Do you remember that scene in Tommy Boy where Chris Farley describes his precious sale as a naughty little pet that he nurtures and loves and then squashes and rips apart? Lovingly over-emphasizing an earlier sale until he tries so hard he sets the CEO’s desk on fire. A comical version of Lennie Small’s heartbreaking mice in Of Mice and Men.

This is how I feel as I face the next chapter of finding paid work. I focused so singularly on the creative, put all my energy into building in this direction — one where I am alone in the writing, alone in the salon launching — to the point that anything other than that mono-focus feels like my pet failed to thrive.

Since launching this publication in March, kicking off the salon series in April, I have been entirely dedicated to this new path as a creative. And it took that much attention — it is not an easy transition from 20 years in the left-brained life of a project manager. From structuring systems and re-orging teams to strategizing ecosystem outreach, my right brain was employed in building relationships, but vastly under-exercised in regular use. Pivoting to daily writing, struggling to translate mental rabbit holes into digestible concepts, convey nebulous ideas (hopefully cogently and compellingly, though that is for you to judge, Dear Reader) — it has taken all my mental resources.

So now, as the training wheels come off and I can steer one-handed, it is time to refill the coffers. I must admit: part of it feels like failure. Not because I had some romantic vision of 10k subscribers in 10 months or overnight success, but because my non-logical side had the soft wish that this nothing-but-creativity mode could be my life.

It is soul-nourishing in ways I have never known.

In comes the pivot. Not away from this work by any means, but towards collaboration, because that is how I’m choosing to think of it: seeking out new connections and co-creations that never would have come writing alone from my cabin. Taking these ideas out into the world, using this changed perspective in service of different projects and people.

…And yet the modern-day narrative of “Your art did not feed you” creeps in. The unbidden comparison to those with 50k followers who are sustained by their work, whose hustle is paying off. The intellectual knowing-better overlaid atop the emotional sigh.

I know dozens of others in this boat, wishing we had inspiring ways to keep ourselves fed versus the pragmatic sense that there is meaning and there is earning and they are not the same thing.

I am deeply sick of them not being the same thing.
Maybe we all are.

Read more

I recently spoke to a pioneering, innovative, risk-philic friend who spent a decade campaigning for transparency in governance. She now jokes about homesteading and raising chickens because: things are fcked.

Something is coming.

We have been watching old systems crumbling. As Paris burns, Korea shakes awake, Iran wrestles a sleeping tyrant, and the US becomes farcical, we can feel the cracks at our feet.

We don’t want soulless jobs. We are tired of the game. Sick of stepping over our neighbors on sidewalks, running the “just a bit more” earnings race, endlessly shopping on Amazon…the structures are becoming sickening.

We know we can care for our planet. We miss caring for each other. We sense there is a better way to be, yet feel blocked, overwhelmed, and under-impressed by how our fellow humans have shown up so far.

If the world is resigned to watching AI cat videos, how is there hope?

What’s missing is the sense that there are many of us feeling this way. It is not “Others are fine” and then there is us — it is us. Globally, pervasively, there is a huge tide of humans welling up who have grown discomfited by the dominant paradigm, ill-fitting clothes we can no longer ignore.

Who in your life isn’t saying the world is a giant cluster fck? We can feel the shift coming.

Pluralistic ignorance: a social psychology phenomenon where individuals privately reject a group’s norm, belief, or behavior, yet publicly conform because they mistakenly assume that everyone else accepts it.

Pluralistic ignorance is watching everyone else go to work on Monday — despite the latest bombing, another drastic climate event, further evidence global leaders are committing atrocities — and acting like it is the weather. Like “this is how the world is and there’s nothing we can do to change it.” Defeating doesn’t convey the weight.

In 1989, every Monday, a church in Leipzig, Germany held a prayer for peace. In September, people stopped going home afterward. Unbidden, they lingered in the square. The next week, more came. Then more. Soon they were walking the city together. It was not an organized event nor did it start as a protest. But within two months, more than 500,000 people gathered in Berlin. Five days later, the Wall fell.

This is a definition of pluralistic ignorance breaking. Due to threats of Stasi capture, rightly, no one spoke to each other about the status quo. No one knew they weren’t alone in wanting change — until they were standing next to each other in the street.

So why don’t we speak?

Read more

Sunday night, I got to participate in yet another deeply moving conversation. Tired and worn out from a long trip, I honestly didn’t feel like doing it. Not for the first time, the depth and candor of those who came rejuvenated and inspired me.

My cup is regularly filled by thoughtful humans engaging honestly.
Thank you for being a part of this.

The topic of the salon was part three in a series on relationships. It is a broad one with endless areas to explore. Among others, we have delved into templates for romantic relationships, the intention with which we build them versus the engrained patterning into which we fall with our families, how we build and foster community, and how we have, learn to, and engage in hard conversations.

