faith – Simply O

Learning to see Yellow:

I see red. I see blue. But I experience yellow.

Perhaps it was because I had never really thought much about yellow.

Like many people, I have always been drawn to deeper, more commanding colors. Blue has dignity. Red demands attention. Purple carries the ancient associations of royalty, wealth, and power.

Yellow seemed almost ordinary by comparison.

And yet, standing there one day, surrounded by it, I began to wonder whether yellow might be one of the most important colors in our lives.

The sun that rises each morning.

The warm light that enters our homes.

The headlights that guide us through darkness.

The wheat fields that feed nations.

Bananas, lemons, mangoes, and fruits ripening on their branches.

Sunflowers turning instinctively toward the light.

Yellow is everywhere in God’s creation.

Perhaps that is precisely why we hardly notice it.

Red announces itself.

Blue invites admiration.

But yellow simply arrives.

Every morning.

Quietly.

Faithfully.

And somewhere in that realization, I stopped thinking about color.

I began thinking about life.

How many of life’s greatest gifts are experienced rather than noticed?

How many are freely given, so constantly present that we eventually stop recognizing them as gifts at all?

The bright reds and deep blues of life are easy to see. They are the celebrations, achievements, journeys, promotions, milestones, and extraordinary moments. They stand boldly against the canvas of our existence precisely because they are not constant.

But the things that sustain us often resemble yellow.

The spouse who has shared decades of ordinary days beside us.

The friend who always answers the phone.

The faith that quietly steadies us when the road ahead becomes uncertain.

The health we rarely think about until something begins to hurt.

The family members whose presence becomes part of the background of our lives simply because they have always been there.

The home to which we return.

The morning we assume will come.

Another breath.

Another day.

Like sunlight, these gifts illuminate almost everything while asking for very little attention.

Perhaps that is why they are so easily overlooked.

As I have grown older, I have become increasingly aware that gratitude often arrives late.

We spend so much of life searching for the extraordinary that we can fail to appreciate the ordinary blessings that make the extraordinary possible.

We notice health when illness comes.

We understand companionship when someone is gone.

We recognize time when there seems to be less of it ahead.

We appreciate peace after chaos has disturbed it.

And sometimes we understand the magnitude of someone’s presence only when their chair is empty.

The irony is that many of the most valuable things in life are hidden in plain sight.

Not because they are rare.

But because they are constant.

They become so woven into the fabric of our existence that we stop seeing them altogether.

Perhaps gratitude, then, is really an act of seeing.

Not merely giving thanks for the spectacular, but learning to recognize the quiet gifts that have been carrying us all along.

I had spent much of my life admiring the reds and blues.

The achievements.

The milestones.

The places traveled.

The things accomplished.

They were beautiful, and they deserved to be celebrated.

But all along, beneath them and around them, I had been experiencing yellow.

Love.

Family.

Friendship.

Health.

Faith.

Time.

Grace.

The quiet things.

The constant things.

The things without which none of the reds or blues would have mattered very much.

And perhaps this is one of the gifts of growing older: not that the world suddenly reveals something we had never seen before, but that we finally learn how to see what was always there.

The sun was always rising.

The light was always entering the room.

Yellow was always there.

I simply had to learn to see it.

Simply O.

Paradise Harbor

I have seen beautiful places before.

Mountains.
Oceans.
Forests.
Cities illuminated at night.
Sunsets that seemed to set the entire sky on fire.

But I had never seen anything quite like Paradise Harbour.

I had travelled almost to the end of the world, to a place that seemed as though it could only have been made by the hands of God.

The landscape was almost devoid of color, and yet I had never seen anything more beautiful.

White snow.
Dark water.
Charcoal rock.
Gray sky.
And the luminous blue of ancient ice.

Perhaps that was what made the place so arresting. Nothing competed for attention.

No flowers.
No green trees.
No brightly painted buildings.
No architecture demanding admiration.

Almost nothing we normally depend upon to call something beautiful.

And still, I stood in awe.

The mountains rose directly from the sea, their dark faces disappearing beneath snow. Icebergs drifted across water so still that their reflections sometimes seemed as substantial as the landscape itself.

