[068] Somewhere Around the Michigan Border

Story #068

Somewhere Around the Michigan Border

Max J Miller

July 6, 2026

I flew to Illinois last week carrying something I don’t usually pack for memorials: hope.

My younger brother — who suffered a traumatic head injury years ago that has profoundly altered his emotional landscape — had told a cousin he hoped the memorial might be an occasion for reconciliation. I heard that, and something in me quietly opened.

It didn’t happen. He was there. We were there. And then, as has happened before, he pushed us away again.

After the memorial, I drove to Michigan with my cousin Amy, carrying something heavy on my heart. At first, it felt like anger. I’ve done enough work to know that anger at my brother would be like being angry at the weather. Deeper down, I sensed grief. His injury is real. His suffering is real. What he cannot access emotionally is not a choice. But the loss is real too, and I let myself feel it.

After Amy and I visited the Obama Library (very inspiring, but more on that another time), I found myself reaching — almost instinctively — for the oldest wisdom I know on this particular subject.

The Dichotomy of Control

Epictetus was a former slave who became one of the ancient world’s most influential philosophers. He knew something about circumstances beyond his control. His foundational teaching, recorded in The Enchiridion, opens with a clarity that still lands like cold water:

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor, Stoic student, and a man who governed an empire while watching children die and wars grind on — kept returning to the same distinction in his private journals:

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

I’ve known these ideas for years. I’ve written about these ideas several times here in The Wisdom Wayfinder. And yet, sitting with so many matters beyond my control — with a brother I cannot reach, another brother who has chosen distance, a body that needs a new kidney and no longer has a donor, and the general ambient uncertainty of being 69 in a mortal body — I felt their weight differently, urgently.

The Inventory

Let me be honest about what’s currently outside my control, because I think there’s something useful in naming it plainly rather than dressing it up:

My injured brother’s capacity for reconciliation is not mine to determine. His injury changed him in ways neither of us chose. I can show up — and I did — but I cannot make the door open.

My other brother’s estrangement is perplexing. After our mother passed, I expressed my desire to stay more connected in our retirement years than we have during our careers. He wrote me a long letter that boiled down to “I don’t have the bandwidth to maintain a relationship with you.” I don’t fully understand it. I’ve made attempts to respond to his “Dear Max” letter. I’m stumped.

My health is in a state of active uncertainty. I’m listed for a kidney transplant. The live donor I had — a generous soul who stepped forward — recently developed his own kidney problems and had to withdraw. The waiting continues. The body does what bodies do.

And then there is simply this: I am 69. The effects and uncertainties of aging are no longer abstract. They show up in the mirror and in the body, and frequently at three in the morning.

I’m not listing these to invite pity — I have a rich and genuinely fortunate life, and I know it. I’m listing them because I suspect many of you are carrying your own version of this inventory. The person who won’t reconcile. The diagnosis. The donor who had to step back. The birthday that felt more like a threshold than a celebration.

What do we do with what we cannot fix?

What Viktor Frankl Found

Viktor Frankl survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He lost his wife, his parents, and his brother. He arrived at a conclusion that has outlasted nearly everything else written in that era:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

The Stoics and Frankl are separated by nearly two thousand years, but they are having the same conversation. What is mine? My response. My attitude. My willingness to show up even when the outcome is not mine to determine.

I showed up in Illinois. I brought my open hands. My brother couldn’t take what I was offering — not because he didn’t want to, but because something in him is broken in ways that aren’t his fault and aren’t mine to repair.

That is a grief. And it is also, somehow, enough.

I can keep showing up. I can keep my hands open. That’s mine.

The Part I’m Still Learning

I want to be careful not to wrap this too neatly.

The Stoic framework is clarifying — even liberating. But there’s a version of it that becomes an emotional bypass. Just focus on what you can control can quietly become don’t feel what you’re feeling. And I don’t think that’s Stoic wisdom. I think that’s avoidance wearing a toga.

What I’m working on — and I use the present tense deliberately — is something that sits alongside the Stoic discipline: self-compassion. Not self-pity and definitely not resignation. But a genuine kindness toward myself for the losses that are real, the uncertainty that is real, the aging that is real.

My cousin Amy told me last week that she thought I’d become quite wise in my third act. I received that — didn’t deflect it, didn’t dismiss it. But I also know that wisdom isn’t a destination I’ve arrived at. It’s a practice I can return to, imperfectly, every day.

Some days, the practice looks like grace in a difficult conversation.

Some days it looks like crying on I-94 and then choosing, somewhere around the Michigan border, to keep driving.

something that was never yours to control — and what might become possible if you set that weight down?

Shine,

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