Often we undertake bringing about healthful, positive changes in our lives, but we always seem to find ourselves falling short of our expectations. Our resolution just seems to eventually fizzle out. We have the best of intentions. We start off well with lots of enthusiasm and determination. And then, life just starts to get back in our way. We tell ourselves that it’s just a momentary hiatus, nothing more and that we get right back on track; but, we don’t. Instead, we find ourselves on a slippery slope and our determination eventually evaporates.
Every one of us can tell a similar story whether it’s weight loss, exercise, or spending quality time with our kids. As one of my acquaintances put it, “I’ve been losing the same twenty pounds my whole adult life.”
So why do we all find ourselves falling short? The answer: We all exhibit a lack of mindfulness. We deal with our expectations–with what we should bedoing–what the future was supposed to be. Or, we kick ourselves in the rear with frustration or guilt about the past–what we should have done. In both the past and the future, we’ve locked ourselves out of the present (the now–the moment) where the real engine of change and transformation lies.
So let’s say I’ve resolved to finally lose that twenty pounds of extra weight my doctor has told me I need to shed. I get out my healthful dietary plan and recipes. For a few days, I’m all pumped up, psyched. I’m the fervent convert.
The first week goes well.
But then there’s the night when I’m stuck at the office. I get home late. I take some paperwork home to finish that night. I tell myself I can’t afford the extra minutes to cook something so I stop off at McDonald’s. I grab my bag and drive home. Plop my work on the dining room table and start reaching in for a few fries. I turn on CNN to catch up on the news and the stock market.
So where am I in all this? I’m all over the place! I’m bouncing off the walls and my attention is ricocheting like a bullet. I’m not even enjoying the burgers. I’m not giving my attention to the paperwork. And the market dropped a hundred and fifty points, so I’m worried about how my portfolio is going to do tomorrow.
What was I really feeling through out all of this? Resistance. I was not mindful enough to stop, feel it, and recognize when it was happening. I was angry and frustrated that my boss made me stay late. I could have made a healthy meal out of the fridge. It actually would have taken less time and money than the stop at McD’s but, in truth, the burgers were the consolation prize I gave myself for what I perceived as having been treated unfairly and made to stay late against my wishes. So I felt I deserved “a break today”, as the commercials say.
I reacted to my resentment. I did not stop to ask myself what I was really feeling at that moment as I watched the clock ticking away in the office. Nor did I ask myself what I wanted to do about it. I just reacted. And how did I react? Returning to old familiar habits which is what we all do when we react viscerally. As John Shukwit, a behavioral health therapist, put it, “Habit, by definition, is not mindfulness”. Habit is autopilot. We’re not flying the plane. We’re being carried by it. We’re passengers.
After I’m done gulping down the burgers (I ate them so fast while watching the news I was hardly aware of what I ate), I hate myself for it. Oh, I should have just come home and grabbed something. I chide myself that I should be eating healthier. And there are those magic words again–should have (the past)–should be (the future). Guilt in the past. Expectations in the future. Me? Where do I find myself? Nowhere close to being mindful, in the present.
What is the moment? I hate my boss right now. I’m anxious about reading all those files. Right now: I’m bloated; I’m nauseous; I’m taking an Alka Seltzer. Right now: I am feeling better about my diet when I plan out my breakfast because it helps me feel like I’m correcting myself. Right now: Here’s the orange I’m picking for tomorrow’s breakfast. I love the smell. The feel. The organic label makes me feel safe. The whole-wheat toast feels rough and grainy. The egg whites are put in their container and I’m chopping up some neat looking vegetables to add to the omelet. I acknowledge what I’m feeling. Resistance lies in the past and the future. I cannot focus on what I wanted myself to do or what I hope I will do tomorrow if I declare what sensations I have in this instant.
The question that keeps us anchored in the present is: What am I feeling now? And now? And now? There’s no resistance because I’m acknowledging it. There may be anger and frustration over quitting my diet but that’s what I’m feeling and I want to discern that because when I stick to my diet plan I feel healthier.