There were penguins, seals, and orcas—life appearing in places where life seemed almost impossible.

And then there was the silence.

Not an empty silence, but a silence so immense that it seemed almost tangible. Occasionally the wind rushed across the water, but when it passed, the stillness returned.

I could hear myself breathe.

Standing there, surrounded by such scale, I became acutely aware of how small I was.

And strangely, that realization did not diminish me.

It properly placed me.

Creation did not revolve around me.

It never had.

Before me was a world that had existed long before my arrival and would continue long after I was gone. Mountains, oceans, glaciers, wind, and ice carried on without any knowledge of my ambitions, achievements, worries, or plans.

And confronted by such scale, silence, beauty, and mystery, the possibility that all of this existed without meaning seemed harder for me to believe than the possibility that it pointed beyond itself.

Toward a Creator.

Toward an intelligence greater than my own.

Toward something before which the most appropriate human response was not explanation, but awe.

And yes, it was cold.

Bitterly cold.

I understood something of the science before me—the movement of glaciers, the formation of ice, the forces that had shaped those mountains over unimaginable stretches of time.

But knowledge did not diminish my awe.

It deepened it.

Perhaps understanding creation should never lessen our sense of wonder.

Perhaps it should enlarge it.

Perhaps it should enlarge our faith.

Paradise Harbour seemed to have been created largely by subtraction.

Rock.
Water.
Ice.
Light.
Silence.

Nothing unnecessary.

Nothing competing.

Nothing trying to impress.

Perhaps beauty does not always require abundance.

Perhaps it requires clarity.

Perhaps the soul is no different.

Far from the noise of cities, the cruelty of the world, the pressures we manufacture for ourselves, and the endless insistence that we must become more, achieve more, possess more, I experienced something I had not realized I needed.

Stillness.

For a little while, ambition gave way to wonder.

Noise gave way to silence.

Achievement gave way to gratitude.

And somewhere between the dark mountains and the blue ice, between the bitter cold and the impossible stillness of the sea, I felt the grace and mercy of God descend upon me.

Before beauty of that magnitude, I did not become smaller.

I became more truthful.

I remembered where I belonged.

Not at the center of creation.

But gratefully within it.

And standing there at the end of the world, surrounded by rock, water, ice, light, and silence, there seemed only one thing left to say:

How marvelous is the work of Thy hands.

What a wondrous world God created.

Simply O.

Twenty- Five Years

Twenty-five years.

It is strange how time changes everything, and yet leaves certain moments untouched.

The anniversary of September 11 has made me think about that. Twenty-five years also happens to approximate the length of my career at Capital Health Plan. I had only just begun working there in July 2001. I was still finding my way, settling into my office at Governor’s Square, beginning what I could not then have known would become one of the defining chapters of my life.

And then came September 11.

I remember that morning vividly.

There were no televisions in our offices. There were no sophisticated cell phones delivering breaking-news alerts every few seconds. Social media, as we know it today, did not exist. In many ways, we were isolated from what was happening beyond the walls of the clinic.

Our patients became our windows to the outside world.

Someone would come in and tell us that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Then another patient brought another piece of news. Another plane. Another tower. Washington. Pennsylvania.

Fragments of an unimaginable story arrived through the people walking into our examination rooms.

And still, we continued seeing patients.

That detail has always stayed with me. The world had changed, although I don’t think any of us yet understood how profoundly, and there we were doing what we had come to work to do. Patients needed to be seen. Illness had not suspended itself because history was unfolding elsewhere.

We worked until the end of the day.

On my drive home, I turned on the radio. There was nothing else. Every station seemed consumed by what had happened.

Then I arrived home and turned on the television.

Only then did I truly see it.

The planes.

The towers.

The smoke.

People running through streets covered in ash.

And eventually, those enormous buildings collapsing into themselves.

I remember thinking about the depravity of which human beings are capable.

Evil does not always announce itself with horns and banners. Sometimes it begins in ordinary places—in grievance, hatred, resentment, fanaticism, the gradual dehumanization of another person.

Evil springs from common places if we give it the capacity to grow.

When we water evil, it flowers.

And on September 11, 2001, the world witnessed its terrible bloom.

