When an Email at 2:00 a.m. Changes Everything

Few of us really know the impact we are having on others

3 min readNov 28, 2022

I t was a bone cold night in January, four hours after my wife and kids had gone to bed and I was sitting alone in my man cave with nothing but a laptop and the painful recognition that even though I had written five books, created a successful company, and supported my family for the past 15 years, I had yet to accomplish a single meaningful thing in my life.

This is a feeling most writers know all too well, the moon-howling moment when they recognize that their early promise of genius has not yet borne fruit — the kind of feeling, I imagine, at least partially responsible for Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear, a man who had sold only a single painting in his entire life, and to his brother, at that, a man he knew was buying mostly out of pity.

It was at precisely at this moment, too late to be early and too early to be late, that I just happened to glance down at my inbox and noticed an email coming in from someone whose name I did not recognize — a name with a lot of consonants and very few vowels

Clearly, this email wasn’t from a friend of mine. No. It was from a stranger, a man from Croatia, he explained, with a terminal disease – someone who had been reading my blog for the past five years and now that he had only three months left to live, wanted me know that last night’s posting had touched him in a way that filled his entire being with gratitude. An oasis it was for him, he explained — a place where he could rest, renew, and breathe.

This man, whose name I could not pronounce and whom I had never met, was writing to me at 2:00 a.m. to express his gratitude and request that no matter what happened in my life from this day forward, I continue to write no matter what.

At that moment, time stopped for me. Space, too. I just sat there, stunned, sobbing, my body shaking in a way I had never experienced before.

FOOD FOR BEYOND THOUGHT: Who of us doesn’t feel hopeless from time to time — useless, disillusioned, despairing — our grand hopes and dreams not having materialized in the way we imagined they would?

If you are a human being you have had this experience — and if you haven’t, you will. It comes with the territory of being alive. But what also comes with the territory are moments like the one I had in the middle of the night with the dying man from Croatia – a moment when the universe lets us know that what we have done and what we are doing matters.

It does. Never lose faith in that. Never.

It has nothing to do with numbers. It has nothing to do with fame or fortune. It has to do with feeling — deep, deep feeling — the feeling of knowing in your heart of hearts that you have made your best effort and that someone, somewhere, somehow will be on the receiving end of the power of life that moves within you to express itself.