One woman offered that the health of a relationship is in relation to its ability to “rupture and repair.” Another likened that to building muscle — strain leads to greater strength.

At one point, I asked if handling hard conversations should be something we teach in schools and the whole group responded with a resounding “Yes!”

It was then that our youngest gave us a glimpse into the frustrations of phone-dominated adolescence. Of peers who don’t know how to forge good boundaries around outreach (when you can simply DM, not even having to ask for a number or permission anymore), of the nebulous authenticity of posting for likes, of the damage being done by unsolicited sexual messaging. “Snapchat is ruining the world,” she said.

It is easy to blame cell phones for much of today’s issues — they are changing the nature of communication while bastardizing actual human connection. But just as the flavor of our young friend’s struggle is new, the nature of it is not — we all had rocky teen years filled with identity questioning and fumbled conversations. And it’s not like our parents and grandparents fared any better. Many from Sunday’s salon shared stories of how pushing conflicts under the surface, shoving down personal needs was the directive of their childhood. “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

In learning how to connect today — enlisting tools like Transactional Analysis, NLP, nonviolent communication — we are building on the shoulders of giants, but we are doing so facing entirely new challenges. Your grandfather had to get up the gall to ask your grandmother out, and she never had to regulate herself through surprise (and unwelcome) dick pics.

Now we have to navigate channel fluency, async and digital etiquette. A friend recently told me she gets offended at periods in text messages because they feel like a reprimand, like the statement is too stern.

At the salon, someone told us that she refuses to have hard conversations via text — you must call or meet in person. “There is no nervous system-to-nervous system exchange.” But in the teenager’s life, neither of these is even a considered option — the digital is the medium.

In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle describes families that now fight entirely via text because they can edit. The parents have lost, and the children never gain, the ability to have impromptu, well-managed conflict — to be courteous and not say the thing you shouldn’t say, even when upset. Turkle tells story after story of such avoidance. Yes, kids are picking up poor habits growing up on phones, but also: parents are teaching their children this.

Long before cell phones, it was prevalent that one partner would leave another, somewhat out of the blue, with only an explanation at the end of what went wrong — a Dear John letter. Similar to the families above, it was a means of saying the thing without having to then face the reaction of the recipient.

In a digital world where conflict muscles were never built to begin with, there is nothing to atrophy — it is relational distance by default.

Sunday’s 17-year-old shared how much resentment teens feel towards cell phones and the seeming impossibility of ditching them — it would mean choosing essential social alienation. The adults felt mostly the same. How strange to be in a moment when so many of us feel unable to enact the change we want to see in our lives — like a room with no exit.

I’m obsessed with the implications of the wonderful Lucille Clifton’s argument that:

First, we must know we are not alone in the wanting. Second, we must talk to each other about what the world we want looks like.

A potential starting point: Cat Goetze created bluetooth-enabled landlines that allow sending and receiving calls the old-fashioned way (forwarded from your cell).

Going back to voice builds muscle.

Showing up IRL when it would be easier to stay home and scroll builds muscle.

Staying courteous in a room when not everyone agrees — gym work.

Having hard conversations when it would be easier to avoid is serious strength training.

We and our relationships deserve it.

If this resonates, circle back and share one small way you chose to be in the room vs. taking the digital side door this week — we could all benefit from hearing each other’s bravery right now.

Leave a comment

📞 📞 📞

Also: come to a salon. They’re a nourishing way of wading deeper into community. If we aren’t hosting by you yet, message me if you’d like to explore hosting together.

I highly recommend listening to my fellow storytellers, but if you’re short on time, the piece about Haiti can be watched from minute 12:11 below or listened to here at ~16:20 (click on the “Simple Gifts” episode).

☀︎ ☼ ☀︎

Can you imagine a life in which you did what you loved, full-time, dedicated solely to what lights you up?

My mom asks a great question of those trying to find their resonance: if money were no issue, all finances taken care of, what would you do that felt like giving back? Could be to people, to animals, the environment — just something that made you feel good, like you were making a difference.

Play with that for a minute.

Maybe the answer comes quickly for you. Maybe you’ve known you wanted to be a doctor since you were six. Maybe the direction has been a little more nebulous.

What would be your Lucy Sparrow? Working with children. Teaching ceramics. Cleaning our oceans. Immigrant support. Owning a teahouse. Writing a book.

I recently attended a talk with Tayari Jones in which she said writing may be small, a novel may not have global impact, “but it’s what we can do.”

Stories transport us. Learning ceramics delights us. All these gifts matter. Your Lucy Sparrow may not be building orphanages — that’s perfectly fine. Far better for you and the world is what enlivens you, even if it’s “small.” Sparrow’s first New York installation closed nine days early because all 9,000 felt pieces sold out in just over two weeks. They touched people.

