Last year one of the most precious people in my life committed suicide. It felt even more brutal because he was such a beautiful person that gave so much of himself to others, including me. His wife and three children survived him. Over the past three months, I have trained to become one of the 22,000 Samaritan volunteers. This article is about light in the face of darkness.

If you were to read, watch, or listen to any media over the past decade, you would be hard-pressed to feel as though things are getting better. In fact, it seems impossible at this point for any person to engage with the narratives in the media and think anything other than the feeling that the world is getting worse.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

As we begin a new year, I am immensely grateful for the book, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He passed away a year later. The epilogue by his wife, Lucy, had me in tears for almost all of its thirty pages.

Imagine what the world would feel like if we all gave ourselves to our community instead of our computers one day a week! In this short article, I turn to the great wisdom of George Bernard Shaw to reframe how we think about well-being and the workplace.

I was walking to the gym the other day, and the wind had blown four recycling containers into the road. Usually, I would grab the boxes, but I wanted to see this play out (a kind of nerdy social experiment). How many cars would weave through the boxes as opposed to getting out and moving the boxes back to the pavement? In this article, I explore the joy in serving others.