I Believe in Christmas Magic

There is magic in Christmas, and I believe in it.

The root of where my belief comes from is our family’s lore, originating from a time just preceding my birth. As the story goes, my parents were having a hard time conceiving. At the time they were new immigrants to this country, living in Chicago, I think.

They didn’t have much support or know many people. I can only assume they had little money. As I recall, my father insisted upon my mother learning English. And so she went, taking the bus in the dead of winter, to a Catholic Church that offered English classes to new Americans.

And if you know Chicago, it’s damn cold in the winter. And yet, despite my mother’s protest, my father sent her off trudging through the frigid city to learn to speak the language of this country.

At some time during that season of their life, my mother prayed. Prayed in the broadest sense, I suppose, but really she was making a deal. She promised, to whom I don’t know, that if she was blessed with a child she would put up a Christmas tree, every year.

I am obviously here now, and sure enough, every year a Christmas tree goes up in our Hindu household, for reasons bigger than the commercial and assimilating to avoid conflict. On the contrary, we have not assimilated into Christmas, we have assimilated Christmas into us.

Christmas trees are a durable tradition for Robyn and her immediate family, too. Every year on Thanksgiving she trims the family tree while her mother cooks dinner and the rest of the crew heads to the stadium to watch the Detroit Lions football team, almost invariably, lose the Thanksgiving Day game.

In our own home, we have created our traditions with each other and our children. We trim the tree right around Thanksgiving and start a solid month of listening to Christmas music and watching Christmas movies, always starting first with White Christmas. We eagerly await the first weekend snow, and like clockwork we watch The Polar Express and drink hot cocoa. We unpack and read classic books out of the seasonal box, like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, or ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas which Robyn’s father reads to the family on Christmas Eve, after we all go to church, eat a family dinner, and do a secret sibling gift exchange.

But of all these traditions, and others I haven’t described in detail, the Christmas tree is still the most mystic and alluring. It’s where the magic of Christmas has always resided, at least for me.

After we put up all our ornaments and trimmings and lights, I find myself, every year, sitting on the wooden floor of our family room, carefully studying the tree. This year, I had our sons beside me, for a fleeting moment at least, looking up. It is our family yearbook up there.

Every ornament has a story, a purpose. There are ornaments from Robyn and my’s childhood, representing our experiences and interests growing up. Then there are the ones that represent significant moments in our life together - like our first Christmas together, our first home, or the metallic gold guitar ornament we bought in Nashville which commemorates our honeymoon. 

There are ornaments demarcating when our family has grown, dated with the births of each of our children. There are the ornaments we have from our family trips, most recently a wooden one we luckily found in the gift shop on our way out of North Cascades National Park.

Our Christmas Tree is our life story, our histories intertwined with the branches and lights. It is the only time machine I know of that actually works - drawing me into memories and stories of a different time and place. More than that, it’s a window to the future, leaving me feeling wonder and hope for the possibilities of the coming year. When I am there, at the foot of the tree, sitting at the edge of the red tree skirt, I am all across the universe.

This to me, is magic.

As I am sitting here writing this, it is the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2021. The first weekend snow fell last night. We are in our family room, watching The Polar Express. Robyn and the kids brewed some hot chocolate, right on cue with the appropriate scene in the film. I see them all on the couch, snuggling a few feet over from me. Our family Christmas tree is immediately behind me, the reflection of it’s lights glowing softly on my iPad screen. 

I see the snow covered branches, wet and heavy, out our study room window. The neighborhood is quiet and our radiators are toasty warm, as if we were able to set them at “cozy” instead of a specific temperature.

As I sit here, trying my hardest to soak up this moment, I know that much of the stories we share at Christmas, like Santa Clause’s sleigh and reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and any assortment of Christmas “miracles” reported on the local news probably are not true, strictly speaking. I cannot verify them or explain them enough with empirical facts to know they are true. And I will never be able to.

