Category Archives: relationship

A Five Year Plan

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The Lodge at Whitefish Lake, Whitefish, MT September 2025

It’s been a dense few weeks, friends! Or a dense year, maybe, as these blog posts appear late more often now than in a while. Life! I’m okay with it; eleven years is a long time to maintain a project that was only meant to last one. I’m just happy to be here! Family came in last weekend, and I’m about to fly myself tonight, so this post will serve for two weeks. Hope everybody is well and happy!

Daughter and I signed up for a pottery class back in June, 12 weeks ago, I realize today. It took a food twelve hours to call forth the muscle memory from 26 years ago when I made over 400 pots, and now I’m making progress again. The first batch yielded 27 pieces, teaching me how the glazes behave when layered. By the end, barring catastrophe, I will have over 50 creations to use and share this time. See below for photos!

I recently saw a patient who will retire in the coming year. Their annual exams brought us both warm connection over the years, and we agreed that they are as healthy as they could be on the threshold of this life transition. At the end of the day they asked me to include some parting advice for the next five years, a new request for me. How fun! Now I wonder what I’d write for any patient when I see them (potentially) for the last time. What would I write for myself? For the kids? My parents?

What advice would you write to yourself and your loved ones for the next some years? For your leaders? For our legislators and judiciary? How do you already think and communicate in these terms?

I listened to Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game again yesterday and today. He writes in terms of business and professional leadership, but his premise of an infinite mindset applies to how any of us may choose to live. Inspiring. One of the reasons I get behind on the blog is that I’m writing Love Letters to Patients (LLTP) every week. Every time I think I will address their medical concerns, I end up writing about their life, their relationships, and their impact on me… and my aspirations for them–for us all. I intend to edit and organize after one full year; that will be Book. Can’t wait to share it with you all. Meanwhile, I think this extemporaneous ‘five year plan’ may give you a taste of what that bigger project may feel like. What think you? 🙂

OK so in case I don’t see you next year (or ever again! 😦 ), you asked for my advice for the next five years.  AWESOME, this will be my first time writing something like this, let’s see what emerges ! 😀

  1. Continue to prioritize the most important things to you–the people and activities that give your life meaning.  I think you are already very good at this, and after retirement you will have time, energy, and resources to engage and invest even more, no?  How fulfilling!
  2. Physical fitness will be important. I love John’s advice of using gym time to fill in the small gaps in lower body strength that you may not get from your usual activities.  We discussed the ways you can tell if you’re still fit–getting up and down from the floor or low chairs/stools, feeling confident that you can embark on any new physical activity without limitation (hiking, skating, playing a new sport), etc.  Functional movements in the gym are key for this: forward lunges approximate going down the stairs.  Squats are getting up from a low chair.  Deadlifts are bending over and picking up something from the floor.  It’s the eccentric movement–the controlled deceleration–that is key for fall prevention: Think walking downhill quickly without hyperextending, torquing, or losing balance in your ankles and knees.  
  3. Stay open to learning anything.  Hang out with curious people who know different things from you and are generous with sharing.  Say yes to trying new things.  Spend time with folks from all generations.  I really think this keeps us young–openness, curiosity, exposure to and engagement with novelty, and just growing our neural networks in any possible way–visual, auditory, tactile, intellectual, emotional, and in movement!
  4. Assemble your medical pit crew, if needed.  You have a primary care doctor, and you have us at Exec Health for exercise and nutrition advice once a year.  Events may lead you to need medical specialists in the future, eg physical therapy, personal training, talk therapy–who knows?  But finding *your people* in each of these domains, and connecting them whenever possible so they may compare notes and coordinate care, will give you all more connection and improve outcomes, in my opinion.
  5. Vet medical and health information in the public domain with a very critical mind.  Sadly right now, that includes information coming from the federal government.  Avoid influencers and even medical professionals who are selling products or services for very high prices.  Look at financial relationships between public figures and the products they recommend.  The number of non-evidence based, fear-mongering, capitalist health and wellness businesses increases every year, and I have yet to vet one that I recommend.  Review things with your doctor before you pay for anything she did not recommend herself.
  • I think that’s pretty good general advice–not just for you but for us all…  Thank you for stimulating the thoughts!  Please tell me what you think and if you want me to add/address anything else.
First pottery haul in 26 years. Not all beautiful; every one gratifying.
My best vessel and handle yet!
Accidental finger dents turned into a cute flower, which may be my signature hereafter
Waxy white over blue; two intended for the Ethos kitchen
The upside down ones are mine. Can’t wait to glaze them all!
Practicing for more mugs–learning how much clay and how to make a good cylinder first.
Also hoping to get at least a few ramen bowls out of the lot.