So asking the right question can keep us returning to the moment. And that’s where our ability to carry out transformational change is to be found. Right now. No regrets. No wishes. Just doing or not doing. Even if it takes a whole lifetime to do it.
originally posted in Boomer-Living.com by Dr. Hamilton
My patient was little more than a month or two from dying—at best. A malignant brain tumor would be the cause of her death. Many times this cancer had gripped her in wave after wave of epileptic seizures. These onslaughts began crashing upon her with increasing frequency and intensity until she became overwhelmed with anxiety, dreading where and when the next attack might occur. Her team of doctors prescribed an ever-expanding and increasingly ineffective list of medications and anti-convulsants aimed at holding the fits at bay. Her physicians—myself included– admonished her to avoid alcohol at all costs, lest it perturb her liver functions and, in turn, diminish the concentrations of medications circulating in her blood stream.
In what was to prove her penultimate visit with me, she described a trip that she and her husband had taken to the top of the nearby Santa Catalina mountain range. They had chosen Mt. Lemmon, overlooking the city of Tucson, as their destination as it was accessible by a well-paved road that could carry them all the way to the summit. By this time, her tumor had robbed her of almost all ability to ambulate and she was no longer able to navigate any treacherous terrain, let alone a mountain trail.
Upon arriving at the clearing on the summit, her husband had opened the trunk of his car and, from within its depths, produced a picnic basket, complete with traditional red-and-white checkered tablecloth that he laid out on the ground with painstaking care. The wicker basket, he confessed to his wife, was full of nothing but sin. It contained paté de foie gras. A rich, runny Camembert cheese. And fresh baguette bread and pastries aplenty. He also produced a bottle of vintage red wine.
There, on top of the mountain, he admitted: “I have always been holding onto this bottle. I’ve had it for several years, hoping some great occasion would come along and then I could open it. A chance to celebrate something, to commemorate…something. But a couple of days ago, I came to my senses and decided there is only one thing worth celebrating: today.”
“So what, exactly, are we celebrating?” she asked. “There’s not much to celebrate. I’m dying.”
“No. That’s not exactly true,” he replied. “We’re going to celebrate that you’re alive. You’ll only be dying in that last minute when you actually expire. But, for the rest of the time–up until then–you’re alive. That’s what I want—what we can choose–to celebrate.” His wife looked at him for a second.
“You know, that the doctor told us that I shouldn’t drink. Alcohol could trigger another…event.” The husband didn’t seem to even be listening.
He popped the cork out. “Don’t bother,” she said, “I’m not going to have a drink.”
“Watch this,” the husband said. He slowly decanted the wine into an elegantly stemmed glass of cut crystal. He poured the wine until the glass three quarters full.
“If you drink too much of that,” his wife admonished him, “you won’t be able to drive us back down the mountain. And you know I can’t drive because of my seizures.”
He held the wine glass high up in front of him against the sun where it stood like a gigantic, luminescent ruby. As the light danced through it, he turned the glass by its stem round and round between his fingertips. With each revolution, blood-red shafts of light shimmered.
“Oh, my,” she exclaimed, “it looks like it’s practically alive.”
“It is. The sun is dancing with the grapes right now. There is nothing in this glass that can hurt you.” He held the glass in her direction.
“Think so?”
“I know so. I promise. Nothing this beautiful can hurt.” With that, she took the glass, full of light and wine and love, and held it to her lips. She took a sip and then a full swallow.
“That is a great glass of wine, isn’t it?”
“The best,” he smiled.
The wife finished her first glass. She looked at her husband inquisitively. “You think I dare have another glass?”
“Well, what’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.
She smiled, grabbed the bottle herself and poured another glass, fuller than the first. She then held the glass up high for a toast. “I suppose the worst is that I get a good buzz on and could just go on and die happy. Right now. Then you’d have to drive my corpse back down the mountain.”
“Well, I’d have to drive you down either. Dead or alive. It’s the same amount of gas.”
My patient never did have a seizure. Not on that day, or any of the remaining forty-three she had left to live on this earth. All of us, the doctors, were wrong. The wine was right. As a physician, I can’t help but wonder how many patients we restrain with our conservative advice, how many moments of joy we have inadvertently extinguished with sage, restrained medical advice. It is a part of our frail intellectual tradition of medicine that we play it safe and teach our patients to avoid unnecessary risks. But so often the moments of greatest happiness and abandon lie in the direction of the greatest chance.
previously published by Dr. Hamilton on Boomer-Living.com
Climatic Change in American Healthcare: Melting Resolve
President Obama will address the nation on how he proposes to fix healthcare. Unfortunately, neither the President nor Congress have the courage, will, or strength to put forth a proposal that would support a government-backed single payor plan—the one and only long-term solution to the crisis in American healthcare.
