Happiness in this World

Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife.  I wasn’t surprised.  He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason:  his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.
Or so he’d [...]

In 2002, my third-youngest brother and his wife announced they were going to have a baby.  The news absolutely floored me.  This would be the first baby of our generation and represented a significant life change for us all.
I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages and transitions and found myself wondering why [...]

Last week my 18 month-old son, Cruise, started Montessori preschool.  The first three days my wife and I dropped him off he cried so hard he could hardly catch his breath, his chest heaving in great racking sobs.  By the fourth day, however, we were listening to him repeat his teacher’s name every few minutes [...]

In 2001, just as I was about to take over as Medical Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago, I expressed reservations to a previous Director about my ability to run a clinic that included several clinicians who were not only older than I but who had actually been my teachers ten years [...]

Twenty years ago, the first woman I ever loved broke my heart.  Like many break ups, the end came in stutters and sine waves rather than as an abrupt but mercifully irreversible amputation.  However, for reasons I couldn’t understand yet quickly began to resent, my ex-girlfriend continued to ask favors of me.  And I continued to [...]