Most folks who have found their way into the field of “sleep” have an “AHA!” moment to share, something that changed them, made them see things differently, made them follow a new course. Everybody’s moment is different. This is mine… 

When a project like this moves forward, you have a thousand little choices that you make, so it helps to listen carefully to what the Universe is trying to tell you. Some messages are faint, some are hard to miss. The message I’ve been getting has been so loud, it’s almost deafening.

The Elephant in the Room is the fracturing of our health care system itself…

I’ve been thinking recently about the real meaning of the word collaboration, about what it feels like to truly be in a collaborative state. I know that it’s something more than just 500 people all getting into the same building to broadcast their message, to show the slides of truth, as seen from their silo.

What I actually discovered was my own ignorance, leading me on a journey that took me through time, space, friendship, music and love, seeking for a way to make the journey of Sleep Apnea feel whole, for both providers and patients.

The construct has become the reality. The monster is fully awake.

Hear that? That steady drip, drip, drip? That’s the ugly sound of venture capitalists drooling.

Today, I wanted to write an essay about walking between the raindrops, finding silver linings, and making lemonade, and…well…it just kept coming around to the same image.

So, I figured I’d go with that.

I must have seen hundreds—heck, maybe even thousands—of folks like this. Left behind, by a system that did things mechanically, each step of the way determining what happened next, resulting in the same dumb failure, over and over again, like a person falling down the stairs in slow motion.

And what she said next contained several words which I will not repeat here, though all of it was delivered in a very measured and reasonable-sounding speaking voice.

I’ll leave it at this, dear readers: she enthusiastically declined.

I stepped into that beartrap nearly every day, trying to figure out how it works, and sometimes I got pretty banged up by it.

For some of us, the Hut may be the most important place of all.

If my sister had one super-power (there are many in her life who would claim she had several) I believe it was an innate core belief that every human being was beautiful. She was like that, ever since she was a kid.

Woody Guthrie famously said of his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Along those lines, I think the cartoon caption underneath the hand-knotted bowtie is this: This Machine Resurrects Ghosts.

When it rains, it pours, the saying goes. Also this: sometimes, it rains so much that it feels like it will drain the landscape out from under you.

In the world of SLEEP, if there’s one specialty that gets it, it’s myofunctional therapy.

Oh, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s a pro tip: if you want to suck the life out of everything that you do, try telling yourself that you’re going to make it perfect.

Small, fulcrum moments like these, however, can trigger seismic changes. A life can be reborn. A soul can connect with meaning.

In the three decades I’ve been drawing Claudio Mahoney, to my astonishment, he has never fallen in Love. He’s been on dates, he’s been dismissed, he’s been forgotten. But never in Love.

Poor devil.

…I’m not going to talk about America, during this Independence Day blog post. Instead,  I’m inclined to talk about something much more basic. Something we Americans legendarily embrace.

I woke up thinking about a funny little trait called Wisdom.