But behind the images and the numbers were human beings.

A husband who kissed his wife goodbye that morning and never came home.

A mother who left for work expecting to see her children that evening.

A wife.

A son.

A daughter.

A grandparent.

Thousands of ordinary lives interrupted in the middle of ordinary days.

There were children who went to school that morning with two parents and returned to a world in which one was suddenly gone. Those children are adults now. They have negotiated adolescence, college, careers, marriages, parenthood and the thousand small decisions of life without the guidance of someone who should have been there.

Twenty-five years does not restore what was taken from them.

And then there were the first responders.

Firefighters running upward while others were running down. Police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens moving toward danger because someone they did not know needed help.

Some died that day.

Others survived only to discover that September 11 had not finished with them. Years later, many would suffer illnesses associated with what they breathed and encountered in those ruins.

The casualties of that morning did not end when the smoke cleared.

I have always believed September 11 was a day I would never forget. I hope the nation never forgets it either—not simply because of what was done to us, but because of what we briefly became afterward.

For a moment, the distinctions that so often consume us seemed smaller.

We were frightened. We were grieving. We were angry.

But we were also together.

Over the years I have come to believe that what is best about us is us—what becomes possible when we remember that, despite all our disagreements, we belong to one another.

Perhaps that is what I miss most when I look at the country today.

That sense of common purpose.

That instinct to reach toward rather than retreat from one another.

That understanding that another person’s suffering diminishes all of us.

Oh, how I long for that again.

Twenty-five years have passed.

In almost exactly that span of time, I began a career, practiced medicine, cared for thousands of people, grew older, watched my children become adults, and eventually walked away from the office for the last time.

A quarter of a century.

Long enough for an entire life to change.

And yet I can still see that young physician sitting in his office at Governor’s Square, hearing fragments of terrible news from the patients coming through his door.

Perhaps that is the peculiar nature of memory.

Time moves.

We move with it.

But some days refuse to move at all.

September 11 is one of those days.

It reminds us of the depths to which human beings can descend. But it also reminds us of the heights to which ordinary people can rise.

Both possibilities live within us.

Hatred can be cultivated.

So can compassion.

Division can be fed.

So can community.

Evil can be watered.

But so can hope.

And perhaps that remains our responsibility—to decide, individually and collectively, what we choose to water.

Twenty-five years later, I still believe there is more goodness in us than hatred, more capacity to build than destroy, more that binds us together than separates us.

The world is broken.

It always has been.

But hope remains.

Simply O.

How much is enough:

I have begun to wrestle with a question that seems deceptively simple:

How much is enough?

We spend so much of our lives moving the goalpost.

One more achievement.
One more promotion.
One more investment.
One more property.
One more number that must be reached before we finally give ourselves permission to say, This is enough. I can live now.

There is nothing wrong with striving. Much of what is good in my life came because I worked hard, remained disciplined, took chances, and kept going when stopping would have been easier.

But striving is supposed to take us somewhere.

At some point, surely, we have to stop and take stock.

We cannot behave as though time is limitless. We cannot work and accumulate indefinitely, postponing life until we are one illness away from a hospital bed—or until illness has taken from us the very ability to enjoy what we spent a lifetime building.

There is only one life.

And I am no longer convinced that spending almost all of it in service of one vocation is prudent, no matter how often we tell ourselves, I love what I do.

Perhaps we do love it.

But there are other things to love.

There are people to love.

There is a world to see.

There are mornings that belong to no employer. Conversations that need no agenda. Places that have been waiting patiently for us. There are children who become adults while we are busy. Spouses who grow older beside us. Friends who disappear sooner than we imagined. And there are ordinary afternoons whose value we often recognize only after they are gone.

People sometimes speculate that artificial intelligence may eventually make much human work unnecessary. I wonder what that would reveal about us.

Would we rejoice at being liberated from work?

Or would we discover that we had spent so long defining ourselves by our occupations that, without them, we no longer knew who we were?

Perhaps that is one of the dangers of achievement. What begins as provision can quietly become accumulation, and accumulation can become something else entirely—a gateway to greed, comparison, and an undeserved sense of self-importance.

