I'm not sure if I know anymore how to make a video where I don't just have no script but no notes, but I guess they start out "Good morning Hank, It's Tuesday."  Except it's not Tuesday, it's Sunday night at 11:30.  So there's this Mountain Goats song I love, called "You Were Cool" where the lyrics start out "these are the same four chords I use most of the time when there's something on my mind, and I don't want to squander the moment."  And I guess these are the same four chords I use most of the time.  (0:29) Eight days ago, I found out that one of my close friends from high school died.

And then the next morning I found our that Dr Paul Farmer had died, and then four days later, the 15th annual Project for Awesome began. So this years Project for Awesome happened amid a global crisis but for me, it happened among personal ones as well.

It's been a difficult week for me. I hope I don't have a lot of weeks like this in my life.  There's actually this cardboard cut out of me that's just off-screen for me, I'll show it to you I don't know if you can see it but, uh, it's me, but I'm like, my heads by my feet and I'm completed discombobulated and I've looked at that all weekend and then like, yeah, you know, like that's ahhhh, that's about how it feels.  I don't know what else to say about it. It's not very interesting, it just sucks when people you love die, it sucks and you wonder what you should have done differently, and you wonder how to make sense of a world where they aren't.  But mere despair never tells the full human story.

Like, I am totally unconvinced by any arguments that there is something inevitable or desirable about the inequity and injustice and unfairness of the human condition.  And yes, I know that we will all die, and everyone we love will die, and eventually all humans will die, but for me, that makes the fact that we pour love into each other and we experience real solidarity and we work for a better shared future for humanity, that makes all of that more beautiful. More wondrous. The fact that we're able to do that even though we know this is temporary makes it more amazing.

And yet it is also true that we are monsters to each other, that we are all capable of monstrosity, and I don' t just mean like, the active evil of killing people and starting wars, I also mean the passive evil, the ways that evil can be this sort of, banal, bureaucratic thing where we just pass over human suffering and treat it like it's something inevitable. To me, what is so heartbreaking, and what leads me toward despair is also where I find hope. Which is that there is nothing inevitable about this. (2:41) When I was a freshman in college, kids were twice as likely globally to die before the age of 5 as they are today.

That is a massive human success story. This years Project for Awesome raised over $3 million for charity. By almost any measure, it was the most successful Project for Awesome of all time - including by the measure of how hoarse my voice is.  The reason I've been overwhelmed with grief this week is because I've been reminded that nothing happens alone.

That throughout my life, I have had fellow travellers and people expressing real, meaningful solidarity with me that made me feel less alone.  This week, and during the Project for Awesome I was reminded over and over again of that. That even when we feel alone, we never are, and that our job as human beings is to make ourselves and others feel less alone, and to know that they are accompanied through everything that they will go through.  (3:28) Alright, for my final chord I want to go back to that Mountain Goats song, one of the last lines of which is "we held on to hope that better days were coming, and when we did, we were right."  Thank you, for an amazing Project for Awesome.  Hank, I'll see you on Friday.