[From The Connection Cure archive — originally published in 2021]

Five years ago, armed with an empty olive jar, some dirt, and a bunch of rocks and pebbles, I taught my students the only lesson that would ever really matter. 

They wouldn’t know this then. And neither would I—until I remembered the lesson last April, when the only person I’d ever known to actually live by it had died. 

The lesson takes just three minutes: open the olive jar and fill it with the big rocks. Ask the students if it’s full (They say ‘yes’).  Then add the pebbles, close the jar, and shake until they fill the rocks’ empty-spaces-between. Ask the students if the jar is full (They say ‘yes’). Then repeat with dirt. Students, again, agree it’s full. 

The kicker comes when you empty the jar—the rocks, the pebbles, and the dirt— and start over. This time, put the dirt in first. Ask the students if the jar is full (They say ‘no’). Then add the pebbles (Still ‘no’). By the time you try to add the rocks, there’s no room left in the jar.

Then, in your best soapbox tone, tell the students how the rocks represent the most important things in their lives: the people they care about. The pebbles represent things that matter, but less: work, hobbies, and passions. And the dirt is everything else: ‘likes’ and ‘views’ and the stock market and BravoTV all of the small stuff that sucks our attention, even when we know it doesn’t matter. “If you put the dirt in the jar first, there’s no room for the rocks,” you tell them, still soapboxing. “But if you’ve got the ‘rocks’ and lose everything else, your jar is still full.”

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Of course, the lifelong work of following the jar lesson is much harder than teaching it. It’s not that we don’t love our rocks, and we’re reminded just how much during breakups and birthdays and pandemics. But the day-to-day work of cherishing our rocks doesn’t come naturally, when most of our activities and attentions point us to dirt; ‘feeds’ and hacks and packed-calendars that instruct us to save the cash and the calories and the hours so that we have more freedom and more time, until something or someone shakes our jars and reminds us to ask: what are you saving it for, anyway? 

Joe McGivney knew. And he spent his life—or at least each Tuesday—helping others find out. 

Tuesday was the only day my household held any sort of ritual; Mom would make my brother and me spinach pie, and Dad would set off around rush hour on the ninety minute trek from Jersey to a church gymnasium in deep Brooklyn, where Joe, his best friend of sixty years, had organized for their greater crew of Bay Ridge-born Boomers to shoot some hoops. “Tuesday Night Hoop,” he called it.

For more than thirty years, Joe continued to gather his childhood best friends for that holy ritual, making them custom mustard yellow pinnies with ‘Tuesday Night Hoop’ inscribed on the front and their not-to-be-repeated nicknames on the back. Through births and bereavement, hurricanes and highway construction and 9/11, they met every Tuesday. They met when the Battery Tunnel starting charging ten bucks each way.  They met when cancer and knee pains and back aches turned most of the players’ spritely cross-court sprints into sluggish shuffles. They met when the church landlord tried to evict them in pursuit of more lucrative renting opportunities, until Joe, with his gentle grace and kind, coke-bottle glasses eyes, persuaded otherwise. They met because if you didn’t show up to meet, Joe would whip out his meticulous Excel sheet and record your excuse, which had better be damn good, like “Walking Pneumonia” or “FIPM” (Fell Into Parking Meter).

Later I realized that Joe didn’t just do this on Tuesdays; he lived his whole life through the prism of his friends. Christmas was a chance to gather them for a spirited Kris Kringle exchange. The Tribeca Film Festival was a chance to invite sophisticated film analyses over less sophisticated Bud Lights. The pandemic was a chance to hold virtual poker nights, so raucous you could hear the Zoom roars two floors up. His post-retirement free-time was a chance to start an old-man band and book gigs at old-man bars, where more friends could gather.

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It turns out that living through the prism of friendship isn’t just more fun; it’s actually healthier. In 1938, when Harvard researchers designed an 80-year-study to explore what makes a long life, they found that the people who were healthiest at age 80 were the ones most satisfied in their relationships at age 50. People with strong social connections, according to the study, experienced less cognitive decline than those without them. Other research confirms this: the absence of strong social connections is linked with poor sleep, heart trouble, chronic stress, and even premature death.

The ancient Greeks knew this, too. When the philosopher Epicurus (341- 270 B.C) came down with a painful and fatal urinary infection, he turned to his most reliable medicine: his friends. Deep in Athens city center, in the friends’ garden-facing, jointly-owned home — a trend gaining steam some 2,400 years later, he spent his final days eating cheese and laughing liberally and asking life’s deep questions beside them, writing that physical pain is no match for the ‘cheerfulness of mind’ that comes from such activities.

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When Joe died last April, just nine months after his cancer diagnosis, Bay Ridge boomers everywhere wept, knowing that they’d forever feel the space in their jars.  And when one thought it might be in the spirit of Joe to weep not in solitude, but together, they realized something: they didn’t have each other’s phone numbers. The calling, the congregating—that had been the job of Joe, whose own yellow pinnie nickname — the “Commissioner”— said it all.

At his funeral, when throngs of gray and no-haired men howled with laughter as they reminisced over the thousands of gatherings he’d arranged over the years, I wondered if Joe knew what being the Commissioner meant to them. To me. 

I wondered if I could live it a bit more like Joe—through the prism of the people I cared most about. I wondered what my days would look like if I could dedicate the hours of them, proportionately, to the rocks in my jar. What would I be giving up? Would that sacrifice be worth it? 

And then, when I walked up to his open casket and saw Joe’s gentle grin, I had my answer, for draped over his chemo-worn body was no tuxedo, no achievement medal, but the purest relic of a rare, rock-centric life: a mustard yellow pinnie, and a declaration of his legacy: “Tuesday Night Hoop.”

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This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to have known a jar like Joe’s. And when I find myself habitually reciting the “I’m-too-busys” or “It’s-too-fars” or “I’ll-be-too-tired” in the wake of a chance to gather with loved ones, I’ll try to remember what fills my own jar.