Weekly Insights on Thriving in Our Third Act
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[073] Only God Can Count the Apples in One Seed
- Max J Miller
On a Friday call with his longtime creative sparring partner, a spontaneous answer to a simple question — what’s your calling? — surprises even the person who said it. This week’s Wisdom Wayfinder traces that sentence back to a manifesto written a year earlier, sits honestly with what three years of pursuing an unproven vision has actually cost, and lands on a Robert Schuller line about seeds and apples that reframes what “return on investment” even means for work like this.
[072] Poetry Before Dishes
- Max J Miller
A hand-lettered sign above Kim’s kitchen sink in North Carolina — poetry before dishes — becomes the opening for a harder question: why doesn’t retirement retire the compulsive habit of doing? Drawing on Heidegger’s idea that being is an act of courage, not an escape from one, this week’s Wisdom Wayfinder makes the case that real connection with another person only happens from the space of being — never from inside the doing-mind.
[071] What Shape Is The Pain?
- Max J Miller
Max came to a writing retreat in the mountains of North Carolina hoping to set some things down. The chronic inflammation that accompanies his kidney condition had other ideas. In this deeply personal issue — drawing on Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism, Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, and a morning walk where he asked his pain what shape it was — he explores the difference between understanding impermanence and actually dwelling in it. The practice doesn’t make the pain disappear. It offers something quieter and more radical: the freedom that lives inside the struggle itself.
[070] The Compound Effect of Becoming
- Max J Miller
Issue #69 ended with a question: What kind of person do I aspire to be? Issue #70 takes on the harder follow-up: How does that actually happen? Drawing on Aristotle’s phronesis, the mathematics of compounding, and ten years of a fitful but faithful meditation practice, Max explores how we become — slowly, invisibly, and more reliably than we dare hope. He also makes the case that our non-virtuous compounding, claimed honestly and shaped into story, may be the most generous gift we can offer the generations that follow.
[069] The Difference Between Following Rules and Becoming Someone
- Max J Miller
In the summer of 1983, a young Max J. Miller trekked to Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri school in the Swiss Alps, hoping for intellectual clarity — and left disillusioned. Four decades later, a single passage from Stephen Batchelor’s new book Buddha, Socrates, and Us gave him the framework he’d been missing. The distinction between ethics and morality — between following an inherited code and aspiring to become someone — may be one of the most clarifying lenses available to us in this fractured cultural moment. And it turns out Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus were all pointing at the same thing.
[068] Somewhere Around the Michigan Border
- Max J Miller
After his stepmother’s memorial in Illinois, Max returned home carrying an inventory of things beyond his control — an injured brother who pushed reconciliation away again, an unexplained estrangement, a kidney transplant on hold, and the ambient uncertainty of being 69 in a mortal body. In this deeply personal issue, he reaches for the Stoics and Viktor Frankl and begins exploring what may be the hardest wisdom practice of all: genuine self-compassion for losses that are real and circumstances that aren’t ours to fix.
[067] Divinely Inspired — and Deliberately Vague
- Max J Miller
After a family gathering where a cousin reflected his own wisdom back to him, Max goes looking for a cleaner definition — turning to the Hebrew wisdom texts, the book of James, and the Sermon on the Mount. What he finds is instructive: even the most celebrated wisdom literature in human history prefers to circle, contrast, and illustrate rather than define. Maybe wisdom can’t be downloaded. Maybe it has to be lived into.
[066] Impressions of Wisdom
- Max J Miller
This week begins something new — an open inquiry I plan to carry through the rest of the year, into what wisdom actually is, and what it asks of us. I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think the question itself might be the point. I hope you’ll sit with it alongside me.
[065] What Is Wisdom to You?
- Max J Miller
This week begins something new — an open inquiry I plan to carry through the rest of the year, into what wisdom actually is, and what it asks of us. I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think the question itself might be the point. I hope you’ll sit with it alongside me.
[064] Beyond Optimism: A Third Act Credo
- Max J Miller
I’ll be honest with you — this one came from a place I don’t always write from. A place of genuine uncertainty, and something that might be called frayed faith in the world I thought I understood. A long conversation with a trusted friend cracked it open. What emerged surprised me. I hope it lands somewhere useful for you.
About Author
MAX J MILLER
From 9-year-old ventriloquist to Walt Disney Imagineer to ghostwriter, Max J. Miller’s career has been a journey of hiding in plain sight. Today he’s helping retirees do the opposite—embracing their wisdom, telling their stories, and living with renewed purpose.
Through The Wisdom Wayfinder, Max calls elders to become cultural heroes and leave a legacy of meaning that extends far beyond money or bucket lists.
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