I was in Tillamook, Oregon, picking up an eight-week-old puppy named Lucca, and the trip was fifty years in the making. As a self-employed, screen-facing, wannabe writer, I needed the companionship of a sentient being. I remembered: when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home, and six months later, she was too much, and he took her away.

Now pushing sixty, I was six again.

Ahead of me was a two-hour evening ride to the airport, a six-hour flight, and two hours of local transportation to Harlem, New York City. I wasn’t worried. I had a lot of love to give. And a strategy. When she wails, I will be silent. When she stops wailing, I will talk to her.

I readied the car for her and hopped behind the wheel. Lucca directed her eyes at me from behind the mesh on the other side of the carrier screen. The wailing, honed by evolution to be unbearable, began. I waited until she stopped and started by introducing myself.

“Hi, pup. I am Samir, and I am human. As a result of millions of coincidences, you and I are here now, just the two of us. A two-species encounter in a black rented Kia. You’ve just lost your mom, dad, siblings, and a loving home here in this beautiful Cheese Country. Now, love, we are heading into the night.”

She was terrified, I could tell, and I was helpless.

While thinking of what to say next, she slipped back into the unbearable mode. The woman told me to consider her wailing a survival trick. It wasn’t a trick. Lucca was lost.

I told her about the new home awaiting her in Harlem. “It’s the most recognizable neighborhood name in the world!” I exclaimed. I described each room, each family member, and the streets awaiting her. When I stopped, she took it to another level with quieter, cuter, and far more unbearable sounds.

“I hear you, I really do,” I said, mirroring her voice. “You know, when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home to my eleven-year-old sister and me. We named her Lola, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. We did not know how to potty-train her or stop her from chewing my schoolbooks and my mom’s new white high-heeled shoes. My dad, without telling us, took her away. My sister stayed in her room for three days, my dad behaved as if the abduction didn’t happen, and my mom kept herself busy.”

This realization about my six-year-old self felt like the dark green night descending over us as we drove through Oregon. I became quiet. Lucca did, too.

Two creatures in a black rented Kia, heading into the night.

“Since I was six, a part of me has been sad and mad,” I told Lucca, “Until now. Now I have you. Would you have me?”

She stayed silent, and I took it as a yes.

At the end of the green night ride, Lucca and I got on the plane in Portland.

I had a problem. No matter how much I tried to cajole or coax her to go, she would not go. Hours were passing, and I thought that if I failed in making it happen, she was going to explode.

In the middle of the flight, I took her to the bathroom, spread a pee pad on the floor, and assumed a position with one leg planted at the door to prevent anyone from pushing it open and hurting the puppy, and the other planted behind the toilet.

When I lowered Lucca onto the pad, I was 100 percent sure that she would relieve herself on that damn pad.

She lowered herself onto the pad. And fell asleep.

After about thirty minutes of hovering over her like a drone, my leg muscles started twitching, and the flight attendant knocked. With my nose out the door, I described my predicament. People in line pitied me, and since there was another bathroom across the aisle, I was given a pass. But no business was done in our place. I tried the damn pad routine again at the Newark airport. To no avail.

A two-hour car ride, two hours at the airport, a six-hour flight, and one hour on the subway resulted in nothing.

Twelve hours after I picked her up, we came to our apartment, I took her out of the carrier, and while I was distracted with unfolding that damn, damn pad for her, she relieved herself on the wood floor, then the rug, then on the kitchen runner. This one-minute, three-stage shit show erased my idea of having an acceptable measure of control over a puppy.

Four weeks had passed. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t exercise. I met my work obligations, but only barely. I showered only when absolutely necessary. This was a standoff between the will of a grown man and the bladder, intestines, and teeth of a baby canine.

Further collateral damage came in the form of a stressed-out, late-for-work wife. She was completely exhausted just by watching me do this.

I looked out the window at the city streets and despised the dog owners prancing around with their perfectly tamed bags of shit. Why wouldn’t these neighbors have stopped me? Maybe put me in a kennel until my dream of having a puppy dissipated.

Share

Four months into it meant four months of our lives lost forever chasing a barking, biting, chewing, diaperless devil’s own baby, destroying everything she senses to be precious to us.

