Then I merged it with work, and now it’s a little cloudy at times.

Creating the team was just what Eric needed, but the polarity is that it made him worry about money instead of focusing on the creativity that drives him.  Eric’s creative mind bursting with caffeinated energy often serves as a catalyst within their team, inspiring others with his enthusiasm and unconventional perspectives. He takes on more projects than he dares to count at times. When channeled, his energy is a powerful force for innovation and sparks collective creativity through a refusal to accept limitations or conventional wisdom. I love a meeting with Eric when the entire mood seems to be based on the wonder, What if we…? 

Liz: But when I meet with you and Luke at “the office,” as Luke calls it, inevitably, without meaning for it to happen, a brainstorm happens of something we could do differently or better even if we don’t have it on the agenda. And I think that is something you need to articulate because you’re part of that equation. It takes all three of us there for this project to happen. 

Eric: Well, I think you have to have the right people sometimes that have to be open to the flow and also appreciate what you bring. I mean, there’s a lot of times I go into meetings and they’re just not willing to think of the different options. I mean, truthfully, I would really look forward to going down to talk at the Country Day. It might have been Luke, it might have been whoever else was in the room. I don’t know. But it was the team that I needed… I felt like I was alone, and I think that’s one of the struggles not too many people know when your a solopreneur because you can’t talk to anybody else about your business. There’s nobody there. You’re going through these struggles. You don’t know how to make the decisions. There’s nobody to bounce ideas off of. But it’s so much better when you have other people. And I’m very happy because I feel like you’ll always have Luke.

Liz: God, I hope so. I don’t know if I’m the same person without him.

I have known for years that there is a rare synergy of complementary talents and shared vision that transcends any individual capabilities that Luke and I have. Together, we like to challenge convention by fearlessly exploring what’s possible while maintaining an authentic voice that is just damn fun. Why not? Now we are lucky enough to add the skills and the energy of Eric’s mind to the equation. What emerges from our collaborative explosion isn’t simply the sum of three creative minds, but rather an entirely new creative entity—proof that certain artistic chemistries can transform separate talents into something far more powerful and profound than any one of us could achieve alone.

I love listening to this walk as you can hear Eric’s thinking – he switches from no to maybe as he speaks – his mind working ahead of his words. Our physical walk was very much like Eric’s mind – we didn’t take the same route twice even though we were just doing laps around Wheeling’s Centre Market. You might have heard him say earlier, “Sorry, sharp turn.” I left that because at times I felt like I was on the old Whip at Kennywood Park that never forecasted a turn in advance. There is no coloring within the lines with Eric – it’s not an expected paint by numbers – it’s a dance of unexpected turns using all the colors of the rainbow.

Eric: I’m going to make you dance all around. Yeah.

Liz: That’s the second time you’ve turned without me.

Eric: Sorry. You told me to run.

Liz: But that’s you. You’ll turn because you see something that you think is worth pursuing, and your client will follow your vision.

Eric: I hope. We hope. I mean, This year… I’ve not done resolutions or anything like that. Each year I try to pick a phrase, and it helps me have a vision of what we’re doing.

Liz: So what’s this year’s phrase?

Eric: Fun.

Fun. First it evokes my former life full of hula hoops, legos, chickens, and balloon lift offs. Now fun has become listening, writing and sharing these walks.  Fun is wherever we get our flow. For Eric, he found fun by creating a year-long string of posts on instagram. The theme…

Eric: Am I at Disney? every single day for 365 days. I got more business from that stupid thing than anything else because I was visible, but it was just me being dumb. But it was fun for me to find a picture that I wanted to share. It was very obvious by day 30 that I wasn’t at Disney. Especially when my kids are jumping 12, 8 years in age between pictures. But that stuff was fun.

Liz: You did that for a full year?

Eric: 365 days. I think consistency is a real big… especially in my business, I think people that can do something consistently, say they’re going to do it and do it matters. If you post enough of them, Google recognizes your authority and your consistency. They’ll rank you… They’ll say, “Well, he just wrote 40 blogs about web design. He’s probably one of the best web designers here.” When somebody types web design near me, I show up. So it helps, but if you’re writing it hoping that people are going to see every single thing and reach out to you, it’s very difficult. It’s almost demoralizing because from a creative standpoint, you work and you try real hard, so you have to go into it knowing that you’re writing it just for yourself. I don’t care if anybody else reads this. And that’s how it got me through doing all that because I felt like I had something… If I just wanted to write a stupid joke and have it in there, I had the ability to do it. So it made me happy.

But being a business with a team of employees derailed him for a hot minute. When Eric began hiring employees, he took on many new responsibilities that pulled him away from his original passion. The transition from individual contributor to business owner created a significant identity shift -but it was only a detour.

