Good morning Reader,
It was 5:30 in the morning, still dark, when the cars started pulling into the commuter parking lot where we built the Freedom Festival every year, the booths, the food tents, and a stage worthy of Lollapalooza all going up before the sun crested the horizon. We did this every year for seven years to support and thank our troops. I couldn't have produced the festival without my friends rallying behind me to turn that parking lot into a place of recognition and thanks.
I was setting up a booth that morning with one of them, and after I thanked him for being there so early, he gave me a pat on the back and said it plain. "Dirk, the only reason why we're doing this is for you."
He caught me off guard. I truly believed, and hoped, that we were all doing this together for the good of our troops. It was never about me, not in that moment and not in any of the ones before it. I thought it was only ever about the greater good.
For seven years, We Do Care took me to Guantanamo Bay, to the Pentagon for briefings on the war on terror, and to the deck of the USS George Washington, while the commuter parking lot here in Barrington, Illinois, served as home base for the whole effort. On the same day, at the same hour, troops in Saudi Arabia, Germany, NATO headquarters, Iraq, and Afghanistan ran 9.11 miles, the distance itself the tribute, so that this thing built to support our troops circled the globe. Good stuff, for a good cause and good people, happening everywhere at once.
It was entirely good work. Nobody could tell you otherwise, least of all me. It became who I was, my identity, how other people identified me, and how I'd started identifying myself. I wore it like armor, and that armor got so damn heavy it cost me, in my business, in my health, in my relationships. This cause had become one of the anchors of my life, the kind that holds a life steady and the kind that drags it under, and by then I couldn't tell which one it was doing to me.
Each month, Denny, my business coach, came into my office to work through strategy with me. He brought more than strategy, though.
In an earlier life, before any of that, Denny had been a West Point graduate, and at the time he was still serving as a civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army, which meant that even my own coach carried the perspective of the world I'd built my identity around. One visit, sitting in the conference room of my office on Grant Street in Barrington, the conversation drifted off the business and onto me, how I was doing, and it led straight to We Do Care.
I was looking for an escape. The armor had gotten heavy enough that it was starting to pull me under, but I felt like too many people were counting on me to set it down, the volunteers, the troops, everyone who showed up every year for our 9.11 mile run in Barrington, and the military bases around the world. Families with loved ones deployed loved this event.
The conversation came around to one question. What can I do? I felt trapped, like there wasn't an out.
Denny listened, and then, with more care than I expected, he looked at me and said, "Dirk, letting go is an option." I have never forgotten that moment, because it wasn't just a coach's answer. It came from a man who'd worn the cloth of our nation himself, who still had a direct line to the Pentagon, one of the people I thought I owed all of this to.
He didn't hand me permission to close it down. That had to come from me. But he helped me see I wasn't trapped, that there were other options, that the world would keep going without We Do Care standing in the middle of it, and that was enough to let me give myself the permission I'd been waiting on someone else to give.
A friend of mine is living some version of that same reflex right now. His parents are aging, and every Thursday he leaves his work and his own family and doesn't come home again until Sunday afternoon. He wants to be there. His parents are grateful. His own wife and kids are gracious about the whole arrangement.
And when I've had the chance to talk with him, about business, about life, about his parents, he's never once said as much himself. But I can see the exhaustion, not just in his face, but in his demeanor, in his voice, and I know he would never, ever complain about how he's honoring his parents this way. It's the kind of exhaustion that builds with each yes, because every single one of those yeses is something we choose out of love, on purpose.
My mother gave the last decade of her life to caring for my father. It came from nothing but love, the kind that never once asked what it was owed. There were moments in those years when I watched her reach for something that was still hers, her grandkids especially, and I remember the year she realized she couldn't travel anymore to go see them. Even with a caregiver's help toward the end, the caring took nearly everything she had, so that when my father finally passed, there wasn't much of her left for the two years she had after him.
Six months ago, I walked into her room twenty minutes before she died. I sat down and read to her from Ralph Waldo Emerson. For the first time in days, she showed a little bit of life. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough that I got to see her again before she was gone.
Those final twenty minutes with my mother brought back sixty-five years of loving her, all at once, and with it the plain realization that she was the definition of good. I watched what it cost her. That's where I started to see a single thread running through all of it, the same exhaustion I felt across that conference table with Denny, the same exhaustion behind my friend's Thursday to Sunday visits, the same exhaustion that had settled into my mother over that decade.
Seeing that thread is what made me want to understand the word itself. Exhaust. It comes from the Latin exhaurire, to draw out completely, the way water is drawn from a well. The definition doesn't ask whether the well was good. My mother's well was good. My friend's is good. Mine was good too, all those dark mornings, all that love for the troops. A well doesn't check whether the water is righteous before it runs dry. It only asks how much has been drawn, and how long since anyone poured anything back in.
All of this has led me to a line of thinking and a line of questioning for several months now. I don't like saying it out loud, because on its face the answer should be obvious. The question shouldn't even be asked, but I find myself asking it anyway.
Can there be too much good? Too much good on our calendars? Too much good we keep saying yes to before we've ever asked whether we're filling our own well with goodness first? Every part of me wants to answer no, never, how could there be too much good. Every part of me that watched my mother go to bed exhausted for a decade knows there's a truer answer underneath the easy one.
In one of my Monday morning conversations with my philosopher friend in Athens, we were exploring what we've come to call the tyranny of the calendar, time sliced and segmented until there's no space left for the spirit. Out of that conversation came three words I haven't been able to shake since. The sacred no. It protects what's sacred in us, not from the people we love, but from being scheduled out of us one good yes at a time.
There's an old phrase for the voice that hands us those yeses before we've even opened our mouths to agree to them: thou shalt. Thou shalt be good. Thou shalt give everything to your spouse, your aging parents, your cause. And if there's one thou shalt worth keeping out of all of it, let it be this: hold the sacred no close enough to look after ourselves with as much love, dignity, and care as we give everyone else.
The good was never meant to cost a person their whole self. That was never the price of loving well.
For now, this is where I've landed, still turning it over the way I have been for months, on walks, at my desk, in the quiet after a good day that somehow still left me tired. Can we keep doing the good we're called to do, my mother's kind, my friend's kind, the kind that took me overseas and back for seven years, and still let a sacred no in now and then, not instead of the good, but so the good has somewhere left to well up from?
I don't have the answer yet. I have my mother's final twenty minutes with Emerson, and I have that question, still open. It's there every time I want to say yes to all the good I can bring to the world.
So on this Sunday morning, I'm still asking it. Can there be too much good, even the kind that comes from all the love I have for the people I care for? I know the reflex of yes is still in me. I also know what Denny taught me across that conference table, that letting go is an option, and that a sacred no can live right alongside it.
I don't have this figured out yet. I just know I'd rather ask the question than keep saying yes without ever asking it. I wonder where a sacred no might already be waiting for you, unnoticed, ready to finally be let in.