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My late father-in-law had a million of ‘em. Trouble was, they were corny as Kansas in August. Here’s one I must have heard from him a hundred times: “Do you have trouble making decisions?” “Gee, I’m not sure.” On Wednesday it hit me like never before – I have trouble making decisions. Not big ones. Little ones. I was plagued by two decisions I couldn’t make: • Should I visit the subscriber preview of the Divine Egypt exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day? • Should I join a group of neighbor guys who are planning a Wooster Street pizza crawl the afternoon of October 25? Now, you have to understand that in my life I’ve made some huge decisions without thinking twice: • Proposing marriage • Starting my own company • Buying/building several houses But as I write this, these two upcoming, trivial events have me frozen. To go or not to go? To be or not to be? Experts say a struggle with indecision stems from a fear of making the wrong choice amid the available options, leading to a paralysis that leaves one feeling anxious and unfulfilled. Indecision is, in itself, a decision to remain stagnant. Making a choice, regardless of the outcome, is better than remaining stuck in a kind of limbo. Research identifies people who struggle with taking stands or committing to positions as "indecisive" or "lukewarm" personalities. Indecisiveness is defined as "the subjective inability to make satisfactory decisions" and is considered a trait that has detrimental effects. This isn't simply about being unable to choose between options, they say, but rather a deeper pattern of avoiding firm commitments. Studies suggest that one in five adults exhibit chronic indecisiveness. In other words, inability to make decisions is a significant psychological phenomenon – not an occasional struggle. Common causes of indecisiveness include: 1. Fear of making the wrong choice : A primary factor that can paralyze decision-making. 2. Overwhelming number of options : Too many choices can lead to confusion and uncertainty. 3. Anxiety : The stress that comes from feeling unsure can contribute to indecision. 4. Lack of clarity : Uncertainty about personal goals and values can make it difficult to evaluate options effectively. 5. Desire for perfection : The belief that every decision must be perfect may lead to hesitation. 6. Fear of mistakes : Concern over making a wrong choice can prevent action. These factors create a cycle that reinforces indecisiveness, leading to inaction and frustration. So here I am, writing this blog post Wednesday evening. I still can’t decide if I should head to the Met Museum tomorrow or Friday. I know myself. If I postpone going to the museum tomorrow, I’ll find an excuse to not go on Friday. And I will end up missing the exhibit entirely. I need my Mommy to tell me what to do . . .

From Norse halls to modern America, the thread remains unbroken.

A fellow alumnus of Saint Basil Prep was in Connecticut last week and invited me to join him in visiting our alma mater. My instinct was to turn him down. Why? For no other reason than my anxiety that I can’t afford a day away from my desk, even in retirement. But I remembered my recent resolution to take my inner child on play dates, and I agreed. In our hyperconnected world, where multitasking has become a badge of honor, the simple act of being present has become a radical pursuit. Living in the present moment, however, is more than a philosophical ideal. It’s a scientifically validated pathway to well-being and quality of life. We wandered for hours around the campus that stands as an oasis of landscaped greenery in the concrete and asphalt wasteland that has become Stamford. We prowled through the several school buildings, peering into the classrooms in which we suffered through language, science, and math classes. We sat in the chapel pews we occupied decades ago. We even opened closed closet doors to see what was inside. The human mind's tendency is to dwell on past regrets and future anxieties. This is why we want to go back in time to relive happy moments. The stuff from the good old days is “settled law.” We lived it. It turned out okay. We needn’t worry about it. We can relive the good times and relive them and relive them, relishing our nostalgic sentimentality. But Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Zen master, has said that the present moment is filled with joy and happiness. “If you are attentive, you will see it." Maybe. But sometimes – no, often – I have to look awfully hard to see the joy. I have a hunch that you have to be either a saint or a poet to be really, truly attentive to the moment and in touch with the wonder of being alive. Poet T. S. Eliot thought saints live at the intersection of time and timelessness. I would add poets, too. The saint's aspiration is union with God through self-surrender and love. The poet's is toward the creation of aesthetic works that translate transcendent truths to others. In other words, the saint's existence at the intersection of time and timelessness is fundamentally about being, while the poet's engagement with this intersection is primarily about making. Remember the scene in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town? EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it . . . every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe . . . they do some.” But both saints and poets aren’t residents of planet earth as you and I are. Their dwelling is the Temple of the Present. There, in the temple, they observe the little, thus making sense of the large. So the poet's quest is the same as the saint's—a continuous journey toward deeper understanding. One lives it, the other articulates it. As poet Mary Oliver put it: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I was privileged