Good morning Reader,
For the last month, I’ve been making my way through Ohio and West Virginia in the RV, moving from one state park to another, hiking when I can, reading every morning, writing most days, and stopping at used bookstores whenever one happens to cross my path.
A couple of weeks ago, while passing through Columbus, I stopped at two. The first was fine, but nothing about it really grabbed me. The second was Karen Wickliff Books, and almost the instant I walked through the door I thought, Oh my goodness, this is my place.
The store was old and dark, with books stacked seemingly everywhere, on shelves, in front of shelves, on top of one another, and in places where I couldn’t imagine anyone remembering what was buried underneath. It had that unmistakable smell of an old bookstore that, if you love books the way I do, somehow feels like an invitation to stay awhile.
For the first few moments, I wasn’t even sure the place was open. I walked five or ten steps inside without hearing or seeing anyone until I noticed a small opening between stacks of books. Somewhere behind it sat a woman. Apparently, that was the checkout counter, and I remember thinking the whole thing was just about perfect.
Then she told me they didn’t take credit cards.
I opened my wallet and discovered I had exactly twenty dollars in cash, so the trip through the store became its own little treasure hunt. What could I possibly find in this place for twenty bucks?
I had already picked up a couple of books when I came across On Being Human: The Life of Truth and Its Realization, written by a philosopher named Fritz Medicus, whom I had never heard of. The price was sixteen dollars, so the other books went back on the shelf and Medicus came with me.
A few days later I opened the book and came across a sentence about what can happen to us when we truly encounter a work of art. Medicus wrote that it can “increase our inner wealth.”
Something about those words pulled me in. They seemed both foreign and familiar at the same time.
I wrote in the margin, Inner Wealth. What a great concept, and started wondering what we really mean when we say someone is wealthy on the inside. What creates that kind of wealth, how does it grow over the course of a life, and perhaps most importantly, what does it make possible when life suddenly asks something difficult of us?
I’ve been thinking about those two words ever since, and the more I’ve thought about them, the more I’ve begun to wonder whether I’d experienced the power of Inner Wealth long before I ever had language for it.
One of the clearest examples takes me back sixteen years, to a period of my life when, from the outside, things probably looked pretty damn good.
In February of 2010, for reasons that still make me shake my head a little, I decided to run for Congress. At the time I was trying to grow my consulting business, raise a family, and do all the other things that come with a full life, but something in me believed I could step into the public arena, make a difference, and contribute to something larger than myself. I had a lot of support, we raised real money, and when the primary was over I had finished second in a six-person field.
From the outside, I’m sure it looked like I was doing pretty well. I had just run for Congress, people respected what I was doing, I had a business and a family, and plenty of evidence suggested I had my act together.
What almost nobody could see was that on the inside I was running on inner chaos and fumes.
After the election, I went back to work trying to rebuild momentum in the business and make up for the time and attention the campaign had taken away from my work and my family. Most mornings I woke up tired, exhausted really, knowing everything that had to get done just to keep the lights on at home and at work. Honestly, there wasn’t much left in the tank beyond that.
Fear and doubt had crept into my thinking and, more troubling, had become persistent. Underneath all of it was this nagging feeling that I had let people down. I had taken time away from my family and business to pursue something I believed in, and then I lost. All of that time, money, energy, and hope quite literally vanished by 8:00 PM on election night.
And, unknown to all but my wife, I was suffering from panic attacks here and there.
That spring, while I was struggling internally, something very different was happening around Chicago. The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 49 years, and my wife and I wanted to be part of the celebration.
On the morning of the parade, we headed to the train station in our hometown of Barrington to ride into Chicago and join the hooting and hollering in Grant Park. We went early because we knew the crowds downtown would be enormous, but it never occurred to me that the trains themselves would already be packed.
I remember standing on the platform watching the train approach from the west. As it pulled into the station, I could see people packed wall to wall inside the cars, and almost immediately fear ran through me. My body tightened, the beginnings of panic started making themselves known, and for a moment I honestly wasn’t sure I could get on.
My wife looked at me and essentially said, “Let’s do it,” so we did. We squeezed inside, and I was the last one through the door, my body practically sandwiched between the throng of people and the door as it closed behind me. I could feel the panic rising.
I managed to sink down onto the step I had been standing on, put my head between my knees, and focus on the only things I knew to do at the time: breathe, tell myself I was going to be okay, and grit my way through whatever was happening inside me until we reached Chicago.
There is something about that image that stays with me now. Only a few months earlier, I had been standing in front of rooms full of people asking them to trust me enough to send me to Congress. Now I was sitting on the step of a packed commuter train with my head between my knees, trying to breathe my way into Chicago.
Sixteen years later, I felt it again.
Earlier this year, I had a difficult conversation with the people I’m working with to publish Honor Yourself. Like any meaningful partnership, ours has had friction, and in this moment I let it get the better of me. We’re still working together and still excited to bring the book into the world next March, but I reacted in a way I wasn’t proud of.
More importantly, I acted out of alignment with the person I’m trying to become. I call that person a Divine Hugger, someone who tries to see the divine in others and bring love into the way I lead, love, and live. In this moment, I didn’t do that.