I hear of people owning ten houses.

Ten houses.

Yet no matter how many houses we own, we can sleep in only one bed at a time—and occupy perhaps six feet of it.

That is the absurdity of endless accumulation.

There will always be another house to buy, another dollar to earn, another milestone to cross. If the definition of enough is always more, enough will never come.

And the great irony is that eventually we leave all of it behind.

Every house.

Every account.

Every title.

Every possession.

Even the name on the office door.

None of it comes with us.

Perhaps, then, the question is not how much we can accumulate before we die.

Perhaps the better question is:

How much life are we willing to surrender in order to accumulate things we already have enough of?

There comes a point when the arithmetic changes.

Earlier in life, money is scarce and time appears abundant. We exchange time for money because that is what building a life requires.

Later, if we have been fortunate, money becomes abundant enough.

And suddenly time is the scarce asset.

Except there is one terrible difference.

We can look at an account and know exactly how much money remains.

No statement tells us how much time is left.

So perhaps knowing when enough is enough is not a failure of ambition.

Perhaps it is wisdom.

To stop accumulating merely for the sake of accumulation.

To turn from accumulation to stewardship.

To exchange striving for presence.

To recognize that wealth has fulfilled its highest purpose when it gives us the freedom to spend our remaining time deliberately—and, where possible, to make someone else’s journey a little easier.

Because when everything else is stripped away, what remains is surprisingly simple.

The hope for a long life.

The love that carries us through it.

And the grace that sustains them both.

Peace. Grace. Love. Faith.

Simply O.

The world is broken, But hope Remains

The World Is Broken, But Hope Remains

As I traveled through Europe, I often found myself thinking about the strange relationship between beauty and history.

I walked through magnificent cities.

I stood in ancient squares surrounded by beautiful buildings. I crossed bridges over peaceful rivers. I sat in cafés and watched people go about their ordinary lives. Tourists took photographs. Children played. Church bells rang.

And yet, beneath much of that beauty lay the memory of war.

This was a continent that had torn itself apart more than once.

Cities had been bombed into rubble. Millions had died. Families had been separated. Entire communities had disappeared. Young men had crossed borders to kill other young men they had never met. Human beings had discovered increasingly efficient ways to destroy one another.

And now, decades later, I was walking peacefully through those same places.

I found myself wondering:

Do we ever learn?

Because while I was traveling through the ruins and monuments of yesterday’s wars, my phone kept bringing me news of today’s.

Wars.

Rumours of wars.

Bombings.

Missiles.

Threats.

Refugees.

Children pulled from rubble.

Politicians explaining why the next act of violence is necessary because of the previous one.

Every morning, another notification.

Breaking News.

But after a while, I began to wonder what exactly was still breaking.

The news was new, but the story was ancient.

Human beings fighting over land.

Power.

Religion.

Resources.

History.

Pride.

Revenge.

One generation inheriting the anger of another and passing it faithfully to the next.

Perhaps one of the saddest things about our broken world is not simply that violence continues.

It is that we are becoming accustomed to it.

There may be such a thing as fear fatigue.

The first terrible image shocks us.

The tenth troubles us.

The hundredth becomes another story we scroll past on the way to something else.

Not because we do not care, but because the human heart was perhaps never designed to carry the suffering of the entire world every hour of every day.

And so we protect ourselves.

We look away.

We change the channel.

We continue with dinner.

We plan our vacations.

We live our lives.

I understand this.

But I also fear it.

Because when suffering becomes ordinary, indifference can begin to feel normal.

And yet, traveling through Europe taught me something else.

Destruction does not always have the final word.

I walked through cities that had once been rubble.

I crossed borders that armies once died defending.

I watched people from nations that once tried to destroy one another sit together in restaurants, travel together on trains, conduct business together, marry one another, and raise children who may barely understand why their great-grandparents hated each other so much.

That does not mean history is over.

It does not mean peace is permanent.

Nothing is permanent in this world.

But perhaps neither is war.

The human story is filled with destruction, but it is also filled with rebuilding.

Bridges are rebuilt.

Homes rise again.

Church bells ring again.

Markets reopen.

Children return to school.

