Leave Your Mark — essays and old wisdom on living well.
Reflections A day is one rotation. A year is one orbit. A month is roughly the moon doing its round. The week answers to nothing at all — and the dread you feel on a Sunday evening was never installed by the calendar.
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Reflections Nelson Mandela went into prison at forty-four and came out at seventy-one. Every ordinary human account says the man who walks out of that is owed a reckoning. He went looking for something else.
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Reflections Terry Fox lost his right leg at eighteen. Three years later he started running across Canada — about forty-two kilometres a day, every day — for a finish he did not expect to see.
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Reflections In 1845 there was no feed to check and no phone to put down. He unplugged from ordinary 19th-century life anyway, and said exactly why.
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Reflections A Navy SEAL took two rounds and a face wound in an ambush outside Fallujah. What he built afterward wasn't a comeback story — it was a five-step tool anyone can use.
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Reflections A palm reader told her she'd return to study with him one day. She did — with no idea what that actually meant. It turned into one of the defining relationships of her life.
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Reflections NASA trained him to fly a spacecraft. Nobody trained him for what it would feel like to look back at Earth. He came home a different kind of person than he left.
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Reflections She set out on the Pacific Crest Trail with a pack too heavy and a life falling apart. She didn't expect the strangers. That's what she remembers.
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Reflections A Jesuit priest spent his life telling packed rooms, gently and often hilariously, that they were sleepwalking through their own lives. He might have been talking about this exact moment.
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Reflections Handed seven unplanned minutes on live television, Norm Macdonald didn't rush to fill the silence. He let it sit there — and it became legendary because of it.
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Reflections In the Hanoi Hilton, the prisoners who didn't survive weren't the pessimists. They were the ones who picked a release date and couldn't survive it passing.
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Reflections No publicist, no plan — just a stranger who shows up at your party and starts washing the dishes. The stories may not all be verified. That might be the point.
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