Afterward, I went back through what had happened fully expecting to find confirmation that I had been right. Instead, I found something much harder to face: I had played a major part in creating the very situation I was upset about.
The realization hit me like a lightning strike. One moment I was trying to prove myself right, and the next I was flooded with shame and embarrassment. I felt I had let down my partners, but even more painfully, I had let myself down. I had behaved in a way that was out of alignment with the person I said I wanted to be.
Then I felt something I hadn’t felt in more than a decade. The panic came back.
For a few minutes, it was frighteningly familiar. My mind started racing and pulling me toward that awful place where one bad moment begins to feel like evidence that maybe you’re a bad person. But this time, unlike sixteen years earlier on that train into Chicago, something was different.
I got up and went outside.
It was raining, but I put on my shoes and started walking through the campground anyway. There was no mantra and no magical thought that suddenly made everything okay. I walked, breathed, let the rain hit me, and gave my body enough time to settle while my mind slowly stopped trying to solve everything at once.
Not far into the walk, I rounded a corner and saw two young men standing over a picnic table beside their tent and car. They had a small cooking stove going, and one of them was holding a coat over their heads and the food, trying to protect everything from the rain. Even in the state I was in, I noticed them. I walked a little farther, turned around, went back to get an umbrella, and brought it to them.
It was a small thing, but something about doing it felt good.
As I kept walking, another realization began to take shape. I couldn’t erase what had happened, and I couldn’t pretend somebody else had caused me to behave the way I had. It was me. I had done it. But that moment didn’t have to define who I would be next. I knew who I wanted to be, I knew I could make things right, and I knew that I would.
By the time I returned, the circumstances hadn’t magically changed, but something inside me had. I was calmer, I could see more clearly, and instead of defending myself or softening my role in what had happened, I knew what my next steps needed to be.
I reached out, owned my part, apologized, and came back with a plan for how we could reset the relationship and move forward in a way that respected my partners, our work together, and myself. That’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
When I think about that day now, what strikes me most isn’t that I handled the original situation well. I didn’t. It’s that when things fell apart inside me, I was no longer the same man who had sat on that train sixteen years earlier with his head between his knees, simply trying to endure what was happening.
Something had changed in me during those sixteen years, and I think Fritz Medicus may have just given me a name for it.
Inner Wealth.
The more I’ve replayed that day, the more I’ve realized that what was available to me in the rain wasn’t something I had suddenly discovered. I hadn’t graduated beyond fear, shame, or getting things wrong. What I had was sixteen more years of living.
During those years, I had spent more time trying to understand myself. I had read, written, reflected, made mistakes, changed habits, questioned beliefs, and become more intentional about the person I wanted to be. Long before I called it Honor Yourself, I had slowly begun doing exactly that.
None of it made me immune to losing my way. It gave me more to draw upon when I did.
That may be the simplest way I know to describe Inner Wealth: what our living, when we allow ourselves to learn from it, builds within us. Self-knowledge. Perspective. The courage to tell ourselves the truth. The ability to catch ourselves sooner and choose who we want to be next.
In 2010, I knew how to endure. Sixteen years later, I had learned something else: when I got out of alignment with the person I wanted to be, I could take the next honest step back toward him.
Maybe that is why those two words in that old book have made such a mark on me. We spend enormous energy measuring the wealth around us, the retirement account, the house, the career, the places we’ve traveled. We are much less practiced at noticing what all that living is building within us.
And honestly, I’ve come to believe that this Inner Wealth may be some of the most valuable wealth we’ll ever build, because we rarely know when life is going to ask us to draw upon it.
The good news is that I don’t think it is built through one grand transformation. Looking back, the deposits have usually been much smaller. They have come when I kept a promise to myself that would have been easier to break, had the conversation I wanted to avoid, questioned a belief I had carried for years, owned something I would once have defended, or refused to waste a difficult experience by learning nothing from it.
I think that is one reason I’ve become so convinced that the small decisions of our lives matter so much.
Getting up and walking in the rain did not change my life. Neither did turning around to get an umbrella for two strangers, owning my part in a difficult situation, or making the call to begin repairing it. But each choice moved me a little closer to the person I wanted to be.
Maybe that is what a Moment One really is. Not necessarily the dramatic moment when we change everything, but the ordinary moment when we make one choice that adds something to us rather than takes something away. One honest choice becomes another, and somewhere along the way those choices begin accumulating into strength, perspective, self-knowledge, courage, and trust in ourselves.
They become Inner Wealth.
I still want to build things, accomplish things, see beautiful places, provide for the people I love, and experience as much of this one life as I possibly can. But I also want to pay closer attention to what all of that living is building within me.
Because I know there will be another hard moment. There will be another circumstance I wouldn’t have chosen, another mistake I’ll wish I hadn’t made, another moment when fear or doubt finds its way back in. That is part of being human.
What I can influence is the person who will be standing there when that moment arrives.
So maybe the question for this Sunday morning isn’t what you need to fix, change, or figure out about the rest of your life. Maybe it is much smaller than that.
What is one choice you can make today that honors the person you are becoming?
Make that choice, and then make another when the next moment comes.
Someday, perhaps sooner than you expect, life is going to ask something of you. And when it does, you may discover that all of those seemingly small choices were never small at all.
They were building your Inner Wealth.