I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate.  I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one.  It came out of a complicated equation!  Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”

I’m proudest of some of the work that we’ve done off the field or things that I just take an enormous amount of pride in, ideally with a charity foundation called the Peyback Foundation.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

I'm making cheap electricity,

It is the hardest thing, and inside of it is another secret — we don’t talk about it enough — which is, for anyone who is caretaking someone who’s been sick or who has lost someone, for anyone who’s accompanying someone in a real way, there are times when that love takes every ounce of courage and perseverance that you have in your body, and those are also the times when you like yourself the best.

My ability to connect with people. I think I can see people and they feel it.

It is usually 4 or 5 in the morning so I go downstairs and make tea and then read a bit of poetry – Mary Oliver, Rumi, Hafiz, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Rilke are among my favorites…

One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.

I am lucky not to have felt burned out. That probably goes back to what energizes me. I get great energy from connecting with people we are serving especially. And if the work feels too hard, there is nothing like a long run to revive my spirit…

I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six. And I guess that was part of both the positive and the pressure.