Walk With Me

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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There is a paradox in my life that I do not think I have ever articulated. I went into independent education because I could not believe how complicated it was to help a child learn in the public system when I was interviewing in 1989. I wanted to teach children directly without jumping through the hoops of imposed protocols. I refused to teach to a test where knowledge is reduced to multiple-choice option, and success is measured by filling in a correct bubble. I wanted to be part of developing creative and critical thinkers capable of solving real-world problems. I wanted to make an authentic connection with one child at a time. But…I wanted to help all children, not just the ones who could afford a private education or the ones who could easily comply in the classroom. Therein lies the paradox that never fully sat right in my spirit for 35 years. 

Without realizing it, I find myself drawn to walk with people who made similar choices – like Dr. Jeff Hoepfner.

Liz: I went into independent education as I came out of college because I didn’t like the red tape I found when I was interviewing for public schools back in 1989. And so I’ve been fascinated throughout my educational career with people who see their industry or their field as one patient at a time, and that was what I knew about you from the very first time I visited you.

Dr. Jeff: Yeah, that’s the art part in medicine. I was actually shocked today because one of my patients earlier this morning told me how there’s these little fatty tumors called lipomas that are often down here to your low back, right by your belt. They’re really obvious to me, but then when I send patients to their family docs, so they can get an ultrasound of it to get an idea of the size or get an MRI, the docs don’t touch anybody. They’re 100 % dependent upon special studies.

Liz: Scans, blood work, other tests, ultrasounds…

Dr. Jeff: Yeah, There’s very little clinical decisions made anymore with functional stuff and palpation.

Jeff Hoepfner is a chiropractor. His is literally the practice of hands-on medicine. It always amazes me when he knows exactly where my pain point is. It amazes him that I’m in awe of it. After a high school sports injury of his own, he was drawn to the chiropractic practice that saved him. His work focuses on the musculoskeletal system and the nervous system. I like to think of it this way – it is the infrastructure to my life. If the scaffolding isn’t right, how can I expect to build on all the other systems in a healthy way? I’ve been treated by other chiropractors, but Dr. Jeff’s practice seems different to me. I think it comes from his authenticity and his genuine approach to serving others. I loved the story of his early practice at the art of touch.

Liz: You said to me, I feel things differently with my hands than most people.

Dr. Jeff: In school I was advised to get a phone book, pull out some hair, and start with one page. Work way down into the phone book to where you can still feel the hair. We would do little challenges amongst us in our group of friends, who could go the deepest to hone that sense of feeling? And it’s just…

Magic. He certainly doesn’t finish the thought that way, but I will. As the patient, it can feel like magic.  Maybe that’s because there is something magical that happens when we embrace our authentic selves and the curious and distinct gifts that lie within us. That moment when we stop apologizing for our passions, our quirks and the things that make us uniquely us—it’s like breathing fresh air after being underwater. When we let our freak flag fly, we discover a joy that cannot be replicated. I used to lovingly say that I worked in the land of misfit toys. 

When you step away from conformity, you courageously enter a space of beautiful uncertainty. Without the rigid guardrails of social or (medical in this case) expectations, you’re free to explore the full spectrum of your capabilities. Dr. Jeff did this by taking the risk to become a private pay practitioner exclusively.

Dr. Jeff: Oh, man. That was my favorite year in practice… the year that I got out of doing third party payer systems. It was just all the restrictions left. I actually spent longer with my patients, I spent more time. My decisions were mine and my patients. They weren’t like, well, let’s see what your insurance says we can do, like what their flow chart, which box is next. And it’s really, really nice. 

My fee schedule is very, very low. I’m very old school with the way I do it, because I’ve been self-employed for so long and I have paid for my own health insurance for years. I know what that feels like with high deductibles and copays and things like that. I guess I’m probably too empathetic to the point where I would probably tell you that I’m a bad businessman. I leave a lot of money on the table. I give services away for free like crazy. That’s one of the reasons why I always have to work for myself, because I don’t mind asking for earned capital, but I’m also empathetic to when you’ve got someone in with a hot disk and they’re at 15 visits and you know Christmas is a month away. It feels really good to be that.

Liz: Well, that is what medicine was when I was a child and my parents practiced. I can’t remember the details, but I remember getting a chicken once from a family that couldn’t pay their medical bills.

Dr. Jeff: I’ve received canned food. I’ve received fish from their freezer. In all honesty, those are probably my favorite payments, favorite stories, because they’re equally proud of the fish they caught and the mustard that they made from their Hungarian wax peppers. And I loved that stuff growing up in rural Iowa the way I did. I guess I’m an old soul that way. I don’t know. And I have a good wife who is on the same page with me with this. 

Liz: When you put profit or policy in front of people, it doesn’t take long to fall apart.

Dr. Jeff: It really doesn’t. And it shows its backside every time, eventually.

