I met a free horse on the beach in Costa Rica. Not tied up. Not behind a fence. Just free. What happened next, and the connections that followed, reminded me that sometimes the best mornings aren't the ones you plan.

223 days ago I launched the Heart-Strong Adventure. One post. One question. One year to follow it. A lot has happened since then. The adventure isn't ending. It's evolving.

In Costa Rica, I saw both ends of the surfing spectrum up close. One surfer led with love. The other led with fear. What I noticed had very little to do with surfing.

It took me six months to finish a podcast literally called Men. While on an adventure about men. When I finally circled back, I realized the drift might be the most interesting part of the story.

I gave up a table at a coffee shop in Rockledge, Florida. That small choice led to a three-hour conversation about God, fear, love, and choice with three strangers who became friends.

Healthcare, capitalism, prisons, education. I didn't set out to find a common thread. But one keeps showing up. These systems disconnect us from the things that make us whole.

When I left my job at 29 to start a company, the fear that almost kept me from making the leap wasn't failure. It was losing my health insurance. How much creativity and love never enters the world because of a fear-based system?

The US spends roughly twice as much per person on healthcare as other wealthy nations. We rank dead last in outcomes. What does a system built on fear actually produce?

I had a conversation with a friend who is an emergency room doctor. She told me about a system designed to heal people that is actually built on fear. Fear of lawsuits. Fear of missing something.

A family friend made a claim during a car ride about immigration that didn't sound right. Instead of arguing, I did what the adventure has been teaching me: check the facts before reacting.

This was the first time on the adventure that I shared someone else's words instead of my own. David NeSmith wrote a poem that asks the question at the heart of this exploration: who deserves love?

A white guy from Maine gets invited to speak with 80 incarcerated men in Virginia about leading with love. What happened inside was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

As the year ends, I've been sitting with a question that won't let go: is love a feeling or a way of being? Four months of exploration have changed my answer.

I've been asking men about their emotional lives for months. They'll talk about almost anything. But ask them what they're afraid of, and the air changes. The silence isn't empty. It's full.

I came across a collection of postcards from the early 1900s. The rhetoric on those century-old cards is almost identical to what's circulating now. Different targets. Same fear.

Three months into this adventure, I keep getting the same questions. Why love? Why fear? Why men specifically? And why you? Fair questions. All of them.

I picked up Leo Buscaglia's book Love expecting something soft. What I found was a challenge. He argues love is learned. Neuroscience says we're wired for it. So which is it?

I caught myself cherry-picking science. And it shook me. I was drawn to the findings that supported what I already believed and quietly ignoring the rest. That's not love. That's fear wearing a lab coat.

My dad and I were wrestling with a stuck window on the house I grew up in. Under his frustration I could hear the fear. He knows time is real. The project looked like it was stealing his freedom.

I sat down for lunch with Sam Harris at Saltine in Norfolk. He spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. What makes him remarkable isn’t the time. It’s what he did with those years, and what he’s doing now.