Moment in the Rain
The world feels heavy right now.
Everywhere you look, something is breaking, shouting, or demanding to be solved. Wars. Elections. Markets. Layoffs. AI hype. AI fear. An endless stream of things too big for any one person to carry.
But today in Asheville, in a quiet December rain, something small cut through all that noise.
I was inside the apartment, working.
Writing code. Fixing small things. Cleaning floors. Thinking about how to build the flywheel for a platform that measures how AI remembers the world. My brain was in ten places at once.
And then I glanced out the window.
There was my 88-year-old father — turning 89 soon — hauling mulch.
Forty loads. In the rain.
Head down. Steady. No complaints. Just working.
In that instant, everything else shrank.
All the global problems, all the abstractions of AI and startups and markets, all the stress — it blurred into the background. And this one simple image came into focus:
A man who left Korea with nothing.
Who gave up a PhD in econometrics at the University of Michigan because he didn’t have the money to finish and still bring his family to America.
Who learned English late.
Who worked any job he could find.
And who, at 88, still refuses to sit still while there’s work to be done.
Whatever else my childhood was, he gave me this:
a motor that doesn’t quit.
That sight — my father hauling mulch in the rain while I’m inside wrestling with code and categories and systems — hit me harder than any headline.
It reminded me that beneath all the complexity, life is still built on simple acts of care and effort:
One wheelbarrow at a time.
One apartment repaired.
One line of code.
One small act of love that nobody will ever write an article about.
In a season where the world feels cracked and loud, I’m trying to practice something simple:
Zoom in.
Find one small moment.
Let it be enough.
Today, that moment was my father in the rain, hauling mulch like it’s 1975 and we’re just getting started.
From my family to yours:
Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.
I hope you always have time to haul mulch.
-Sam