No Expiration Date

A reflection on Hannah Arendt, empathy, and the humans we choose to become There is a concept that has followed me for years, resurfacing every time I witness something I cannot explain away. Hannah Arendt called it the "banality of evil". She coined the phrase while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann (one of the chief architects of the Holocaust) in Jerusalem in 1961. She expected a monster. What she found was something far more disturbing: an ordinary man. Bureaucratic. Compliant. A man who claimed, repeatedly, that he was simply following orders. That he had not thought much about what those orders meant. That was Arendt's unsettling conclusion: that some of the greatest evils in history were not carried out by demons. They were carried out by people who simply stopped thinking. I keep coming back to that. Because I see it everywhere. Evil Doesn't Always Look Like Evil Most people will hurt others  (humans, animals, living things) without fully realizing it. Some...

I write often about what is. What exists, what is happening, what is being built or broken in the world around us. I write less often about what is no longer here. Today I want to write about that. The Illusion That Breaks There is a version of the world we are given when we are young. It is not a lie, exactly. It is more like a necessary shelter; a soft understanding that the people we love will be there, that life moves forward in a mostly predictable way, that the foundations beneath us are solid and permanent. And then loss arrives. Not loss in the abstract. Real loss. The specific, irreplaceable kind; a person who was not just loved but load-bearing. Someone whose presence shaped how you understood yourself and the world around you. When that happens, the illusion doesn't crack. It disappears. All at once, without warning, and with a clarity that is almost brutal. You see, perhaps for the first time, how fragile all of it is. How little time is guaranteed. How much you assumed...

And I’m still on both. Years ago, I wrote something down that has stayed with me ever since. Life is as much an internal journey as it is an external one. At the time it felt like an observation. Now it feels like the most accurate map I have ever drawn. What Do You Want? It sounds like a simple question. It is not. I have been asking it for most of my adult life and the answer has never stayed still. At different stages it has looked like: a specific job title, a graduate degree, living abroad, seeing a particular corner of the world, learning a new sport, signing up for a triathlon because something in me needed to know if I could. And then at other times – quieter times, more honest times – the answer has looked like: to be happy. To be at peace. To sit comfortably in solitude. To understand what I actually feel, not just what I am supposed to feel. To be a better person than I was last year. To deepen my gratitude. To keep my empathy intact in a world that quietly discourages it. T...

I have written on this blog about the world; about inequality, about empathy, about the kind of people who show up fully and the rarity of finding them. Today I am writing about one person specifically. The one who made me believe all of those things were worth writing about in the first place. This is for my sister. I Am Because She Is There is no cleaner way to say it than that. Not because I don't exist independently. Not because I can't stand on my own. But because who I am. The parts of me I am most proud of, the version of myself I return to when I've drifted, was shaped in the presence of another person. Reflected back at me. Held up even when I couldn't hold it myself. That person is Nathalie. She is my twin, my best friend, and the only human being on earth who has been present for every chapter of my life without exception. Not just the highlight reel. All of it. The things I would tell anyone, and the things I would tell almost no one. People talk about findi...

  A tribute to Dr. Saeed Mekbel, and to everyone who stands on shoulders they can never fully repay. Some people leave a mark on the world with their name on a building. Others leave it in the way their grandchildren move through life; the standards they hold themselves to, the things they refuse to settle for, the quiet voice in the back of their head that says  you can do more, go further, don't stop here. My grandfather left both. It Started With a Woman and a Bag Before there was Dr. Saeed Mekbel, there was his mother. A Lebanese immigrant who arrived in Costa Rica with nothing but a bag, two children, and a determination that history rarely records but always depends on. She didn't speak the language. She had no education to speak of, no connections, no safety net. What she had was the particular ferocity of a woman who had decided that her children's lives would be different from her own. She learned Spanish. She built a life. And then her youngest was born: the fifth...

A question more of us are asking than we admit. There is a particular kind of person who moves through the world a little differently. They notice things others don't. They replay conversations afterward, not out of insecurity, but out of genuine care about how their words landed. They walk into a room and read the emotional temperature within minutes. They lose sleep over things that most people around them have already forgotten. And at some point, almost all of them ask the same question:  is something wrong with me, or is something wrong with everyone else? The answer, it turns out, is neither. But getting there takes a while. What We Carry Without Knowing It Most of us don't spend much time thinking about how we were shaped. It's easier to think of ourselves as self-made, as individuals who arrived at our values through logic and choice. But the truth is messier and more tender than that. The way you were raised leaves a mark that goes deeper than memory. Whether love ...