Month: March 2026

The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You: Circadian Rhythm, Spring, and Why Timing Matters

Gloria Estefan warned us: the rhythm is gonna get you. A reflection on circadian rhythm, academic life, and why spring feels like the only real beginning.

Gloria Estefan warned us. The rhythm is gonna get you. You can fight it for a while, but it always wins, usually at the worst possible time. Everything has a rhythm. The seasons. The school year. A marriage. Some people find theirs early and live inside it comfortably. Others spend decades bumping around looking for it. The rhythm does not wait for you to figure it out. It is coming for you regardless.

My wife figured this out a long time ago. The rest of us are still working on it.

For the most part, she goes to bed at the same time and wakes up at the same time. It does not matter the day, season, weather, or location. At some point she informed me this was called a circadian rhythm. For years, I nodded and smiled like I understood, which is generally how I handle most things, and then went about my day. But with the arrival of Copilot and ChatGPT, I was finally able to dig into it in a way my small brain could understand. That is how I found myself learning about my suprachiasmatic nucleus, located in the hypothalamus, nestled deep within the brain’s center, positioned below the thalamus and above the pituitary gland. Of course it is. This naturally led me to wonder whether mine had been injured in my January fall. I asked my wife, who works at a hospital. She told me I was fine. Just more irritating.

Further research suggests a handful of best practices for keeping your circadian rhythm aligned. My wife does all of them. She has a blinding light she activates each morning like she’s signaling aircraft. She goes to bed and wakes up at the same time every day, weekends included. She limits screens before bed, with a carve-out for Law & Order and Dateline, because apparently procedural crime dramas are melatonin-neutral. She eats on schedule. And caffeine, well, that deserves its own piece entirely.

Gloria Estefan. My wife. My mother. Fine. The rhythm got me.

For a long time, my rhythm was the academic year. August was pure optimism. You built syllabi, mapped out lesson plans, and convinced yourself this was the year everything would click. You would reach every student. You would teach differently. You would get it right.

Then the first faculty meeting hit. It was Dorothy throwing water on the Wicked Witch, except the melt took until May. Nothing kills momentum like a three-hour meeting about parking, assessment, and what absolutely must be in the general education curriculum that no student has ever once cared about. Even better when faculty from entirely different disciplines are sorted into small groups to solve these problems together. Nothing says higher education like a chemist, a music theorist, and a medieval historian trying to reach consensus.

The best part was that you could always tell exactly which discipline someone was from without ever seeing their name tag. Communications professors liked to speak, at length, about speaking. Biology and chemistry professors made everything about the scientific method, including whether the agenda had a proper hypothesis. Philosophy professors asked questions no one could answer, which they considered progress. History professors talked about the past, often at the expense of the present. English professors, being mostly gentle souls, just wanted to fix things, quietly noting that the third bullet point contained a squinting modifier and the mission statement had a dangling participle. Could we perhaps offer a friendly amendment? Business and accounting professors wanted to discuss the finances and would, given any opening, perform a SWOT analysis on everything, including the parking situation. And the business law professor felt a deep, personal obligation to remind the room that a friendly amendment is not actually a thing. You cannot offer one. It is not valid. It never was. Everyone asked anyway.

And yet, the meeting did not kill the August optimism. Not entirely.

Because then the students arrived. The campus came back to life. The halls filled up. And somewhere in the chaos of the first week you remembered exactly why you were there.

The fall semester was fun right up until the first round of exams and homecoming, whichever came first. If the football team was winning, the campus was noticeably happier, which tells you everything you need to know about higher education. Somewhere along the way, quietly and without fanfare, the great ideas from August disappeared. The innovative plans, the creative approaches, the belief that this year would be different, gone. Professors taught the way they always had, the way their professors had taught them. Innovation, it turns out, has a shelf life of about four weeks. But even that was part of the rhythm. Hope arrives in August. Reality settles in by October. Every year, right on schedule.

Then came the first round of illness, like it had its own place on the calendar, and we limped into fall break having earned it. And promptly wrecked our circadian rhythms for four straight days, which my wife would like me to point out is everything she would never do.

October turned to November, and suddenly it was registration, projects, and round two of exams. We stumbled into Thanksgiving slightly disheveled, definitely behind, and unreasonably relieved we had made it at all. Every class after Thanksgiving felt optional, whether anyone admitted it or not. For all practical purposes, everyone agreed to pretend otherwise. Students and faculty alike did what academics do best under pressure, negotiating, rationalizing, and convincing themselves a paper submitted at 11:58 p.m. represented genuine scholarship. And then it was over. By Christmas, the greatest gift was silence.

Spring semester was different, though not in the way you might hope. Fall arrived like a first date. Spring arrived like a Monday morning. Everyone knew what was coming and nobody was particularly excited about it. The energy was lower. The novelty gone. You already knew some of the students, which was either comforting or concerning.

