& rules for rooting for my next 35 years
I write this from 30,000 feet en route to Germany for a novel treatment I never imagined possible. For a year that has been filled with what seems like so much bad luck, this feels like a tide turning. I am hesitant to get my hopes up, but I believe that your thoughts shape your future. It is a peptide vaccine designed to arm my T-cells against the underlying virus that has driven my cancer. It gestures at something older and more holistic, the idea of strengthening the body’s own balance and defenses rather than simply attacking the tumor. The treatment is not curative alone, but it is a major step towards tomorrow.
It is incredible to me that this technology exists, and equally frustrating that in this moment of my life, where I am the beneficiary of medical innovation, we are even questioning the value and necessity of vaccines and cancer research funding. I am not political by nature; the Libra in me makes it impossible for me not to be compassionate towards both sides, but I’m truly enraged by the notion that in this modern age, a child would not be given a vaccine at an early age that would protect them against the same disease that has nearly taken my life, that very well may take my life. I am eternally grateful for private nonprofits, like the Parker Institute, which have enabled research and collaboration that bring these next-generation therapies to patients, and to Memorial Sloan-Kettering for keeping me alive this long to continue to explore them. Still, I am saddened that these are not more universally available to the general public. I am frustrated that our healthcare system is constrained by insurance, which often leads to patients receiving the cheapest medicine instead of the most effective one. Cost wins over wholeness and well-being. I had to undergo a terrifying allergic reaction last month with one chemotherapy regimen to bypass insurance restrictions to receive a better drug.
Nearly 90% of the American population has had HPV, but most never know it. I received an HPV vaccine as a child, but it did not cover the strain that would later reshape my life. As far as I can tell, I got it at a young age. The virus waited, patient as a seed in frozen soil. It remained dormant in my body for years. It is a mystery I may never be able to solve. It is a mystery actually that does not need to be solved.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how this could have been prevented, how I wish to live my life if I can get through this. Doctors have focused on the disease in isolation, cells mutating and viruses replicating, but I think about the whole. The exhaustion, inflammation, and nervous system strain that led to low immunity. A friend asked me last night if I had any hot takes. I told him this: the Scientific Revolution, hailed as the dawn of modern progress, was also one of our biggest impediments. Our obsession with reductionism led us away from a holistic way of thinking, one that fractured our way of seeing. A mind is divorced from a body, self from nature, parts from a whole, a disease from the human. We have slowly started to unravel this, shifting our own understanding of the world from mechanistic parts towards a sense that reality is relative, indeterminate, and alive with possibility.
This shift in thinking isn’t personal; it reflects a broader revolution happening in science itself. The researcher, Carlo Rovelli captures this when he writes, “ The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.”
It’s the difference between a transcendent truth of the enlightenment and one that is imminent. My mindset towards this has shifted in the last year. In the former, one searches outwardly and strives for a never-achievable Platonic ideal of perfection. Success means leaving the ground, separating from nature, overcoming obstacles, and reaching a level of achievement. It is the skyscraper that rises by force, reaching toward heaven but often untethered from the ground. In the reductionist search for ‘Am I enough? Am I perfect?’, exhaustion and burnout are waiting to happen. In the latter, growth is inward and relational. The truth is already here; the task is not to ‘reach it’ but to harmonize with it. Success isn’t defined as leaving the human condition, but rather, fully inhabiting it. To quote Hexagram 53, J’ian of the I Ching, “ Success comes when you pull your nature forward without pushing yourself into the world. ” It is the tree growing from a seed, dependent on nourishment from its surroundings, but continually expanding according to its internal pattern. The tree does not strive to be anything other than what it is. Its greatness comes from being more fully itself.
This shift shook my faith, too. As a devout Christian, I was taught to seek the truth outwardly and upward, but lying in hospital beds, I found myself drawn inward, to the nervous system, to my dreams, to the quiet intelligence of the body, the Christ that Meister Eckhart found not in the sky but in the marrow of things. The earliest Christian mystics spoke of Christ as the presence in all things, before the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution accelerated the split. Richard Rohr calls this the Universal Christ, not Jesus’s last name, but the pattern of love and presence woven in all things. Religion stems from Re-ligio , to realigament or reconnect. It is to see the world and ourselves in wholeness, as one.
