“It’ll look good on your resume.” Someone planted that sentence in me back in high school, and it took. For decades it ran quietly underneath my decisions, and it worked. A great deal of what I’m proud of got done with those six words humming in the background. What no one warns you about is the slow cost of living by them. The higher I climbed, the more I became my CV. We like these stories to turn on a single dramatic moment. The day you walked out. The meeting that broke s

My daughter asked me a good question the other night, and I fumbled the answer. Not because I didn't know how to answer her, but because I couldn't find the right words, ones that seemed weighty enough to convey what I was thinking and feeling. She has watched Ultreia take shape, and she’s glad I’ve found this thing to build. But she was puzzled by one part of it, and she said so. "Aren't there other trails, other places you could go that would be just as good? What's so spec

It started with a Hallmark movie. It was a March evening, not long before my sabbatical was set to begin. I had been waiting on that first real break in my career, anxious for the reset but with no idea how I was going to use it. I didn't want to spend it sitting around doing nothing, and I knew that prepping for the spring semester I'd return to faculty for wasn't going to fill the hours. So there I was on the couch, a little restless, watching a movie about a woman who had