Yesterday, in the early morning, the universe called Dr. Jim Novak home.
By 8:30 I was standing on his front porch in Pacific Beach, because something in me had already known I needed to be there. Big John — who lived with Jim and tended the grounds — met me at the backyard. Jim was gone.
I want to tell you about him, because I believe you need to hear this story today, whoever you are and whatever you are putting off.
The man who saved my life
Jim Novak was my doctor for more than two decades. He was also my friend, my teacher, and on more than one occasion, the reason I am still here to write to you this morning.
When I had hepatitis C, he cured me — and he did it at a time when most doctors were still telling patients to manage it and wait. When my father was handed a terminal diagnosis, Jim quietly rewrote the ending: he gave my dad thirty more years of life. Thirty. Think about that.
In 2021, I was divorced a second time unexpectedly and bankrupt, I had just lost my father, I was estranged from my sister, I had lost my closest relationship with my eldest son, and I wanted to end my own life. My dear friend Mike Koenig grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Try ketamine IV before you do anything you cannot take back.” Jim delivered it. Seven sessions. He never charged me a dollar, because he knew I did not have a dollar to give. That is who he was.
Breakfast on Garnet
Here is something I have not told many people, and I am telling you today because it matters.
For years now, my mornings have been built around two things: my AA meeting at 7 a.m., and the time I spend afterward with my unofficial sponsor JJ. JJ and I walk Pacific Beach. We talk about the steps, about surrender, about what I am carrying that I am not supposed to be carrying. We end up, more often than not, at breakfast spot on Garnet right near Jim’s office.
And Jim was always there.
Not every time — but often enough that it stopped feeling like a coincidence years ago. I would be sitting across from my sponsor, working the hardest hour of my week, and Jim would walk in for his coffee, and he would see us, and he would nod, and sometimes he would sit for a minute. He was doing his own morning, and I was doing mine, and the two of them kept crossing on purpose.
Yesterday morning, April 20, I went to my meeting at 7 a.m. I did what I always do. And then, when I would normally have headed to meet JJ, something in me said drive to Jim’s house instead. I did not know why. I just went.
I want you to hear what I am saying. I did not find Jim. The universe walked me there. I was doing God’s will before sunrise, and the universe used that moment of surrender to put me on the porch where I was supposed to be. If that does not tell you something is running the show, I do not know what would.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
If you have never learned the Serenity Prayer, learn it today. Say it out loud. It is the shortest, most honest piece of writing about the relationship between a human being and everything larger than a human being that I have ever found. It is also the exact thing Jim Novak lived by, whether he ever called it that or not. He trusted his gut. He followed what was true. He accepted what he could not change and he changed what he could, and he was at peace with the difference.
Trust your gut. Trust the universe. It has got your back, even in the mornings that look like bad news.
❦
The regret research nobody wants to read
Bronnie Ware was a palliative-care nurse in Australia who sat with dying people for years. She began writing down what they told her at the end. She turned it into a book that has now sold over a million copies in thirty-two languages. Here, verbatim, are the five regrets she heard most often:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Ware noticed something else: most people, she wrote, had not honored even half of their dreams — and they had to die knowing it was because of choices they had made, or not made.
Read that sentence again. Slowly.
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Jim never carried a single one of those regrets
That is the most important thing I can tell you about him, and it is the whole reason I am writing this today.
Jim lived the life that was true to him. He chose integrative medicine when the establishment ridiculed it. He spent three years of his twenties on Native American reservations with the National Health Service Corps because that is where he was needed. He opened his own practice in 1985 and ran it his way for forty years. He questioned everything, he read constantly, he sat at UPW and Date With Destiny beside me more times than I can count, and he lived by what he learned.
He told his feelings. He stayed in touch. He flew to New York with me to stand beside a younger author who needed a doctor’s credibility in the room, and then dragged me through Whole Foods at Columbus Circle teaching me which endives are best for the liver. He went to yoga retreats. He hiked to the top of Mount Soledad with me last Christmas Day and told me, as we came down, not to let GLP-1s become another Adderall — “use them as a jump-start, not as a crutch.”
He let himself be happy. He fed strangers every Thursday at Ventura Cove Park with God’s Kitchen. He was, until his last morning, the light.
What the data says about waiting
The research on midlife is brutal if you read it honestly. A meta-analysis of ten studies covering over 136,000 adults, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that people with a strong sense of purpose have roughly a 17 percent lower risk of death from any cause. Boyle’s work out of Rush University showed high-purpose adults had a 40 percent lower mortality rate than low-purpose peers. Hill and Turiano, tracking six thousand adults for fourteen years, concluded that purposeful people simply live longer — and that it doesn’t matter when you find it. It only matters that you find it.
The Jim Novak Creed
So here is what I am doing, starting today, Tuesday, April 21, 2026. I am calling it the Jim Novak Creed, and I am challenging every one of you reading this to take it on with me for the next thirty days.
Honor the dreams you have not yet honored. Write the book. Make the call. Forgive the sister. Tell the child. Take the action today that you would regret, at the end, having not taken.
Be the light.
The one thing
Here is what Jim Novak would want me to leave you with today, and it is the whole point of this letter.
Jim lived his life by doing the most important thing first. The hardest thing. The thing everyone else was putting off. The treatment no one wanted to try. The therapy that required him to sit with his own pain. The career pivot when the old career stopped being true. The trip to see the grandkids instead of another week at the desk. The thank-you to the universe before the next complaint. The hike up Mount Soledad on a Christmas Day when he could have stayed home. He did the hard thing first, and everything else in his life fell into place behind it like dominoes.
So here is the only question that matters this morning.
What have you been putting off?
Not the easy thing. Not the small thing. The one thing — the one you know in your heart represents the whole chain of positive change that needs to happen in your life. The treatment you keep rescheduling. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The call to the estranged son. The resignation letter. The plane ticket. The 7 a.m. meeting you have been meaning to walk into. The doctor’s appointment. The book you were meant to write. The apology you owe. The dream you keep telling yourself there will be time for.
Think of that one thing right now. You already know what it is. You knew before I asked.
Be like Jim Novak, and do it today. Not tomorrow. Not this weekend. Not when the quarter closes or the kids are back in school or the weather turns. Today. Because today is the only day we have, and Jim proved that in the most final way he could on Sunday morning at five a.m.
That is the Celebration of Life he would actually want.
❦
Come say goodbye
We will gather to honor Jim on Thursday, April 30, 2026, at 10:00 in the morning, at Ventura Cove Park, 3209 Gleason Road, San Diego. We are hosting it alongside God’s Kitchen — the Pacific Beach meal service where Jim volunteered every Thursday — so that the work he loved continues on the day we honor him. To coordinate with the family or to contribute to God’s Kitchen in Jim’s name, please reach Chris Ibanez at (619) 929-7669.
If you cannot be there in person, then do the one thing. That is the only tribute Jim would want.
He did things now. He never postponed a kindness. He never waited for the right moment to tell the truth. He was the light, and now he is part of the light, and the rest of us are the torch.
Carry it well.