February tested everyone. The holidays were a distant memory. Spring break was not close enough to matter. The days were gray and identical. You taught. They sat. Everyone just got through it.

Then March arrived. And March meant spring. And spring meant just enough hope to keep everyone moving.

Students left for spring break and returned tan and suspiciously cheerful, having traded a meaningful number of brain cells and part of their liver for the experience. They all came back physically. But something stayed in Florida. You could see it in their eyes, that faraway look of someone who had briefly escaped and had not yet accepted that they hadn’t.

As the weather warmed, attention drifted toward the windows and away from the board. The same was true for me. By March, I was done pretending otherwise. I had graded enough papers and sat through enough meetings to know that when the sun finally showed up with intent, something shifted. The same projects were back, just with new due dates and the same dread. But it felt manageable. The days were getting longer. The end was finally in sight. The rhythm was doing what it always does, pulling everyone forward whether they were ready or not.

And then it was over. Students moved out. Graduation happened. And then the campus went quiet. Beautifully, mercifully quiet.

I have not stood in front of a classroom in years. But every March, something stirs anyway. Old habits. Old rhythms.

Which brings me to now.

What is my rhythm if not the academic year? The calendar year never made much sense to me. January has never felt like a beginning. Short days. Dark skies. Cold everything. January feels less like a beginning and more like a life sentence.

Then we spring forward, which feels like something designed by Satan. A small disruption, but enough to remind you how fragile the whole system is.

And then, almost without warning, it changes.

Spring arrives.

Spring is August of the academic year. It is January with actual hope. The grass turns green. Leaves return. Flowers push through the ground. And then there is that first warm Saturday where you find yourself standing outside for no reason at all, just because you can. That is when you know it is back.

And baseball season starts. There is something about opening day, the impossibly green grass, the crack of a bat, the unhurried pace of a game that refuses to hurry, that feels like the world exhaling after a long winter. On opening day, every team is undefeated. Every fan is a believer. For a while, that is enough.

Spring does not just arrive. It reminds you that things come back. That the world has a rhythm, and if you are patient enough, it finds you again. My wife, of course, already knew all of this.

Some of us just needed a few decades. And a March morning.

Gloria was right.

What the Day Means

This past weekend, many people celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. A massive snowstorm celebrated back. I missed the parade. I did our taxes.

Fair warning, this one is longer than most. I started writing and couldn’t stop. Hopefully you will indulge. Mothers deserve more attention.

I’m old enough to remember when St. Patrick’s Day was actually celebrated on March 17. Then someone probably decided it conflicted with March Madness and the next thing you know it’s drifting around the calendar like a bar promotion looking for a Saturday. Which, honestly, is all it ever was for most people. I just preferred the fiction.

Here’s what most people don’t know about March 17, nor do they care. It’s not St. Patrick’s birthday. It’s not the day he drove the snakes out of Ireland, and for the record, there apparently weren’t any snakes in Ireland to begin with, which makes that particular miracle less impressive upon reflection. We celebrate March 17 because it’s believed to be the day St. Patrick died, in 461 AD. The Irish built a party around a death anniversary. For me, that’s always been a strange thing to celebrate.

My mom was raised an Irish Catholic, and she loved St. Patrick’s Day the way she loved most things, fully, and with very little patience for people who didn’t. She loved a big party, loved an occasion, and could walk into a room full of strangers and leave knowing everyone. Not in a working-the-room way. In a genuine way. People wanted to be around her because being around her felt like something. She also had strong opinions about most things, and the wisdom to know when to share them, which turns out to be a much rarer combination than it sounds. She died on March 17, 2005, and I’m not a huge fan of this day. But here we are again, twenty-one years later, parade missed, taxes done, and I find myself back at this keyboard trying to figure out what this day is asking of me now and whether I have a better answer than I did the last time.

I’ve written about March 17 twice before. In 2022, I wrote about the sweater. Bright, multicolored, chosen by her on the last morning of her life. She had Parkinson’s for thirteen years and it took most of what made her her, slowly and without mercy. But that morning she picked the right sweater. In 2024, I wrote about standing on a sidewalk the day she died, holding the hand of a two-year-old who had no idea what had just happened and very much wanted to see some floats.

I didn’t want to go to that parade. I wanted to sit somewhere quiet and let the day be what it was. But he wanted to see the parade, and she would have wanted him to see it, and those two things together were enough to get me to the curb. He was completely, unreservedly delighted the way two-year-olds are, without conditions, without any awareness of what it cost the person next to him to be standing there. I was grateful for that. Uncomplicated joy turns out to be exactly what you need when everything else is the opposite of uncomplicated.