That’s because such a plan would mean the end of excessive profiteering by both the health insurance and the pharmaceutical industries. Together, these two industrial sectors represent the most powerful lobbying groups the Congress has ever seen. Their combined revenue last year was in excess of a trillion dollars and that buys the attention and compliance of a lot of members of both the House and the Senate. And those elected officials who do not go along with the agenda of these lobbyists will find their more willing opponents well funded in the next upcoming election.
A single payor universal healthcare plan would mean no private insurance company (what’s referred to as third party payors) could survive if they charged more than the government. That would be equivalent to a congressional mandate requiring that private health insurance not seek reimbursement greater than what is provided by Medicare—a non-profit, government-run healthcare program. An insurance company cannot comply with such a requirement and still skim off thirty percent of its insurance premiums to funnel back to shareholders and top executives (many of whom received bonuses in excess of $4 million last year while millions of Americans lost their jobs and healthcare coverage). Most third party payors currently seek reimbursement rates as high as 115-200% of Medicare reimbursement.
Unfortunately, the situation is even more despairing when it comes to the pharmaceutical companies. The last thing they want to see is a federal single payor system that can basically demand that negotiated prices on drugs carried in the government’s formulary be reasonable, fair, and subject to periodic review. That would be a pity for many of the pharmaceutical companies that see as much as three thousand percent mark-up on the medications they sell. To put this excessive profiteering into perspective, American patients spend as much as eighty percent more for exactly the same medications that their European counterparts are purchasing. Why? Because American healthcare is as ripe for plundering and profiteering as Wall Street found the real estate market to be.
Many critics (and now the ubiquitous “carpet bombing” of television ads produced by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies) claim that a government-run single payor system is tantamount to the s word—socialism. So what. Such socialistic healthcare systems have worked well in more than twenty countries in Europe. In fact, every nation listed in the top twenty of the World Health Organizations ranking of health care systems provides its citizens with universal health care. The United States, incidentally, is ranked thirty-seventh, just behind Costa Rica and just in front of Slovenia. Ask how many Americans want to seek their healthcare in Slovenia? Interestingly, Medicare could be fairly described as a socialist institution. No one has objected to the fact that currently more than fifty percent of all American healthcare is funded and overseen by the US government and that it used as the standard by which the private payors measure the coverage in their own healthcare plans (not the cost, just the coverage).
Finally, sooner or later, America must have a single payor system. It is inevitable that something must be done to control the upward spiraling costs of healthcare. We are just beginning to learn that we must tackle global warming or we will all perish with our planet. For healthcare, the end is much closer than for carbon emissions. Medicare funds will be completely depleted by 2015. If Medicare and Social Security costs continue at the current rate of growth then, by 2050, the entire budget of the federal government will be reduced to just these two items. No DOD. No EPA. No Department of Justice, Homeland Security, or Department of the Interior. It will mean the end of government as we now know it. So, like it or not, we have got to control healthcare costs (and, yes, to some extent, probably ration it too). The only solution lies in a universal, single payor, healthcare program for the United States.
But, in the next few months of debate and hearings about healthcare reform, the only mention of a national single payor system will be denouncements by naysayers. Not supporters. It will be discussed as untenable, unnecessary, and un-American—largely by the individuals bullied or paid to say it. As the American people, we have recently been witness to the un-American qualities with which the top executives have been leading this country’s largest, most powerful corporations. And you will see the idea of a national, single payor healthcare conveniently smothered at the hands of hundreds of our elected representatives—again. And we will wait for American healthcare to collapse–as we did for the auto industry, the mortgage funds, and the stock brokerage houses–before we can find the courage to do what’s right and to do what’s needed.
Every morning, we wake up to a choice: status quo or something better? 
We must decide if we are content to live as we have been doing or do we, can we, change? Wayne Dyer has summed the challenge like this: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” But we’re also hopelessly caught in a kind of Catch-22: How can we change the way we see life if it is largely determined by our genetic and experiential history–something we have no control over? The answer lies in our ability to transform our personal story.
