This one is from 2014. For four years I'd been building something I believed in completely: a collection of sculptural furniture pieces, each with a story, some even garnering international recognition, and then a gallery / event venue, filled with those pieces my team and I made, alongside works from artists I was personally connected with.

I'd poured every ounce of energy I had into the pieces and the space.
But the town shut it down. The strange part is that they actually loved it.

The day I got the notice, I went and talked to the fire chief. He felt terrible about it and was genuinely sorry. It was a code violation, plain and simple, and his hands were tied. Nobody was against me. But, it still had to close.

That night, all I could think about was the hole I'd put my family in. I lay in bed, tossing and turning, until around three a.m., when I finally gave up on sleep, got out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water. I was empty. Almost in shock.

That's when I saw it. A little Post-it note sitting on the table, in my six-year-old son Orion's handwriting. It said, "I can tern into eneething."

In that instant, everything in my reality "terned." He gifted me a new perspective.

His message opened my mind's eye, allowing me to realize that most of what was crushing me was the future I was frantically inventing: a collapse I was so sure was coming. And the past I kept replaying like one long list of mistakes. But for all I knew, maybe in that journey, I planted a golden bean that just hadn't sprouted yet.

Here's the part that still makes me laugh. When I thanked him, he explained why he wrote it. He was playing Skylanders, a video game that had actual figures he could pull apart, swap the legs, switch the torso and head, mix and match them into something new.

"I can tern into eneething" wasn't intended as a message about starting over. It was a statement from a child's mind about his toys and his imagination. Orion had no idea what he'd handed me in the exact moment I so desperately needed it.

And there's one more thing, which I didn't find out until this week, while I was writing this story. That note didn't just happen to be on the table. My wife, Suzy, had found it first. She left it out for me on purpose. I'd carried it with me all this time, without ever knowing it had been placed in my path.

But that's the thing about a message. It doesn't just depend on what the sender meant. It really depends on who's ready to receive it. A six-year-old talking about action figures and a thoughtful person sharing something she thought was cute turned one of the hardest nights I'd had into a moment of rebirth.

So keep your eyes open. The thing that saves you might already be sitting on the table.