Perhaps I’ve been staring into the void too much lately, but I keep thinking about how much of our ambition and our lives are performative. We inherit a culture of measurements, milestones, and progress reports that comprise a life, a legacy of a worldview that exalts what lies beyond us versus within. Years ago, a mentor, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, told me, “Don’t hire dead people.” I think about that a lot as I go through my day. Am I dead? Or am I making a conscious and intentional choice?.
I turn 35 next week (9/27). I went through the first 30 years of my life hating my birthday - the attention, the expectation, the dreams unfulfilled, it was all too much - to recognizing that birthdays are not milestones, but thresholds. They collapse time, blending past, present, and future into a single invitation to reflect, realign, and begin again.
This vaccine may or may not extend my life. But this threshold has already reshaped it. If the first thirty-five years of my life taught me how to climb, the next thirty-five, I hope, will teach me how to root.
Rules for Rooting
I’ve lived by my 10 Commandments of Lou (more here) for years, my framework for loving myself and showing up consciously each day. Now, as I cross into 35, I feel the pull toward something broader. I am no longer climbing toward self-improvement, but rooting into self-becoming.
These rules aren’t additions to the original ten; they are a fractal expansion of them, the same patterns of self-love spiraling outward into deeper ways of being in the world and in my self. These are not mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive. I will likely add to these over time and welcome any feedback or additions!
1. Be the creator, not the consumer, of your life. Do not live in default mode.
2. The certainty of death is clarifying. Let mortality sharpen your priorities daily.
3. Spend more time excavating your own mind than scrolling through others. Your daily intake should always begin within.
4. You can’t write your own story if you only ever say yes (or no).
5. Flow trumps force. Work with your energy rhythms, not artificial deadlines.
6. Wherever your body is, bring your mind. Half-presence is the thief of all experience.
7. Let silence punctuate your days; without it, nothing has weight.
8. The past is fact, but the beliefs you formed about it are fiction. What happened is over; what you tell yourself about what happened shapes everything that comes next.
9. Live your life in tune with nature. Avoid unnecessary travel, late nights, or anything that disturbs your body’s clock and natural rhythm. Live with daylight.
10. Your body is a system; view it holistically. Eat based on what you can digest. Focus on whole foods and a diet from your ayurvedic or TCM pattern of disharmony. Avoid anything that inflames your body through blood sugar spikes.
11. Pay attention to how you feel after you leave someone or hang up the phone. That’s the truth of the relationship. Optimize for people who replenish you, not drain you.
12. Where you place your attention, your life will follow. What you repeat becomes who you are.
13. Amor Fati, love your fate and commit to your becoming. Trust that every turn, even the unwanted, belongs to the making of a life.
14. Approach the world without the urge to classify or contain. The more you think you know, the less you actually see.
15. Every moment you notice the birds, the wind, the trees, you are co-creating the world with it. To observe is to join.
16. Do not confuse stimulation with nourishment.
17. Curate your environments as carefully as your thoughts. We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
18. Seek thresholds and liminal spaces. The discomfort of transition is the price of transformation.
19. Think in loops, not lines. What you put out will come back to you. Time is recursive, life spirals.
20. Compassion is systems-thinking applied to people. What looks cruel or foolish is, with context, coherent.
21. Life lives in patterns. The micro is the macro in miniature. Every fractal of life contains the blueprint of the whole.
22. Feeling everything is better than feeling nothing. What you numb in yourself, you cannot heal.
23. Do not get lost in the form. All religions, all art, all thought are prisms of the same source.
24. The most personal truths are the most universal. Run towards what scares you. What you most resist revealing is what makes others feel less alone.
25. Generosity is a system, not an act. Imbalance comes from only giving; stagnation comes from only receiving.
26. Live the questions rather than forcing answers.
27. Create without attachment to outcome. The act of making is the reward. Art is the ultimate form of healing.
28. If you want to change the world, focus first on yourself.
29. Scarcity holds, abundance circulates. Life thrives in flow, not in grasping.
30. To hold space well, you must clear your own; otherwise, you bring noise instead of care.
31. Without boredom and rest, imagination has no space to appear. The mind needs emptiness to create.
32. To speak only in your voice is to live in coherence, regardless of what you do or create. It’s the self untouched by expectation or criticism.
33. The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. Rather than asking, “How do I get what I want?”, a more interesting question is, “What wants to emerge through me?”
34. Your dreams are your unconscious mind's way of processing what your waking mind cannot integrate. Pay attention to the blueprints.
35. Learn to distinguish between what drains your energy and what transforms it. Some difficulties deplete you; others forge you into who you are meant to become.
