As we take down the Christmas lights and carefully put them in plastic boxes in the attic, don’t forget that somehow, next year, they’ll be tangled again. And so will your heart.

If we humans learned anything from the Tower of Babel, it’s that communication matters.

This entire column is meant to help prepare you for the quote at the end, my favorite about what it means to be child-like.

If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy then we need to have a conversation about playing. This is the theme of the movie “Christopher Robin”: the curse of adulthood is that you forget how to play, and therefore, how to live.

There is a direct link between depth and difficulty. If you don’t believe me, take a stroll through the biography aisle at books a million. Deep stories are defined by it; shallow ones lack it.

The world is getting faster and we only have two options: get left behind or become stressed out. I found a solution recently in the concept of “personal density“ as introduced by Alan Jacobs.

No matter what career you find yourself in, odds are, at the core, you are an educator.

You educate employees to your company’s process, or you educate staff when they need help, or you educate customers when they are trying to find the right product.

Imagine yourself at war, on the front lines, and you’ve just heard the report that a long range missile has been launched straight at your base. The anti-air gunners run to their places while everyone else runs to theirs. You break your neck to hurry up and wait.

Kids learn at the pace of a rocket, their world constantly changing and expanding, but eventually, as they become adults, tragically, that slows down.

There are a thousand songs telling us that love is a mystery, but I would say love is clear as a bell compared to the human heart. We are defined by what we love and value, and those are often incredibly hard to perceive.

There are lizards everywhere. When you are walking down the sidewalk downtown it’s like parting the Red Sea with all the scampering as they clear the way.

None of us set out to be copouts, but somewhere along the line, sometimes people lose touch with reality. We can say we care about solutions, about real positive change, but if we refuse to get beneath the surface, we prove ourselves Mega-Fibbers.

There are only two life forms. If you were to make a bar chart out of them, ranked by number of occurrences, one would be as tall as the Empire State Building and the other as tall as an ant, lying flat on his back, with his legs curled in.

Whatever you sell them on is what you will keep them with.

We drink our own kool-aid: we believe our own press. Especially about our accomplishments, we have trouble distinguishing fiction from reality, but in reality, we have work to do.

Businesses spend millions of dollars on advertisements trying to earn your trust. But trust can’t be bought, only familiarity can be bought. And familiarity is not trust.

The columnist is in a prickly place. He’s breaking the silence regularly and presenting himself before the judgement and scrutiny of the world, and he does so because he thinks it’s a good idea.

I want to take the next two weeks and provide a thorough thank you to everyone involved in this column. It’s been almost a year now, and time would pass me by before I take the chance to slow it down and express my gratitude.

“Help us, God, to live in the abundance for which you made us, and to bring that abundance to every part of your world.” So ends the preamble to the most profound creed of Christian business I’ve ever encountered.

Imagine you’re at dinner and you overhear a middle-aged couple talking about their retirement and the end of times. You tune them out, trying to focus on your steak dinner, but suddenly the man comes up to you and says, “Excuse me, we are having a debate, and I wonder if you will help us settle it. Do you know where we are all headed?”