Our life here is simple, very simple. Get up in the morning, go for a run, come back. If it is a day for cleaning, we do the cleaning, or we just relax. Then go for lunch, massage, the 4 o'clock run, evening tea, relax, go to sleep. As simple as that.

Every morning, Monday to Friday, I get up at 7am and make my wife breakfast in bed.

When I’m working on a novel I type the initial draft first thing in the morning. Really: first thing. For preference, I have a cigarette ready-rolled and a coffee percolator loaded the night before; then I simply roll out of bed, fuel up and set to it. I believe the dreaming and imagining faculties are closely related, such that wreathed in night-time visions I find it possible to suspend disbelief in the very act of making stuff up.

You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the President and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that's the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.

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…

Email. Or call a good friend. Reading this reminds me that I should instead read poetry. Or write.

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…

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.

But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us.

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