The One Gift We All Carry Equally

Dear Friend,

I read this and thought of you because you are one of the most genuinely present people I know — and lately I've been wondering if you even realize how rare that is. I stumbled across this story and sat with it for a long time afterward, the way you sit with something that rearranges a few things quietly inside you.

It's told by a chiropractor named Scott Levine, and it begins with a crash. He was flying down a hill on his bike one morning when a woman leaned out her car window and warned him to slow down. His exact thought was, What does she know? I'm a great bike rider. Minutes later he tumbled over the hood of a car, his head hitting metal, traffic stopping all around him. He wasn't badly hurt, but lying there in the road he felt something shift. Three days earlier he had told his wife he wanted to separate. He had grown up in a house full of yelling and screaming, and he was carrying all of that unprocessed weight fast down the hill. The collision, he said, was a wake-up call. Something in him said: I need to figure this out.

What followed was nine years of losing almost everything — his marriage, a twenty-two-year clinic that collapsed financially while he was at a festival in Costa Rica and received a photo of an eviction notice on his door, the structures and paperwork and certainties he had always leaned on. And somehow, in the losing, he found the thing he had been building toward all along.

What surprised me most was this: he started meditating and noticed that when he did it alone, he felt lonely. But in a room full of strangers doing the same meditation — eyes closed, not touching, not speaking — he felt more connected than he had in years. That observation became a spark. He eventually built something called WishWell, an app where you gift someone a minute of your presence. You hold the vision of them already living their wish, already in their joy. The science behind it is something he spent years learning to trust: I can hold your wish for you better than you can hold it for yourself. You're attached to the wanting and the fear it won't come. Someone who loves you isn't. They can simply hold the frequency of it coming true.

He watched a waitress in Mexico come running down a sidewalk three months later — my wish came true — her dream of owning a restaurant suddenly real. At a festival in Texas, a woman running a nonprofit called Joy's Kitchen received fifty thousand dollars from a complete stranger within hours of being held in that kind of intention. I don't know exactly what to make of all of it, and I'm still thinking about it.

But the line I keep returning to is this one: Presence is the one gift we all arrive on this Earth carrying in equal measure. Not money, not time, not talent — presence. He spent decades believing he had to do more and know more to be worth anything, and it took losing nearly everything to discover that the truest thing he had to offer was simply his attention and his intention, his heart turned fully toward another person.

I think about how often I hand my attention over to things that don't deserve it, and how rarely I offer it as deliberately as this story suggests we can.

I'd love to know — is there someone in your life right now who you feel like you haven't truly turned toward in a while? I'm asking myself the same thing this week.

With love,

Your friend