what you present

Dear Reader,

A client mentioned once that she'd been the reliable friend in her group since she was about nineteen. She said it as a passing detail, but I kept thinking about it afterward. Nineteen. She was in her forties. Whatever she figured out back then about how to be around people had worked well enough that she'd never had much reason to look at it again.

I think a lot of how we come across got settled earlier than we realize. Most of us found something that went over well, usually before we had much say in it, and it kept going over well, so we kept doing it. You can usually spot the result in what people come to you for. Someone calls you when they need a calm voice. Nobody expects you to be the one crying at the wedding.

So maybe just notice what you tend to put out, and how long you've been doing it that way. What people count on you for. What would surprise them. Whether you'd make the same choices now that you did back when you first landed on them.

A lot of it probably still fits, and there's no sense pulling apart something that's working. But some of it might be a call made by a nineteen-year-old who was doing the best they could with what they knew.

Yours in the journey,

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the pace you keep

Dear Reader,

A lot of the people I sit with describe their life as unusually busy at the moment. Not busy in general, but busy right now, as though I've caught them during an unrepresentative stretch. Sometimes I'll hear the same description from the same person two years later, and both times it's offered as a temporary condition.

That's what makes pace hard to see clearly. We tend to treat it as a phase we're passing through rather than a pattern we're living inside.

You can feel the gap on the first days of a vacation, or at least I can. I've arrived somewhere with nothing required of me and found myself unpacking a bag that could have stayed packed, checking email one more time, restless by late morning. It takes me a couple of days to actually settle, and by then the trip is half over. The calendar says the week is off, but something in me hasn't gotten the message and keeps running at the old speed. Whatever that is, it isn't coming from my schedule, because my schedule is empty.

Our pace is one of the most visible things about us. The people around us could describe it in a sentence without much effort. But it's also one of the first places we can feel something else moving underneath, because nobody arrives at their speed by accident. Somewhere along the way it got set, and it's been running quietly ever since without checking in with us.

So the question isn't whether things are busy right now. They probably are. It's whether right now has been going on long enough that it's just called your life.

Yours in the journey,

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what your habits say about you

Dear Reader,

A man I work with told me recently that he's never been much of a planner. Then, a few minutes later, he walked me through his morning. The coffee maker starts at the same time every day. He sits in the same chair, reads the news in the same order, and empties the dishwasher before he lets himself do anything else. When I pointed out what he'd just described, he laughed. He'd never thought of any of it as planning. It was just what he did.

Last week we noticed the versions of ourselves that show up in different rooms. Habits are a different kind of clue. They follow us from room to room without asking who's there. Whatever role we happen to be playing, we still check the phone the same way, still take the same route home, still put off the same conversation. Our roles adjust to whoever's in front of us. Our habits don't bother.

What I've come to appreciate about habits is how much they remember. Every habit began as a choice that worked, and over time the choosing faded while the doing remained. So your habits hold a record of what you've needed and what you've been practicing without meaning to practice it. Read together, they say something about you, and it doesn't always match the story you tell. The man in my office calls himself unstructured while living one of the most ordered mornings I've heard described. 

Your habits have been telling your story all along. This week, try listening.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

the roles we play

Dear Reader,

A client's phone rang in the middle of a session once. She glanced at the screen, apologized, and said she needed to take it, just for a second, it was work. And for about thirty seconds, a different person sat across from me. Her voice lifted, her sentences turned quick and bright, and her whole posture reorganized itself around whoever was on the other end. When she hung up she set the phone down, exhaled, and came back. She caught me noticing and laughed. That's my work self, she said, the way you might introduce a colleague.

Most of us carry a small cast like that. There's a version of us that shows up at the office, and another one appears, without ever being summoned, the moment an old friend calls. We don't usually decide to make the switch. We change our posture crossing a doorway before we've said a single word, and the whole thing happens so smoothly that we almost never see it from the inside.

The word performing can make this sound like an accusation, and that's worth resisting. Learning to meet each room on its terms is a skill, one we picked up so early that we can't remember practicing it. Each one is made of real material. It's just that we've been running the whole repertoire for so long, so automatically, that we rarely pause to notice how many there are, or how different they've become from one another.

So that's the invitation this week, and it asks nothing more than attention. The next time the phone rings, or you walk from your car into somewhere that expects something of you, see if you can catch the switch as it happens. The small shift in your voice, the settling into a familiar shape. You don't have to judge it or change it. Later in the year, we'll get curious about where these versions came from. For now, it's enough to start noticing the cast.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

what’s on the surface

Dear Reader,

When I meet with someone for the first time, I sometimes ask them to walk me through an ordinary Tuesday. What time they wake, what they reach for when they wake up, how the morning shapes up, or where the day tends to thin out or go sideways. These questions usually surprise people. They arrived ready to talk about the big things, and here I am asking about breakfast. But an ordinary day carries more information than almost anything else a person can tell me. The surface of a life is dense with evidence.

Most of us assume that self-understanding has to begin somewhere deep, that whatever is worth knowing about ourselves must be buried and hard to reach. So we skip the obvious. We treat the visible parts of our lives as background, too plain to hold any meaning. But the surface is where honest examination starts, because it's the one layer we can see without effort.

The visible facts of your life are available to anyone who cares to look, and you may be the person least likely to look at them. Familiarity is its own kind of camouflage. Consider what your calendar actually holds, the route you drive without quite deciding to, and the subjects you return to when nothing requires you to say anything at all.

This is where a year of examination begins, at the surface, with what anyone could see. So this week, try describing one of your ordinary days as if you were telling a kind stranger. Notice what you'd include and what you'd leave out. You don't need to draw conclusions yet. The noticing is the work, and interpretation can wait.

Living intentionally means letting yourself see what has been in plain sight all along, and trusting that what you find there is worth your attention.

Yours in the journey,

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