Living in Alignment

I was twenty-something when joined a friend to start a small organic food distribution company and with head full of ideals. At the time, I didn’t have language for it—“impact,” “sustainability,” “alignment”—I just knew that the way we treat the land and one another mattered, and that food grown with care should reach the people who valued it. I didn’t yet imagine a career in wealth planning or philanthropy. I certainly didn’t imagine I’d one day be a grandfather trying to explain to little ones why the choices we make ripple outward far beyond our own front doors.

But even then, I sensed that every decision—every dollar, every hour, every bite of food—was shaping something larger than myself. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand that truth more fully and to help others see it too.

Paul Hawken once wrote that “the most complex, radical, and far-reaching changes will come from the human heart.” I have carried that line with me through decades of financial planning, through my years on the board of the Intervale Center and now the Vermont Community Loan Fund, through the conversations with clients who sit across from me wrestling with how to use their wealth in a way that feels responsible and humane. Again and again, I’ve learned: when something in us shifts, the world around us shifts too.

Today, in my late sixties, with a long career behind me and a quieter, more intentional practice—Aligned Giving—before me, I find myself returning to a simple question: How do we live in a way that reflects what we truly value? Not just in our charitable giving, not just when we write a mission statement or gather for a family meeting, but in the unglamorous, everyday decisions that define the course of our lives.

I’ve come to believe that money, for all the tension it carries, is one of the clearest mirrors we have. Every spending choice is a vote. Every investment is a signal. Every savings habit is preparation for the future we believe is possible. And every act of giving—no matter how humble—is a quiet declaration of what we stand for.

Joel Solomon, whose work in “Clean Money” I’ve long admired, speaks of money as “energy”—a force that can heal or harm depending on how we direct it. When I first read that, it struck me as both obvious and radical. For nearly 30 years as a wealth advisor, I watched how money could create distance, anxiety, even shame. But I also watched how it could be a catalyst for dignity, fairness, opportunity, restoration. I saw families transform their financial lives simply by pausing long enough to ask, What do we want our money to do in the world?

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that this is the real work—not mastering tax strategies or chasing market returns (though those things matter), but cultivating awareness. As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, “When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens.” That includes our understanding of how our choices affect others.

When we buy something, someone made it.
When we invest in a company, its practices become—at least in part—our practices.
When we give, we shape the possibilities available to someone else.
When we save, we make a statement about the future we hope to meet.

Living this way doesn’t require perfection. It requires intention. It requires slowing down enough to notice the quiet tug inside—a feeling I have learned to trust over the years. I felt it when I first dreamed of building a life in Vermont. I felt it when I shifted from running a business to helping families steward their wealth. I felt it the day I realized I was ready to retire from the investment world and devote myself fully to philanthropic advising. And I feel it now, every time I sit with a client who knows they want their giving to mean something but isn’t yet sure how to make that meaning real.

In my work with Aligned Giving, I no longer ask people, “How much do you want to give?” I ask, “What do you want your giving to say about who you are?” I ask, “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?” I ask, “Where does your compassion call you?”

Kindness, generosity, dignity—these have become the compass points of my life. They guide how I spend my time, how I support my community, how I show up as a husband, father, and grandfather. They guide my environmental commitments, which were shaped as much by afternoons walking our local Vermont trails as by the countless hours spent on the Intervale board listening to farmers and visionaries who knew that caring for the land is inseparable from caring for people.

At sixty-nine, I do not pretend to have all the answers. But I know this: alignment is not an abstract ideal. It is a practice. A daily practice. A lifelong practice. And if enough of us commit to living in alignment—with our values, with the planet, with future generations—we begin to create what Hawken calls “the blessed unrest,” a movement of ordinary people choosing, again and again, to act with heart.

I don’t think we transform the world all at once. I think we transform it every time we choose compassion over convenience, stewardship over indifference, generosity over accumulation. Every time we remember that our money is not separate from our morals, that our choices are not separate from their consequences.

And every time we pause—right in the middle of our messy, modern lives—to ask ourselves:
Is this aligned with who I mean to be?

That question, I believe, is the beginning of a better world.