A WORLD WE WILL NEVER SEE — BUT MUST STILL HEAL

When world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma turned 70 a month ago, on Oct. 7, he asked a question that stopped me mid-scroll: “In the year 2100, my youngest grandchild will be 76. What kind of world will she be living in? And what can we do now to ensure that today’s children can live with hope, purpose, and meaning?”

- DR. RAFAEL R. CASTILLO

In every note, a call to care: Yo-Yo Ma reminds us we are nature.

That, my dear readers, is not just a birthday reflection — it’s a moral MRI of our times.

At some point in life, we stop counting years forward and start counting generations downward. I know the feeling. Seeing toddlers and babies makes me think of my own grandchildren, Leon and Elliott — three years and two months — blissfully unaware of the world they’ll inherit. Will they also be hopeful and active—yet wonderfully distracted by the same glowing screens that both connect and divide us?

When you've seen enough heartbeats on a monitor, you start to realize that the most fragile organ of all is not the heart but the conscience. And Yo-Yo Ma’s question pierces exactly that: What kind of conscience will this world have when we are gone?

In his birthday letter, Yo-Yo Ma wrote, “We are nature.” It’s a simple line with a profound prescription: we are not outside the system we're trying to fix.

Doctors like me are trained to manage nature — blood pressure, cholesterol, infection, pollution. But the truth is humbling: we are part of the same feedback loop. Every plastic fork we discard, every car trip we take, every kindness we show —all of it returns to us in some form.

Biology reminds us that the human body is its own living ecosystem — around 30-36 trillion human cells sharing space with roughly 38 trillion bacterial cells—a near 1:1 partnership that thrives only in balance.

There's a popular parable, often attributed to Indigenous storytellers, about two wolves within us: one of compassion, one of anger. “Which wolf wins?” asks the child after listening to his grandfather tell the story. “The one you feed.” Attribution of this parable is debated, but the wisdom endures: attention shapes character.