But I still believe in the magic. Because of the tree, and what happens nearby.

Our tree, and what it represents, is a special relic in our family. As we put it up, year after year, it reminds me that our history is worth remembering and that our future is something to be hopeful about. Our tree, and what it represents, renews my belief that there is magic in Christmas.

Damn it, let's give our kids a shot at choosing exploration

In retrospect, this isn’t the vocation I was supposed to have. It was put on me, or at least started, by an act of God. But my path within the universe of organizations  - a mix of strategy, management, public service, and innovation - was never supposed to happen.

I had always, in my heart of hearts, set my mind on space. I knew I would probably never be an astronaut. For a multitude of reasons I would’ve never had a path to the launchpad - being an Air Force pilot or bench scientist wasn’t me. I won a scholarship to Space Camp when I was in 4th grade and I got to be the Flight Director for one of our missions. And from then on, I dreamed of being on a team that reached outward and put a fingerprint on the heavens.

Five years later, a mosquito was never supposed to bite my brother Nakul -when I was 13 - thousands of miles away in India. That mosquito was never supposed to give him Dengue Fever. He was never supposed to be patient zero of the local outbreak and die from it. None of that was ever supposed to happen, but it did.

And, when he died, I got hung up on something. I didn’t get caught up on curing the illness itself. I didn’t feel called to become a biologist, epidemiologist, or a physician. What I couldn’t for the life of me understand is how in the 20th century, with all its wealth and medical progress, could Nakul not receive the treatment - which humankind had the capability to administer, by the way - he needed to survive Dengue Fever? How was Dengue Fever still a thing, in the first place? How could governments and health care systems not have figured this shit out already?

The problem, as I saw it then, was institutions. His death, and millions of others across the world, could be prevented with institutions that worked better. And the vocation that called out to me shifted, and here I am.

—

Watching kids watch Christmas movies is interesting. You can see their body language, facial expressions and language react to the imagination and wonder they’re observing. Their bodies seem like they’re preparing to explore, just like their minds are. They light up, appropriately enough, like Christmas lights. It’s really something to see a child imagining. 

For our boys, right now, anything in the world is possible. Any vocation is on the table for them. They can dream of exploring. They can dream of applied imagination. They can dream of storytelling and art. They can dream of so much. At this age, I think they’re supposed to.

What occurred to me, while watching them watch Christmas movies, is that I don’t want them to be drawn into the muck like I was. 

I was supposed to be exploring space, but plans changed and now I’m firmly planted on earth, in the universe of human organizations. I am definitely not charting new territory, rather, I’m fixing organizations that should never have been broken in the first place. I am not an explorer, I am a reformer. There was no choice for me, the need for reform here on earth was too compelling for me to contemplate anything else.

But for our children, mine and yours too, let’s give them a choice. Let’s figure out why our institutions seem to be broken and do something different. Let’s figure out why our social systems seem to be broken and do something different. Let’s not let institutions be a compelling problem anymore. Let’s take that problem off the table for them. Let’s complete this job of reform - both of our organizations and our individual character - so they don’t have to.

Maybe some of our children will want to follow in our footsteps and be reformers, but damn it, let’s give them a chance at choosing exploration instead.

Terran address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation

Address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation, Earth Date: October 11, 3020.

Friends, it is a great honor to be addressing this esteemed body on the occasion of the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation. Prior to the beginning of my remarks, your interstellar translators were to set to English, which is one of the classic languages of Earth - the home planet of my species, located in the Terran system.

It thought it fitting to address you in this way, because I will be sharing with you the last 1000 Earth-years of my species’ history. Why? Because the trajectory of my species in this time is a fitting metaphor for the important decisions we are about to make as we sign the accords which outline the principles all our species have agreed to as we engage in trans-galactic exploration for the first time.

