First Person: A man learns to dig deep to find the courage to change

Telling you this now, I can picture my son just as I was seeing him on the beach then, my memory colored by the photo I keep framed in my mind all these years later, the photo I’ve dropped on every laptop bundled over the years with the buyouts, the startups and the start-overs: he in his beige bucket hat, leaning into me, two hands clutching a red shovel, demanding that I dig. Dig, in the sand, now. Dig, a big hole. Dig, deeper.
I’d left him and his imperative back on that Maui beac