Exhausted by the assembly-line approach to patient care that insurance companies demanded, Dr. Jeff made the calculated decision to ultimately stop accepting insurance altogether. The depth of care he can now provide has attracted patients willing to pay out-of-pocket for someone who truly listens. When some cannot pay at a given time, he prioritized the person over the profit.

It was a risk he found to be more than worthwhile.

Dr. Jeff: I was really happy to get rid of any of the HMOs just because of the amount of paperwork and then asking for just even six visits, twelve visits. And they’ll say, well, you can have two. And you’re like, well, what are you supposed to get done with two visits?

Now, he could take the time with his patients. The art and science of chiropractic medicine also has a therapeutic element in Dr. Jeff’s office. People share with him. They tell him about financial concerns, family crises, personal joys. Maybe there is something about trusting him to manipulate your spine that affords a level of trust to understand your worries and carry your heart. 

It hasn’t been long enough for me to forget, but I do. I am not sure if I met Dr. Jeff because I was a patient or if I met Dr. Jeff because he was a dad. Both endeared him and his family to me. He has two older children and a younger daughter whom I met when she was just four years old. She could light up a room, but she didn’t easily conform to social norms or the seemingly random benchmarks we sometimes blindly accept and expect in child development.

Dr. Jeff: She wouldn’t sleep. She didn’t sleep or meaningfully talk until she was four. And that was a really bad time.

Liz: Didn’t sleep?

Dr. Jeff: She would sleep for maybe two hours and then wake up. One of us would sleep up there in the other room because there’s three bedrooms up there and would get up with her, soothe her, comfort her, do whatever needed, and then try to get her back to sleep.

Liz: So it was years of sleepless nights. What was the moment that pushed you to ask, we’ve got to see what’s up?

Dr. Jeff: Oh, wow. It was that and the lack of conversation. She would say words, but she would say water, and not because she wanted it, whatever. It’s just because that word popped into her head, not because it was related to something she was seeing or doing.

Liz: Or necessarily wanted.

Dr. Jeff: Correct. So that’s what they… Meaningful language. The language didn’t have meaning. It was just random words that she knew. So we did a lot of sign language in the beginning just because that was the stuff that was meaningful. It was easier. My wife raised the question to our pediatrician, and he was more akin to thinking that it was just her being stubborn. So we had probably another six months, and then we went up to Pittsburgh to Children’s Hospital. And within 20 minutes of Julie being in the office, he’s like, your child has a spectrum issue. You know how it is when you get confirmation and stuff like that. It’s just a kick in the stomach.

Nothing prepares you for that moment. Even if you suspected something was different about your child’s development, hearing an official diagnosis feels like having the air knocked out of your lungs. In the days and weeks that follow, I have sat with parents as they go through stages of grief – disbelief, anger, sorrow, bargaining, and others. I think it is comparable to grief because there is a shift in the life imagined for their child. The truth is, receiving an autism diagnosis for your child changes everything – including you.

Dr. Jeff: It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. And I’m speaking from the dad’s perspective. I can’t imagine what it was like being a mom in that situation. Tough, very, very tough. Services are not great in Ohio as a whole, let alone in the Ohio Valley, as far as what we needed, because we looked around for stuff. Autism is such a vast spectrum. Not all of the hallmark therapies would be a good fit for our kid. You know what I mean? So we ended up traveling to the Boston area. Kelly did. Not me. Kelly did. And she did some training up there at the Sunrise Program, and that was a life changer. That brought her from moderate autism to more of a mild autism, more functional, much, much more functional.

Liz: And that’s the way that program works. They train a parent? 

Dr. Jeff: And you do home-based therapy there. You create a room specifically for the therapy, and you get volunteers to come in that you also train so that you can have someone working with your child. And we were very blessed that way. We had a church that was really helpful and some good friends who came in and helped a lot. And we just had huge jumps during that time. 

And the other thing was up in Wexford, it’s called Brain Balance. In that time period, she actually learned to advocate for herself, to understand what that was and start to do it. 

I guess I’m lucky I had a really good wife who was in education and was just super passionate.

In my years in education I have seen parents, like Kelly, become an autism treatment expert overnight. Special diets, sensory integration therapy, speech therapy, ABA, etc – you name it, they research it. Their calendars fill with appointments, and their credit cards max out with specialists and promised success. As if sheer willpower could change the diagnosis, they do all they can. Each child is unique. It is a spectrum afterall. There is no perfect intervention combination. As a Head of School, I felt helpless at times. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a parent.

Liz: I think what you and Kelly did with Julie is really great advice that you could give your former self. Pick the thing that’s important. “We want Julie to have friends.”

Dr. Jeff: It’s funny that I’m glad that you’re describing that because Julie just turned 14 and we went out bowling. They had the lights down and they had all these flashing lights on, which Julie doesn’t really struggle with. And they had music playing. It was pretty loud, but it was like dance music. And she doesn’t really get too upset about that. And we, I mean, she brings that out in us. Because it’s always been there, my wife and I both like to dance and be goofy. We did that Saturday night and it was a ball. I always say, “Did you let your freak flag fly?” 