Eric: I went away from it because I ran out of time. So this year, once again, we’re writing blogs. we’re making podcasts, we’re making videos.

Liz: And the reason for it is?

Eric: Because my word is fun, because I felt like I stripped away a lot of the fun of this job. I mean, if you can’t have fun, if you own your own business and you can’t have fun and dictate what you want to do, then what chance do we have in anything else?

Eric so loves his work, he finds himself immersed in it all the time.

Eric: I get dad guilt from all of it. And I think it’s because… I don’t know. I mean, from a parent standpoint, I work from home. They think I’m always working. I don’t think I’m working almost ever because it’s more fun… I don’t know. It’s just fluid for me. If you email me at seven o’clock, I might just go email you back. And that’s a blessing and a curse. I don’t know if the guilt will go away, if there’s always guilt. Miles has a pretty good life. He’s doing fine. I’ve said it way too many times, probably. If he doesn’t know how to read by high school, I’ll have a problem. I don’t try to force it early. There’s nobody, in my opinion, that says, You have to know this by a certain date. I think we all learn differently and do it at different stages. When we felt like he was falling behind, we very much took the actions necessary to try to catch him up. If he caught up, great. But I can’t speed that stuff up. You can’t force somebody to learn something. The only thing we could do is give him the best opportunity. And I feel like that’s what we’ve done. So I guess that’s maybe where the dad guilt rests, I try to justify it, knowing that, yes, I don’t read many books to him. But I didn’t read many books to any of my kids. It’s just not my thing.

Liz: So where’s the reading books come from? Is that just what you’re supposed to do if you’re a good parent?

Eric: Yeah. But You know what I did? I realized that I don’t necessarily have the skill sets to be that parent that most people think of. I have skill sets to be a good parent in other ways. Lainee and I are doing a podcast. I think that’s a cool thing you can do with your kid. We go to Disney, we do all types of fun things. But I was never one to be like, All right, let’s read together.

Liz: Now, you have to publicly admit you’ve done something for your son’s passions that I don’t know a single other parent who has. You have a wrestling ring in your basement.

Eric: That’s not his passion. That’s me. That was a promise. 

Liz: So that’s just you transferring it on to him?

Eric: No, no, no, no, no. That is me making a promise to myself. That is an Eric Hersey midlife crisis promising the 16-year-old Eric who basically wanted a wrestling ring, that I was going to buy one one day. So the fact that Miles and Lainee get to participate in that is more so because I promised myself that I was going to do it. And I have no reason for it. My knees are obviously bad now. I can’t do anything fun with it. Miles can play in the ring, and Lainee can play in the ring, but that ring was for me. I told people forever I was going to buy a wrestling ring. Wrestling, oddly enough, is very crucial in my life. My dad died when I was 16. My mom did not work, so we were low income, if that was even a word. So I was pretty poor. And when my dad died, it was into the wrestling of Steve Austin, the raw resurgence there. So I was a backyard wrestler. 

Not knowing what to do with the emptiness left physically and emotionally when his father died, Eric filled that space with wrestling – not just the physical sport but the branding and entertainment of it all too.

Eric: Backyard wrestling was a craze in the ’90s, where the teenagers would emulate their stars, and they would go in the backyards and fight each other in a choreographed way. We created our own little wrestling organization. Me and about 20 of my friends, and I was the owner/orchestrator of it, and we’d have events every Sunday. I’d get four mattresses, we’d have big tarps, and we’d videotape it and have story lines. Everybody had characters and theme music and all that stuff. Real orchestrated. Well, typically, when you lose a parent when you’re 16, you don’t really have a good foundation any other way. A lot of my friends experienced divorces and stuff like that, but I had this thing of mine, so I kept going. Essentially, that helped me through a pretty tough time – having this federation and branding it and marketing it. We got invited to go to Ricki Lake. 

My character’s name was Hostile. I was a tormented soul, of course, as you would be in the ’90s. Almost like a goth type, to an extent. But I told myself back then that I was going to own a wrestling ring one day. And I told enough people that, that I said, I’m still going to. So every time we looked at the house, I always planned out where I was going to put that ring.

Liz: It’s a pretty big polarity to go from the character of Hostile to the theme being fun for this year.

Eric: Yeah. Maybe it’s a polar opposite where I’m playing a different role.

Liz: Do you feel like you’re playing a role, or do you feel like this is the authentic role now?

Eric: I think fun is the authentic role. I think you go through times. Obviously, when I was 16, I was dealing with the death of my father and stuff like that. Obviously, I was tormented. I mean, I had rough years, but I’m very, very thankful that somehow I made it out. I mean, it’s not even somehow. I got very fortunate to meet Lauren. We’ve been together since I was 17, I think. So she’s always seen potential in me and pushed me from one job to the next to the next to the next to say, “Hey, you can do this stuff,” where I’m just trying to have fun. I never really sought out to be a business owner or do anything. I just wanted to make cool websites for passion projects. And then somebody said, “You know people pay you for this.” And I still make fun projects. I just reached out to a Disney historian and was like, “Hey, your website’s not very good. I can help you.” And next thing you know I’m working with former imagineers including the guy who invented the Touring Plan.

