I built my wife the assistant she needed

Last week many of you checked on me… where I'd gone, whether I was okay. I read every message. Thank you.

I think a lot of us are living through a season of quiet doubt. About our work, about where we stand, about whether anyone is really listening. There is reflection in it, but there is also anxiety… and for some, something closer to despair. I am not watching that from a distance. I've lived it too, inside the field I chose to give my life to.

I still have much more to say about education, and more to do there. Many stories are still waiting.

But this one couldn't wait.

Erika is a doctor. For years I've watched her come home carrying the whole day… the forms, the messages, the schedule, everything that stands between her and the patients she wants to care for. Sitting at my desk, talking about her on camera, I heard myself say it: she's not being human anymore. There's simply no time left.

So we began building her an assistant. And the deeper we go, the more I keep returning to a VHS tape. José and I were eighteen, in a history class in El Paso, making our first film. It was terrible. We knew no better. The tape is lost. Thirty years later he is a doctor, I am not, and we are building this together.

If we are going to spend our days on something, and we only get about twenty-eight thousand of them, I want it to be this: systems that give us our humanity back, so we can lead with the heart and the mind again.

This is entry four of twenty-eight thousand days. The first three are on my page, if you'd like to walk the road from the beginning.

Subtitles in English and Spanish (CC).
Music: "Cylinder Six" by Chris Zabriskie, CC BY 4.0