I wanted to sleep, I wanted to stand under the hot water in the shower. I wanted to cook a meal. I wanted to get back to my work. I wanted to, in peace, think about the meaning of life. And maybe, if the cosmos would have mercy, be happy again.

Then one day, I was cooking, just cooking. I was taken away by my thoughts for the first time since Oregon when I spotted her in the middle of the room and was startled by a realization.

“Oh gosh. I am a dog owner.”

She was sitting with her butt on the ground, front legs straight, tall back, fully alert, with those eyes of hers—not beady, but rather with enough white in them that you can’t help but believe there’s a person in there.

I had forgotten I had her. One sliver of a moment, the first in four months, of not watching her.

She was now watching me.

She was watching me with a patient steadiness I had earned. And in that gaze, without a word, without even knowing she was doing it, she said:

“I see your effort. I see how these months have cost you. And I am telling you: I am worth it. I come to you with a gift you do not yet understand. But you will.”

I went back to cooking.

She kept watching me for so long; her gaze became the gaze of life itself. The steadiness of her eye contact told me we are not talking about the costly months here, but years, decades, all the way to the beginning. Life said to me:

“I see your effort. I see every story you’ve told yourself. Every year you’ve spent becoming who you thought you needed to be. Every drop of sweat or blood, every scream and silence, every year of love and loss. I see it all. And I am telling you: I am worth it. Every bit. You don’t understand it all yet–but you will.”

On her first birthday, I calculated that she had taken me out for 1,000 walks I would not otherwise have taken. A million steps I would not otherwise have made. I am a self-employed, screen-facing, home-office man with excellent reasons to stay inside.

She gave me the street.

And the window.

We live on the third floor of a building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, with one wall entirely made of glass. From up here, you are part of street life without the city staring in or you staring out. It is the best place in the apartment.

Half Border Collie, she sits in front of that window like an old shepherd dog on an Irish hill. Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem is her valley, her domain, her responsibility. Every hour of the day brings something different, scurrying adults, children horsing around, yellow taxis, slow buses, the morning crowd, and the night crowd, all of them hers to watch over.

From up here, I began to notice the oak tree I had never seen before. It grew so big so fast. I began to see the people I had never paid attention to before. Working alone from home for years, I had given in to a quiet, private illusion: that I was essentially alone in the world.

Lucca took it away without an argument.

She just sat at the window. And the world was there.

She became a portal. Not into a philosophy or a revelation, but into the actual world, the one that had been outside my window the whole time. And in the subway, and in the tired, crowded veterinarian waiting room in the Lower East Side.

Share

She didn’t change my mind. She changed my radius. And inside that radius, I could see I was never, actually, alone.

I spent thirty years helping other people wake up. And now this.

I trained her with discipline. I disciplined myself to do it.

Sit. Down. Come. Stay. Four sessions each day, patient and consistent, everything the books told me to be. She didn’t understand what any of this choreography was for. But she knew I was engaged and that was enough for her. She was happy just to participate, happy to make me happy.

Though on the fourth sit, sometimes, she would look at me with those person-eyes and I could see the question forming, “Is this really necessary? Are you genuinely asking me to sit again, or are you now just asserting your power over a creature who loves you?”

Still. She sat.

I have spent years reading and thinking about transformation–how people change, what actually moves along our journeys of becoming. One night during those four months, I wrote a note to myself: if it were possible to open our skulls and use pliers to rewire ourselves into who we want to be, it would be a way inferior method of changing ourselves than having a puppy in your lap every day.

And then I hit her.

I lost patience. I was exhausted and frustrated, and I hit her. Once. And she looked at me with complete bewilderment in her eyes — not anger, not withdrawal, not fear. Bewilderment. As if she simply could not locate the logic of what had just happened.

I looked at my hand in horror.

How can I be capable of this? What gives me the right?

I have been learning about shame. Grappling with whether it can be something useful, something life-giving, something that protects rather than destroys. In that moment, looking at my hand, I had my answer. Shame arrived not to punish me but to help me. To say: this is not who you are. This is not how this works.