If I seek fun, then I will be successful. And that’s where I’m like, don’t get in the weeds. If you do things and if you’re authentic to who you are and you have something worth selling or at least worth working with…then I think fun attracts people. I think people want to work with people that are smart, smiling or doing things that are cool. And that’s primarily what, at least this year, is about.

I have it written on a board, plain as day, every single day I see it. If the choice comes up for me to do something that’s fun versus something that makes you more money,  I’m probably going to choose fun because I think the fun will make more money in the long run.

Are you following? We moved from backyard wrestling to Ricki Lake to meeting the love of his life to making webpages for a Disney Imagineer. Yes, Eric’s is a neurodivergent brain… thankfully. He doesn’t follow a prescribed path – not on foot, trust me, or in his story. But if you press pause and slow the story down, you see so many creative pursuits that naturally flow from one another. And you need to – slow the story down, that is, when you talk to Eric because his words come as fast and as furious as the thoughts that enter his mind.

Eric: A weird thing affected me, and it comes off as a weird legacy. I was really upset that my dad didn’t have an online legacy because he existed before the Internet. You can’t Google him and find anything about him. That really upset me. Not so much that Lauren never met him, but anybody that knew my dad, it’s all what it is. You just have a little pocket of these people that knew who he was. They didn’t document anything. So I wrote this blog back when I was doing laps here. I was basically thinking, “Hey, my dad deserves better than that.” So I did what I could and shared as much as I knew about him, which is not a tremendous amount because, let’s be real, we didn’t have too many hard-found conversations prior to… age 16. It’s not like I sat down and said, “Tell me about your life.” So I wrote the blog, but this year at Thanksgiving, a guy emailed me. It was Dad’s best friend who found his blog when he was Googling him. He shared all types of cool stuff about him. And I was just super happy.

Eric found a way to allow his father to leave a legacy for him and anyone else who cared…even if he wrote it himself. Walking did that. He wasn’t walking with me that day. He was just following his thoughts as he waited for his children to finish piano lessons. A muse moment as I like to call it. Eric wasn’t just inspired by the muse, he acted on it. He got back in the car and wrote the blog and a few years later he received the collateral beauty of a mind that is always active. He learned something new about his father. 

Of course, Eric now has other dreams. 

Eric: For someone like myself who thinks the online is your legacy now…  how people can find about you when you’re gone, to know my dad didn’t have anything… 

He doesn’t finish the thought. He is on to the next one.

Eric: My mom barely has anything, but I can change that. 

I am sure he is writing that in his mind, as a new idea and then another lands abruptly on his train of thought.

Eric: For Christ’s sake, I could probably figure out how to get my dad an IMDb page. Oh, wow. I don’t think so. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

There is no maybe about it. He will figure out a way. Afterall he has given himself a task, so he will have to see it through. This brain is never still. This creative mind doesn’t recognize boundaries. When it encounters a locked door, it doesn’t simply look for the key—it questions why doors exist at all. Sometimes this brain works in whispers, quietly suggesting connections while washing dishes or watching a movie. Other times, it arrives in thunderclaps of insight while walking laps in Centre Market. Every new idea becomes raw material for the next creation, transforming endings into beginnings in an endless cycle of renewal.

Eric Hersey has learned to trust the spinning, to stay open to the constant flow, and to capture the sparks as they fly by. Make sure you are paying attention or he will turn right abruptly and whip you into the next idea. You wouldn’t want to miss the fun of it all.

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When tragedy strikes, I know people who build mental rooms. The grief stays in one. Work in another. Family needs in a third. This isn’t denial—it’s survival. They have learned to close doors without locking them. They may visit the pain room daily, but on their terms. Ten minutes to cry. Twenty to rage. Then shut that door and open another.

You might think of this as unhealthy, but compartmentalizing isn’t about avoiding pain—it’s about functioning when everything inside might otherwise collapse.

The trick so I have heard… Never mistake closed doors for sealed vaults. Let yourself process it all in time. Maybe you process in contained bursts that don’t consume your entire existence. Maybe you try to make time to focus on joy until it becomes a room of its own… or perhaps until it is the lifeline that threads through all of those mental rooms.

Since I first met him, John Evans has always embodied joy to me. He is such a thread. When John is in it, the room is full of joy. He is a like-minded soulmate. What are we doing in elementary education if life can’t be fun? Participate in one game night organized by John Evans and you too will be hooked.  Like me, you will find yourself drawn to him and his decisive and positive energy.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It was sort of disheartening to me that it was going to be so disgusting here (in Wheeling) while we were walking, but I know it won’t feel that way, because I’ll be talking to you, John.

