three years

Jul 2

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,