Today is my 60th birthday (I know!). And on the occasion of my 60th birthday I thought I would pull together sixty snippets, memories, quotes, and thoughts that have guided me over the years. Many of these have been my companions for years. Some newer developments. I hope you enjoy. And to all who have walked the journey with me past and present. I love you.
1. Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman Song of Myself, 51
2. “Chris, you better get comfortable in the gray.” - Randy Moss (private conversation 1993)
3. “Be careful what you pray for, you might actually get it.” - Randy Moss (private conversation 1993)
4. My earliest memory is the time my mother forgot to pick me up from pre-school. The people responsible for watching me put me in a room of cots for nap time by myself. I waited for what seemed like an eternity. I imagine this was the beginning formation of what I have named as my “philosophy of self- sufficiency.” A philosophy that would ultimately lead to ruin and one that will rear its ugly head still.
5. Curiosity has taken me farther in my life than any other aspect of my being (persistence is a close second).
6. You don’t discover yourself; you compose yourself.
7. Read books outside of your social location.
8. You can spend your whole life critiquing a world that you never helped build. Don’t do that.
9. I read something recently about William Burroughs final thoughts that he wrote in his journal:
"There is no final enough of wisdom, experience-any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats present and past. Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
Yeah, Love is all there is. (and I miss all my cats as well William)
10. Your bookshelf predicts your future.
11. For example, a book that altered the course of my life was Richard Ronhr’s Falling Upward: A Spiritualty for the Two Halves of Life. In the book Rohr popularized a poignant quote by monk Thomas Merton that goes “people can spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” I’ve never forgotten it and it gave me permission to leave a successful business and become a therapist.
12. Collect ideas more than possessions.
13. Be suspicious of anyone selling certainty.
14. “Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.” –Shakyamuni Buddha
15. If your world keeps getting smaller you are doing something wrong.
16. I believe that the originators of Alcoholics Anonymous had great vision, and a
profound understanding of the significance of rites of passage. At the centre of AA
is a ritual event that provides for a formalisation of the stages of separation and
reincorporation, and for a marking of the turning points of personʼs lives. This is
accompanied by the convening of forums that provide the opportunity for
persons to give testimony to the decisions that they have made to break from
excessive alcohol consumption, to the desires and purposes that motivate these
decisions, and to tell and retell the stories of their lives before a group of
witnesses, many of whom are veterans of such journeys. In this context, the
responses of the witness group are powerfully acknowledging and authenticating
of these decisions, desires, purposes and stories. As these decisions and stories,
and these accounts of desire and purpose, become more richly described, they
become more influential – they are more significantly shaping of personsʼ lives.
- Michael White
17. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
- the Upajjhatthana Sutta (“Subjects for Contemplation”)
18. “…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. “
- Henry Thoreau
19. Protect your attention more fiercely than your reputation.
20. Therapy is less about solving lives and more about enlarging them.
21. Not everything broken needs to be fixed. Some things just need to be mourned.
22. I’m beginning to think that purpose is the answer to everything.
23. Make things. Not because they will last or be important or find an audience. Rather because they change you while making them.
24. I have always found a north star in what writers on Buddhism call the “bodhisattva ideal.” This refers to a spiritual outlook and way of life rooted in a resolute vow and dedicated to the welfare of all sentient beings. I am struck with the promise of the bodhisattva of not entering Nirvana until all sentient beings are freed from suffering. It is a heroic ideal for me. I like the idea of going out as the last man on the sinking boat after getting everybody in their lifeboats. I mean, we all want to be a hero in some story.
25. Speaking of sinking boats. “Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.” ― Shunryu Suzuki
26. More boats. (sorry, I grew up and still live very close to the ocean)
I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
- Cheryl Strayed
27. A life organized around validation eventually becomes inhabitable.
28. People remember how you made possibility feel.
29. Go where interesting conversations happen. Artist talks. Panels. Webinars. Book clubs. Organizing events. Salons. I recently went to a bookseller’s event for the first time and learned so much and made a new community of friends and colleagues.
30. On that note. The world becomes larger every time you meet someone genuinely different.
31. Travel as much and often as you can. Even if it’s just a couple of hours away.
32. Sometimes your job is to remember.
33. Books have been some of the best mentors I’ve had.
34. Most people need accompaniment more than advice.
35. My work is becoming less psychological, and more ecological.
36. If someone asked me to summarize the twenty years of my life, I don’t think it would mention therapy. I think it would be something like: we become who we are through our participation in stories, communities, and futures, and we have more freedom than we imagine to compose those worlds.
37. A well lived life isn’t measured by what you accomplish. It’s measured by whether your participation leaves the world more alive than when you found it.
38. Life always invites us back into participation after disappointment.
39. Not everything should become content.
40. Love doesn’t require complete understanding. Neither does ethical relationship.
41. The world is becoming louder. Become someone who can hear whispers.
42. Information wants circulation. Wisdom wants relationship.
43. One of the deepest forms of respect is to allow people to be partially unknown.
44. Build the room you wish existed. Then leave the door open.
45. Culture is made by amateurs.
46. The question isn’t whether you’re angry. It’s whether your anger is pointing toward something worth building. Honestly, much of what I have built, I built on anger.
47. Don’t organize your life around avoiding embarrassment. Most things worth becoming or doing require you to look foolish, at least in the beginning.
48. A lot of life requires you surviving your own opinion about yourself.
49. I don’t care what the problem is, it grows in isolation.
50. Some of the most radical things you can do are slow down, listen carefully, and remain present.
51. When we both of us knew how the end always is
How the end always is
- Robert Smith The Cure Disintegration
52. The sacred often arrives disguised as ordinary life. The world is already richer, stranger, more beautiful, and more alive than we usually notice. Our job is to learn how to pay attention.
53. Every life deserves more than one future.
54. Be careful of the rooms you continue living inside after you’ve left them.
55. Most of us are running on inherited stories and calling it reality.
56. The world is always larger than the story fear gives us.
57. The strongest people I know aren’t the ones who’ve never needed help. They’re the ones who have learned how to accept it.
58. Don’t become so critical that you lose what once gave you life. I have been there. Trust me, not a fun place.
59. The growing pragmatist in me believes that a good life is less about having the right beliefs (or theory) and more about cultivating the practices, relationships, and forms of attention that keep enlarging your participation in the world.
60. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost The Road Not Taken
When I’m gone, I hope people remember that I tried to leave the world a little more interesting, a little more compassionate, and a little more alive than I found it.
Peace.
Come Join the Conversation
If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.
October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.
I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.
And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.
Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available
Come be part of the conversation.
Good stuff Chris - I’m bookmarking this. I’m ahead of you by a few years - a distance that shrinks the longer we age. Also, in #27 I think you mean “uninhabitable.” 😉 See you in October.
Happy 60th birthday, Chris! Always so proud of you.
In our home as kids/teens, we had a little spiral bound flip book that sat on the kitchen windowsill with inspiring quotes, thoughts and poems. My mom would turn a new page each morning when she made the coffee. Your list of 60 inspiritiational thoughts and snippets reminded me of this little flip book. All of the snippets in your list are so good, they each deserve a full day to ponder. Maybe you can have these made into a flip book. It may help people slow down for a moment in our fast moving world. Just an idea.
Hope you enjoy being celebrated today. Thanks for making the world a better place.