1000 years ago was the beginning of our 21st century of demarcated history. My species did not realize it at the time, but we had been deteriorating as a civilization for nearly one thousand years. The 21st century was was when my species finally starting bearing the costs of that millennia, which we now call the age of subjugation.

That millennium of subjugation was when my species came of age. We grew the population of our home planet into the Billions. We made pathbreaking progress in science, physics, philosophy, and art. To terrains living in those times, it seemed like that our species had reached a pinnacle point of thriving.

But it was not necessarily an era of thriving. There were religious wars. And then wars for power, wealth, and planetary domination. Later, we began to subjugate our living environment - our atmospheric gases, our liquids, and our solid naturally occurring elements. We harnessed the power of atoms and made explosive weapons, which are primitive by today’s standards but were capable of destroying our home world when stockpiled.

And then in the late 21st century, the millennium of subjugation pushed our species to the brink of extinction. Our environment, our politics, and our morals were pushing every person on our home planet to the brink of violence, starvation, or both.

But what also started occurring in the middle of the 21st human century was rapid progression in our understanding of information computing. We started to see the beginnings of what our species called “artificial intelligence".

And what saved our species from the brink of extinction was not the computational power we harnessed, but the cultural understanding.

Terrans, as you know, are some of the most emotional and irrational beings in the galaxy. We are messy, volatile, and downright nutty. We do not possess the physical strength, intellect, logic, or discipline of any of the species represented in this chamber today. And I say that as a proud terran myself.

What we are, however, is imaginative. We have tremendous capability to envision what does not yet exist - however illogical it is. In fact, our imaginations are at their best when we are.

Which brings me back to artificial intelligence. It gave us a quantum leap in information computing power, yes, but it’s most transformative effect on our species was to make us understand what made us unique and special in the galaxy. We could not out-reason the computers we built. We could not out-compute it.

But when contrasting ourselves with information computers, we realized what our souls and emotions were capable of. Advancing information computing technology, surprisingly made us understand what it meant to be terran (or “human” as it was said in those days) more than any other development in the history of our species.

When pushed to the brink of extinction in the late 21st century, my species finally realized that we were never good at subjugating, or even built for it - we were made to imagine.

And all across our planet, we started imagining. Our planetary government stopped every new activity for 10 Earth years and spent a decade imagining what the next millennium could look like for our species, so that we would not repeat the mistakes of our history.

And what a millennium it has been, it has exceeded our wildest dreams. In the past millennium we have established peaceful worlds across our stellar system, we have made contact with all of your species, some of which that have been space-faring civilizations for tens of thousands of Earth years.

And now, all our species, together, have explored the galaxy, peacefully for the past five hundred years. We are discovering the origins of the universe itself. We are doing something my species could have never even contemplated 1000 years ago.

And here we are, today, on the eve of the signing of the accords which will govern how we - for the first time - venture outside our galaxy. Even though we now know that those galaxies could be wildly different than our own - down to the very physics that have prevailed as truth in our galaxy for billions of Earth years.

And on the eve of this most remarkable occasion, I share the history of my species with you to illustrate that audacious goals are irrational by their very definition. They are laughable. They are unbelievably scary. But in these times of extraordinary circumstance, the lesson my species has learned - when we were on the brink of inevitable extinction, when we felt most pressured to be practical and modest - is that what we must do, even though it is foolish, irrational, and scary is to imagine.

And I speaking as the representative of of 35 Billion terrans across this galaxy, suggest to you that if we let our imaginations reach far and wide, when it feels most ludicrous, we can explore the next galaxies, together, and discover unimaginable beauty, prosperity, fellowship, and peace with all those we encounter.

As we sign the accords tomorrow, let it be a sign for all of galactic history that it was a day of extraordinary imagination.

Visualizing the Highest Version of Ourselves

I feel so many pressures to “be” very specific, culturally-prescribed, things. Be productive. Be smart. Be professional. Be loving and kind. Be pious. Be cool.

And being all these things is so confusing, because being one seems to conflict with another, much of the time.