Because here is what I know about training a puppy: punishment takes you nowhere. Shame, yes, the shame that makes you look at your hand. But punishment? No. Only kindness moves anything. Only communication, only gentleness, leads anywhere real.

A dog doesn’t carry the verdict of every failure into the next moment. A dog does not need to earn its place in the room.

Share

Lucca trembles with delight. She quivers in her readiness to do everything she possibly can. She stands in one place and waits, and waits, and waits.

And asks a question I could not unhear:

“What would happen if you treat yourself like you treat a puppy?”

Not as sentiment. As a method. The same presence, the same return to the moment, the same gentleness after every mistake I make. What would it be like to say sorry to yourself, to forgive yourself, to respect and delight in yourself like you respect and delight in me? How about that, Mr. Transformation?

I should tell you about my wife.

She was bitten by a dog once — a chained, frightened animal outside a store, a crowd pushing it towards her. She agreed to Lucca the way you agree to something you have researched and accepted, but do not yet believe. “The studies are clear,” she said, “Dogs are good for your heart, good for your mental health, and good for your longevity. Fine. You can have your dog.”

Lucca’s greatest happiness, it turned out, is my wife’s arrival home.

In the morning, when Lucca has not seen us all night, she bypasses me entirely and leans into my wife. I have trained her, cleaned her, medicated her eyes, and done every undignified thing a dog owner must do. And still. She goes to her.

I don’t know what to make of this. I have decided not to.

Now let me tell you about the city.

I think about what would happen if, by some rapture, every dog in New York City disappeared overnight. I have come to believe the city would not survive it. Not the buildings — but the people. The mental health would collapse. The loneliness would become unbearable. The physical health, the order of daily life, the ten thousand tiny blessings people get when they leave their apartments and nod at strangers — gone.

In a city of asphalt and screens, dogs are our contact with the wild. There is still a wolf in them. A wolf who chose to adapt, to change, to come inside and learn our strange human ways and live in our cement buildings and walk beside us on our leashes.

That wolf looked at us and said: I am all in with you, my human.

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes — the book of Solomon, supposedly the wisest king ever — in which he grapples with how little we humans actually know. We are so deeply in the unknown, he says, so surrounded by uncertainty, that everything we live is essentially a hunch. A conjecture. A beautiful, vain, and desperate guess.

To illustrate this, at one point he says, “We humans do not even know whether dogs will inherit eternal life.” Whether they will go on and live forever.

The wisest king. And this is what kept him up at night.

I have been thinking about this.

What if this whole planet is not about us? What if the entire story — all of our religions, our philosophies, our self-importance, our civilizations built and collapsed and built again — what if none of that is the point? What if, in the witty and slightly insane way of the universe, in a genuine mystical twist, dogs are actually the species around which we evolve and revolve?

They are not destroying the planet. They love without condition. They are all in, always, for whoever wants them. They adapt to our world without losing their wildness. They tremble with delight at our returns. They dream their vivid, urgent dreams and make small, tender sounds in the night that awake your heart.

They do not carry shame past the moment that earned it. They do not shame us. They do not need to earn their place in the room.

Just because we know calculus, quote Shakespeare, and practice Zen Buddhism does not mean we are the point of all this.

What if our dogs go to heaven?

What if heaven is for dogs — and we are invited because we loved them?

Lucca is asleep beside me as I write this. She is going through something in her dream — I can hear it, small urgent guttural sounds, her legs twitching gently, a whole movie playing behind those closed eyes. Full of life.

Dark green Oregon night is a distant memory now.

Now we have each other, and life is all in.

Share

Subscribe now

Every dog owner has this moment.

HAVE A DOG? Show us your dog (share a pic below) and/or finish this sentence: the moment I knew I was theirs, not the other way around, was when…

Every five years or so, I turn to a poem that grows deeper, truer, and more joyous every time. A Caribbean poet and playwright wrote this poem, Derek Walcott (b. January 23, 1930), a poet of such extraordinary depth that his 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature is a wholly inadequate measure of his mesmerizing words.

He wrote long, complex poems about history and the place of his Chile. And this one!

I have come to believe that his brief, luminous, and unexpected gleam of human life in this poem, “Love After Love,” (Collected Poems: 1948–1984), is the greatest adulting poem ever written.

