Sources of Meaning

Much of my professional life has been organized around enduring questions: How do people come to know who they are? What gives life meaning? How do belonging, place, memory, and daily activity shape a life over time?

Those questions did not arise only from scholarship. They also grew out of experience—from people who influenced me, places to which I return in memory, lessons learned over time, words that steadied and guided me, and a growing conviction that gratitude and stewardship are central to a life of meaning.

People Who Inspired Me

No life is self-made. Mine has been influenced both by great figures whose words and witness have endured across time and by mentors, friends, and family members whose example touched my life more directly. Among those who have especially mattered to me are Jesus Christ, Lao Tzu, St. Benedict, St. Francis of Assisi,  Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Different as they were, each represents qualities I have long admired: moral courage, compassion, humility, disciplined conviction, service, and devotion to purposes larger than the self.

I have also been influenced by people I have known personally, some still with us and others no longer here, including retired Brigadier General Donald Wagner, Dr. Armin Weinberg, the late Drs. Gary Kielhofner and Kenneth Ottenbacher, my late Uncle Paul Christiansen, and my wife Dr. Beth Jones. These individuals, along with many others too numerous to name, have brought something distinctive into my life—friendship, intellectual depth, steadiness, encouragement, loyalty, or an example of disciplined commitment. Their influence reminds me that who we become is shaped not only by ideas, but by the character and presence of those who accompany us along the way, including the many friends and family members whose quiet kindness has enriched my life.

Places I Return To

There are places to which I return not only in travel or recollection, but inwardly. Madison, South Dakota, Gladstone, Oregon and Grand Forks, North Dakota remain important to me because they were the settings for several key events in my second decade of life, a formative period marked by growth, anticipation, discovery, and mistakes that became lasting lessons. They were home to my first stirrings of a larger sense of possibility. Portland, Oregon and Multnomah Falls, Oregon evoke family roots, memory, and enduring emotional ties. The Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon calls forth reverence, remembrance, and gratitude. and the place I choose to be laid to rest.

Other places hold a different but equally lasting significance. British Columbia remains vivid in my memory for its extraordinary topography and for the especially happy years I spent teaching at the University of British Columbia. Galveston, Texas is deeply meaningful because it was the setting for important years of my academic and professional life. Glacier and Waterton Parks, bordering the U.S./ remain places of beauty, reflection, and renewal.

I have never thought of place as incidental to a life. The places we inhabit, love, and remember become part of our inner story. They hold memory, deepen feeling, and give continuity to a life.

Lessons Learned Over Time

I have come to believe that people thrive best in groups and communities where they are known, valued, and connected to purposes beyond themselves. I have also learned that life-changing mistakes can be made when emotion clouds the mind, which is why self-discipline matters so deeply. It is not only a safeguard of integrity, but also a condition of kindness. I believe humility, integrity, compassion, and gratitude are among the true fundamentals of character.

I have also come to see time as one of the great currencies of love. How we spend it, share it, or fail to give it reveals much about what we value. I also believe that moral courage is essential to a flourishing society, and that daring to be bold in key situations carries a certain magic, as long as it is guided by care, conscience, and sound judgment.

Another lesson I have never forgotten is that names are more than words. When ones meet a person for the first time—especially someone you expect to see again—it’s worth making the effort to remember their name. Early in my career, when I was a Captain in the Air Force, I admired a general who made a conscious practice of learning the names of everyone he met, not only senior officers, but everyone. He understood that few things communicate respect more clearly than remembering a person’s name.

Words That Have Guided Me

The words that have guided me have come mainly from leaders, scripture, and readings I encountered at important moments in life. Some offered moral direction, some consolation, and some a language for values I had sensed before I could fully articulate them. Over time, I have come to appreciate how deeply words can influence not only thought, but character.

Among the passages that have remained especially important to me is John 3:16. For me, it speaks not only of faith, but of love, grace, sacrifice, and hope. It points beyond self-interest and toward a larger moral and spiritual horizon.

Another phrase that has stayed with me so deeply that I have worn it engraved on a silver wristband is Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est—“Where charity and love are, God is there.” Its meaning is both simple and profound. It expresses a conviction that love, compassion, and moral presence are not secondary things in life, but among its deepest truths.

I have also long valued the Apostle Paul’s counsel in Philippians 4:8 to dwell on what is true, noble, just, pure, lovely, and worthy of praise. And I have been moved by poetry, including Mary Oliver’s reminder in Wild Geese that “you do not have to be good” or “walk on your knees for a hundred miles, repenting.” Those lines have always seemed to me a humane reminder that grace begins with mercy toward oneself and extends outward into compassion for others.

Gratitude and Stewardship

My understanding of gratitude deepened after the sudden death of my close friend Gary Kielhofner. His passing left me with the painful realization that I had not fully communicated how much I admired him and how much his friendship had meant to me. Out of that loss grew my Panamanian Balboa silver dollar tradition. I began collecting these coins, minted in the country and year of my birth, to give as symbolic amulets or keepsakes, with the hope that they might someday be passed down in like fashion. Over time, the gesture became for me a way of recognizing, colleagues, friends, family and even strangers, whose kindness, loyalty, goodness, or quiet example had touched my life. It also became a way of affirming that kindness is one of humanity’s vital forms of sustenance.

Gratitude, however, calls for more than remembrance. It also asks something of us. My own sense of stewardship has found expression in endowed scholarships at the American Occupational Therapy Foundation and at The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), as well as an endowed professorship in Occupational Therapy at UTMB. Board service, volunteerism, and a commitment to peaceful activism for social justice are also part of that response.

I have come to believe that community is essential to both human survival and human flourishing, and that each of us bears some responsibility for helping to build and sustain it to the extent that we are able. Those who have been blessed with more, have, in my view, an obligation to give more as a tangible expression of gratitude.

A Final Reflection

Who we are— our identities —are shaped not only by traits or roles, but by the experiences that become part of the story we tell ourselves about our lives. We are always revising that story as we live, seeking a narrative that feels coherent, truthful, and meaningful, not only to ourselves but, one hopes, to others as well.

Much of human life is bound up with that longing: to believe that our loves, commitments, failures, losses, and acts of care amount to more than disconnected events, but instead form a life with purpose. And if, as a sentiment often attributed to Emerson suggests, we can believe our brief presence in this wondrous and mysterious universe has made some positive difference, then we may truly be said, in Whitman’s memorable phrase, to have "contributed a verse."