“You’ve got to find what you love,” was Steve Jobs’ endlessly echoed line from his 2005 Stanford commencement address. It was an era when the U.S. narrative was obsessed with “following your passion,” “finding your calling,” and other graduation-speech refrains. TED Talks and news headlines and career counseling leaned heavily on you finding your one true path in order to be happy and live up to your potential. The problem was: most of us had no idea what the hell this meant, and the pressure to figure it out made many of us feel worse for not knowing.

So we fell into regular jobs, we explored strengths more than passions. As David Brooks explains it, much of the first era of adulthood is about achievement and self-validation. We work to prove our worth — largely to ourselves, but also as standing in the workplace. The second era is when we have the foundation to turn outward and think of impact, of meaning and community. Less about a single grand path for life, more about liking how we fill our days.

I can no longer count the number of friends I’m hearing question their “work.” Viktor Frankl famously wrote that what keeps us alive is engaging with meaning. His observations in nazi concentration camps were that those who didn’t have something to fulfill were the ones who most often failed to make it through. For some it was children to live for; some it was comforting other prisoners and being of service. For Frankl it was writing the book that lived inside him.

Being of service can show up in myriad ways. Being a good neighbor helps. Calling your grandma. Saying “Hello” on the sidewalk. We need it all right now. At a moment old structures are crumbling and the shape of the future is increasingly unknown, it seems more important than ever we reach for what matters.

And it seems many of us need new forms of meaning.

Thinking of all my talented, seeking friends, I wish I had an amazing startup idea — I’d have a whole village to build it. I wish I had a way to funnel all the creativity and huge contribution these brilliant humans have yet to make.

For now, what I have are words, formed into an invitation to consider. What lights you up? Not what is your “passion” — that proved to be grandiose and overwhelming in scope. Just: what would feel good in the doing of it?

Maybe it’s felting Windex bottles.

How can we take the pressure off “callings” and careers and big bottom lines — just for a moment — and consider what small activity might add some to our cups today? Even moving in the direction of meaning matters.

I will leave you with fewer words today because I want to hear more from you. Nothing profound needed — simply drop one thing you love doing into the box below.

Reading others’ delights has a way of awakening our own.

Leave a comment

♢ ♦︎ ♦︎ ♢

P.S. A few items inspiring me this week —

Tayari Jones and Ben Fountain at the Aspen Literary Festival

[HT: Jackie Erikson] Artist Fills a Museum with 20,000 Felt Grocery Items

[HT: Lara Himber] The Homeless Community That Became a Self-Governed Village

It is fall equinox in the Rocky Mountains. A moment of equilibrium of day and night, of reflection on the last six months. In a ceremony to honor mother nature and the four directions, the facilitator asked us to notice what we have been apologizing for.

The night prior, I stood on stage in a room full of strangers and named one of my deepest sources of shame. I had signed up for a community storytelling event. To my horror, that was the story that wanted to be told.

Asked what I have been apologizing for, the answer came quickly: everything. For weeks leading up to the storytelling, grief had been spilling out of me — far more than I was aware was buried on top of the shame I had thoroughly shoved to the back corner of my emotional closet. But just as clearly, I saw that next night I have also been shrinking my light. Too big, too small, too bold, not enough — I have silenced at points all along the spectrum.

At the end of the ceremony, sharing with a friend (who had been there the night before) what had come up for each of us, I thought I was holding space for her experience, but I must have said something that struck her. She went home and sent me a writing challenge: to author a piece in which I own all the big things I have done — to “shamelessly brag” about my life and experiences. When I told her that felt edgy, that I have received a lot of pushback for being too big, she said that it was obvious in the way I let things quietly slide out. “I’m so curious about the shame in the brag versus the bravery in the shame of the vulnerable story,” she said.

⟘ ⟙ ⟘

In my first grade there was a boy named Jack. Big eyes and full lips, nothing was wrong with his face, but in that uncanny way even small children filter based on attractiveness, he wasn’t accepted by many of the kids. So he was singular, hung out alone. It didn’t help that he’d go into the corners of the recess field and eat grasshoppers. He stayed friendless.

Sometimes I wonder if that early isolation didn’t work out better for Jack in the long run. Maybe he never got stuck in the endless cycle of trying to please and fit in. Perhaps never popular, he never learned to contort.

I, on the other hand, became a chameleon. Partly because I genuinely love a variety of people; partly because I was dying to be accepted.

In learning period one day at the same school, I used a word that was evidently abnormal for someone my age and a boy made fun of me for being a smarty pants. Hand verbally slapped, I learned to dumb it down. I didn’t use “brainiac” words for 20 years.

A late bloomer, a head shorter and flat-chested, I had to effort to be liked, to be funny, to fit in. I didn’t have the boobs or great hair that made many girls automatically popular. So I tried. Hard.

