what you reach for

Sep 3

Dear Reader,

A client told me once that she never remembers picking up her phone. She remembers putting it down, twenty minutes later, without much sense of what she'd been looking at. The picking up doesn't register at all.

I hear versions of this constantly. The wine that gets poured at 5:15 whether or not the day was hard. The refrigerator opened three times in ten minutes when nobody is hungry. The house that gets cleaned when there's a difficult conversation waiting. Someone will describe it and then say they don't really know why they do it, and often that's true. It was already happening before there was anything to decide.

What strikes me is how few of these we have. You'd think comfort could come from anywhere, but most people have two or three and that's the whole list. Ask someone what they used to do with a hard evening fifteen years ago and it's usually close to what they'd do tonight. The wine might have been cigarettes. The scrolling might have been the television. The habit itself hasn't moved much.

These are among the most private things about us. Your pace shows up in your calendar and other people can see how you come across, but almost nobody knows what you do at nine o'clock on a bad Tuesday. The kitchen at that hour is usually empty except for you.

So this week, see if you can name yours. Just the one or two you'd go to if this afternoon turned hard. There's nothing wrong with having a way to get through a rough hour, and you don't need to give anything up. It's enough to know what it is, and to catch yourself the next time you're already halfway through it.

Yours in the journey,