Let’s start off by confessing that each of us is just the main character in his or her own story. And that story—like all good ones—is made up. It bears no resemblance to any truth because it is simply our version of the truth. So it is fantasy, mostly lies. Not that we’re liars (we are that too, but that’s a different story). Some of us see ourselves as victims - or patients - or martyrs. Some have chosen to cast ourselves as heroes - or providers - or saviors. And, we could just claim that all of these scripts are the result of mere chance; or we can take ownership of them by admitting that our personal vision of the truth is nothing more than story we choose to believe in with the most energy.
But that admission also opens a vital option for us too. We can exercise the author’s ultimate prerogative - a rewrite. We can turn the page and start a beautiful new chapter about the story of how we began to transform ourselves to become well, to be healthy, and to be at peace. We can grant ourselves the power to declare this day - this moment - different from all the others we have experienced so far. Wellness is a script where renewal is central to the plot. It’s sets up the development of sustained inspiration, fueled by faith that every moment lying ahead can hold as much joy and beauty as we choose to put into our story.
The truth is that we just need to throw the switch in our heads. Turn disbelief into wonder. Maybe it’s nothing more than walking the dog two extra blocks (for the dog’s sake) - or heading to the gym for the first ten minutes of your life - or maybe, it’s canceling fast food tonight and deciding to cook a fresh, wholesome meal - or maybe, it’s listening. Maybe it’s asking a question, instead of giving an answer, so there’s a space created for another person’s voice to fill - or maybe it is just watching stuff instead of doing stuff.
The changes may be small changes but they are the bricks with which we build the path of rejuvenation. Two blocks becomes four. Ten minutes in the gym leads to fifteen. One good meal takes you to the organic produce aisle. And one conversation of active listening leads to a deeper friendship. That’s how renewal begins.
The best part of renewal is creating a context for dreams. My daughter taught me the power of context. One day, when she was about ten, she went through a stage where she had a fantasy that she would go diving for buried treasure off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Don’t ask me where or how this notion came. Let’s just assume she wrote it that way. But, as part of her chapter, she decided one afternoon she should lead me by the hand to the swimming pool in our backyard.
Here, she took a step down into the water and then settled her diving mask on her face. Then she looked up at me expectantly as if to say: “Well, we’re not going to find any gold standing here on the edge—out of the water.” So I put on my mask, flippers, and snorkel to play along and off we glided into the deep—the deep end, at least. The next evening the ritual repeated itself only we swam about longer. Somehow the game got more elaborate with each dive. Soon, on my way home, I would stop off at the pet store and purchase a handful of small plastic sharks and rubber whales, designed for decoration in aquariums, and bring them to populate the imaginary reef in our pool. We would swim after them and race to see who could get them first. We would hold our breath and dive to the bottom to retrieve them. Our play sessions in the pool stretched into hours.
I also began to mysteriously develop a terrible French accent - a bad imitation of Jacques Cousteau - with which I would narrate each of our dives. “As we pree-pair to leeva da safetee of da Calypso, my diving part-nair and I sink een-too dee deep when we suddenly see dee vague but ohm-meenous sha-dough of what could only be aah great white shark.” Then I’d start shaking a handful of my sharks back and forth, wrestling with them in a miniaturized feeding frenzy, and left me sinking helplessly to the bottom. Only my daughter could save me. And for that, well, she had to decide to change the story. Forsake her quest for the gold or save me instead? The great whites would then slowly sink into the depths. As she swam to rescue me, I could see my daughter smile so widely that tiny little bubbles would escape from the corners of her mouth. I am sure Monsieur Cousteau could not have written it better.
Renewal means today will be different because we are willing to entertain new, different stories which all begin by allowing ourselves the freedom to play the characters we want to be.
This article originally appeared in Dr. Hamilton’s Well-Beings column on boomer-living.com
Our collective reaction to the swine flue epidemic over the last few weeks tells us quite a bit about ourselves.
When the first news stories broke, a sense of an impending plague began to swell. Death—inexplicable, unstoppable, and on a scale so large that it made the loss of individual human lives virtually trivial—was headed our way. Undercurrents of panic followed. Frenzied press conferences from the CDC. Government spokespeople telling the public to remain calm. I don’t know about you but nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than people whose sole advice is to remain calm. Remain calm? Why should I? You’re the government. You’re supposed to have all the answers. And what do you come up with? There’s no need to panic. Thanks. Next.