That two-year-old is an adult now, my son, and I’ve been thinking lately about how well he and my mom would have gotten along. They would have found each other immediately, compared notes, and spent a considerable amount of time making fun of me together, shamelessly and with great enthusiasm. I would have been irritated. I would have given anything for it.

He walks into a room and something shifts. Not in a loud way, he’s not performing anything. People just want to be near him, want to talk to him, want to know what he thinks. Strangers become less strange around him. He has opinions about everything, and like her, he knows exactly when to use them — and when to put them down in service of the people in the room. He reads the room the way some people read a clock, naturally and without thinking about it. He shows up for people, genuinely, reliably, in the ways that actually count. And he loves a good party, which in this family is less a preference than a personality trait passed down like eye color. And like her, he finds a way to get on camera. For the record, he will be missed this March Madness.

I’ve watched him in rooms the way I used to watch her in rooms, and the feeling is the same. The particular warmth of watching someone who doesn’t have to try to make people feel welcome because it never occurred to them that anyone might not be.

She never met him as the person he became. Parkinson’s had been taking her for years by the time he arrived, and she died when he was two, and the version of her that could have really known him, the sharp, funny, opinionated, life-of-the-party version, was already mostly gone by then. That’s the loss inside the loss, the one that doesn’t get talked about as much. It’s not just that he lost a grandmother. It’s that they lost each other, and neither of them got to know what they were missing.

But here’s the thing I’ve come to understand, slowly and without any dramatic moment of revelation. She didn’t disappear. She just carried forward. The warmth with strangers, the stubbornness, the peacemaking, the way a room feels different when he walks in, the absolute conviction that life is better with more people in it and the volume turned up, that’s not coincidence. That’s her, showing up in the next generation, wearing different clothes.

She would have recognized him immediately. And she would have adored him, and he would have adored her, and together they would have been a handful, and I mean that as the best possible thing I could say about either of them.

Here’s what twenty-one years teaches you. Grief doesn’t leave. It just stops being the loudest thing in the room. In the early years it’s everywhere. It answers your phone, comes to work with you, sits across from you at dinner and says nothing. But if you’re patient with it, and patient with yourself, it eventually learns to share the space. It lets other things back in, joy, distraction, a walk on a good morning. Twenty-one years in, grief and I have an arrangement. It gets March 17. I get the rest of the calendar.

Those words — your mother died — don’t stop being true. They just stop being the only thing that’s true. She loved a big party, she picked the right sweater, and somewhere in a son who lights up rooms and shows up for people and knows exactly when to say the right thing, she is still very much present. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to believe that. You just have to pay attention.

Life is worth showing up for. She knew that. Turns out, so does he.

This weekend I missed the parade and did our taxes. She would have had opinions about both. The taxes she would have understood, reluctantly. The missed parade she would have given me grief about for years, which, now that I think about it, would have been its own kind of gift. Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Mom. You would have loved this one. You’d have especially loved who else showed up.

The sweater is still here. And in all the ways that matter, so are you.

This is the third March 17 I’ve written about here. The first two are here and here. New readers, start there. Returning readers, thank you for coming back.

The next 30 million steps

Six years of walking at least 10,000 steps a day taught me a lot about perseverance. A fall in my driveway taught me even more about perspective.

In 1989, the first Life Alert commercial hit television. A woman on the floor yelling into a necklace: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

To a twenty-something watching it at the time, the whole scenario seemed absurd. That was a problem for Old People, somewhere far down the road, probably around the same time you start voluntarily eating bran for breakfast.

Life, of course, has a way of adjusting your perspective.

Given my recent fall in the driveway, that famous line suddenly felt less like a punchline and more like a documentary. Gravity made a convincing argument, and the driveway won the debate.

In last week’s blog post, I joked that only five people read the essay and two of them probably clicked the link by accident. At least I think I was joking. The analytics suggest I may not have been. But those five readers were clearly paying attention. Within hours I received several helpful suggestions, including one enthusiastic recommendation that I start “walking by five in the morning,” which I assume is now considered medical advice.

Last week also marked six years of walking at least 10,000 steps a day. Other than writing about it here, the milestone passed with almost no fanfare, which frankly felt appropriate. Nearly 30 million steps sounds impressive until you realize most of those miles were not heroic. They were cold mornings, windy afternoons, and sidewalks that could politely be described as uninspiring. Plenty of days the couch made a very strong closing argument. People assume a streak like that is about discipline or health, and those things matter. My knees appreciate it. My doctor probably does too. But after six years, I’ve realized the real benefit isn’t physical. Mostly, it’s perspective.

And perspective has a funny way of making you look at familiar things differently.

This week the streak continued, but I changed a few things up. Same commitment, just a slightly different angle.

One morning I walked a familiar route in the opposite direction, clockwise instead of counterclockwise. Another day the treadmill got involved, and I started playing with the incline and speed like a bored airline pilot. One morning I swapped the usual podcast for music.