last week to bring my Healing Verses Workshop to The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, a welcome expansion of my volunteer efforts to guide people in writing poems to help ease emotional trauma. This is the press release issued by the hospital: The Center of Excellence for Cancer Support Services at Mount Sinai launched its new Art Fridays program on September 12 with a poetry workshop at the Dubin Breast Center in East Harlem, welcoming nearly a dozen patients, caregivers, and staff. The monthly enrichment series is designed to provide creative outlets that support healing, connection, and self-expression. Author and poet Peter Yaremko, who shared how poetry can help people process the emotional weight of cancer, led the inaugural session. Participants heard poems by distinguished writers who turned to poetry in times of illness and grief, and then wrote their own personal reflections. “The whole purpose is to put on paper the feelings that are bothering you, so you can unburden yourself and find some peace,” Yaremko explained. “Poetry doesn’t take away pain, but it provides companionship in the grief journey.” Yaremko’s commitment to leading healing poetry workshops is deeply personal. After losing his wife to cancer ten years ago, he turned to poetry as a way to cope with his grief. Writing became a space where he could slow down, reflect, and begin to heal. Inspired by how transformative the practice was for him, Yaremko now shares this gift with others facing illness or loss, guiding patients and caregivers to discover how words can bring comfort, peace, and resilience. For patient Lisa Atkins, a Brooklyn resident, the event felt like a sign. “This class was inspirational. Art is healing because there’s no right or wrong—you can just express yourself freely,” she said. “My dad was a poet, and I saw this as a way to reconnect with him, and with myself, after my cancer diagnosis. “This workshop reminded me that even in the middle of a cancer journey, I can find moments of joy and expression. Writing poetry helped me put my feelings into words and feel connected to others who understand what it’s like,” she said. Alison Snow, PhD, LCSW, co-director of the Center of Excellence for Cancer Support Services at Mount Sinai, described the gathering as intimate and moving. “Everyone was holding back tears,” she reflected. “Art allows patients to tap into creativity, feel safe, and form bonds with one another. You could see those connections happening around the table.” The Art Fridays series will continue this fall with workshops in painting, cooking, and interior design. “We’re excited to see this program grow,” Snow said. “Through art, we want to give patients and caregivers moments of beauty, healing, and hope, a reminder that even in the hardest times, creativity can light the way forward.”

It comes as no surprise that a July poll finds most of us have lost faith in the American dream. Seventy-five percent of Americans see little hope for improving their economic status and nearly seventy percent say the idea that “if you work hard, you will get ahead,” no longer holds true, or never did. So at a recent Zoom gathering of my Healing Verses workshop, we took a look at how poetry might help. This is precisely what poetry does – help us make sense of life. What we found was eye-opening and encouraging. For starters, I could find precious few poems that focus on hope. I was damned if I was going to spend an hour rehashing Emily Dickinson’s paean to "the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul." So I decided to write my own poem: There Are No Poems about Hope By Peter W Yaremko The assignment was to bring a poem about hope to class. But I couldn’t find any. Not one. Not anywhere among the labyrinth that is Google. ChatGPT let me down as well as Claude.ai. Even Poem Hunter. We must be so full up of hope there’s no need for poets to suffer for it or sing of it. Such a sissy word. A girl’s name, for Chrissake. No wonder poets don’t bother with it. “Do not go hopeful into that good night?” No. Doesn’t work. Could it be we don’t know what hope is? We pray for faith, hope and charity all the time. Faith and charity I can understand. But what do we hope for? Maybe we shouldn’t hope for, or hope that, or hope if. Just simply hope. Or just simply change hope to dream. Hope has had many definitions through the ages, and philosophers and psychologists have had a lot to say. One constant is hope's fundamental connection to our ability as humans to project ourselves into imagined futures and find meaning there. In other words, to dream. Which is why writer Ilia Delio defines hope as “the main impulse of life.” Legendary author Fyodor Dostoevsky chimes in with: "To live without hope is to cease to live." Mark Twain is his usual blunt self: "Without dreams and goals there is no living, merely existing, and that is not why we are here." And Langston Hughes, the great voice of the Harlem Renaissance warns: Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird, that cannot fly. To my way of thinking, the concept of hope that checks all the boxes and puts further debate to rest is this one by French philosopher Gabriel Marcel: “The essence of hope is not to hope that . . . but merely to hope. The person who hopes does not accept the current situation as final.” Václav Havel, the poet who became president of the Czech Republic, says much the same thing: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out." During the writing period of the workshop, participants created poems that heartened me, and I hope will uplift you: Parens Patriae By SJ Harrold The day I slugged my father was uneventful as I recall. I must’ve done whatever a thoughtless boy does to someone, or something or, perhaps I did nothing and that was the sin. In my tiny room, hearing his heavy