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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the archeology of self

Dear Reader,

There's a moment I've learned to watch for in my work. Someone is describing a pattern they've had for years, a way they always seem to respond, and partway through the sentence they slow down. They hear themselves. Then they ask, almost surprised: why do I do that?

I love that question, because it's so honest. Most of us can rattle off our coffee order and the things that reliably annoy us. But ask where any of it came from, why the sight of dishes in the sink can undo a whole evening, and we go quiet. We've been with ourselves our entire lives, and there's still a lot in here we've never gotten a good look at.

Last week we mentioned that this year we'd be staying with one thread instead of changing subjects every Thursday. This is it. We're calling the year of the archaeology of self, and we mean the name pretty literally. When something gets buried, it doesn't go away. It just ends up underneath the newer things. The way we react, the rules we follow without knowing they're rules, so much of it was laid down a long time ago, and it's still down there, quietly shaping the surface.

So the surface is where we'll begin. The parts of our lives that anyone could see. From there, the questions will work their way down on their own, a little further each week 

For now, there's nothing to do. Maybe just try what my client did. Sometime this week, catch yourself mid-pattern, doing the thing you always do, and ask, gently, why do I do that? You don't need an answer. This year, we'll have plenty of time to look.

Yours in the journey,

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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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