Hey,

My 40th birthday is coming up and I'm boomeranging between existential dread and syrupy nostalgia for times when I was younger.

I've been think a little about where I am now, but a lot about how I got here. Somewhere in the process of excavating the people and places I've had the joy of experiencing, I started thinking about previous birthdays, and how certain gifts had a completely unexpected impact on my life.

When I was seven, my mom gave me an architecture book with magnetic pieces for reconstructing the famous buildings it described. I was homeschooled through my entire educational career in a wonderfully unstructured way and spent much of my time wandering through books.

I have vague memories of spending hours reading about famous architecture and trying to recreate them from the palette of magnets.

But I have a very strong memory of first reading about Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Write's ode to the humble glory of a forest creek.

That house showed me that buildings could be more than just walls, ceilings, and floors; they could be livable works of art. The introduction to Write opened my eyes to the idea that design could be a job.

Not long after, my dad brought home a Tandy 1000 computer. The 3.5" disk drive and boxy profile would make the thing unrecognizable to kids today as a computer, but to me, it was pure magic. My dad loved technology and would periodically come home with a pocketful of games and programs he'd picked up on the sneakernet.

I spent way to much time in front of that computer.

At first most of my time was playing games like Toobin or Altered Beast with my friend Paul. Thinking about Altered Beast 30 years later still makes me stressed out.

Before long I wanted to make games of my own. I started writing simple text-based adventures. I can guarantee you they were awful. But I remember feeling like a 1337 hacker when something worked end to end. I moved on to taking out books from the library that taught me to build visual pool tables by copying page after page of code.

That computer taught me that I could work magic if only I learned the magic words (basic at the time). It also taught me to love to tinker.

The last gift was a trip to Disney World my mom put took me on not long after my parents divorced. She packed my four sisters and two brothers into our massive Econoline 15 passenger van and took the drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and on to the most magical place on earth.

Before my mom and dad divorced we had a comfortable middle class life. We lived in a big house with a garden in the front, swing set in the back and no real want for anything. After they separated, our lives became dramatically more stressful (we would go on to be evicted from 3 houses in the next several years).

I wouldn't say that trip to Disney was the best financial decision; but damn if it wasn't a sweet one. My mom knew that things were about to change for us and moved a minor mountain to give us a spellbinding adventure.

One night from that trip stand out to me most. My mom took a few hours to visit the park with me alone. We spent the twilight cycling through my favorite ride, Space mountain. The thing I remember most vividly wasn't the ride. It was riding the tram to and from the park, talking with my mom about all the trivial things that seem like the world to an 11 year old.

My mom taught me how small actions that show care and interest in someone are often the things that actually make a mark on their life.

These three gifts hold a lesson: success and growth depend on the people around us.

As we navigate life, let's remember to give generously and appreciate the gifts, both big and small, that have formed us.

I'd love to hear what gift had the biggest, most surprising impact on your life.

✌️ Chris