Surf the Seesaw: Unconventional Essays on Balance, Beauty, and Meaning in Life shares with readers your insights on how to build a purposeful life with less drama and achieve a life balance. Why was this an important book for you to write?

All writers, whether fiction or non-fiction, write because they have seen something important about reality and they want others to see what they have seen. That is certainly true of me; I write to share something true.

I think fiction attracts us especially with its elegant use of narrative and its indirect approach to revelation. Often times in comparison, non-fiction is terribly boring and intolerably preachy. So, though Surf the Seesaw is clearly a non-fiction work, I’ve tried to incorporate the features of fiction literature that I love: the narrative scene-setting and the indirect approach to revelation that allows the material to morph uniquely in each reader’s mind.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

Well, that is a question worthy of roughly 220 pages! In a nutshell, I would say that I wrote the book with my children and grandchildren in mind, with the idea of sharing a few handfuls of key concepts that when properly understood can transform a human lifetime into something spectacular – something with so many positive consequences that the universe’s norm of entropy will have a hard time erasing the evidence of the person’s existence.

What is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were younger?

You can do hard things. In fact, most of the worthwhile things on which you can choose to spend your time are hard things.

In western culture, we glorify the natural gift and the extraordinary imagination, which programs many young people that life is supposed to be easy. Human beings evolved to tackle immense challenges and reshape our world to our vision – through the hardest of efforts. But, the culture’s present obsession with imagination and natural skill can turn a young human of near limitless potential into something more akin to water: lazily flowing to the lowest point.

I wish I had been exposed to the power of tenacity and discipline earlier in life. But, the good news is life taught me those lessons anyway – albeit in a more painful way.

What is one thing readers take away from your book?

The magic is in the middle. Extremes are almost always destructive, but for various reasons human beings are blindly attracted to extremes. Surf the Seesaw is full of stories on a wide variety of topics, but most of them share the common thread is active balance: the most productive and harmonious solution to important challenges is to operate in a zone in which we constantly, actively balance two ideas in tension with one another. To maintain active balance is to turn tension in to power, like in a dynamo.

That is actually the source of the book’s title. Surfing the seesaw is standing on top of the seesaw with each foot on opposite sides of the fulcrum, and actively working to keep both seats in the air. It’s one of my favorite memories from childhood, and it captures visually the core idea of the book.

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