Why 100 Marbles Help Me Accept Life and Death

There are 100 marbles in these two jars. Here’s what they mean.

I went 26 years before Robyn and I started dating, which is why there are 26 peacock-colored marbles at the bottom of the jar on the right.

Then, we were together for three years before we had kids. That’s what the next three marbles are for. They’re a vibrant yellow because those years were our first golden years—just the two of us.

After that, there are 27 multi-colored confetti marbles. These are for the years we’ll have kids in the house. I can’t believe a quarter of them have already moved from the jar on the left to the jar on the right.

Next, there are 24 more golden marbles for the years Robyn and I will have together as empty nesters before I turn 80—just the two of us, again. Real talk, but that’s about how long the Social Security Administration says I’ll live based on my age and sex.

And then there are the clear marbles. There are 20 of them, representing the bonus years—if I’m lucky enough to get them. Living from 80 to 100 isn’t guaranteed, but if I make it, those years will be a mix of divine blessing and pure luck.

Finally, there’s one marble sitting between the jars. That’s this year. Beside it is a card with my New Year’s resolutions on it—those are a huge deal in our family.

I think it’s important to have reminders—clear ones—of our own mortality. Death is certain. It’s a painful thought, yes, but ignoring the truth is worse. Pretending I’ll live forever would guarantee that I’d look back with regrets.

I swear, honest to God, I’m the calmest I am all day when I step out of the shower and see the marbles. I see the “Year of Joy” marble between the jars and it reminds me to play in the basement with my sons after dinner. I remember I need to sweat everyday, to move, to take care of my body.

Those marbles bring me back to a place of radical honesty about my life, my death, and my choices—choices I’m making right now.

If we can accept the hardest truth—that we’re going to die—what else would we ever need to lie to ourselves about? When we accept death, every other problem in life becomes easier to face.

In my experience, the suffering of problems is almost always less than the suffering of avoiding them. Grief, divorce, loss—those are brutally hard, but avoiding them? Blaming other people for them? Lying to yourself about them? That’s worse.

Here’s the thing: we don’t have any real choices until we accept where we are. Denial is a dead end. It keeps us stuck. But once we accept reality, we can start to choose differently.

If “I love you” is the most powerful sentence in the English language, then “I am where I am, but I’m not going to live like this anymore” might be the second.

When we accept hard truth, we don’t need to spin stories about our lives or control other people. We don’t need to make enemies out of others just to avoid fighting the battles inside ourselves. We don’t need to live in a fragile state of fantasy and delusion. We can just get on with it.

And this is where I’ve landed: accepting death is the foundation for living a life of love, character, peace, and responsibility. Why? Because we can take all that energy we would’ve spent avoiding the truth and spend it improving our souls and making things better around us. If you’re more interested in power, status, or avoiding struggle, this radical honesty probably isn’t for you. But if you want something deeper? Start with death.

I use marbles because I’m a visual person. Maybe you need something else—a quote, a photo, time spent with people who are sick or dying. Maybe you need to go to church more or adopt a dog, knowing they’ll go first.

Whatever it is, my friends, find a way to face mortality. Because when we can accept that, we’ll have the courage to face everything else.

I’m not saying any of this is easy, but I am saying it’s worth it. Radical honesty isn’t warm and fuzzy. It doesn’t look great in an Instagram post. But it’s real.

And being real with death is the best place to start.

How to become the richest man in the world

There’s an appeal to living life purely through arm’s-length transactions.

We agree on terms, make an exchange, shake hands, and we’re done. No recurring obligations. No one owes anyone anything. It can easily be how we operate in many situations: buying a new pair of jeans, running a garden club, working a job, or splitting chores with our wives.

A life of deals and agreements can feel in control, efficient, even profitable in a sense.

But I don’t want this.

I want my life to have strings attached. I don’t want to live at arm’s length from everyone else. I don’t want to depend on the market or a series of transactions to bring companionship, compassion, or joy into my life.

I want to be enmeshed. I want to watch my brothers’, sisters’, and friends’ kids when they need a date night out. I want to know the next time I hug someone in my family or anyone else I always hug is going to be soon.

I want to accept meals after we have a baby and reciprocate that kindness to the next ten families in line. I want my neighbors to call me when their computer monitor is broken, and I want to lean on them when I need a ride to the airport, and Robyn has to take the kids to a piano lesson.

I want to stay up later than I should to hear one more story over beers with my buddies, especially when they’re visiting from far away. I want the DCFC clubhouse to feel like our country club because that means we’re showing up for soccer practices, and cheering not just for our sons but also their teammates.

I want the gentle nudge—and the pressure—to show up to Mass or open car doors in the school drop-off line, knowing the kids and other dads notice when I’ve been MIA for a while. I want to linger places, even at work, just to ask someone about how they and their family are doing.