Take a calming breath and let the words in. Thank you for all the good wishes and vibes you have been sending my way today.

Cheers from Harlem friends!

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

We all know how it feels to be muted by other people, by ourselves, or by life’s circumstances. We cannot breathe. On the other side, there’s no greater joy than releasing our story into the world. Something magical happens when we let our lives speak.

Yet there’s more to it than our joy of telling. Your story does not belong only to you. It is sacred. You owe it to the world. Articulating your story—whether in the family, at work, or in a larger community—is one of the most potent and necessary catalysts for human transformation.

You might have a story about your diabetes, or about a daughter, or about a river, or about a place inside of you that you don’t even know how to name yet.

Looking back on helping hundreds of people tell a story that matters about a life that matters to people that matter, while they are still around to enjoy it, has taught me something.

Most of the time, when people “introduce” themselves, they hand over a headline: a role, a company, a city, lines that fit neatly on a screen or a slide. Leaders do it in boardrooms. Elders do it at family gatherings. Meanwhile, the actual story—the early chapters, the near-misses, the ordinary Tuesdays that secretly changed everything—remains unspoken.

Friends miss the origin story. Children never learn what happened before they were born. Colleagues see only the public pages. It all seems efficient and responsible. But there is a quiet cost: an enormous amount of meaning and beauty disappears.

I am one of the co-founders of Your Epic Ordinary Life. We are on a mission to turn life experience into a source of inspiration, connection, and purpose for others. We focus on the stories people are actually living, in all their contradictions, fears, humor, and grace.

Telling your present story—on purpose—is more powerful than any strategy, course, or framework you could buy.

Here are ten truths I’ve learned sitting with people at thresholds of change—leaders, parents, elders, grown children, people between chapters—who are ready to gather their lives into a story they can live from, live out, and share.

Which one of the ten truths resonates with you?

1. Your life is not a list.

Most of the tools we use to “capture” a life are list-shaped: résumés, bios, obituaries, LinkedIn profiles, family religious holiday letters. Sorted by achievement rather than meaning, they reduce a person to a list of bullet points.

A list can tell us what you did. In the breathing realm where we live, however, far more important things are happening.

Honestly, none of us is that interested in what you have accomplished. Whether in your family, your company, or a larger community. Have a list of values you uphold? Not interested. Your good deeds? Not interested. Your bad deeds? Not interested.

Here is what we are interested in instead: what you have done with what life has dealt you.

Tell us how you kept showing up at work while your marriage was falling apart in private, and what the cost was. Tell us about the late nights when you sat in a car outside the hospital, trying to decide whether to go back in. Tell us about the time you told your team the truth when a safer lie was within easy reach. Tell us about the ordinary evenings at the sink, when you chose to unpack your teenager’s half-formed anger instead of scrolling on your phone in avoidance. Tell us what you don’t want to tell us, and then we will hear everything you do.

That is the fierce heat of living. And of leading, and of loving. When you speak from there, we will all pull up a chair.

We want to know what courage looks like when your voice shakes in the boardroom or at the kitchen table, how responsibility feels when everyone is looking to you while you feel lost, how love behaves when the prognosis is bad, the deal falls through, or the person you trusted does not come back. However awkwardly, give us the moment, the tension, the small choices you made.

2. Silence is already writing your story for you.

We like to imagine that if we don’t tell our story, it simply remains untold. That’s not what happens.

If you don’t tell your story, your habits will. Your anxieties will. Other people will. Systems will. You’ll still be living inside a narrative—“I’m the responsible one,” “I’m the one who messed up,” “I’m replaceable,” “I’m the hero who holds everything together,” “I’m an impostor,”—you just won’t have chosen it.

In organizations, silence turns into lore: “She never talks about that time,” “We don’t ask him what really happened.” At home, silence turns into guesses: “I think Grandma was just always like that,” “Dad never really liked to spend time at home.”

When we don’t tell our story, we don’t keep it neutral. We leave it exposed and vulnerable to distortion. Silence makes it inevitable.

