Puppies Behind Bars is a nonprofit organization that teaches prisoners (some violent offenders) how to train service dogs. The dogs spend 24 hours a day for 12-18 months with their assigned trainer, sleeping in a crate in the trainer’s cell. The prisoners’ stories and their transformations as a result of participating in the program are incredibly inspiring.

My husband is a mountaineer, a rock climber, a backcountry skier, and a doctor, which makes him equal parts adventure junkie and safety nerd. When we met he was doing a lot of mountain search and rescue, orienteering, and other boy scouty things. We would often go for day hikes in the woods and I would invent epic scenarios, which he would then have to talk us out of, stuff like:

      What would you do if I fell down that ravine and broke my arm?
      I would climb down to get you and then take you to the hospital.
      What if I broke my arm and my ankle?
      I would climb down to get you and then hop with you to the hospital.
      What if I broke my arm and both of my legs and I weighed three hundred pounds and we were ten miles in and I was all mangled and bloody and couldn’t walk or hop and I was losing lots of blood from one of my arteries?
      I would climb down to get you and make sure you were breathing. Then I would fashion a tournequet out of my shirt and a stick…

This became our thing. Whenever we were out in the middle of the woods I would make him explain all the different ways in which he could get us out of danger in the event of some horrific accident. It made me feel safer somehow.

One day we were walking on one of our favorite trails and I tripped over a log and turned my ankle. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t walk on it but I wondered aloud what would’ve happened if it had been worse. We were many miles from the trail head. Josh said he would’ve rigged some crutch-like device for me or made me a little shelter and then run back for help.

Something terrifying occurred to me then, something I had never thought of before. “What if I’d been alone? What if you weren’t here and there was no one else around to help me?”
Joshua turned to me and, without a trace of sarcasm in his voice, said, “I guess you’d just have to rescue yourself.”

Fred McFeely Rogers testified in front of the U.S. Senate on May 1, 1969 in an attempt to secure 20 million dollars of funding for public broadcasting, which the government was threatening to cut in half. If you have seven minutes to spare today, you can witness for yourself the power of kindness and authenticity to melt even the toughest of hearts. Enjoy.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, gives a talk at the TED conference about the fickle nature of creativity and how it connects us with something greater, something over which we have absolutely no control.

I just caught a rerun of Six Feet Under, a show which always inspires me. This particular episode ends with a conversation that gave me a lot to think about. It is a dialogue between David, one of the main characters who was just assaulted, and his dead father Nathaniel whom he continues to talk to. It was written by Nancy Oliver who also wrote one of my favorite screenplays of all time. Hope you enjoy it:

Nathaniel: You’re missing the point.

David: There is no point, that’s the point. Isn’t it?

Nathaniel: The point’s right in front of your face.

David: Well I’m sorry but I don’t see it.

Nathaniel: You’re not even grateful are you?

David: Grateful? For the worst fucking experience of my life?

Nathaniel: You hold onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well let me tell you: let it go. [Looking skyward] Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.

David: Well what am I supposed to do?

Nathaniel: What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard, you’re alive. What’s a little pain compared to that?

David: It can’t be so simple.

Nathaniel: What if it is?

My husband is in his fifth year of medical training to be an emergency doctor. And as yet, not one of his patients has died. ¹

They have a term for this. In the hospital they call him a white cloud.

When a new batch of interns comes in each June, it quickly becomes evident to the nurses and other doctors whether a particular intern is a white cloud or a black cloud. When a black cloud comes on shift the patients tend to be more agitated, require more medication, their vital signs drop precipitously out of nowhere. Black clouds see a lot of action during their shifts: an unusually large number of accidents come into the Emergency Department (ED), existing patients require further intervention; they spend their time at the hospital putting out one medical fire after another.

White clouds, on the other hand, tend to have a calming, stabilizing effect on their patients. Their shifts are boring. People get better, need to be discharged. White clouds struggle to get enough experience performing the different procedures they are required to master, because when they’re around patients don’t need them as much.

It is not uncommon for me to receive an email from Joshua after a shift in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), perhaps the most medically stressful place in the hospital, that says, “All’s quiet in the ICU tonight.” Hours later, after my white cloud has signed off to a black cloud, a patient that was firmly out of the woods takes a nosedive.

Though the medical community acknowledges this phenomenon, they treat it as coincidence, fairy tale, ghost story. ² They do not see it as I see it: an opportunity to witness the powerful effect someone’s energy ³ can have on the well being of others. Imagine if they used this information for healing purposes, if they trained doctors not just to do procedures, but in how to be centered, calm, and hopeful when interacting with patients.

And, of course, the white cloud/black cloud phenomenon extends beyond the walls of the hospital. Don’t we all have people in our lives who cause us to exhale when we spend time with them? And people who stress us out just by being in the same room with them?

It is my experience that the black clouds of the world don’t realize that they are black clouds. They don’t have the benefit of the hospital’s heightened circumstances to get feedback about themselves: when they walk into a room people don’t drop dead. ⁴ As humans we have a tendency to look inward to figure out what kind of people we are. But Joshua’s experience at the hospital has taught me that if I want to know what kind of energy I’m putting out into the world, it’s best not to look at myself, but rather at the people around me.

And the truth is there are days when my cloud is white and days when it is black. On the latter type of days, everyone I come into contact with upsets me in some way: they flake out, they don’t live up to expectations, they are confrontational, they hurt my feelings, they cause me anxiety. I used to blame it on them. But now I know that it is me, that if I shift my perspective and the way I interact with them that their behavior will follow suit.

So I try. I try to put positive thoughts out into the world. I try to put positive messages in my writing. I try to be positive when I interact with people, even when they hurt my feelings. I try, I try, I fail. I try some more.

Over the holiday break I met a woman who started a charter school in inner city Boston. It’s an extremely competitive college prep school (6th-12th grades) that serves the most disadvantaged students in the area, many of whom are not at grade level when they arrive. Admission is free.

Because it’s a charter school, it acts like it’s own district and makes its own rules: The school day is nine hours instead of six. They all eat breakfast together. Everybody wears a uniform. Kids who are not doing well must attend school on Saturdays. The curriculum is designed around building the virtues of courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance, and respect. In short, it’s totally bitchin.’

They have devised a complicated system of merits and demerits, which if I understand correctly, goes like this: Each merit is worth a certain number of points, say +7, and a demerit is worth another, say -4. (A merit is worth more positive points than a demerit is worth negative points because doing good in the world is more powerful than doing bad.) If you have three or more demerits at the end of the week you have to serve a detention after school on Friday that is longer than Lawrence of Arabia. The following week your demerit slate is wiped clean.

They also have something called a Merit Bank that tallies up all your positive points and subtracts from it your negative points, giving you, essentially, your Total Awesomeness Score (TAS) for the week. That TAS can be used for tender at the school’s canteen/gift shop where students can buy things with their virtuous behavior.

This got me thinking about starting an International Merit Bank (IMB), whereby everyone could travel, shop, pay their bills, and support their family on their acts of kindness alone. Imagine a world where the CEOs of oil companies would be forced to live in shacks by the side of the road while teachers and aid workers sipped mai thais poolside at their sprawling villas upon returning home from school or from a mission. Imagine a world in which good deeds were commodities, in which you could buy a Lamborghini with community service, in which all those who were rich on the inside would be so on the outside too.