It is 1:54 on Tuesday morning as I am writing this. I know the exact time because I just looked at the clock again instead of sleeping.
Ironically, it’s also my birthday.
Apparently, this is how I celebrate turning seventy-five, waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about something I’ve been carrying around for a week.
The culprit is too many podcasts featuring guests across the ideological spectrum. On one hand, I reward myself for wanting all points of view. On the other, I curse myself for not deciding which camp I want to live in.
This week, it’s an unlikely pairing: mighty industrialists and a revered Buddhist nun.
The end result: another invitation to decide who I am, which turns out to be a pretty good question at seventy-five.
My brother Jay recently turned me onto the All-In Podcast. Jay has always been a tech enthusiast. He attended CES in Las Vegas before it was a cultural phenomenon and has integrated cutting-edge technology throughout his dental practice. The podcast has become enormously popular because it taps into something deeply Western and American: the belief that smart people, good ideas, free markets, and strong leadership can solve almost any problem, including our own worries about the present and our place in it.
The episode I listened to featured Charles and Chase Koch discussing their extraordinary multi-generational business. The message was clear and confident: build things, make mistakes, learn from them, iterate, drive growth, make systems work better. There was something almost contagious about their certainty that human progress comes from competence, innovation, and relentless execution. It’s an approach I often share with my corporate clients, who sometimes forget how much structure and disciplined trial-and-error can actually grow a business.
On the flip side, I listened to an interview between Pema Chödrön and Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast. For those unfamiliar with her, Pema Chödrön is an 89-year-old Buddhist nun, author, and teacher whose work focuses on fear, uncertainty, suffering, compassion, and the profound difficulty human beings have in accepting that life is often unpredictable and beyond our control.
The tone of that conversation could not have been more different. She invites us to befriend the parts of life that typically fill us with dread, our uncertainties, losses, grief, and even our joy. She argues that sitting with those feelings, rather than running from them, is what releases their grip and opens us to new ways of seeing and learning. She talks about collaborating with reality when things don’t go as expected, and learning to awaken to the aliveness of the present moment. Her basic point is that much of our suffering comes from constantly trying to eliminate uncertainty. We keep manufacturing guarantees where none really exist. This too is a practice I share with clients facing their own big-world challenges.
I’m not sure I’ve solved any of this for myself. For all the work I’ve done over the years, uncertainty still gets to me. I still lose sleep over things I cannot control — health, family well-being, the challenges of running a small business, the direction of our country and how best to defend what I believe. Some genuine worries. Many meaningless ones.
And yet I’ve improved. I recognize the pattern more quickly, get a grip earlier, and do something useful rather than just ruminate. Even so, maybe because I still care deeply about the world and my place in it, uncertainty finds its way in. At least at 1:54 in the morning.
So what is the answer?
The Koch and All-In worldview says: reduce your worry by building better systems and solving problems.
Pema Chödrön’s worldview says: allow uncertainty into your life, stop trying to solve it, and discover that it is simply another part of living, like exercise, or dinner, or sleep you are not getting.
Later this morning, we head to Omaha for our granddaughter Tori’s wedding to her longtime love, Blake. Unlike most of what keeps me up at night, I’ve felt nothing but joy anticipating this weekend and the chance to be with family and friends and celebrate two people building a life together.
When I think about love, I realize it was hiding in both conversations all along. Among all the high-tech confidence, there was something unmistakable between Charles and Chase Koch. The deep pride of a father and son who built something meaningful together across generations. In Pema Chödrön’s voice, there was also a tenderness she carries for her teachers and for every student who has trusted her with their deepest fears and hopes.
So maybe love is the real curative. Genuine connection relieves our anxiety in ways that neither systems nor surrender can fully manage, because it gives us the common ground we are truly searching for.
That’s my plan for the weekend.
And if that’s true, then perhaps Pema and the Koch’s are both right: the way through uncertainty isn’t found in better systems or deeper surrender alone, it’s found in the certainty we feel about the people we love, and the common ground we discover when we’re with them.
All done: 3:40 AM