… she always feels best when she can do that, when she doesn’t feel the imposed filters that we as society put on. 

Liz: I feel best when I can let my freak flag fly. I mean, that’s just… I think who Julie is is more authentic than… any of us.

When you step away from social expectations, something remarkable happens. You realize how wonderful it feels to be authentically YOU. It reveals how much of our anxiety stems from trying to fit predetermined molds… or have our children fit into them. The energy previously spent on maintaining appearances, fitting in, fixing things, chasing profit becomes available for genuine creativity and connection.

The most profound benefit is discovering that your peculiar perspective, your unusual combination of interests, your distinctive voice—these don’t need to be suppressed but rather to be celebrated in an impromptu dance party at the bowling alley.

Dr. Jeff: I guess one of the hard things for our walk in autism was there’s not a lot of genuine cheerleaders. There’s not a lot of consistency. Because therapists come and go and things like that. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s a toughie. There are teachers, even during my time at Country Day, Julie could tell you who her best teachers were. And it’s not based on what she learned. It’s the ones who really tried to understand her and empathize with her. And she could also tell you the ones who didn’t. And so that’s a good lesson for us. I think as I’m saying this, it makes me think that maybe that’s what I gained watching that in the autism world, that’s what I gained in my practice life by going cash. Do you know what I mean? I could be that more connected, more empathetic chiro, as opposed to … well let me give you an example, I can see about 35, 40 a day max, and I am exhausted based on how I practice. And I have friends who see 70 to 100 a day, and they’re still up for going out for a sandwich after work.

You know what I mean? It’s got to be a stark contrast in how we’re talking with patients, how we just interact and all that stuff. 

Liz: But a patient has the choice to pick a different Chiro. Julie didn’t have that choice with any teacher …ever.

Dr. Jeff: Oh, man. Yeah, that’s the truth. I mean, there is open enrollment, but it’s roulette when it comes to… Because regressions are real, man, when it comes to autism, and that’s tough.

When we embrace our differences, our quirks, we create safe spaces for others to embrace us and to do the same in embracing their own. We silently give permission for authenticity to ripple outward, creating communities where genuine connection can flourish. So go ahead—geek out, laugh too loudly, dance off-beat, sing in the musical, drop the third party payer. The world needs you to be your authentic self more than it needs another complicit carbon copy. The rapturous joy you’ll discover in being unapologetically you is worth every moment of vulnerability it takes to get there.

Liz: Everybody should be forced to go back and just be somebody else on stage and let their freak flag fly. Well, that might very well have to be the title of this.

Dr. Jeff: Let your freak flag fly.

And when you do… you’ll dance …and if you are lucky… you’ll look at your remarkable child and your blessed life and you wouldn’t change a thing.

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Standing at walk 25, looking back at the distance covered and forward to the path ahead, I find myself both humbled and amazed by the evolution of this project and even more so by the expansion of my thinking.

This isn’t just about completing a goal or accumulating miles. The second 25 walks represent a deepening of everything I’ve learned so far. The first half taught me to show up, to put one foot in front of another even when I felt lost. Each story invited me to walk with greater awareness, to truly inhabit each step. When I offered trust, I found authenticity.

The art of listening has perhaps been my greatest teacher. Not just hearing stories, but absorbing the subtle meanings beneath them. Listening to others without the urgent need to respond, advise, warn or relate it back to myself. Listening to the world around me – the rhythmic conversation of footsteps, breath, wind and passing cars that provide a soundtrack of presence.

And through this listening comes the most transformative lesson: people just want to be seen and loved. Not the easy, conditional love that comes naturally, but the intentional love and seeing that requires practice. The kind that sees beyond differences, and extends grace when it’s difficult. I take the responsibility as an honor to carry their hearts as I write their stories. You would understand if I let you hear some of the responses I get when a walker approves the piece.  

Let’s be honest, there is a lot left on the cutting room floor. You don’t hear all of the stories or all of the cussing. You don’t have any idea how often I have to re-record because Finley is my not-always-so-calm constant companion. You don’t capture my anxiety at the start of almost every walk because the mics don’t work. You miss my ineptitude at taking selfies – or remembering to take the picture horizontally. You also might miss that I have started walking on different paths – place-based listening, as I like to call it. Of course, I walked in an airport for The Oxygen Mask …or the Celtics practice facility with Ashley Battle …or the streets of Bellaire, OH with Jeff Hoepfner …and the alligator path for Listen with Rick Poalina. Otherwise, I’d have a mental ranking of whose lawn needed intervention, who got a new dog, or who gets the most packages delivered. Instead it increases my presence as I walk in a place that matters to the story or the person telling it.  I love that this is an imperfect project from which we keep learning.

As I lace up for the next 25 walks, know that this second half isn’t just a repetition of the first. It’s an invitation to go deeper, to listen more intentionally, to love more completely. I hope you have realized that there is something to gain from every walk – a chance to learn something new – even if you do not know the person by my side. Every story matters.

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