steps stomping down the hall, closing in. Another beating penciled-in from loving dad. Crashing through the door, thick fingers stabbed my puny chest and his lips peppered foamy spit. Untethered, my pot melted. A robot fist punched him square in his fleshy jaw. He played the stunned mullet, bulged eyes and gaping mouth, dropping to the floor like a sack of whatever. A damaged chip ripped off the flawed block. The parched apple finally dropped from the hoary tree. Perfect harmony. Amidst the circus bear dance my reptile brain fired. Enveloped in shame, I fell back, defenseless. He pummeled away to my crocodile tears. We knew no better. I still grieve that. Life and death in September By Paul Bumbar September 3, 1939, Sunday morning in Buffalo, NY, In a wood frame, rented house on Timon Street, Sophia Bumbar gave birth to me her third child ( second son ) in the same bed she and my father had been sharing for the over three years since their wedding. My life – as with most – begins in love and life goes on. September 3, 1939, that same day, the “war to end all wars” was reprised as England and France declare war on Germany and World War II begins. Death and destruction for six years. Worldwide, up to 80 million people – soldiers and civilians - will die. September 3, 2025, 80 years after it had begun, thousands in Tienamin Square commemorate the end of the war with dictators reviewing marching military and rolling weapons of destruction, all the while professing peace, but the drums of war go on, and so do birthdays. Assisted living By Tina Peel Leaning over his walker Glasses slipping down his nose He slowly navigates the pathway Over to the garden that reminds him of his youth There, he keeps watch as he did long ago Weeding Watering Muttering Expecting sweet corn to come From a plant that’s mostly stalk right now “A couple more weeks, or maybe three,” he guesses And as each day passes, he waits As a wad of silky golden thread Lures him into believing That yes, That sweet ear of corn will come A millennium ago Japanese poetess Izumi Shikibu found cause for hope in the moon beaming through the broken roof of a desolate house. It was about the year 1000 when she wrote: Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. And today, poet Alexandra Vasiliu offers this advice: Never empty your heart of hope. Try to copy the moon because on her lowest days, a crescent moon starts to rise. So, my darling, imitate the moon. It all comes down to this: hope, like faith and love, is an act of will power . . . a decision.

Doctor Google advises me that my waking up every night at two o’clock may be caused by stress. It took some time for this to hit home because I’m the guy who is spending his retirement guiding others in writing poems to ease their emotional stress, anxiety, and trauma. I don’t need to be Doctor House to diagnose my situation. In leaving the corporate business world, I’ve merely transferred my work ethic to my retirement routine. My day, for example, is scheduled in Excel in half-hour increments – right down to “shave, shower, dress, make bed” – that I adhere to and closely monitor. I track my weight and blood pressure every morning. I set a daily goal. I do work every day, including weekends, whether it’s putting together my weekly blogs, writing and submitting poems, or preparing lessons for the poetry classes I conduct. I can’t remember taking a real vacation since my wife died almost ten years ago. Even when I lived in the vacation paradises of Cape Cod and Puerto Rico, I couldn’t just sit still and enjoy life. I had to turn both houses into bed-and-breakfasts and strive for perfect Trip Advisor ratings. Does this sound anal retentive? You bet. I remember many years ago coming across a book about caring for your “inner child.” The author advised us to ensure our inner child has plenty of play dates. Have I been doing this? No. In fact, I’ve been guilty of child neglect. A 2020 study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that people who engage their inner child decrease anxiety symptoms by a third, with a twenty-five percent improvement in emotional well-being. And according to John K. Pollard, author of Self-Parenting: The Complete Guide to Your Inner Conversations , the inner child represents the part of us that holds our needs, feelings, and vulnerabilities. “The inner child,” Pollard writes, “can be a source of joy and creativity.” That’s for me. According to the experts, recovery and growth come from acknowledging and nurturing your inner child. Inner child therapy focuses on reconnecting with this part of yourself. Dr. Louis Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life : “When you heal your inner child, you create a future full of love and happiness.” Okay, Doc, you don’t have to call me to lunch twice. I’m going to start treating my inner child to play dates. I have a few things in mind already. Like seeing a movie every Friday morning – as soon as new releases hit the theaters – no matter how lousy the movie. I’ll call it “Friday Flicks.” Within a ten-minute walk of my New Haven neighborhood are entire city streets that qualify as “restaurant rows.” Wooster Street, for example, is nationally known for its pizza places. I never go out for lunch – from now on I will. If I find a favorite, I might become a regular, ala Norm in Cheers . I will actually take the train into New York City – for fun stuff. When I get to Grand Central (for the senior fare of $12.50), I might saunter into Pershing Square for their magnificent chicken pot pie or stroll down Madison Avenue to see whatever exhibit is on at the Morgan Library or just people-watch on a bench in Bryant Park. And grab a food-cart knish and a hamantasch cookie for the train ride back. Brace yourself, world. Here comes mini-me! (Top image: Inner Child is a mixed media by Aeron Brown.)

During the next two months, I will guide a number of workshops on writing poems to help relieve some of the stress of emotional trauma – not how to write better, but writing to feel better. During the weekend of November 7 - 9, I will conduct a program on “Writing for Wellbeing—Emotional Healing through Expressive Writing” at Mercy by the Sea Retreat and Conference Center in Madison, Connecticut. If you attend, I’ll show you how easy-to-understand poems can be beautiful, uplifting, and healing. Our discussions will center on what poetry is all about, and how famous writers have created poems to address their own personal issues. I’ll show you how to write poems to better manage any emotional trauma – from the stresses of illness or grief to the rupture of a relationship or the loss of purpose and hope. I’ll share my two secret hacks to get you writing your first poem, and there will periods of reflecting, writing, and sharing. For details and to register . That’s in November, for a weekend. On September 12, I will be in Manhattan to conduct a workshop on the healing power of poetry. My poetry program will launch the Friday Arts initiative at New York City’s Mount Sinai Cancer Center. Friday Arts is a monthly enrichment program designed to nurture creativity, community, and healing for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers. This session at Mount Sinai is in addition to the healing poetry gathering I host each week at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge, also in New York City. And you already know about the “Healing Verses” workshops I hold every other Wednesday via Zoom. We read set a theme for the meeting, read a poem that speaks to that theme, and then write our own poem. This Wednesday, September 3, we’re going to talk about the poem, “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon. I’m going to tell the Zoom group what I think is the real definition of hope – and its true healing power. The Wednesday workshops have a one-hour format: • Reading and discussing a famous poem that has healing properties • Quiet time to write your own poem • An open period when you can read something of your own if you want to To join my Zoom room – open to everyone – enter this link into your browser: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89034950365?pwd=DEFfvQ1bMqlUX1Wu1qK3mApkR0Q1gH.1 The foundation of the teaching I do is Expressive Writing, a therapeutic discipline developed at the University of Houston in the early 1980s and replicated more than 2,000 times since then. It’s a kind of writing unlike journaling, and research has shown it yields significant benefits in alleviating emotional trauma, with general enhancement of immune system function, physical health, pain symptoms, sleep, and overall functioning. In the long term, trauma victims report feeling happier and less negative than before practicing Expressive Writing. And isn’t that what we all want?