John Evans: Oh, I can be a little sunshine for you, I hope

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You are a little sunshine for me.

I asked John to be one of my very first walks. We were supposed to take to the trails together in October in Austin, TX, but life happens when you are making other plans. As a second best alternative, we committed to a virtual walk from opposite coasts since John Evans is the Head of School at Village School in Pacific Palisades, CA. Yes, the Pacific Palisades – the area where wildfires ravaged whole communities… including John’s school.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: When you and I did not walk in October. I wasn’t upset. I literally had this feeling we weren’t supposed to walk yet.

John Evans: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I cried when I heard you lost your school because your heart is right there on your sleeve, and I knew it the minute I met you. I couldn’t imagine at first the pain you were experiencing, and then very quickly,  I thought, I can’t imagine anybody else leading children and parents and teachers through this, but you.

While the brick and mortar is in ashes, John is very successfully leading the school back to joy. Finding his way through tragedy is a journey with which he has become all too familiar, but he finds the greatest inspiration in the resilience of children.

Liz: I just have to ask, because my heart broke when you sent the email that you were in the hospital with your husband who broke his arm while skiing… right after you told me that you finally had room to breathe. What is tragedy on top of tragedy like for you right now?

John Evans: You know, I think it’s really odd to say this out loud, but the truth is, it’s become my normal. You know my headship has been scarred, laden with one tragedy after another. I started at Village in the pandemic. I got the job in 2019 and started July 1, 2020. I was handed keys and told, “Good luck opening the school.” That July 1st both my brother and my assistant head of school were diagnosed with cancer. My brother’s doing well, but my assistant head passed away the next year…and then after that… the fire. So I just feel like there’s been just a ton of heaviness and trauma. But I’m really good at compartmentalizing, which I didn’t realize I was so good at.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And John, I love that your husband’s broken arm didn’t even make that list

John Evans: No, it sure didn’t. Poor guy!

Elizabeth Hofreuter:Have you come up with a metaphor of any kind for what it’s like to have lost your school in a fire?

John Evans: I mean, I’ve been focused so much on the future, so much on moving forward, I think the biggest piece for me was taking the lessons from the pandemic … be transparent. Tell the parents everything. Do not leave any stone unturned in terms of communication, and get those kids back together as soon as possible. So that’s why I, with my competitive spirit, rushed out immediately to get space… to find the best possible space and to start making it home. I’m only thinking about what’s next as opposed to what happened. Obviously we deal with trauma. But as Michael Thompson and Rob Evans said to my entire community, “The kids are all right.” And they look to the adults to make sure that we’re handling things in the right way. So that’s what my primary focus has been on making sure the teachers and the parents are okay, so that the kids can just keep doing what they need to be doing…learning, raising their hands, getting messy, you know.. playing at recess …all the good stuff.

…the pandemic feels like it pales in comparison to this, you know. Like, if you think of it as a game of Jenga. I just don’t even know what lever to pull. I just look forward, and I’m taking small wins and going day by day.

Taking small wins. Compartmentalizing. Yes, the pandemic taught every head of school I know how to compartmentalize. In one room you were a public health expert. In another, a psychologist. A strategist in another. In time we added a room for construction projects and campus planning. The list went on and on. For me there was also a great room just for Grace, Ella and me where we had prom night dressed in our best dining on the homemade sushi Grace rolled. There were no events or dinners to run off to – nothing that stole my “off hours” away from my girls. 

At a time when I too had to make sure all the WCDS children were all right, I also had more room to make sure my girls were all right too. It wasn’t a small win. It was a big one. It’s odd thinking that I miss some of that.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I just finished a walk called The Oxygen Mask about taking care of ourselves, and I didn’t hear that in your list of things you’re doing, but I did hear you allude to the way we look to a flight attendant during turbulence. And if the flight attendants are okay, we’re not panicking. This thing’s not going down.

John Evans: Yeah, no, that’s a really good metaphor, for sure. And you know, my husband, who takes very good care of me, at one point said, “You’re not taking the oxygen mask,” and I was like, “Leave me alone.” Admittedly, I think there have been moments where I haven’t stopped to take breaths when I should have, but now I’m starting to, you know, weave those in more consistently and really focus on the wins…

He hasn’t built that room to focus only on himself… yet, but he promises that is on the horizon. Less than four years after the fear of the pandemic, John is faced with the unknown again. The devastation this time is catastrophic. It is unreal.. although it is a reality I imagined when I walked off campus back in March 2020. I think of it in slow motion…turning off the lights, locking the door, taking what I feared was one last look around. It is like a scene in a movie I saw, not a moment I lived. As John recounts the similar events of the day the fire spread, he sounds like he is just telling me a story. 