Telling your story is not self-indulgence. It’s the stewardship of your life. It is how you take responsibility for the experience and meaning your life has gifted you with and wants you to carry it forward—into your family, your team, and even your own future decisions.

3. The story decides what is possible.

We think we make decisions based on data: the behaviors, the outcomes, the budget, the calendar.

We stand on those things, but underneath those things, there’s always a story, and the story invariably surprises us with its power.

The story you believe about yourself and your people quietly decides:

• Which risks are you willing to take

• What outcomes can you even imagine

• How much of your actual self do you feel allowed to bring into the room

The same is true at home. The story you hold about your family shapes:

• Which conversations “aren’t worth starting”

• What gets celebrated and what gets quietly buried

• Whether your children inherit a to-do list and advice, or a sense of rootedness and life-giving values

You can redesign your life plan, org chart, or mission statement every year, but if the underlying story doesn’t change, the same dynamics will keep repeating.

Working directly with your story is one of the simplest, most leveraged moves you can make. Change the story, and the field of possibility changes with it.

4. If you feel stuck, you’re stuck inside a story, not a circumstance.

We say, “I’m stuck.”

Stuck in a role. Stuck in a relationship pattern. Stuck between eras of my life.

From the outside, however, the circumstances are rarely as fixed as they feel. There are options, experiments, and conversations that haven’t been considered yet. There are feelings that haven’t been allowed yet.

What is usually stuck is the story:

“This is just who I am.”
“This is more than this organization can do.”
“This is how this family has always been and will be.”

When you work with a good guide, you begin to see the story itself. You notice where it hardened too early. You notice where someone else’s fear became your script. You notice the places where you were braver than you remember.

You realize, “Oh. I’ve been acting as if this chapter were the whole book. It isn’t, and I have a greater story to tell!”

A recognition like that alone can loosen something in you that’s been seizing for years.

5. Only a story lets you harvest your transformation.

Most of us quietly become different people every 3–5 years.

We go through a crisis, a move, a birth, a loss, a promotion, a diagnosis, a burnout, a new love—something shifts outside our ability to grasp or even be aware of. You look back, and you realize you are not who you were before.

But unless you consciously revisit and re-story your life, you keep operating inside the past narrative.

My favorite poet, David Whyte, sometimes says, “Your inner life is about six years ahead of you.” Fascinating.

This means I might still be making decisions as if I were the younger, more fearful, more ambitious, more wounded, more invincible version of myself—while life is asking something new of me and, with it, offering me what I need to respond.

Telling your story is how you harvest the change life has already grown in you.

You get to say, “I used to be that. Then life happened. Now I am becoming this.” Not as a slogan, but as a hard-won recognition that organizes your choices from now on.

Without that harvest, the fruits of change dissipate. Harvest turns hard work of change into a legacy—for you, and for the people watching you navigate your life.

Subscribe now

6. You can’t see your own life clearly without a witness.

There is a reason you can’t see your own face without a mirror.

In the same way, you know how your life feels from the inside. But you don’t necessarily see the patterns, hear the echoes, perceive your quiet courage, notice the humorous, or experience the beauty of the whole.

That’s where a witness comes in.

A paradoxical truth: You alone are responsible for telling your story, but you cannot tell it alone.

In our work, Your Epic Ordinary Life is not just a project of helping people tell their story. It’s a relationship. It is a series of unhurried conversations where someone like me sits (or walks, or swims, or eats) with you—not to interrogate, research, or fix you, but to be present and curious in a way that draws out your story.

Important side note about AI here. It is the ear of the listener that makes the story alive. If you let AI do the witnessing of your story, your story will sound like AI.

A good listener is someone who can hear the story beneath, above, or within the story. They notice:

• The memory you almost skipped past

• The side remark about “that one person”

• The way your voice shifts

They help you hear your own life in a new key.

This is why trying to do deep story work entirely on your own never works. Left by ourselves, we tend to perform or minimize. With an unhurried and unconditional human witness, you don’t have to advocate, decorate, or defend. You tell the truth, and the real story begins to take shape.

7. Being deeply listened to is itself a turning point.

People often assume the value of a life story lies in the final “product”—the digital record, the audio, the beautiful leather-bound book on the table.