She was young, tall, and supremely elegant but weak and thin from weeks of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. She wrote the loveliest poem I’ve heard in a long time and wept as she read it to me. It’s miraculous, I thought when she and I were together to talk poetry last week, how such beauty blossomed from the dark humus of her disease. In guiding cancer patients to write poems to ease their emotional trauma, I witness how the rude rigors of cancer treatment magnify emotions and set them very close to the surface. Right beneath the breastplate, it seems, hard against the heart. So expressing feelings in poetry comes more easily than otherwise. In addition to teaching cancer patients and their caregivers, I conduct workshops in healing poetry for people who are dealing with all sorts of emotional trauma. The phenomenon of heightened creativity applies to all of them. Perhaps due to the fact that all emotional trauma exhibit common characteristics: unexpected, unwanted, and seemingly beyond our ability to make them stop. I continue to be awed at how men and women with no background in writing can craft breathtaking poems that grow out of the fertile soil of their suffering. They are testimony to what I always tell them: “What you learn in this room will not lead you to poetry as much as what you bring with you into this room.” The myth of the suffering artist is misleading. It’s not suffering itself that produces creativity, but the psychological growth and awareness that arise from it. In her 2007 book When Walls Become Doorways , psychologist Tobi Zausner writes: “Life’s lowest moments can hold our greatest potential for creativity and transformation. When the wall of illness becomes a door of opportunity, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.” As an aside, you should know that when Zausner was diagnosed with the most aggressive kind of ovarian cancer in 1989, she was told she would not last the year. Instead, her life changed for the better and she completed a doctorate in art and psychology. The healing poetry I teach is founded on the discipline of Expressive Writing developed at the University of Houston and replicated more than 2,000 times. The premise: writing for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day about a topic that triggers strong emotion has been shown to help people garner meaning and a measure of relief from their stress. Marcel Proust was on board with the idea long ago. He wrote: “Ideas come to us as the successors of griefs. And griefs, at the moment they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.” Author Mark Nepo stresses that we cannot choose to indulge solely in happiness. He writes: “If you are thirsty, you can’t dip your face to the stream and say, ‘I’ll only drink the hydrogen and not the oxygen.’ If you remove one from the other, the water cannot remain water. The life of feeling is no different. We cannot drink only of happiness or sorrow and have life remain life.” My Catholic faith advises me to “offer up” any suffering that comes my way in order to remove its weight from my shoulders. I say no. I say embrace sadness and suffering. It’s a portion of our humanity and has yielded some of our most creative achievements as a species. As proof, here’s the young woman’s poem that took my breath away last week, drawn from her experience with radiation treatment: I settle into the bed that is not a bed into the cradle that is not a cradle nestling deeper like a pine cone on the forest floor this bed that is not a bed holds no sweet dreams or lazy Sundays cookie crumbs or lovemaking thirty seconds until your first beam a crackly voice announces bang whirl whoosh it’s happening now I imagine light gliding through me filling me spilling out of me the machine quiets I suppose I am healed now As Dr. Zausner puts it: “When the wall of illness becomes a door of opportunity, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.”

I’ve had the opportunity to work with two starship commanders. One was the hero of Apollo 13. The other the hero of TV’s original Star Trek series. During my years at IBM, ROLM, Siemens, and Executive Media, my work as a speechwriter expanded to encompass writing and producing live corporate events. These were also known as business theater—recognition meetings, sales rallies, management conferences—for audiences ranging from a few hundred to more than 10,000. One of the benefits of being a producer is that the job enabled me to indulge my boyhood fantasies. In creating program content that would excite and motivate audiences, I was influenced by my boyhood passion for science fiction. I had watched Captain Video on my family’s black-and-white Dumont and deported myself as one of his “Video Rangers.” I was in the movie theaters for the premieres of the 1950s sci-fi movies that are now classic: “The Thing” … “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” … “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” So it was a natural for me to hire Jim Lovell, whose heroic performance brought the crippled Apollo 13 and its crew safely home. That’s him in the top photo, along with his team of lunar module pilot Fred Haise and command module pilot Jack Swigert. Captain Lovell served as on-camera narrator of an identity video for the high-tech ROLM Corporation, which pioneered voicemail among other telecommunications innovations. I picked him up at SFO, noticing how he put on his seat belt first thing. As we drove down Route 101 past Moffett Field, he reminisced about testing planes tethered to an anchor post inside one of Moffett’s vast hangars. In the car that day, I asked Captain Lovell the question that had burned since my days as a Video Ranger: “Just how strong is the thrust you feel when you lift off?” His disappointing answer: “About the same as accelerating a car.” Heck, Captain Video had me believing the acceleration of lift-off practically flattened your eyeballs. Captain Lovell was a delight to work with—affable, patient, and a natural on camera. I hired him a second time to speak to a ROLM recognition event about his near-fatal Apollo 13 experience. Then there was Captain Kirk—William Shatner. You remember: “To boldly go . . . ” On stage in front of six hundred or so top performers at a different ROLM recognition event, the CEO—a German national—talked with a video-projected Captain Kirk who was supposedly orbiting Earth in the Starship Enterprise. Then, using what’s known as a “laser cone” effect, we beamed Shatner down to the stage to join the CEO and help him conduct an awards ceremony. Shatner turned out to be a not-so-good choice. For one thing, he toyed with the CEO and kept going off prompter. Shatner enjoyed tripping up the CEO, who was trying to follow a carefully crafted script to help him with what was his second language. I came away thinking that Shatner seriously thinks he’s a starship commander. The difference between the two? One of these starship commanders was a real hero. The other only played one on TV.