Secondly, everything we did to halt the spread of the virus bordered on futile or symbolic. We never closed air traffic from Mexico. Why? Because it would disrupt airline schedules. Businesses. Tourism. It would cost money. So instead, the poor Mexican citizens closed their schools, restaurants, offices, and even their churches. But we left doors to the single most dangerous source of far-reaching contamination wide open: airplanes.
Thirdly, we were inundated with stores about how soon the NIH would create a vaccine. When would it be available? In the meantime, how many millions of doses of Tamiflu would be mobilized to protect the American public from the swine flu? Fifty million? What if we all got the flu? All three hundred million of us? How would you triage out the Tamiflu? Youngest and oldest? Most likely to die? Healthiest in their prime? Most vital to national interest? Government officials and soldiers? Or taxpayers?
And then we were told wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough. I was waiting for news reports on the latest soaps and towels being developed to aid the American citizenry in stopping this killer virus. Oh, and we closed schools as soon as a flu case was discovered forgetting that much of the contact and spread of flu had occurred long before an individual became symptomatic. Then we discovered cases unrelated to travel to Mexico so they were springing up de novo and we were no longer sure what to close.
Finally, we forgot about it. Not that many people had died from it anyway. Enhanced interrogation techniques seem more relevant. And maybe it wasn’t Black Death, losing sight of the fact that nearly 30,000 people die every year from the flu in the United States and no one starts heading into underground shelters or buying Hazmat suits. Many people stopped eating pork until officials formally changed the name of the virus to H1N1 because there was pressure on the government to help out the pork industry. Great. Still “swine flu” was the number one topic on Twitter for about four days after the name change. “H1N1” never appeared. It was kind of like changing “Wall Street” to “Trust Us Street.” It didn’t stick.
In the end, the Swine Flu episode (this is only Part I, stay tuned for the whole season) taught us that when things scare us, we get irrational (close Mexico but keep the planes flying) and desperate (let’s shut down GM and convert the company to making barrels of Swine Flu vaccine but forget that the only real remedy is handing out soap). And, finally, when something really frightens us change the name (so Swine Flue becomes H1N1 and torture becomes enhanced interrogation techniques).
The episode mirrored other steps being taken in the country, like giving billions of dollars to the companies that cheated and deceived the American public. Then we declared that imprisoning and torturing individuals is illegal, a violation of our laws, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the UN. Oh, but let’s not prosecute anyone who did it or approved of it. Let’s leave all the elected Representatives (especially the ones that lie about it) and Senators in place who let it happen. After all, either everyone didn’t know (was there anyone in the United States—in the world—who didn’t know?) or, if they did, they were just following orders (or memos, even better).
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the American psyche. But…there’s no need to panic. Remain calm.
The left side does all the talking. It’s where speech, logic, analysis—all the cognitive skills so valued by our society—come from. The left hemisphere of our brain is our species’ crowning evolutionary achievement. It is our left-sided linguistic abilities 
that launched us into well-coordinated hunter-gatherers. Our ability to make records, to share technologies allowed us to become the master consumers and predators on our planet.
Acquiring our linguistic abilities came at a price. When we focus on speech, there has to be the emergence of a speaker and a listener. There is automatically a “me” and a “them.” The universe splinters off into what we identify as being within and without. We create an ego.
But there is another part of the past buried in us too. It is in our right hemisphere. Our mute, emotive, intuitive half. It is the side of our brain that puts us back in touch with nature, that makes us feel part of something greater than ourselves, beyond expression.
Think about how we meditate. We close our eyes. Why? To cut down on the constant sensory barrage that drives our insatiable visual cortex. We slow our breathing down, focusing on inspiration and expiration. Every time a thought comes into our head, we ignore it. We return to our breathing, trying to stop the incessant banter in our heads. Gradually, we get to a moment where there is serenity. Our inner voice is silenced. Why do so many spirituality retreats ask us to refrain from speaking? Because we cannot reach our spiritual core through the left hemisphere. The notion of speech is so intermeshed with that of the self that we must develop ways to work around language itself to get beyond an egocentric perspective.