With Your Epic Ordinary Life, we do that. Those things matter. These artifacts become touchstones, life’s reminders, and ways of staying in touch with the sacred.

But again and again, I’ve seen that the experience of being listened to in a way most adults almost never are is a threshold of its own.

No rushing. No multitasking. No angling for a soundbite. Just time, attention, a few good questions, and space for being safely lost, for laughter, for grief, and for surprise.

When someone receives that kind of listening, something shifts:

• They stop trying to make their lives sound better than they are.

• They start telling the truth.

• They hear themselves say, out loud, what they’re actually living.

You can feel the room change when that happens. People sit back differently. Their shoulders drop. Their story stops being something that happened to them and starts being something they are in conversation with.

That alone can mark the beginning of a new chapter—before anything is written down.

Share

8. A simple story can transfer more wisdom than years of advice.

Advice evaporates.

We give our teams speeches about culture, strategy, and accountability.

We offer our children lectures about work, love, money, faith, and risk.

Most of it doesn’t stick. If you ask almost anyone what has actually shaped them, they will tell you about a story they have heard, witnessed, or been a part of. It will be a story behind a scar, a move, a business decision, a divorce, a reconciliation, a sunrise, or a storm.

Your stories travel within people who hear them. They come back to them in the moment they need them the most, long after your presentation or your relationship advice has been forgotten.

When you gather your life into a clear, honest story, you give people something sturdier than instruction, a lived pattern they can adapt in their own way. Instead of pushing a universal map on them, you gift them with your experience of the landscape.

That’s how wisdom actually moves between generations and teams, not through perfectly engineered messages, but through stories we absorb.

9. Your story is time-sensitive.

Memory is fragile.

Details fade. Voices blur. The “I’ll ask her about that someday” moment never arrives. The “I’ll write it all down when life calms down” season never comes.

Story work has quiet urgency.

We are not promised unlimited time to tell our lives. We will likely not be here next week, month, or year to enjoy the telling—to laugh at the ridiculous parts, to grieve what was lost, to praise what has been found, to share our life with the people who most need to hear it.

At the same time, the process itself does not have to be frantic or complicated.

The way we practice Your Epic Ordinary Life is intentionally simple: a handful of spacious conversations, some careful crafting in your own voice, and a tangible form for your story to live in. There’s no performance, no homework, and no need to “get it right.”

Urgent and unhurried at once.

We don’t know how long we have. But we can choose to use some of that time to let our life speak and matter—to ourselves and to the people who matter to us.

Subscribe now

10. You don’t need to be finished.

Some people assume story work is for the end of life—for retirement, or a hospital bed, or a farewell party.

In reality, the most potent storytelling happens in the middle. In transition. In reinvention. In an illness that isn’t terminal but is clarifying. In the messy middle years where you’re too old to pretend you’re just starting and too young to pretend you’re done.

You are not a monument. You are a living, changing human.

Telling your story is a small hinge that opens the large doors so that you can cross the threshold into your next chapter. It lets you say, “Up to now, this is what my life has been about. From here, this is what matters.”

It gives your family, your team, and your own future self a way to understand the moment, and the chance to be astonished by your own life while you are still in it.

Imagine! You get to enjoy the look on someone’s face when they finally hear the story behind your choices. You get to feel your own respect for the younger you who kept going. You get to bless the parts of yourself you once wished away.

You don’t have to be finished to be worth remembering. You just have to be seen.

The simplest work, the deepest impact

In a world that constantly tells us to do more, optimize more, effort more, the story can feel almost too simple.

Sit down. Talk. Listen. Share.

But in practice, telling Your Epic Ordinary Life is one of the most gentle yet radical things you can do—for yourself, for the people you love, and for the communities you influence.

If, as you’ve been reading, you’ve thought, I want this for myself, or I wish this existed for my mother, my father, my mentor, my boss, pay attention to that and make it happen in the way you can.

Some part of you already knows that your life is quietly epic, and that bearing the untold story within you is an agony. The invitation here is to unmute yourself, let your life speak, and trade a little time and vulnerability for becoming whole.

Share

Read more

When I visit my home country, Croatia, every summer, I am mesmerized by the sea, sun, …

Read more