I want to pour my love and laughter into someone who is struggling, even though it obligates me to the scary reality that, maybe—just maybe—I’ll have to open my heart and let it in when someone notices my grief and suffering and pours it right back.

These are the scenes from a life with strings attached.

This is what I want for us. I want us all to work hard and build just a little surplus—of money, love, time, and health—so we can take that extra and give it away.

Doing that isn’t how we become wealthy. In fact, we’re probably better off keeping people at arm’s length if wealth is our goal. Why? Because it’s easier to extract money from people when we stick to the terms of the contract. Our pesky emotions and feelings of attachment won’t dull our killer instincts, so to speak.

So intertwining ourselves with others—stringing ourselves to them and them to us—may not be the best way to become wealthy.

It is, I’d argue, how we become rich.

What if death wasn’t certain?

Friends,

I was driving the other day when a thought hit me.

Death feels unpredictable, doesn’t it? We have no idea when it’ll come.

But it’s also the most predictable thing there is—it’s the only thing we know for sure is coming.

But here’s the thing—it’s not just certain that we’ll die. We even have a rough window for it, right? Most of us can expect to go somewhere between 70 and 100 years old, and almost no one makes it past 110.

But what if that wasn’t the rule anymore?

Imagine this: a new treatment for longevity. You’d have to take it by 25, but here’s the kicker—it only works for half of us, and we can’t even tell who it’s working for.

This kind of life? It would be tough—devastating, even.

I can’t imagine not knowing whether I’d have to live without Robyn for 100 years. Just thinking about it—it’d tear me apart.

And what about my kids? Their kids? Would I end up burying generations of my own family because I lived to 500?

Then there’s friendships. Would they cross generations too? Or would we all start isolating, afraid to get close to people when we had no idea how long they’d be around?

Money—would we work forever? Could we even retire?

And politics? Would having immortals who cared about the extreme long-term make things better? Or would culture fall apart because the thread of shared experience stretched too thin?

I don’t have the answers. This idea—this uncertainty about how long we might live—it’s unsettling in ways I didn’t expect.

But what about you? How does this land for you? What would it mean to live in a world where death was no longer the one certainty we had?

With love from Detroit,

Neil

Becoming giving beings

Children are selfish. By design. That’s what they’re supposed to do and their survival depends on it. From the moment they are born, they demand that we feed them, clothe them, protect them, love them, and bathe them.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @adroman

And so did I. Like every other person that has ever lived, I was a selfish child. Far into adolescence, I was selfish, even if it was slightly less so than the day I was born.

As we age, it seems as if life extracts the selfishness, little by little, from our bodies and minds. First through marriage, then through children. For those of us who believe, through faith also. Through the intensities of grief and joy the selfishness is stolen sneakily, by the experience of life itself - if we let it.

If I am lucky enough to live a full life, without sudden death, I don’t know, exactly, what it will be like to die. I know it’s coming someday, but say I am dying at 95 from the ailment of a having a body that has long since depreciated past its useful life - what will it be like? I meditate on what it might be so that I can be prepared.

If I am so lucky to not die a sudden death, I think it may actually be like the movies. That’s what I hope for, anyway.

When I meditate on what I will be thinking and feeling on my deathbed, I imagine being close to Robyn and our children. I think I will want to just sit with them, drinking water and eating rice with lentils. Simple food, that does not distract from the company.

As I visualize myself slowly chewing the tasteless rice, my deathbed meditation progress to its very last moments.

I am there. Robyn is there. Our sons are there, and even in my foggy mental state, and despite the excruciating pain of inhabiting a dying body, I can tell our sons are grown because the hair on their temples has started to grey - that is the mark of a grown man in our line.

And then, at the very end, I gaze at Robyn. I am there, trying to muster some last words before I go ahead. In that last moment I do not ask for more painkillers. I do not cry. I do not beg God for more time. I do not say to her, “tell me you love me.” In those last moments, I am determined not to take.

With the last breaths of oxygen I breathe, and the last beats of my heart, before my thoughts go dark, I will try to say, “I love you.”

I will try to give love, to her, until the literal end of my life. Until God takes me from her embrace. In that moment, when I am as vulnerable as the day I was born, I dream of giving whatever love remains. Just like that. Just like the movies.

In life, and death, there can be so much suffering. That’s part of the deal. But what a beautiful thing to be part of. It is wonderful to know that if we must suffer the fate of death that there’s at least a fighting chance that life will have transformed us from something selfish into something more gracious.

It is utterly remarkable to me that we can go from being newborns, designed to be selfish, into giving beings. What a beautiful and curious thing it is, that after the immense suffering of our lives, at the moment of imminent death, our singular focus, above even our own survival, can become, “I love you.”