John Evans: I was in the middle of a meeting with my director of athletics, and we were talking about a really important problem. We had too many kids enrolled for sports for the winter season. It was like we were giggling. We were so happy that we had 48 kids sign up to play basketball and volleyball. And so we’re talking about having to find more coaches… and then my assistant came in and said, “I need you to see something,” and I went out and saw billowing smoke.

I was like,” Oh, no! What is that?” We watched it for a good 30 seconds, and then saw orange flashes and we knew.

Right then I called my CFO. The Admin team came together, and within 10 minutes we had a communication out to all of our families saying, “Come, pick up your kids.” We just basically got everybody out super efficiently. I had to drive a kindergartner with me from the school. I was the last person to leave with little Everly Krubich in my backseat because her parents were trapped up in the Highlands. They had fire behind them and in front of them, and they couldn’t get out. Eventually, they did, but I had their daughter for about an hour.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Is that one of your crisis scenarios that you had planned for?

John Evans: No. Definitely, not. I mean, we were able to call on our protocols for how to keep the kids safe and to move swiftly. I’m so proud of my teaching staff, and how folks just remained calm. What was amazing to me was having the kids all in the gym trying to keep them calm and happy. And some of the older kids, like the 6th graders, had kids sitting in their laps, and they were taking the role of caretaker and helping out. So it was a true, beautiful community moment, but it was also really scary. It was crazy out there, you know. People were pulling off to the side and getting out of the cars and running for safety. And then trucks had to barrel through, wrecking hundreds of cars because they needed to get to the fire. I don’t even know how to describe it. Dystopia.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It sounds like you’re describing a scene from an LA movie, not an LA school.

When we retell a tragedy, something strange happens – the raw, chaotic experience becomes packaged into a narrative with structure and meaning. When we share the stories, we naturally impose order – selecting details, creating cause-and-effect relationships, building toward climactic moments, and offering meaning or lessons. This narrative structuring helps us process overwhelming events, but simultaneously creates some underlying tension. We’re aware that our tidy retellings, however necessary for communication, inevitably fail to capture the full weight of what actually happened to us and to the people in our care. The gap between raw experience and narrative serves as both shield and balm. When we turn overwhelming pain into a story with coherent shape, we give it its own room and we gain some measure of control over experiences that originally left us powerless. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It has to feel like you were there, but you weren’t there… like you’re telling me a story that somehow your nervous system is letting you believe is just a story and not reality.

John Evans: Yeah, yeah, no. True. That’s very true. 

John Evans: As we all know, grief is a wave, and it’s going to be felt in different ways throughout a very long time. But I knew immediately that the best thing to do was to get these kids with their friends and their teachers. Because that’s what children need. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Resilient little ones.

John Evans: Yeah, adaptable and strong. And you know, our theme this year was leadership, and we had these banners made with our Village values. They’re beautifully done, and they were hung on the campus, and one of them survived, which is kind of incredible. 

John Evans: It’s pretty extraordinary. I have a picture of a mom who lived in the neighborhood, whose home burned down, so she had a pass to get in early, and she was the first who walked the campus. I think it was like 48 hours later, and she picked it up and held it. It’s quite beautiful.

It says Village builds courageous leaders. So we decided to move the focus from leadership to courage and talk about what courage actually is… leading from the heart with the root word “cor” meaning heart. So we focused a lot on that – just getting kids to understand how resilient they are and how adaptable they’ve been. 

John’s story is starting to come around to that beautiful conclusion – a story of courage – of heart. Like a good story it also seems to have a prologue recognizable only in hindsight.

John Evans: I wrote this piece, Liz, on January 6, after a really wonderful break that was now, when I look back, prophetic in its resonance, because it was all about Pema Chodron’s famous words, “Nothing ever really goes away until it has taught us what we need to know”…what we need to learn.  And it’s almost like I was preparing everybody for a real challenge to come.

We never know how the story is going to go. When we think we have learned the lesson, sometimes we have not. There is more to come. I am learning there is no prescribed timeline. No date by which to get over it. No box to check off. Even when we think we have learned what we need to know, some new challenge may lie in wait to test us. We may not have fully processed the lessons. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I have only just realized that one of the reasons this year is turning into a full year without a position instead of a shorter period of time as I thought it would be is because I still had so much healing to do between what I experienced with Covid and then losing my mom, my dad and my stepmother and I needed to heal, and I had no idea how much I needed to heal. But the other thing I’ve learned is that everybody’s timeline’s different.  I’m not healing late. This is just when my time was to heal.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You’ll heal when your body and your spirit need it.

In the meantime, John has that gift to find and celebrate the joy. There’s a profound alchemy in finding joy within or after tragedy – not as erasure of what was lost, but as affirmation of what remains, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit… as seen in the resilience of children.