Keep Showing Up

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“What mountain stands before you that you will climb with confidence fortitude courage and power?”

“You don’t get stronger by adding weight. You add weight when you get stronger.”
—Alec Blenis, Instagram

I love this quote. It feels a little counterintuitive at first, yet speaks to the fundamentally important understanding of skill building that keeps us safe, strong, and motivated in the gym: Keep showing up. Do the work. Get help if needed. It’s hard until it’s not, and then you level up. It also resonates in two domains outside of strength training:

Health Habit Change
“I know what I need to do, I just don’t do it.” I have written about this phrase I hear often from patients. For two years I met with one of the dieticians in our practice, feeling both hopeful and a little hopeless at the same time. Every week or two I both dreaded and anticipated the calls, knowing I had both attempted and failed to implement our action plan from the prior session. I muttered this statement myself how many times? We stopped meeting eventually; likely multifactorial but I think we both felt that further gains were unlikely. That may have been a year ago.

I felt a bit defeated at first, thinking my behaviors had not changed much, and I had not lost any weight. But looking back, those sessions served the same purpose as the years I spent with my personal trainer. Julianne was my nutrition coach. She made me better at executing the knowledge I already had, reflecting, investigating, trouble shooting, and brainstorming how to apply both basic and advanced nutrition principles in the various contexts of my life. I now eat more colorful plants, and I get substantially more fiber on a daily basis. I am much better attuned to hunger and satiety, I always fuel before workouts and make sure I bring a snack for after. I keep healthy snacks at the office and hydrate consistently. I eat a lot less dessert, and volumes are about half of what they used to be. I walk the talk of “enjoy every bite” much better now than before. My portions of everything are generally smaller. I estimate that I have shaved a few hundred calories per week from my diet, which should lead to very slow weight loss, about a pound every three months. That actually feels about right, and I can handle this. As I continue to train, both strength and cardio, I see my shape changing more than my mass, which I am happy about.

I keep showing up to apply, adjust, and adapt, and results emerge proportionally. Persistence pays off, and it’s infinitely easier with support from knowledgeable and supportive people like Julianne the registered dietician, my Ethos coaches, and my friends.

Civil Political Discourse
For some years now I have actively sought conversation and connection with my Red Voting Friends. Since 2017 I have supported Braver Angels, and now multiple organizations offer myriad approaches, strategies, and even education and venues to practice connecting meaningfully with people who disagree with us. Some even impact policy in a bipartisan way in local governments. We have come so far, and have very far yet to go.

How hopeless and/or hopeful do you feel about the state of political discourse, nationally, locally, at the level of your policy makers, in your social circles, in your family?

How do you impact those places and groups with your presence, your words, your attitude, demeanor, expressions? Bluntly: are you part of the civil discourse problem or solution?

It’s hard, I know. Uncomfortable, sometimes viscerally and distressingly so. And not everyone is a suitable counterpart for such conversations. Still, it is a learnable skill and more and more amazing people like Mónica Guzman and the folks at Braver Angels, Builders, and the Dignity Index provide support and education to help us do it better. We just have to keep showing up.

This weekend I will gather with one of my Blue voting friends for my first ever “Builders BBQ“. We won’t barbeque and I will not be actively bridging with any Red voters. But Blue Friend and I will talk about how we can do it better. We will practice curiosity, openness, self-regulation, and holding connection in front. We may even role play a little, who knows? It’s not exactly what the Builders BBQ is meant to be, but I have taken the liberty to show up how it works for me, and to keep iterating from here. I fully expect that there will be a Red-Blue gathering in my foreseeable future. If not, no matter.

I continue to invite and facilitate connection, unafraid and well-equipped to wade confidently into disagreement of all kinds with respect and good humor. I have trained for years and it has paid–is paying–off in spades. I keep practicing because while I am proficient, I still have a long way to go. Bridging work is a labor of love. It takes time to build trust, testing, building, and proving the strength of ties that start slim and tenuous, but have the potential to hold us together through the harshest storms.