Being that, a giving being, is what I hope to become.

Death is glue

There are so many issues and problems that we need our politics to alleviate. Everything from the economy, to health, to environment, to violence. So how do we organize it all, what do we do first?

To me, the most profound and impactful thing that will happen to any of us is death. Death is one of, or perhaps the only thing, we all truly have in common. We all grapple with it. We will all face it. Death is non-discriminatory in that way. Death binds us together. Death is glue.

If death is glue, I’ve wondered what a political framework that acknowledges and is informed by the profundity of death would be. To me, three principles emerge that could help our politics sharpen its focus on what matters most.

The first organizing principle is to prevent senseless death. A senseless death is one that does not have to happen, given what is and is not in our control as a species, right now. Death is inevitable and basically nobody wants to die, so let’s prevent (or at least delay) the deaths we can. So that means we should focus on these data, figure out which causes of death are truly senseless, and address all the underlying determinants of them.

Before we do anything else, lets prevent senseless death - whether it’s from war, from preventable disease, from gun violence, or something else.

The next principle is to prevent a senseless life. What is a senseless life? That’s a difficult, multi-faceted question. But I think the Gallup Global Emotions report has data that are onto something. They ask questions about positive or negative experiences and create an index from the answers - surveying on elements like whether someone is well rested, feels respected, or feels sadness. What we could do is understand the data, geography by geography, to understand why different populations feel like life is worth (or not worth) living. Then, we solve for the underlying determinants.

There are so many reasons that someone may feel a senseless life, these challenges are probably best understood locally or through the lens of different types of “citizen segments” like “young parents”, “the elderly”, “small business owners”, or “rural and agriculturally-focused”.

What’s great about these types of problems which vary from person to person, is that tools from the private-sector marketing discipline - like customer segmentation, consumer insights, consumer experience - are extremely well developed and equipped to make progress on understanding these “senseless life” challenges which affect different populations differently.

The last organizing principle for a politics informed by death is protecting our freedom to prepare for death. Death is so tremendously profound and difficult, we all try to prepare for it differently.

For some, we turn to our faith to cope. For others, we turn to science, philosophy, or self-expression. For others, still, we turn to a life of service. Many of us build our lives around a devotion to family, and that devotion and connection is what helps us prepare for death.

What we have in common, though, is that we all try to prepare for death in some way or another.

I don’t claim to know the single best way to prepare for death, which is why ensure sufficient freedom to allow everyone the choice in how they prepare for death is so important.

To be sure, there are problems with this political framework. Most obviously, controversial issues remain controversial. Take the death penalty for example. Is abolishing the death penalty an act of preventing senseless death or is it an act of enforcing the freedom to prepare for death? These sorts of tensions still remain.

Moroever, envisioning a politics centered around the idea that death is the most profound and binding experience there is, would require a citizenry that accepts death. It would take a culture that is courageous enough to talk about death. It would take all of us doing the hard work of trying to imagine how to minimize regrets on our own deathbed, when we are weakest and most vulnerable. That’s no walk in the park, especially in America where we sometimes seem allergic to talking about death, even slightly.

And yet, I think the adhesion death provides is still so compelling. Death give us some chance of finding common ground on society-level challenges. I want, so badly, to not die from preventable causes. I want, so badly, to live a worthy life rather than a senseless life. And finally, I want, so badly, to prepare for death so its cloud of fear and uncertainty is lined with at least some sense of peace and acceptance. Our shared interest in death and life gives even political adversaries some place of agreement to start a dialogue from.

And even outside of politics in the formal sense, I feel like I owe it to others to act in a way which is mindful of death and our shared struggles with it. As in, I feel like I owe it to you and my neighbor to help you avoid a senseless death. I feel like I owe it to you and my neighbor to avoid a senseless life. I feel like I owe it to you and my neighbor to give you the freedom and to help you prepare for death.

I think I owe it to you to be generous, compassionate, honest, kind and respectful to you to some reasonable degree, because we are all facing death. This shared mortality binds us and obligates something of me to you, whether it’s in the political realm or just in our day to day lives.

A politics that acknowledges and is informed by the profundity of death could be too confusing and volatile to even consider as a teneable framework for political thinking, let alone an electoral strategy. But it could nudge our politics and culture to be more honest, courageous, and compassionate.

Because death is glue.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @claybanks

This Is Soul Searching

In the waning moments of my life, what do I want to be true? If I do not die suddenly, and unexpectedly like my father and my others did, I know I will be taking stock of my life. What story do I want to be the real, true, story I am able to tell myself about my own life?

