the art of simply being

Jun 25

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,