Former enemies eventually sit at the same table.

Perhaps this is what hope looks like.

Not the denial of suffering.

Not pretending that everything will be fine.

Not closing our eyes to evil or refusing to speak when truth demands a voice.

Hope is something more stubborn than optimism.

It is the refusal to believe that destruction must have the final word.

Jesus said that we would hear of wars and rumours of wars.

Two thousand years later, the words remain painfully familiar.

But perhaps the instruction hidden within them is not to surrender to fear.

We are still called to live.

To love.

To pray.

To speak truth.

To help where we can.

To resist the temptation to divide every human being into camps of us and them.

To remember that behind every statistic is someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s friend.

The world is broken.

Perhaps it always has been.

But I have walked through places where broken things were rebuilt.

I have stood in cities where hope returned after people believed all hope had disappeared.

I have seen flowers growing beside monuments to the dead and children laughing in places where soldiers once marched.

And perhaps that is why I still believe.

The headlines may continue.

The wars may continue.

The rumours may continue.

But somewhere, even now, someone is rebuilding a wall.

Someone is planting a tree.

Someone is feeding a stranger.

Someone is choosing forgiveness over revenge.

Someone is teaching a child a different story.

Someone is praying for peace.

These things rarely make the breaking news.

But perhaps they are the news that matters most.

The world is broken.

But hope remains.

Simply O.

Trust,Verify and the Search for Truth:

I often hear the expression, “Trust, but verify,” and I find myself wondering whether it still makes sense in the world we inhabit today.

After all, why should one trust before verifying?

We live in an age where appearances are increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. An hour spent watching what appears to be a legitimate video may later reveal itself to be entirely AI-generated. A compelling podcast host can speak confidently for ninety minutes while presenting little more than opinion dressed as fact. Politicians, influencers, commentators, and even well-meaning individuals often repeat information that is incomplete, distorted, or simply untrue.

Truth seems harder to find, yet opinions have never been more abundant.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of trusting first and verifying later. By the time verification arrives, the falsehood may already have taken root. Reputations may have been damaged, investments made, votes cast, relationships strained, and decisions finalized.

I once read that truth has only one way of being.

There may be many perspectives, many interpretations, and many narratives, but reality itself remains singular. An event either happened or it did not. A statement is either accurate or inaccurate. A document is authentic or it is not. Human beings may disagree endlessly about meaning, but truth itself does not bend to our preferences.

Yet few of us encounter truth directly.

Most of what we know comes through intermediaries—journalists, scholars, friends, social media feeds, podcasts, television programs, and increasingly, algorithms designed not to inform us but to capture our attention.

Attention has become a commodity.

The modern economy rewards outrage, certainty, speed, and emotional reaction. Nuance is often discarded because it does not generate clicks. Humility is overlooked because it does not go viral. The careful admission of “I may be wrong” is drowned out by those who confidently proclaim certainty.

Perhaps that is why the old proverb deserves reconsideration.

When it comes to people, trust remains indispensable. Families cannot flourish without it. Friendships cannot deepen without it. Communities cannot survive without it. Much of life requires us to extend trust before we possess complete evidence.

But information is different.

Information should earn our confidence.

A headline should not be trusted because it confirms our beliefs. A podcast should not be trusted because we enjoy the host. A video should not be trusted because it appears authentic. A claim should not be trusted simply because thousands of others have shared it.

Information deserves verification before belief.

In such an environment, verification becomes an act of stewardship.

Stewardship of our minds.

Stewardship of our beliefs.

Stewardship of the decisions that shape our lives.

This does not mean becoming cynical. Cynicism is merely distrust elevated into a philosophy. Nor does it mean doubting everything. A life spent questioning every fact and every motive would be exhausting and ultimately impossible.

Rather, it means learning to distinguish between trust that is earned and trust that is assumed.

It means asking simple questions:

How do I know this is true?

What is the source?

What evidence supports the claim?

Who benefits if I believe it?

Have I heard the other side?

What if I am wrong?

The older I become, the more I appreciate that wisdom is not measured by how much information one consumes, but by how carefully one evaluates it.

Perhaps the modern version of the old proverb should be this:

Verify what matters. Then extend trust where it has been earned.