I want it to be true that I did not bring death, senselessly, upon myself. Whatever is left of me after death would be ashamed at my negligence if I was texting while driving, or accidentally injured myself because I was drunk. Similarly, if I died needlessly young because of poor nutrition, air & water quality, rest, stress, or apathy toward my own health, my lingering soul would be devastatingly sad. When my time comes, it will be my time, but I don’t want that time to be recklessly early. Our bones may break, but I do not want to break my own.

I want it to be true that I did right by my family, by other people, and by other living creatures. I would be so regretful if I had lived my life neglecting my family, by being untrustworthy to my friends, disrespectful to my neighbors, unkind to strangers, and insulting to life, as it came to my doorstep, in any form. How could I steal the opportunity for a good day from others? How could I take out anger on children, a dog, or other defenseless creatures? How could I pollute the water or air and bring suffering to living creatures 100 years from now? I cannot selectively value life - I’m either in, or I’m out. And I’m either honest, kind, and respectful of life or I’m not. I either did right by others, or I didn’t. Do or do not, there is no try.

I want it to be true that I used my gifts to make an impactful contribution. I think I have realized that it’s less important to do something “big” or “noteworthy”. What is it that I and few others on this earth could contribute? It takes a village to leave the village better than we found it. What’s my niche? What’s my lane? What’s the diversity of contribution I can bring to the table? Papa always told you that you were a capable person, Honor your gifts, Tambe.

I also want to be at peace with death itself. Some people call this being ready to die, or having come to terms with death. I think that means forgiving and asking for forgiveness. I think that means righting my wrong and accepting the wrongs I could not make right. I think that means having lived a life seeking out, learning from, and hopefully understanding something of the the natural beauty of this world and traveling graciously to experience the beauty of human culture. I think that means having my affairs in order medically, legally, and financially. I think that means having done the hard, spiritual work to be prepared for the unknown and undiscovered country. I think that means knowing that I’ve shared the good parts of life with the good people God has brought me to. I want to be ready. Live like there are 10,000 tomorrows, all of which that may never come.

Thinking through this has been a bit of a reckoning. Am I really living to these principles? I’m not 100% sure.

Do I really, truly, not drive distractedly? Is eating fish consistent with my perspective on respecting life in all its forms? Is working in business, or even public service, really the way to contribute my unique gifts? Have I righted the wrongs of my adolescence and been present for my extended, global family? I’m not quite sure about any of these. I think the exercise of reconciling life today with the person we are at death’s doorstep is what is meant by “soul searching.” And that’s what this is, soul searching.

—-

I have dedicated a significant amount of my life to understanding teams, organizations, and how they work. Understanding these sorts of human systems is one of my unique gifts. And one of the enduring truths of my study is that the way for a human to solve problems is to begin with the end in mind.

What this approach absolutely depends on is knowing what the end actually is. What is our endgame? What are we trying to achieve? What result are we trying to create? We must know this to solve a problem, especially in a team of people.

This post was inspired by a few things - a few conversations with a few members of my extended family at dinner this weekend, and finishing the book The Path to Enlightenment by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama - and it’s become a set of organizing principles of how I want to live. These four ideas: avoiding senseless death, doing right by others, contributing my unique gifts, and find peace with death itself, have been loose threads that I have been trying to weave into a narrative since the beginning of my time writing this blog in earnest, almost 15 years ago.

What I have been missing this whole time is that tricky question - what is the end? What we experience about death in our culture is truly limited. The end of life is not a funeral or a eulogy. The end of life is not what is written about us in a book or newspaper. The end of life is not our retirement party from a job or a milestone birthday in our late ages where everyone makes a speech and says nice things about us.

Those moments are not the end, but those moments are usually what we experience, either in movies, television, or our own lives. The end we have in mind when we tacitly plan out our lives is maximizing those moments. But that’s not the actual end.

At the end of life we are really mostly alone, mostly with our own thoughts. I have never seen dying up close, and I think most people don’t. I did not have grandparents who lived in this hemisphere. My father wen’t ahead so surprisingly. My surviving parents (Robyn’s folks and my mother), thank God, are not quite that old just yet. I have never truly seen the true end of life.

I think for most of my life I have been optimizing for the wrong “end”. I have been trying to design my life around having a great retirement party, or a great funeral. And that has made me put a skewed amount of emphasis on what others might think and say about me one day.

What is the better, and more honest approach is to organize life around the true end: death.

It is hard, but has been liberating. Imagining what I want to believe to be true has given me remarkable clarity on how I want to live. And that is such a gift because, thank goodness, I still have time to make adjustments. It’s not too late. And in a way, I truly believe it’s never too late, because we’re not dead yet. Even if death is only days away, or even hours perhaps, it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. We still have time to choose differently.