So here’s a few exercises to work on some right hemisphere “muscle:”
1. Take a few hours out of a weekend and tell everyone you are not going to speak. Keep a pad of paper with you. Limit yourself to only answering on the pad with drawings to indicate your answers.
2. Go spend part of the day with your favorite pet. Look at the amount of expression possible between the two of you without words! How is it you can communicate without words? If you don’t have a pet, head off to the zoo and spend a few hours with your favorite animal.
3. Put ear plugs into your ears and then headphones over that to block the sound. Walk around without any noise. Do this someplace secluded and safe from traffic. Look at the world without noise. It’s a different place. Sit down somewhere cozy. Listen to your breathing and heartbeat. That’s really your true, inner voice.
4. Take a night to go camping under the stars—by yourself. There’s something about feeling the sweep of the heavens as your roof. With no one to distract, you begin to have your own private conversation with the cosmos.
5. Now this one will get me in trouble with a lot of the ecologists but I’m going to suggest it anyway. Get out in your car and drive on some sweet stretch of highway. If you feel inclined, open it up. It’s magic. Rolling down the road. The hum of a muscular motor. Music blasting. It shorts the old left hemisphere out. It’s pure adrenaline rush and plain old fun.
6. Go skiing. Same idea. Speed on a different kind of road. As a friend once said: “A mountain full of snow that makes the heart soar.”
7. Go fishing. Casting out there and fiddling with a rod and reel makes our cares melt away.
8. Cook a favorite meal for someone you love. Food is the ultimate expression of love and says everything without words.
9. Pull a Tom Cruise. Make sure no one’s around, first. Take your pants and shoes off. Put on a pair of sunglasses Break out Bob Seeger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” Crank up the volume. Get out a hairbrush and sing your heart out. Risky Business but it’s worth it.
10. Take your honey out and go to some Country and Western outfit where you can learn line dancing.
No one said spirituality has to be silent. Just speechless.
Note: This article by Dr. Hamilton first appeared on Boomer-Living.com, the website for Active Baby Boomers. Dr. Hamilton is a monthly contributor to Bommer-Living’s Well-Beings section.
A few days ago I learned that my book—my first book—The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope was one of the recipients of the Nautilus Silver Award for 2009. These awards are meant to recognize “distinguished literary and heartfelt contributions to spiritual growth…and positive social change….” I am touched that readers and competition judges could attribute such important goals to something I wrote. The authors who have received this award in the past have included His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Andrew Weil. These are my heroes. Their works shine, endure, and inspire. I don’t belong amid this circle of spiritual icons. I’m a fan not a member. The award is an accident, a kindness, a benevolent wink from the Universe in my direction. Of course, the recognition is wonderful and gratifying. But the award is a gift, not a reward. It reminds me the world is like that: beautiful things are given to us without our having done anything to deserve them.
Someone once said: a writer is someone who is a fan of reading but has taken it to extremes. Succumbing to that impulse induces a schizophrenic experience: an exercise in both self-involvement and self-detachment. You obsess about your own words at the same time that you are willing to give up a part of yourself. Sales rankings, promotion, book tours, signings, and awards make writing an emotional mine field. But every writer traverses it in the hopes their craft will improve. The writer knows that better writing is always possible. Because there are those particular authors whose prose is so lyrically composed, whose descriptions so vivid, and characters so poignant, that their writing simply takes one’s breath away. You read their works and want to fall on your knees in front of their art, skill, and craft. These are the masters–the ones with divine talents beyond the reach of the average writer. These gods (my personal pantheon includes authors like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Larry McMurtry, John McPhee, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Chabon, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Ernst Becker, Jess Walter, John Steinbeck, Ken Kesey, Studs Terkel, Bernard Malamud, William Warner, Tom Wolfe, David McCullough, Phillip Roth, Edward Wilson, Annie Proulx, John Updike–to name just a few) are the writers for whom there are no adequate awards to recognize the gift their talents give us. They simply show how far words can go: words change lives and can change the world.
So while I am deeply moved by the Nautilus Silver award, I accept it simply as token of good luck. I give twenty rules to live by in the last chapter of my book and the first rule is: “Never underestimate luck.” I add that luck merely establishes the realm of what is possible but that one should “never feel any sense of personal triumph when you’re lucky. Be grateful that it went your way.” So I am going to take my own advice, and write harder, deeper, and better. Oh, and thank you.