For trust remains essential. No family, friendship, institution, or society can function without it. But trust untethered from truth eventually collapses under the weight of reality.

Truth requires no defense from us. It simply is.

Long after opinions fade, narratives change, and headlines disappear, reality remains what it always was.

Our responsibility is not to manufacture truth but to seek it faithfully, test what we hear carefully, and remain humble enough to change our minds when the evidence demands it.

In an age overflowing with noise, that may be one of the most important forms of stewardship we can practice.

Simply O.

Amsterdam: Chance Encounters, Yellow Light, and the Mirror of Transition

Before our Tauck river cruise began, Amsterdam gave us more than museums and monuments. It gave us a chance dinner conversation, a meditation on retirement, the weight of Holocaust memory, and the unexpected beauty of yellow.

Amsterdam has a way of opening conversations you did not know you needed.

We arrived in the city before beginning our Tauck river cruise, expecting the usual rhythm of travel: check in, settle down, have dinner, rest, and prepare for the journey ahead. But sometimes the most memorable part of a trip is not the monument, the museum, or the carefully planned itinerary. Sometimes it is the person sitting at the next table.

At dinner, a pleasant couple sat beside us. Before long, we were talking easily — so easily, in fact, that we had not even asked one another’s names. What was supposed to be a quick dinner became several hours of warm conversation.

The most intriguing part was how closely our lives seemed to intersect. We were both at similar stages of transition, negotiating retirement, family dynamics, and the emotional shift from years of saving to the unfamiliar act of spending from retirement accounts. For so long, the discipline had been accumulation. Save. Invest. Plan. Defer. Prepare.

Now, with earned income fading or gone, the challenge becomes permission — permission to spend, to enjoy, to travel, to live from what we spent decades building.

There was comfort in discovering that we were not alone in that paradox.

We were both travelers at heart. We had both come from Florida. We had both visited five continents, with two still waiting. As husbands we found ourselves sharing many similar thoughts, and our spouses seemed to recognize similar rhythms in each other as well. There was an ease to the conversation that surprised me — the kind of ease that usually belongs to old friends, not strangers sharing a dining room in Amsterdam.

Only after hours of conversation did we finally ask each other’s names. We exchanged Facebook contacts, and I shared my blog handle. We even learned a new acronym: the SKI Club — Spending the Kids’ Inheritance. It made us laugh, but beneath the humor was a very real transition: learning how to enjoy what we had spent decades building, while still honoring family, legacy, and responsibility.

It felt like one of those small travel moments that may quietly remain with you long after the trip is over.

That, I think, is one of the great gifts of travel. It opens our lives beyond our familiar borders. It places us beside people whose stories mirror, challenge, or expand our own. Seeing how other people live helps us understand how we are living. Sometimes a chance meeting becomes a gentle confirmation that we are all navigating transitions, uncertainties, and dreams in our own way.

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Amsterdam and the Weight of Memory

Earlier that day, Amsterdam had already placed us in a reflective mood.

We visited the Anne Frank House, and outside stood the statue of Anne — young, still, fragile, and yet somehow enduring. The bronze figure felt small against the brick buildings around it, but the moral weight of her story filled the entire street.

There are places where history does not shout. It simply stands there and asks you to remember.

Nearby, the church tower rose above the neighborhood, bicycles lined the streets, and ordinary Amsterdam life continued around us. That contrast was striking: daily life moving forward in a place where the past still breathes through brick, stone, and silence.

The small brass memorial stones embedded in the pavement were especially moving. Names underfoot. Lives interrupted. Families erased from ordinary streets. They reminded me that history is not only held in museums; sometimes it is built into the ground we walk on.

Later, at the National Holocaust Namenmonument, the scale of remembrance became almost overwhelming. The monument bears the names of more than 102,000 Jews, Sinti, and Roma from the Netherlands who were murdered during the Holocaust and never received a grave. Seeing those names transformed the tragedy from abstraction into presence.

It is one thing to know history.

It is another thing to stand before names.

