three years

Dear Reader,

I still remember the conversation I had with Caralyne the morning after the first issue went out. We were standing in the kitchen, her coffee still brewing, and I asked her if she thought anyone had actually opened it. We didn't know if six people would read it or sixty, and for the first few months I checked the numbers more than I'd like to admit. 

What I didn't expect was how much the writing itself would change me. Three years of sitting down on the same day each week, sometimes with something clear to say and sometimes with nothing, taught me more about discipline than almost anything else I've tried to build a habit around. There's a version of this newsletter from year one that reads like a brochure for a better life, all action steps and tidy resolutions. I can see now that we were still learning how to trust a reader with quiet instead of instruction. Somewhere in year two we stopped telling you what to do and started just telling you what we'd noticed. That shift mattered more than any single issue we've written.

There were stretches, more than I'd admit to most people, where I wondered if we should let this go and put that energy somewhere else. The writing isn't always easy to find time for (ironic right?), and it's hard to know if a Thursday email is landing anywhere or just adding to a pile. What kept us going was the messages we got from you. Someone telling us a line from an issue followed them into a hard conversation they'd been avoiding. Someone forwarding an old one to a friend going through something we'd written about months before. Those notes came at the moments we needed them most, and they're the real reason there's a year four at all.

Starting next week, we're trying something we haven't done before. Instead of moving from topic to topic, we're going to follow one thread for the whole year, going further into it than a single issue ever lets us. This means less ground covered and more depth in the ground we're standing on. We don't know yet exactly where it leads. We rarely do.

If you've got someone in your life who might want a few quiet minutes in their inbox on a Thursday, this would be a good week to pass it along. No pressure, just an open door.

And if your weekend includes a flag, a grill, or a kid falling asleep before the fireworks start, we hope it's a good one. Happy Fourth.

Here's to year four,

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the art of simply being

Dear Reader,

A client I had been seeing for a long while came in one afternoon and sat down with nothing to say. This was unusual for her. She was someone who arrived each week with a list, sometimes typed into her phone, sometimes just held in her head, and we would move through it together. That day there was no list. She apologized for it. She said she wasn't sure what we were supposed to do if she had nothing to work on, and I could see the worry underneath the question, the sense that showing up empty-handed meant she had failed at something. We sat with it for a while. Then she said, almost to herself, that she couldn't remember the last time there was nothing about her life she was trying to fix.

I've thought about that afternoon often, because it touched something I keep brushing up against, in the work and in myself. We have spent a long time now, the two of us writing and you reading, gathering things to try. Ways of paying closer attention to a life that tends to move quickly. We meant all of it. And yet somewhere in the accumulation of so much intention there is a quieter possibility that almost never gets named, which is that you might one day put the whole project down and simply be here, with no agenda for yourself.

Three years of these reflections has, in its own way, been an argument for becoming. But the truest moments most of us can call up were never the ones we engineered. They were the unremarkable ones that asked nothing of us at all. Coffee going cold while the rain came down and we forgot to drink it. The particular quiet of a house after everyone else has finally gone to sleep. We weren't working on ourselves then. We were just there, and it was enough, and we knew it without having to decide that it was.

So maybe living intentionally also means knowing when to stop being intentional. To let an hour pass unmeasured. This week, if you find yourself somewhere with nothing to fix and no list to move through, you might let it be exactly that. You might let yourself be what you already are inside it.

Yours in the journey,

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fine, just tired

Dear Reader,

Someone sits down across from me and I ask how they have been. Almost without thinking, they say they are fine, maybe a little tired. We move on, because that is what the answer is designed to do. It closes the question gently and lets us get to whatever comes next.

But sometimes, twenty minutes later, the fine starts to come apart. Though nothing in the room has changed, they have only stayed in one place long enough for the first answer to lose its grip. What was tired turns out to be closer to disappointment, or to a loneliness they hadn't made room to feel.

I think most of us believe we already know what we are feeling. We can answer the question quickly, and the speed of the answer feels like proof that we are paying attention. But the quick answer is usually a headline. The mind produces it to settle things, to give the feeling a shape we can carry without having to stop. And a headline, by design, leaves almost everything out.

Naming a feeling is easy, and most of us are good at it. We can have the word ready before we have really felt anything. Sometimes the word is even a way of stepping around the feeling, a tidy summary we hand ourselves so we don't have to stay with it. The harder thing is to leave it unnamed for a while, long enough to be surprised by what is actually there.

I do this too. I will tell myself I am frustrated when the truer word is hurt, because frustration is easier to stand inside. Frustration keeps me busy and a little above it all. Hurt asks me to slow down and admit that something reached me. The label I choose tends to protect me from the version of the feeling I would rather not have.

This week, when someone asks how you are, you do not have to answer differently. But you might notice the answer as you give it, and wonder, if it left anything out.

Yours in the journey,

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I know this sounds stupid, but…

Dear Reader,

In the therapy room, people often begin with a small apology. "I know this probably sounds stupid, but..." Before they have even told us what happened, they have already decided how it should be heard.

Many of us talk to ourselves this way too. A feeling shows up and we immediately decide whether it is acceptable. We tell ourselves we shouldn't be this upset, or that we have no real reason to be. The deciding happens so fast we barely notice it. By the time we are aware of the feeling at all, it has already been told it doesn't belong.

Non-judgement can sound complicated, like something reserved for meditation retreats. Really, it is simple. It means letting an experience be what it is for a moment before deciding what it says about us. Noticing "I'm anxious today" and stopping there, without adding "and that's ridiculous."

That small difference matters more than it seems. When we judge a feeling right away, we stop being curious about it. There is nothing left to learn from something we have already dismissed. The feeling doesn't go anywhere, either. It just goes quiet, and keeps influencing us from somewhere we can't see.

In sessions, when someone stops apologizing and simply says what is true for them, their shoulders often drop. The feeling that seemed so unreasonable usually makes sense once it has room to explain itself. It came from somewhere, and it is often trying to tell us something. It becomes much easier to hear once we stop arguing with it for existing.

Maybe that is all non-judgement really is: a willingness to look at something honestly before deciding what it means. Most things, it turns out, can bear being seen.

Yours in the journey,

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the unfinished

Dear Reader,

There are things we call undecided that we have already decided. We just haven't said so yet, and keeping them in the undecided category is how we avoid having to.

I've watched this happen in session more times than I can count. Someone describes a situation they've been sitting with for a long time such as a relationship that isn't working, or a job that stopped fitting years ago, and when I ask what they're waiting for, there's typically a pause that tells me everything.

They already know.

They knew before they walked in the door. What they're doing by keeping it in the "still figuring it out" category is buying themselves more time before they have to live with what they know.

I believe this is one of the more human things we do. A real decision has weight to it, and weight has consequences, and consequences mean that something actually changes. Keeping something open postpones all of that. It lets us stay in a middle place where the situation is still technically unresolved and so we are not yet responsible for resolving it.

This week, it might be worth asking whether anything you're calling unfinished is actually undecided, or whether you already know and are just waiting for a better moment to say so. There may not be a better moment. There's only this one, and the version of you that already has the answer.

Yours in the journey,

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