Each and every one of us has the capacity–and I would argue a civic duty–to engage in building and bridging work, or at least to not contribute to derision and division. The nature of a democracy is that the power should lie with the people. We are the system. We get stronger as a collective when we exercise our power to connect.

Consistency beats intensity. Keep showing up, my friends, to all that challenges us in life.
We’ got this.

Listen to “Keep Showing Up” by Doctor Jose de la Rosa Mambo Town for some extra inspiration!

So Proud of MaBa

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On their 51st wedding anniversary (watermelon ‘cake’ decorated by Daughter)

Who in your family immigrated? Which generation are you?

My parents will visit this week, in the narrow window during which they are not traveling elsewhere and both of my kids are home before going back to college. It will be harder to coordinate calendars hereafter, I realize–I have adult children! What a milestone! I knew it was coming, but it only hit me when Daughter got herself from Trim to Dublin to O’Hare to home all by herself, with luggage, all while I was asleep and at work. [vibrating astonished smiley emoji]

Son is about the age Ba was when he left Taiwan. He and Ma met in high school, in study group at church. They got engaged after he completed military service and undergrad, and she was partway through nursing school, and came to the United States for his graduate studies. They eventually landed in Evanston, Illinois for his PhD in civil engineering at Northwestern, and I was three when he graduated. We moved to Colorado when I was six, and they still live in the house where my sisters and I grew up.

What a different world it was in 1971. Imagine picking up and moving to the other side of the globe, to a country where you barely speak the language, where you have few if any people, and you can only connect with them through snail mail. No internet, no cable TV, analog everything. I suspect most readers of this blog lived and recall those times clearly. Still, remembering is also akin to distant imagining, because our current reality is so drastically different and we simply adapt to what is.

How brave my parents were to do all of that. How mutually trusting in each other, in their own ability to figure things out. And maybe also in the decency of their fellow humans? They recently told me a story of their friend who was stranded in Memphis on his way to grad school at Ole Miss, who was taken in by a stranger, fed and housed overnight, and delivered to the bus station the next morning, all without ever knowing his host’s name. A kind American man helping out a young Taiwanese student, with no expectation of anything in return. Can we imagine anything like that happening today?

What happens when we cannot solve everything ourselves? What if I were stranded somewhere in a foreign country, phone dead, language barrier tall and wide, plans all upended? What if the people I could find were also disconnected from the internet? I suspect we’d find our shared humanity pretty fast, as long as none of us were outright sadists or sociopaths. I imagine that though racism and other ills of humanity existed then just as they do now, MaBa found folks who showed kindness, generosity, and even curiosity. They made friends, connections, and a life.

55 years on, they can look back at a remarkably successful life in every way. Steady professions, completed degrees (Ma got her BSN from CU while I was in high school and ended her career as a clinical instructor for our local community college), three daughters married to amazing sons-in-law, three grandchildren, a wide and exuberant circle of friends, and a remarkably active retired lifestyle. This is the American Dream, no?

My sisters and I watched how hard they worked our whole lives. Our family practiced frugality in ways my friends could barely imagine. Sisters and I experienced both the generation and cultural gaps known by all immigrant parent/native born children families. I think we have all come to appreciate and admire how MaBa confidently instilled traditional Chinese values in us, while also fully embracing qualities of American culture that made us better in synergy. Our academic and extra-curricular standards were high, but only because we could meet them easily–expectations were set by our own potential, not in comparison to anyone else. Tigers my parents were not, by a long shot.

MaBa continue to serve as respected leaders of the Chinese community in the region. They are tribal elders now, and I get to 沾他们的光, ‘dip from their light’, in other words, benefit from their positive reputation. People respect me because they respect my parents. It’s a status I gain by their decades of engagement and contribution to helping Chinese people be seen and included in America.

Their story is so much deeper, richer, and more awesome than I can write on a random Sunday night. As I witness my own kids emerging into fully functional adulthood, it makes me reflect on all MaBa went through to get here today. Somehow my own journey through this life phase feels prosaic and unremarkable in comparison, maybe because my parents were always within reach? I could always call if I needed anything. They could always (and did) fly to my assistance in a crisis. They not only created a solid life for themselves; they laid the foundation for my, my sisters’, and our own kids’ advantages and successes. They have set a loving and selfless standard for ancestral legacy, one that I feel proud to uphold.

Thank you, MaBa, from the bottom of my heart. Can’t wait to see you both soon. And I will do better expressing my appreciation from now on. xo