I was struck again by the extent of depravity human beings are capable of when fear, hatred, and narrowness replace empathy. The Anne Frank House and the Holocaust memorial both reminded me that an expansive worldview is not a luxury — it is a moral necessity. When we stop seeing the humanity of others, we become capable of terrible things.

Travel matters because it enlarges us.

It moves us beyond the smallness of our assumptions.

It teaches us that borders may define nations, but they should never define compassion.

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Van Gogh, Yellow, and the Self-Portrait of a Life

From the heaviness of memory, we moved into the world of Van Gogh.

At the Van Gogh Museum, I found myself unexpectedly captivated by yellow. Not just as a color, but as an emotion. Yellow as sunlight. Yellow as longing. Yellow as brightness trying to break through suffering.

One display described sunshine as a light that, for want of a better word, could only be called yellow. Another suggested that yellow is not merely seen, but experienced. That stayed with me.

Van Gogh’s work seems to hold both anguish and radiance at once. Despite his inner struggles, he created with astonishing intensity. His paintings were not casual expressions; they were urgent attempts to translate feeling into color.

His self-portraits were especially revealing.

They were not simply paintings of a face. They felt like examinations of a life.

And I wondered: perhaps we all need self-portraits of our own lives.

Not the polished version. Not the curated version. Not the version we show at dinner parties or post online. But the honest one — the one that reflects our fears, our transitions, our joys, our wounds, our contradictions, and our unfinished hopes.

We may not always like what is reflected back.

But if we are willing to look closely, we may see something true.

Van Gogh died tragically, but his paintings continue to speak. Anne Frank’s life was cut short, but her words continue to bear witness. And in a quiet Amsterdam dinner, four travelers from Florida found unexpected companionship at the edge of a new chapter.

That is the beauty of travel.

It can take you from a memorial wall to a museum of color, from a stranger’s table to a reflection on your own life. It can remind you that the world is both wounded and beautiful, both tragic and luminous.

Amsterdam gave us all of that in one day.

A statue.

A name.

A stone in the pavement.

A wall of remembrance.

A room filled with yellow.

And a conversation that began before we even knew each other’s names.

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Closing Reflection

Some journeys begin with a boarding pass.

Others begin with a shared table, an unexpected conversation, and the quiet courage to see yourself in someone else’s story.

Amsterdam reminded me that retirement is not simply an ending or a reward. It is a transition into a different kind of seeing. We are learning not only how to spend what we saved, but how to inhabit the life we prepared for.

And perhaps that is what travel does best.

It gives us new mirrors.

It gives us new colors.

It gives us yellow.

“Travel enlarges the portrait of a life. It adds light where routine had drawn only lines.”
Simply O.

A Broken World, A living Hope.

Another Easter Reflection

There is so much turmoil in the world today. Much of it, at least on the surface, appears to be driven by religion. Conflicts rooted in belief systems, identities shaped by faith, divisions that seem irreconcilable.
And yet, when you step back, a different truth begins to emerge. We are more alike than we are different.

Science tells us that all humans share a common genetic origin. Faith traditions, in their own ways, trace humanity back to a shared beginning—a family, not fragments.

So the question becomes unavoidable:

If we are, in essence, one family… why so much hate?

An Old Problem, Not a New One

It is tempting to think this is a modern crisis. But history tells us otherwise.

Even in the time of Jesus Christ, the world was deeply divided.

Truth was not universally embraced—it was challenged.

Love was not always received—it was rejected.

And those who carried the message forward paid a heavy price.

With the exception of one, His disciples were martyred.

This is not a new story.

Where the Tension Lies

Perhaps the issue is not religion itself—but what we, as humans, do with it.

At its core, faith calls us to:

Love one another
Show mercy
Walk in humility
Seek peace

And yet, in practice, we often:

Defend identity over truth
Choose tribe over unity
React in fear rather than understanding

The tension lies in the gap between what we believe… and how we live.

A Broken World

It may simply be that the world has always been broken.

Not irredeemable—but fractured.

Capable of great compassion… and great division.

Capable of grace… and of harm.

And perhaps the discomfort we feel when we observe this is not a weakness—but an awareness. A recognition that something is not as it should be.

The Easter Perspective

And this is where Easter speaks most clearly.

Easter does not pretend the world is whole.