Lately, I’ve wondering if I could stop trying to be something specific and try to just be the highest version of myself. Paradoxically, maybe trying to be the best of everything would actually be liberating.

And that’s when this thought experiment came to be. Like an athlete visualizing peak performance in their sport, what if I picked a specific environment in my day-to-day life and just visualized being the “highest” version of myself? It could be in a meeting at work. When with my family on vacation. When running. When mowing the lawn. Doesn’t matter - it could be any environment.

In any environment, what if we tried to imagine the highest version of ourselves? Would we be more likely to live up to it? Would the process change us? Would we be more or less frustrated at ourselves?

I didn’t know, so I gave it a try. I don’t think you need to read my reflection (below), unless you want to. I include it only to illustrate what I mean.

What I will say is this, I did this on a whim, just to see what would happen. And I don’t know what will happen in the future.

But after I did this thought experiment (in italics below), I had a tingling feeling in my lower abdomen. Not the queasy stomach feeling, but the kind of tingling you feel when you are about to give someone a gift on their birthday. Or the butterflies you get at the last step before solving an equation in math class. Or when the curtain goes up at the theater.

If you want to, give it a try. Just take the sentence below and replace what’s after the ellipsis with something relevant to you. I hope you get the same warm, tingling feeling if you try it for yourself.

I close my eyes as I type this, and push myself to imagine the highest version of myself in a typical situation…in this case when eating dinner, with my family, on a week night, 12 years from now.

I am at the dinner table. Specifically, our dinner table at home with my wife and kids. It is about 12 years from now - say in 2032. We are eating tacos, the same way we have every other Tuesday for nearly 15 years. It’s early autumn. We all sit quietly and pass our dinner around the table, everyone taking a turn. We are light and easy and comfortable feeling, because we are home. Robyn is laughing with one of the boys about a new joke they heard from a son’s friend on their way home from school - Robyn had pickup duty today. I laugh as I put a dollop of sour cream atop a small mound of avocado. Even though I am assembling a taco, I’m paying close attention to everyone. I look up, giggling at the joke.

I scan the room with my eyes only, this is my opportunity to check how everyone is feeling. If they are laughing as they normally do, all is well. I see our other son crack a smile but he doesn’t laugh. Hmm, how unlike him.

I quickly look down at everyone’s plate. Normal, normal, normal, hmm. Our same son, the one that didn’t laugh didn’t take as many tomatoes as he normally does. How unlike him. I sit up straight and start my meal, keeping him in the corner of my eye softly.

We do our nightly ritual of catching up on the day, and we do our “highs and lows”. My son seems to be his normal self, but his eyes are wandering a little bit. There’s something distracting him. I decide instantaneously that I should try talking to him after dinner. I mentally note that and focus my attention back on the entire family and our meal, so I don’t disengage myself.

As we start to break from the table, I ask, “Son, could you help me store the dog food? It’s a pretty big bag and my wrist still hurts from playing tennis yesterday.”

I probably could store the dog food myself. But my wrist IS still sore and I want to create the space for him to open up.

I ask him as he opens the container, “So bud, what have you been thinking about lately?” As he pours the kibble into the bucket, he starts to talk. He mentions a friend off-hand and how he had to cancel on their weekly study session.

I see my opening, but I opt not to take it. Instead I say, “Hey bud, since you’re already over here would you mind helping me load the dishwasher?” When he agrees, I smile extra wide and say thank you.

We chit chat the whole time. Just as we load our last plate, my son pauses, seeming to collect his thoughts. And then he hesitates. I wait . Then I gently raise my eyebrows to let him know that it’s his turn to speak if he wants to.

He takes my cue. Then he says, “Hey papa, have any of your friends ever avoided you?”

I take a moment, and pour two glasses of water. I motion him over to the now spotless dinner table.

“Yeah bud, sometimes. Let’s relax for a minute and I’ll tell you about it.”