I wish I was a little bit taller

Happy New Year everyone! (Today's edition means a lot to me.)

Five years ago today, I received an unexpected email that changed my life.

It came in reply to that year's installment of my annual tradition of starting the new year by publishing a list of inspirational quotes -- the very first thing with my byline that always hits the Interwebs at 12:01 a.m. on New Year's Day.

(Here’s this year’s edition; I have to make sure I include a link!)

That year was the fourth installment, and I was about done with the idea. Finding the quotes was fun, but it was time-consuming. Also, formatting what amounts to a single, 10,000-word article on Inc.com each year was always a bear.

I'd make a small change, accidentally mess up the HTML, and find myself alone at my in-laws’s house in the middle of the night, trying to find some stray piece of code, while everyone else was dreaming of sugarplums.

Seriously, 2020 was almost my Waterloo. But having invested so much into it (and fully aware of the irony of someone who writes a lot about business deciding to ignore the sunk cost fallacy), I drove on, finished the quotes, and scheduled it to publish.

Then I forgot about it all until I got the email. (Trigger warning, it talks about ending one's life.) Here’s part of what it said:

Hi Bill. You may never read this, but I wanted to thank you, anyway.

I was going to kill myself today. I cry as I type this. ...

Then, by chance, I opened your article of quotes for 2020. I read them all. Every one of them.

[Y]ou saved a life ... My guess is that you, single-handedly most likely saved a few other lives [too]. Thank you.

I replied immediately, thanked this person, and asked them to call the suicide hotline number. Truly, I wondered: What else do I do now?

We corresponded a few more times. I asked for and received permission to quote the email and tell the story -- although I've stripped out some personal details, as you might imagine.

Over time they stopped replying, but I saw that I had a new newsletter subscriber with the same email address, and I could see in the dashboard that they read Understandably fairly regularly.

Life went on, of course. As cathartic as this whole experience was in January 2020 -- you might remember there was a little thing called the Covid-19 pandemic, and the world went crazy. Our family’s life was no exception.

One story we Murphys can all laugh about now (can’t we?) is how I did a back-of-the-envelope math calculation of my expected tax liability before sending the documents to my CPA not long after this (also probably my best friend since long before he was a CPA)—and I made a very basic error in the process that basically qualified me for the anxiety Olympics.

Basically, a few misplaced decimal points left me utterly convinced (incorrectly!) that may family was headed for bankruptcy in the middle of a global health crisis.

That was fun! Just ask my amazing wife!

Occasionally, even in the midst of all that, I would think about the person who sent me the New Year's Day email. But it was a busy year and I mostly put it all out of mind until I started on the 2021 quotes list.

You might guess where this is going. I looked up the email address in the Understandably reader statistics. No opens for quite a while.

I searched the Internet. I found an obituary.

I went through some serious emotions. I had been so incredibly proud and grateful to realize that a tradition I'd kept going had actually saved a life!

But then, it wasn't enough. I don't want to say exactly how long in order to keep the person’s identity private, but less than a year, clearly.

Eventually, I came to appreciate that ultimately, if the quotes article had helped this person to live one more day, or one more month—or heck, even one more minute, it was something.

That made me reassess the value of every mine of life in general. Turning 50 probably affected this, too. Sure, I still hope I have a lot of life left, and I hope that I can do some good things with my time.

But like any limited resource, it gets more valuable as you have less of it.

Also, I began to realize that the value of life itself doesn't really depend on circumstances. It's all valuable—all of it.

Sure, we all have moments when we wish life were a little different: more money, fewer worries, happier, whatever. You might remember this classic song (if not, it’s still pretty cool IMHO):

I wish I was a little bit taller

I wish I was a baller

I wish I had a girl who looked good I would call her ...

That song is now 30 years old, but it's funny how often those lyrics pop into my head.

I'm 5 foot 7 and a comically horrible basketball player so the first two lines were always pretty apt. (But I do have the girl who looks good now!)

Still, I'll bet you could write your own version. It doesn't have to rhyme:

I wish I was a little bit better with back-of-the-envelope math.

I wish I had found the magic elixir prescription that helped me get my anxiety and some of my ADHD under control earlier in life.

I wish maybe my wife and I hadn't taken an entire almost 20-year hiatius between breaking up and getting back together and getting married ...

I should come around to the point(s). There are a few.

First, isn’t it wild that it too me half a century of living to really believe that even the toughest, most painful moments mean something and are valuable? Arguably even the most evil moments are too, although that's a Jesuitical debate that I can't fit in one newsletter.

In fact, if you view life itself as a gift from God, then those toughest moments are part of the gift itself. (Hat tip: Stephen Colbert.)

Second, who knows how many positive ways the person who sent me that email might have touched other people's lives during the additional time they told me that the quotes article bought them?

It's mind-boggling.

Finally, and most cyclically, this experience changed my ranking of the best inspirational quotes of all time. (How's that for cyclical?)

I'd said for years, in almost every edition of the quotes, that I had two top favorites:

• "The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow." -- H.G. Wells

• "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all." -- Helen Keller (popular version).

Wells keeps his place; that's a good one. (See, for example, my story about the back-of-the-envelope math error above.)

But as inviting and understandable as the (misquoted) Helen Keller sentiment is, it sort of flies in the face of my whole meandering realization.

In short, life doesn't depend on adventure for its value. Adventure has value, but it’s separate.

Honestly, this hit me like a brick -- and when I found myself summing it up, I realized that much like my Skee-Lo "I Wish" song lyrics reference above, it was well-articulated in pop lyrics that had been hanging out in the recesses of my ADHD-addled subconscious for decades.

Are you ready?

Of all things -- of all things! -- it's the opening line of the theme song of the 1975 sitcom, One Day at a Time:

"This is it. This is life, the one you get."

I don't even think I was ever allowed to watch that TV show; granted I was about 5 years old at the time, so I probably wasn't interested.

Still, it somehow seeped in. It really hit me, probably more than anyone watching Valerie Bertinelli with a teenage crush back in the 1970s:

It doesn’t matter if you wish you were taller or better at math: This is it! This is life!

(I included that quote as the very last one in today's new installment of 365 Inspirational Quotes for 2025, which you can find here. Yes, this is the second link to that installment, but maybe you’ve forgotten by now.)

Anyway, here are my wishes for everyone reading this as we start a new year:

• First, file away those random pop culture references. You never know when they come in handy and wind up meaning much more than you imagined.

• Second, I hope you have times this year especially, when you hear out of the blue that something you did had an unexpected and positive effect on someone else.

• Finally, as for the new year itself, we’ll all have good days and bad days. I hope you can find reasons to be grateful for and inspired by every single one of them.

(No 7 other things today; this was a long one and it took a bit out of me. Thanks for reading!)