John Evans: The thing that I’m most proud of is just how we all came together at Village. How everybody was able to see the important aspects of community and lean into that  – that has felt really powerful.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And something you can hold, no matter what comes next.

John Evans: Exactly.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: So you did it. You had the center hold when most people wouldn’t.

John Evans: And I learned that from Covid. I mean, all of these things do teach us what we need to learn.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: If we’re open to learning

John Evans: If we’re open to it. 

Nothing ever really goes away until it’s taught us what we need to know, what we need to learn. Maybe we can learn some of those lessons from the stories that connect us. When our personal anguish or suffering becomes communicable, we’re no longer alone with our grief. The storytelling itself becomes a communal act that can bring witnesses into our experience without overwhelming them or ourselves.

Perhaps most importantly, shaping tragedy into narrative allows us to gradually integrate it into our broader life story instead of remaining trapped in its raw immediacy. We can begin to say “this happened to me” and with it comes the subtle peace that storytelling offers – not erasure of pain, but the beginning of containing it in its own room.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I will be writing this and smiling the entire time, which is one of your amazing gifts to help people smile through tragedy. So thank you.

John Evans: Thank you, Liz. I appreciate you so much, and enjoy the rest of your walks.

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Recently, I listened to A Bit of Optimism Podcast between Simon Sinek and Melinda French Gates. You need to understand that Simon Sinek impacted my leadership mindset years ago. I am a fangirl. When he spoke at the annual conference for NAIS, I sat in the front row and made Luke Hladek and Joe Jividen sit right there with me although once he started talking, I had no idea any one else was even in the space. 

In this particular podcast, he and Gates spoke about the ways we get through suffering. When life throws you a curveball, whether it is of your own choosing or not, gather your friends. You have some control. My mom used to say, you always have a choice – even when you are thrown into a transition that you didn’t choose – she’d remind me sometimes what you can choose is to simply walk away.  When you do, walk away, Gates would recommend that you surround yourself “with good friends who remind you ‘We don’t know where you’re going but you will be ok. Yes, you are sad now, but you are going to be OK.’ These people can hold space and offer the perspective that you are going to be fine even as you sit in the uncomfortable place you find yourself. Sinek reminds us that surrounding ourselves with good people is a positive action. It is an example of the agency we have. He comments, “You put the parachute on before you jump out of the plane.” 

Tammy Augustine is my parachute. We met months before my divorce when I hired her as a personal trainer. Her gym was steps from Wheeling Country Day School. Back then, the only way I was going to take care of my health was if someone scheduled it on my work calendar. 

Liz: If you know the only way you’re going to show up for yourself is if there is an appointment on the calendar, then that’s what you need.

Tammy: Accountability. You have to. And sometimes that’s somebody to work out with.

So I charged Tammy with my fitness, but with each rep, I recognized my strength. When life started to get squirrely, I still showed up and she held space for me to achieve whatever I could that day. Tammy Augustine didn’t fix me. She brought out in me the strength and fortitude I had. In the last eight years, she has been there through all of life’s big transitions. She is a trusted fellow traveler as she has had her share of suffering through big events.

Liz: In your life, what’s the big event? 

Tammy: Without a doubt…My son having a stroke when he was six. It changed my whole perspective of life, scared me to death, someplace I can go back to immediately and feel every aspect of how I felt in that moment, and it was a lot of pain.

I had two healthy children. And in a split second, my life changed.

That was the worst moment in my entire life to date. I hope that I don’t have to experience anything that traumatic again. But It also changed my perspective on the importance of the little things in life. I can remember sitting at a ball game, and my son, obviously, he survived with some deficits, but he worked really hard to get movement back and speech back and all those things. But he wasn’t the best player on the soccer team. He just got to get in a little bit, and he was part of the team, but I would sit in the stands, with parents who are screaming at their kids because they’re not playing well enough. Maybe they missed the goal. They didn’t give it their all that night. And me… I was sitting there just so happy that my son was part of the team, that he actually could be out there. And I actually got to watch him play. 

I wanted to lean over and say, “Hey, just be so grateful that he’s got two legs that work, and he can kick a ball.” He never scored a goal or anything for most of his soccer career. And there was one game, they were playing a team that was not really good at all, and they were killing this team. And the coach is like, “Austin, come off the bench. Come on, we’re going to put you in.” And he had wonderful teammates who all supported him. That whole game that he was in, they were trying to kick the ball to him, to assist so he could get a goal.  Somebody got it in front of him. He kicked a goal, and every single one of those players out on the field ran to him and picked him up. And I remember sitting up there just like… That was the best moment. He was alive and could do that.

