tending

Dear Reader,

There's a plant in our office I've watered for the better part of a year. It hasn't grown much. It hasn't died either. About once a month I notice it's gone a little limp, and I get up to fill the watering can. Most weeks, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what color the leaves looked like the time before. The plant doesn't thank me, and it doesn't ask. We have a quiet arrangement that asks nothing of either of us, and the arrangement itself, repeated, becomes the relationship.

A lot of life is held together this way.

Tending is what we do for the houseplant. It’s what we do for the long friendship that survives on a text every other Tuesday. It’s what we offer our partner when time and energy feel thin. None of this looks like love from the outside, but it often is. It’s the unglamorous half of how love behaves once it has settled into the long arc of a life.

The harder lesson is how steady this kind of work has to be to matter at all. The things we love rarely change in sudden ways under our hands. They shift over time, and the shape of having been cared for begins to show gradually, often without us noticing as it happens. A friendship held lightly and consistently may ask very little when a hard season comes. The years of small contact have already done work no single conversation could carry. What the body wants, most of the time, is the quiet reliability of sleep and movement and food it can recognize.

A marriage, too, is built this way. It gathers strength through small, repeated attentions. Over time, those moments make strain less likely to take hold. It forms in ordinary exchanges that rarely stand out, yet leave something durable behind.

Tending is the form love takes once it understands it will remain. It becomes a steady presence, one that no longer needs to prove itself through anything dramatic.

If there is any invitation today, it is simply to notice what you have already been tending without quite naming it. Let your attention rest there this week. Set aside what you’ve been meaning to begin and look instead at what is already in motion. These small, repeated acts have become so familiar you may have stopped seeing them. They are the quiet work of a life held together with care, and they have been carrying more than you think.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

re-entering

Dear Reader,

I've been thinking about how often clients come into session having just gotten back from something. A vacation, a hard week at the hospital with a parent, a retreat, a funeral, a stretch of time that asked something different of them than ordinary life does. They sit down and there's a particular look I've come to recognize. They're here, but not all the way here yet. Their body made it back before the rest of them did.

I think most of us re-enter too fast. We grab the pace again the moment our feet touch the ground, because the world didn't pause while we were gone, and now it expects us to slip back into the rhythm of it.

I do this myself. I'll come home from somewhere that mattered and within twenty minutes be triaging emails on my phone. The emails aren't genuinely urgent. Moving fast just feels easier than sitting with the gap between what I was just inside of and the kitchen I'm standing in.

Here is what I've come to believe about this rhythm. When we skip re-entry, the experience we just had does not get to change us. It just gets archived. The hospital week becomes a story we tell at dinner parties. The vacation becomes a row of photos on a phone. The grief becomes a thing we hand off to the next quiet moment, which never comes, because we keep filling our quiet moments with work emails. Whatever was actually happening to us in that other place gets sealed off, and we go back to being the person we were before, except slightly more tired and slightly more confused about why we feel off.

I see this play out in the therapy room months later. A client will be describing some low-grade weariness, some general sense that something is wrong, and we'll trace it back to a week in February they never really came home from. The week didn't cause the problem but the fact that they sprinted through it did. Whatever happened during that time never got the chance to land somewhere inside them and become part of who they are now.

This is what re-entering slowly does. It gives the experience a place to land. It lets what you went through change something about how you're living. Otherwise it gets stored on a shelf next to all the other things you didn't have time to feel.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

permission to change your mind

Dear Reader,

I've been watching a client struggle with something that feels familiar. Years ago, she decided she wasn't the kind of person who could handle conflict. She built a life around that belief, chose relationships where things stayed smooth and she structured her work to avoid confrontation. The problem is she's starting to realize that belief isn't serving her anymore. She's capable of more than she gave herself credit for, but changing her mind about who she is feels like admitting she's been wrong about herself all along.

I think that maybe we hold onto old conclusions about ourselves longer than we should. At some point, often early, we decide something is true about who we are. I'm not creative. I'm not good with people. I need a lot of alone time. I can't handle uncertainty. These assessments might have been accurate once, or they might have just been survival strategies that helped us get through a specific season. Either way, we carry them forward as fixed truths about our identity.

The hard part is that changing your mind about yourself requires more than just deciding differently. It means letting go of a story you've been telling for years, and that story has shaped real choices. The relationships you're in, the work you do, the way you spend your time, all of it was built around a version of yourself that you're now outgrowing. Changing your mind means facing the possibility that you've been living smaller than necessary.

I do also think some things shouldn't change. Commitments you've made, vows that matter, people you've promised to show up for. Those deserve endurance even when it's hard. But the beliefs you hold about your own limitations, the narratives about what you're capable of or what you need to be happy, those aren't vows. You're allowed to outgrow them.

Living intentionally means being willing to see yourself clearly now, even when that means releasing who you thought you had to be. It means giving yourself permission to change your mind about your own story and then living into the person you're actually becoming.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

embracing uncertainty

Dear Reader,

Someone asked me last week how to know if they should stay in their job or leave. They'd been sitting with this question for months, going back and forth, asking everyone they knew for advice. Every time they got close to a decision, something new would come up and they'd be back to not knowing. They wanted me to help them find certainty, and I had to tell them I couldn't give them that. In fact, nobody could.

I've been thinking about how much effort we put into trying to make uncertainty go away. We keep looking for more information, waiting for some clear sign that we're making the right choice. But that kind of certainty rarely shows up for the bigger decisions we face, and we exhaust ourselves waiting for it.

I've sat with a lot of people through uncertainty, and what seems to make it unbearable isn't just the not knowing itself. It feels like we should have figured it out by now, like not having an answer means we're doing something wrong. We treat uncertainty like a problem to solve instead of a reality to live inside while we figure things out.

I keep wondering what it would mean to intentionally embrace uncertainty instead of just trying to eliminate it. To say "I don't know how this will turn out" and make a choice anyway. To accept that no amount of research delivers the certainty we are looking for, and to choose a direction anyway.

Uncertainty doesn't disappear when you stop fighting it. But the paralysis might.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

meaning making

Dear Reader,

A client told me recently that her childhood was hard, and she's spent most of her adult life trying to figure out what that means. Was it character building? Was it trauma she needs to heal from? Was it just what happened, with no larger significance attached? The question exhausts her because she's spent so long searching for the answer, as though there's one true interpretation hiding somewhere. What she's starting to realize in therapy is that meaning might be something she gets to create rather than uncover.

I've been noticing how often we do this. Something happens and almost immediately we're interpreting it. Your friend doesn't text back and suddenly you've decided they're angry with you. You don't get the job and the story becomes that you're not good enough. Someone compliments your work and you're already assuming they're just being polite. The thing that happened is just the thing that happened, but the meaning we attach to it is what we end up carrying.

Most of this happens without us thinking about it. We inherit meanings from our families, our past, the culture we grew up in. Someone who was criticized a lot as a kid hears feedback differently than someone who was encouraged. The same words land in completely different places depending on what meanings you've already built around being corrected.

What can change when you start noticing this is that you have some say in the story of your life. For example, your boss gives you critical feedback. The first meaning that shows up might be "I'm failing." But you could also read it as them investing in your growth, or as one specific thing needing adjustment. Same conversation, but the meaning you settle on changes what you do next.

The meanings we make shape the lives we live. Making meaning intentionally instead of automatically changes what becomes possible.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive