Leave Your Mark — essays and old wisdom on living well.
Reflections He played in a Major League game every single day for more than sixteen years, broke a record everyone assumed was permanent, and when he finally sat one out, it was because he decided to — not because his body made him.
Photo by Rick Dikeman (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Reflections Two hundred thousand miles from Earth, three men were being slowly poisoned by their own breath, and the fix had to be built from what was already in the cabin.
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Reflections In 2022 lookups for 'gaslighting' jumped 1,740 per cent and Merriam-Webster made it word of the year. Somewhere in there it stopped meaning what it meant, and the people who needed it lost the only word that named the thing.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
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.
Photo by Alex Wigan on Unsplash
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.
Photo by Paul Fiedler on Unsplash
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.
Photo on Unsplash
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.
Photo on Unsplash
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.
Photo on Unsplash
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.
Photo on Unsplash
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.
Photo on Unsplash
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.
Photo via Unsplash