I’m just so happy that he could even be out there. And don’t get me wrong, you fall back into that non-appreciative life. We all do. You fall back into getting angry about the dumb things. But if you can think back on that moment…

Liz: When I asked you about the big moment in your life, I wish that instead of the stroke, I wish our brains were wired to go to that really wonderful, positive moment.

Tammy: I’ve often wondered this, why in my life.. why do we remember so clearly every aspect of the painful parts of our life? But the happy moments, the joy, you don’t remember the details like you remember it in the detail that you do for the painful ones. 

It’s strange, isn’t it? The way our minds cling to memories of struggle and hardship with vivid clarity, while the moments of pure happiness seem to slip through our fingers like sand. I’ve been thinking about this peculiar tendency we have to catalog our suffering in high definition while joy gets filed away in some dusty corner of our consciousness.

Pain etches itself into our neural pathways with remarkable precision. I can still feel the exact moment my heart shattered after my fiance and I broke up. I recall the specific shade of beige on the hospital walls when I heard Nicolas had no heartbeat. I remember the distinct emptiness in my stomach driving to a lawyer’s office to give back a baby we had adopted 11 days earlier when the birth mom changed her mind. These memories don’t fade – they crystallize.

Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Our brains developed to catalog threats and hardships as a survival mechanism. Remember the berry that made you sick, the path where you encountered danger, the time you almost didn’t make it – these memories kept our ancestors alive. Joy, pleasant as it is, didn’t confer the same survival advantage.

Or maybe it’s because pain demands our full attention. When we suffer, we’re completely present – every nerve ending firing, every sense heightened. Joy can be experienced peripherally, sometimes even unconsciously, while pain commands our entire being.

Most ironic of all is how we gloss over the joy that emerges from our struggles. The relief of making it through a difficult time, the profound appreciation that follows deprivation, the deep connections forged during shared hardship – these precious afterglows of pain often fade fastest of all, though they represent some of life’s most authentic moments of happiness. 

Until we develop a new practice – to give joyful moments the same attention and reverence we automatically give to painful ones. To notice joy fully when it occurs, to reflect on it deliberately afterward, to tell the stories as completely as we recount our struggles. Like sitting at a soccer game when your son scores his first goal.

Tammy: Although it was the worst time in my life, I walked away with what was positive, that he survived.

While Tammy and Austin’s dad desperately waited for doctors to determine the reason for their son’s blood curdling screams that came out of nowhere, a nurse showed kindness.

Tammy: She has a little angel pin on the lapel of her shirt, and she takes it off. And she said, I want you to have this. Somebody gave it to me in a time when I had some things happening in my life. You’re going to need this. And she put it on my shirt. And next thing, we had to drive in the middle of the night in pouring rain to get to the next hospital – we had no idea where we were going.

There are always angels if we look for them – people who surround us when we need them.

After four days sitting with her son in a medically induced coma with doctors watching for brain swelling, Tammy was told

 Tammy: This isn’t good. We don’t know if he had another stroke. He’s not coming out of it. We’re going to take him down and do another CAT scan. And of course, we’re, again, in shock. There’s four people around him pushing the bed, and they tell us to come with them. And this is a moment that I’ve lived in my head many times. We’re following the bed down a hallway, and it’s lined with chairs, and people are sitting in the chairs waiting for appointments or whatever, and they’re bagging him. I’m a mess. I can barely walk. John is holding me up, and I’m falling. And all I can picture in my head is we’re the car behind the hearse. This is what is going to happen, and I don’t want to be here anymore. If he goes, I want to go. I can’t imagine him being in a big world that I don’t know of by himself. I have to go. They sat us in a room by ourselves for 15 minutes, but it felt like five hours. And the hospitalist comes in. She goes, “He’s fine. No changes. Can you go buy him a pair of high tops?

He’s getting dropped foot, and we don’t want him to get dropped foot.” And I went, What? You don’t know whether to cry, laugh. It was so nonchalant. Like, Oh, he’s fine. I just had the worst moment in my life, but he’s good.

And he was good.

Tammy: I sat in bed with him on day two of being in the upstairs wing. He had just learned how to read his colors in kindergarten… red, yellow, the primary ones, I wrote all of them down on a piece of paper in pencil, and I pointed to red, and I had crayons of the colors. And I said, Find this crayon. He could read the colors and pick the right crayon. When the doctor came in, I said, “He’s going to be fine. He knows. He didn’t lose anything cognitively. He knows.” And the doctor looked at me and he’s like, “He knows, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.”

The kindergarten teacher who taught Austin to read the colors turned out to be another angel – part of the Augustine support system. Just months out of college, managing her first classroom, her life was changed as well. She wrote in a newspaper piece, “ Suddenly the lesson plans and petty worries of everyday life didn’t seem so important anymore. Here was this bright-eyed little boy paralyzed on one side of his body with bleeding in his brain.”

Tammy: She’s 20-some years old. Oh, my gosh. She was devastated by it all. I mean, it impacted her a lot. She was a fantastic teacher. Again, so blessed and lucky that we had her as his teacher. She came to the hospital. When we got back home, she herself volunteered to stop twice a week after school and tutor him when she was done with her day, she would stop. And on good days, she could work with him. When he had bad days, there’s a lot of bad days that he was either too tired… or he’d have fits of crying, not being able to talk. So he didn’t know how to handle his new world, and we didn’t either. I mean, we were all learning.

Liz: Did he ever go back to kindergarten? 

Tammy: He did. Yeah. In her class. Surprisingly, he went back. I’m going to… I think it was like two months later.

Kalin Freisen, the kindergarten teacher who showed up on good days and bad held space for Austin and his parents. She couldn’t fix it, but she could be there in support and prepare his classmates to do the same. In that same article she also wrote, “I see such love and compassion shown in my classroom. The children have learned one of the greatest lessons of life: to show compassion toward others.”

Austin’s stroke had a positive ripple effect on so many lives… his classmates, his teacher, his caregivers, his therapists, his sisters and his mother.

Once Austin was back in school, however, Tammy had to find activities to help her move through her suffering. The caregiver requires as much recovery as the boy. For Tammy a great deal of it involved dedicating herself to her passion for wellness and fitness, but there were simpler actions as well like the comfort found in a swing or a rocking chair. When we rock or swing, the repetitive movement activates our “rest and digest” mode, which naturally counters the “fight or flight” response triggered by anxiety. At WCDS we bought rocking chairs to comfort children for that very reason. We adults used them much more often. For Tammy, she now has a porch swing for relief when worry sets in.

Liz: Your nervous system doesn’t forget. Even as your brain starts to… Your conscious brain starts to move past, your nervous system doesn’t forget. And I wonder if swinging isn’t our taking care of that earlier version of ourselves that is still really hurting.

Tammy: Right. Do you ever… I’ve caught myself at the grocery store standing in line, rocking back and forth. Do you ever do that?

Liz: Like you’re holding a baby. You know, I always assume that I’m going to sway the rest of my life because I am still swaying Nicolas.

Tammy: But hey, I’m also one that sees an empty aisle in Walmart or Kroger, and wants to lunge all the way down it.

Liz: Yeah, I don’t have that impulse.

Tammy: I want to do walking lunges down that aisle.

Liz: That’s good for you. You do those for me while you’re there. Everything in moderation.

Another one of my mom’s pearls of wisdom. Everything in moderation. That was her answer for diets, workouts, travel… we don’t have to go full throttle all the time. Sometimes we need to let up on the gas and just walk.

Tammy: Let’s just walk.

I guess that is why I started walking last fall. I was surrounding myself with good people. I was taking positive action. It was a reminder that I had agency. I was following the advice of Melinda French Gates before I had ever heard it.

Liz: I do go back and wish that when suffering came, I could more easily hit the pause button and see this too shall pass. And something good is probably coming from this.

Tammy: I’m going to ask you the question. Don’t you feel like you’re better at that now, though? 

Liz: I feel like I’m a ton better at it. 

Tammy :It’s saying to yourself, Why are you getting upset over this?

Liz: Right. But for me, It’s “Good Lord, you just went through this big thing seven years ago, and you let this take you to your knees?” You have to give yourself grace. 

Tammy: Agreed. Right. 

Liz: I am definitely better at it.

There’s an art to showing up when someone’s world is falling apart. When I’m drowning in grief, anxiety, or just the overwhelming weight of existence, I’ve learned to gather my people, but I have also learned to be selective about who gets to witness my undoing. The people who earn this privilege are rare and precious.

They don’t try to fix me. They understand that some pain can’t be solved, only witnessed. They sit with me in the darkness without frantically searching for a light switch. Their presence says, “I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

These space-holders don’t fill silence with empty platitudes or toxic positivity. They know that “everything happens for a reason” is the last thing a suffering heart needs to hear. Instead, they offer a gentle “this is really hard” – acknowledgment without minimization. They show up authentically. I’m not always good at that. I think I insert humor when I don’t always need to… but at the same time that is me being authentic.

The most valuable people in my darkest hours are those who remember to check in again next week, who drop off wine or coffee without expecting conversation, who text “no need to respond” and mean it. They understand that suffering isn’t linear, and healing doesn’t follow a tidy schedule.

I’ve learned that these rare souls often have their own intimate relationship with pain. They’ve been to the depths and back. They don’t fear your darkness because they’ve navigated their own. Their compassion isn’t theoretical – it’s been forged in fire.

The people who can truly hold space are the ones who understand that sometimes, the most powerful thing they can offer is simply to stay.

Tammy Augustine is one of those people. Tammy stays. She gives me strength… theoretically and literally. 

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