I just read your wonderful essay on Oprah’s website. My wife Marcia, to whom I have been happily married for 40 years, watches Oprah’s show religiously, taping it every day and sometimes making me watch it when she thinks I will profit from it. To be asked to be on Oprah’s website is a “feather in your cap.”

But as you point out, life’s true riches are not about accumulating feathers but finding one’s spiritual center and being able to share the love one has for oneself with others, and as you do–inspire them to be themselves, authentically and courageously. As one whose career was “teaching teachers” (primarily secondary teachers), I often told my prospective teachers something they probably knew intuitively–namely, that no matter what subject they taught, they always taught who they were. Kids see through phoniness in special ways; that’s why Holden Caulfield has a special place in our literary imagination and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger continues to sell millions of copies. When I reread this book two years ago for a talk I was giving, I noticed something more clearly than I had noticed before–something that Holden’s beloved sister Phoebe points out to him after he has flunked out of his fourth prep school and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown—that Holden likes virtually nothing but especially does not like himself. Unfortunately Holden cannot really face that painful truth–the truth shared by a vast majority of people in our society (my view). Your work–perhaps your life’s purpose–is to restore people’s faith in who they are–deep down–where it really matters. It is important work and I am confident you are doing it with the genuine passion that comes through in your articles and talks.

With every good wish.

Michael Katz

In any case, I think your beloved father Eddie must be looking down with a big smile on his face–a bigger smile than he might have had when you struct out the side pitching for Stanford. I know he wanted nothing more than for you to be happy, and to live your life doing what you believe in and what makes you passionate is one of the sources of happiness, along with loving relationships, and as you suggest here, a deeply grounded sense of one’s self worth that does not come from external things but from something deeply internal. That something internal is my own sense of being connected to a spiritual source and being connected to everyone else in the same deeply spiritual way.

Here are a couple of my favorite lines:

1) From Jack Kornfield and A Path with Heart: Beware of climbing the ladder; it might be against the wrong wall.”

2) From Indar to Salim (two characters in V.S. Naipaul’s A BEND IN THE RIVER–wonderful book about east Africa): “We create ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

I believe we are placed here on this planet for two reasons: a) to serve others and to grow (in creativity, wisdom, compassion, etc.); you are helping people fulfull these purposes and in the process achieve what Aristotle viewed as our essential end in life–”happiness” –defined not as pleasure or going for the gusto, but as a deep sense of well being.

Onwards with your work. And my personal best to your family with special “hellos” to your mom Lois, and your sister Lori.

Wishing you the best,

Michael Katz (now joyfully retired)