Small adjustments, same routine. And something interesting happened. By making those subtle changes, I started noticing things in my own neighborhood that I hadn’t seen before. An electric utility box that had always been hidden from one direction but stood out clearly from the other. A tree I don’t remember ever seeing, even though it must have been there the entire time. I noticed the sunlight hitting houses, water, and the sidewalk differently depending on the angle. Turns out sometimes the only thing that changes is the direction you’re looking from.

It reminded me of something I once heard from pro golfer Dicky Pride. When Pride prepares for tournaments, he sometimes walks the course backward during practice rounds. Not playing it that way, obviously, just studying it.

His explanation stuck with me. Golf course designers are good at their jobs. They know exactly where players look and where the traps appear when you approach a hole the way it was designed to be played. From the tee forward, the course tells you a story.

Walk it backward and suddenly you see something else. You see where the trouble really sits, and you notice angles you missed. The fairway that looked generous from the tee suddenly looks a lot narrower when you’re standing on the green looking back. The bunkers make more sense, and the danger becomes clearer.

Same course, different perspective.

Six years ago I started walking because I wanted to feel better. What I didn’t realize was that the real value wouldn’t be the miles behind me. It would be the perspective that comes from continuing to put one foot in front of the other. The real story was never the first 30 million steps. It’s the next 30 million.

The weather is finally starting to warm up, which means Ginger is thrilled the streak continues. She has always been a strong advocate for additional walking. So tomorrow morning we’ll head out again, same sidewalks and same neighborhood, maybe clockwise, maybe counterclockwise. Sometimes the best way to see things differently is simply to keep walking — just from another direction, toward the next 30 million steps.

Six Years. Nearly 30 Million Steps. My Dog Is Thrilled.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Fair warning. If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know what is coming. I have written about this before. My five loyal readers are nodding. The other two are still trying to find the exit. Feel free to skim. I mostly write these for myself anyway. It is cheaper than therapy and the co pay is better. Still, stay with me. Maybe something here lands for you too.

January was brutal, and I wrote about it. Somehow it became the most viewed post in the five year history of this blog. Apparently the best thing I ever did for readership was fall down. February was merely hard, and through all of it there was the streak. Today it turns six years old.

That means two thousand one hundred ninety one consecutive days. Not one missed. No exceptions. At least 10,000 steps every single day.

Nearly 30 million steps. Over 13,000 miles. An average of 13,500 steps a day. Thirteen thousand miles, on foot, mostly on ordinary days.

The last two months tested the streak more than most. I am still hurting from the fall in January, and my neck and back remind me every morning that gravity won. Some days I stand up slowly and negotiate with muscles that are not interested in compromise. There were days, more than I would like to admit, when I considered letting it go because six years felt like a respectable number. Instead, I pressed on.

Here is what that actually looks like sometimes. It is 8:57 p.m. I am tired. The weather is ugly. My neck and back are staging a formal protest. And there I am, walking circles around the main floor of my house, because every loop is 75 steps and I still need 1,256.

It is not scenic. It is not Instagram worthy. It is a middle aged man shuffling past his own kitchen for the fourteenth time while his dog watches with concerned confusion. But the steps get done and the streak survives, and somewhere in that absurd little ritual is the whole point. Some days, showing up looks nothing like you imagined, and it counts anyway.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Six years of daily movement has not made me stronger. It has made me steadier and less dramatic about hard days. I am more willing now to do the small, boring thing that keeps everything else from unraveling. The change was not heroic or loud. It was ordinary, and it stuck.

Today feels like spring’s opening act. The snow has mostly surrendered. I spotted a robin doing that smug little robin thing like it never left, and the days are stretching longer. Year seven will not be about intensity. It will be about curiosity. I want new trails, new neighborhoods, and roads I have never turned down before, because discipline got me here and curiosity can take it from here.

That is where you come in. Yes, you, all five of you plus the two still searching for the exit. If you have a favorite two or three mile route, send it my way and consider it your contribution to year seven. I cannot promise I will get to all of them, but I can promise I will keep moving.

Six years ago this started as a way to survive a pandemic. Now it is the anchor in chaotic mornings and the release valve at the end of hard days. It is quiet proof that I showed up for myself again, even when showing up meant walking past my own kitchen for the fourteenth time.

If I am honest, though, I am not the one who benefits most. Spring means real walks again, trails and air that does not sting. It means doors that open on purpose and paws that hit pavement with enthusiasm. Discipline is easier when someone is waiting by the door.

She has watched the kitchen laps and endured the treadmill indignity. She has waited on cold mornings with complete certainty that today would be worth it. She was right, because six years and nearly 30 million steps later, it was never really about mileage. In the end, it was always about the dog.