No

I was with two of my finest friends on Christmas Eve when they received not good medical news.

I have always wondered what it would be like to get a bad news diagnosis phone call, so I was curious about the experience, even though it was hard and bad and dumb and scary and sad.

I sat with them in their living room, Christmas tree in the background, watching them ask questions of the medical professional on the other end of the phone. I watched their reactions, watched them hold hands.

I especially looked at their faces and thought about how much I love them and how much they love each other. I just watched and watched and watched their faces during the phone call of bad news. I saw it all: their pain, confusion, dread, love, sorrow.

Later, while I was driving home, I thought about all the time we’ve spent together. I remembered the text I received from them, asking if I would officiate their marriage. I remembered evening swims in a friend’s pool, out on a lake in the Adirondacks, the many nights they gave me shelter in their guest room, the many good meals we’ve had together. All the Sundays they drove to Vermont to sit in church when I was a pastor.

I kept thinking about their faces and how a day would come when I would no longer have the chance to look at them, to see their expressions, the things that make them uniquely them.

I decided, because of how much I love their faces and the faces of all the other people I love, that it was time to eliminate as many distractions as I possibly could from my life so I can spend whatever time I have left here being truly present. Actually living in my life, not skating through, distracted, disorganized and running late.

When I got home I shut down all social media, including my website, which I have had for about fifteen years. The only thing left … you’re looking at it.

I’ve done this before, for periods of time, but I’m 60 now and acutely aware that the sands of time are running away from me. Three of my friends have cancer. I work in hospice; death is my life.

I don’t want to spend any more time looking online at the lives of strangers. I just want to be in my actual life, where I know what’s happening is real and not AI-generated.

Someday that bad news phone call is going to be for me, and I don’t want to panic when it happens.

In some ways it feels like not spending so much time online means that the aperture of my life is widening, that I can take more in, but in truth I want to do less, to do only the things I enjoy doing with the few people I truly love. I want to have experiences with and stare at the faces of the people I love and admire the most.

2026 has already been declared the Year of No for me. I’m creating tight parameters and dense boundaries and I’m saying no to a LOT of things. Yes to more skiing and ice skating and swimming and looking at the ice forming on the edge of the pond and the flowers blooming, even in winter, and the antics of the little ones running around the house. Yes to reading books checked out of the library and yes, yes, yes, to eating delicious food. Yes to sleep and to showing up wherever my kids are living their good lives. Yes to art and opera and movies. Yes to holding hands and hugs that mean something.

I know it potentially makes me sound like a jerk, but I no longer care about a lot of things. I have spent the last decade strenuously helping other people try to get their spiritual life together, and I’m kind of done with that. I don’t even care that much about my own spiritual growth anymore. I just want to be in this life and make measured choices and let life be life. I don’t want to be a teacher anymore; I no longer believe I have to save every broken human. My projects are simple and few: the SAM project, because I care a lot about old people, and Medical Aid in Dying, because everyone should have the option of completing their life on their terms.

There was a time in my life when I wanted to go to parties and I wanted to be seen in the world and I thought it mattered that other people liked what I was wearing or thought I had good taste. Validation, I guess, made me feel alive and okay.

If a beautiful gathering happens in our dining room or I go skiing in Aspen and I don’t post anything about it anywhere, did it actually happen? The thinking once reserved for trees has seeped into every aspect of our lives.

How the hell did we used to do anything without the internet? Without GPS? Without music streaming services? Without Netflix and Door Dash?

I don’t know, but everything was just fine. It all worked.

Let me tell you a funny story that reeks with nostalgia for a simpler time.

Last week my dad had to go to the ER in Saratoga. He was exercising at the gym and got dizzy and passed out. Because my parents have one car, my mom walked to the gym (full stop here to give Mom, physically able, at 83, to easily walk the mile or so in the winter to the gym, a shout-out), hoping the keys were there somewhere. They weren’t, but the husband of Dad’s physical therapist, Bill, offered to drive Mom to the hospital to get the car keys, then to drive her back to her car. Somewhere along the way, in their conversation, they figured out that Bill knew my high school tennis coach, Rich.

My mother doesn’t use a cell phone, but Bill told Rich that my dad was in the hospital and then Rich called me to let me know.

Rich was my (and my sister’s) tennis coach forty years ago. He cared enough to reach out to me, and then to check in the next day to see how Dad was doing.

That’s how things happened before the internet and cell phones. People talked to each other and helped each other, and things somehow worked out.

It was the best gift I got this year: a reminder that goodness and kindness and human connection are not dead yet.

Listen, if I don’t return your phone call or text in a timely fashion in the new year, don’t take it personally, I’m not ghosting you, just trying to use my time here more thoughtfully until I become one. 👻

Here’s to bigs and littles and books in ‘26.
And to B + P: you’ve got ALL MY LOVE.

Happy New Year, my friends. Thanks so much for being a reader. xomo