It acknowledges betrayal.

It confronts suffering.

It does not deny injustice.

But it does something else—it introduces hope into brokenness.

It reminds us that even in a fractured world, redemption is possible.

A Personal Responsibility

We may not be able to fix the world.

But we are not without influence.

In our words.

In our actions.

In how we choose to see others.

We can either contribute to division… or to healing.

Final Reflection

If we are all part of the same human family, then perhaps the question is not why the world is broken—

but what each of us chooses to do within it.

Closing Thought

In a world that has been broken for centuries, choosing love is not weakness… it is resistance.

—Simply O

The Skin We Live In.

An Easter Reflection

From a biological standpoint, there is something quietly profound about the human body.

Our skin—the part of us most visible to the world—is composed of layers. The dermis beneath, and the epidermis above. And at the very surface lies what is known as the stratum corneum—a layer made up almost entirely of dead cells.

Cells that have fulfilled their purpose.

Cells that no longer live… yet still cover us.

They protect us.

They define our outward appearance.

And they are constantly being shed, replaced, renewed.

In a sense, we are all walking around covered in what is no longer alive.

The Illusion of Permanence

And yet, despite this remarkable process of renewal, we age.

The body changes.

Time leaves its imprint.

And slowly, unmistakably, we are reminded of a truth that no advancement in science has been able to reverse:

This body was never designed to last forever.

What We See… and What We Are

There is something humbling in realizing that our most outward expression—our skin, our appearance—is, in large part, composed of what has already passed.

What the world sees first… is not the essence of who we are.

It is a covering.

A temporary layer.

A reflection, not the core.

A Quiet Message Over Time

Perhaps this is why aging brings with it a different kind of clarity.

The things we once held tightly—appearance, perception, external identity—begin to loosen their grip.

And in their place, something deeper emerges:

Character.

Wisdom.

Faith.

Grace.

Things that do not shed.

Things that do not fade in the same way.

The Easter Connection

And in this, Easter offers a profound reminder:

That life is not defined by what is outward and temporary…

but by what is enduring and unseen.

That what fades is not the final story.

And what is renewed is not always visible to the eye.

Final Reflection

We spend much of our lives tending to what is seen…

yet the deeper work is always within.

Closing Thought

The body may age, the surface may fade, but the essence of who we are was never meant to be confined to what is visible.

— Simply O

The Mirror We Fight

The Story I read somewhere and my reflection.

The dog wandered into a strange museum.

Every wall was a mirror.

The ceiling, the floor—even the doors.

The moment he stepped inside, he froze.

Everywhere he looked, dogs stared back at him—

in front, behind, above, below.

A whole pack surrounding him.

Fear took over.

He bared his teeth.

They did the same.

He barked.

They barked back—louder, sharper, multiplied.

Panic exploded.

He lunged left, then right.

They lunged too.

He snapped his teeth—

thousands of teeth snapped back.

The more he fought, the more enemies appeared.

The more afraid he became, the more terrifying the world looked.

He never realized the truth.

There was no pack.

No threat.

No enemy.

Only himself.

The next morning, the guards found him lifeless—

lying alone in the mirror hall,

surrounded by thousands of reflections of his own body.

No one attacked him.

No one harmed him.

He died fighting what he believed was the world…

but was only his own reflection.

Reflection

Life has a way of placing us in rooms like this.

Not always made of glass—

but of perception.

There are moments when everything feels adversarial:

the market, the workplace, even relationships.

And in those moments, something subtle happens.

Fear sharpens.

Assumptions harden.

Reactions escalate.

What we see begins to reflect what we feel.

Not every challenge is imagined.

The world is not always kind, and it is not always fair.

But often—more often than we admit—

our response amplifies our reality.

Fear can turn uncertainty into threat.

Anger can turn difference into opposition.

Defensiveness can turn silence into hostility.

And before long, we find ourselves surrounded—

not by enemies,

but by echoes.

Closing Thought

The world is not always a mirror…

but it often echoes what we bring into it.

Before assuming the world is against you, pause.

Sometimes the noise you hear

is your own reflection speaking back.

“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”

— Anaïs Nin

Simply O