Even though we were contemporaries from the same state, I never heard of Travis Roy until a couple of years ago when I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Ohio and got distracted by a documentary on one of the screens on the wall.

Travis Roy was a talented hockey player who was paralyzed in a tragic accident in the first few seconds of his debut on the men’s ice hockey team at Boston University in 1995. Roy went on to graduate from BU and create a foundation for spinal injury research and support for spinal injury survivors. He passed away just a few days ago at age 45.

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There’s a tension that I experience on a frequent basis. It’s between the necessity of slowing down and allowing space for reflection and growth, and the reality that the clock is ticking.

I don’t do my best work dangling by my fingertips off of a precipice. I need to be peaceful, grounded, and safe.

And yet these are the same conditions that can lead to complacency — to doing nothing and letting the time simply pass by.

It is easy enough to fill a day with meals, laundry, and a walk in the fresh air — maybe a bit of bill-paying, family time, or creative work. And the next, and the next.

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I keep thinking back to a perfect day last October.

I woke up in a boutique hotel room just off of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. after having spent a lovely weekend with my family (including my littlest nephew). The city was a bit on edge because the Astros had taken the lead over the Nationals the night before in Game 5 of the World Series, which I had watched in between bites of cake and ice cream the night before in a common area of the hotel (along with getting a little work done).

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When the lockdown began, I was ready. I was on high-alert mode.

For two months, I worked long hours from my parents’ dining room table and my childhood bedroom, taking breaks to walk along the cold windy beach until the beaches closed, and then down and around the cul-de-sacs of the neighborhood on the days after that. Sometimes, I played a little tennis with my mom — until the tennis courts closed, and then we hit the ball back and forth in the gravel driveway in the afternoons.

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To be rulerless doesn’t mean “without measurement.” It means, in part, that we choose our own metrics instead of using established ones that don’t serve us.

If I try to stop measuring, it’s like the old “don’t think of an elephant” thing. No, I accept my urge to understand how I’m changing and the impact that I’m having. What I try to do is measure in such a way that I can highlight what’s working, what’s progressing, what’s growing, what’s developing, in realms that I have control over.

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It was the last day of school. It had been a bittersweet morning full of summer sunshine and goodbyes.

One of the last remaining students began to cry. “It’s over!” she wailed to her mother. “I don’t want it to be over!”

“It’s okay, honey,” her mom said. “You can have sleepovers with Emma and Sarah — you’ll see your friends! You’re going to camp! Remember how excited you were about that? And we’ll be back here again in just a couple of months!”

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