Still taking my own path, travel has been a passion since I was little and I have done it often and widely. That, too, became something I needed to shrink. Hearing a fragment of my foreign trips, a friend of a friend snapped at me for showing off making it clear I was an asshole for sharing my experience. I learned not to be a tall poppy.

As with so many women, I was forced into some situations with men I didn’t want, but was scared so didn’t fight or scream “No.” So I saw them as my fault. It felt I had brought them on myself, so I learned to hide them. Shove my shame in the back of the closet.

In numerous committed relationships, I didn’t say how I was truly feeling, voice my concerns about our future for fear of hurting them. [My biggest fear has long been hurting others.] So I kept my mouth shut. Softened my concerns to the point of palatability (and often meaninglessness). I didn’t leave when part of me knew I should have. Olympic-scale contortion.

The number of times I didn’t voice my needs — to friends, to family, to strangers, to the waiter who brought me cold food — is too vast to figure. All for the sake of being accepted, liked, easygoing.

⟙ ⟘ ⟙

The answer to my friend’s question is that both shame and pride have been punished. Each has been the same flinch, the same reshaping of myself in order to be accepted.

Not the piece she asked for, but a start: I have traveled and worked all over the world — in big cities and tiny remote villages — often alone. I have raised and managed multi-million-dollar budgets. I have hired 400 nurses in a language I don’t speak. I have worked natural disasters and epidemic emergencies. I have helped save over 6,000 lives.

That last line has lived far more on flat pages of my resume than in words from my mouth.

⟘ ⟙ ⟘

Unspoken shame. Unspoken bravery. Unspoken pride. Unspoken asks. Unspoken love. Unspoken changes (sometimes ends) in love.

We withhold for so many reasons — most of them seemingly “good.” We keep our lips closed for fear of hurting others, of being hurt, of being judged, of being rejected.

“Don’t rock the boat.”
“Don’t stick your neck out.”
“Stay within the comfort zones of those around you and things will be fine.”

How quickly we learn to sell ourselves short for the sake of others. To shrink and contort. Bend into a shape others find palatable.

How strange. How tragic — the many things we silence for fear of others’ judgment.

What have you not fully said?

⟙ ⟘ ⟙

You’re on a hiking trail. It’s genuinely hard, steep and demanding. You’re out of breath and have been for a while. Looking uphill, the incline does not let up soon. What do you do?

Work has been grueling. You’re understaffed for the demands and the demands keep stacking. You have been pushing for what feels like an eternity, and the big deliverables are still to come. Exhausted and not done, what do you do?

Think about the last half dozen challenges you faced — which way did you go? Did you push through, no question? Meet some, but back off others? Choose not to push because the conditions weren’t right?

I live in a valley that is exceptionally Type A. From double black diamonds to conquering 14,000-foot peaks, it is a joke (that is true) that a regular Saturday is biking uphill to a 14-mile trailhead, then riding down to the river to SUP. Aspen Extreme was aptly titled.

If you’ve been here recently (or know me IRL), you’ve seen my battle with when to be eggy and when to be spermy. I am a prodigious forcer-of-outcomes. The struggle is that there is no line, no “right” approach. Sometimes I push and it works; others, it backfires. At work, I push too hard and the team resents it. In training, I overdo it and suffer the consequences. Often, my internal taskmaster is an unhealthy ego.

Alternatively, there are times when I shrink rather than show up — excuse bowing out (of social engagements or exercise) when part of me knows I should probably lean in.

It is difficult to be honest with ourselves about when to back off versus when we back down. Sometimes, these two may be indistinguishable from the inside (when choosing the chill night at home is genuinely restorative rather than avoidant). Sometimes, our answer is continually “not yet,” and that’s also a problem (when we’ve been putting off the gym for months and there’s always a reason).

As a woman in my 40s, the current health thinking is that it really is time to lean in: to maintain muscle mass, bone density, and fight dementia, we have to lift heavy and eat an absurd amount of protein. Each is equally challenging in their own ways, especially if we are unaccustomed. The women around me run the spectrum in responses from the extreme — optimizing with peptides and six-day workout schedules — to outright avoidance. Having lived through the low-fat Atkins trend, speedy ephedra diet pills, raw foodism, carnivore, paleo, keto, and now GLP1s, hindsight will tell us if any of this was advisable.

For men (and men, please weigh in and correct me where I’m wrong), it seems the pressure lies heavier on the push instinct — always push at work, always go heavier in the gym. And the inverse is to not start at all — an inclination to avoid if it’s not going to be successful/well done/perfectly executed.

Much of all this stems from a U.S. culture built around individual accomplishment and an idolization of success. When I lived in waify Paris, the moderate muscle tone that often feels like the minimum bar here in active Colorado was derisively called “sporty.” There, it is considered vain to spend time in a gym working solely for physical attainment. Running? Fine, you’re outside. Tennis? Also fine, it’s outdoor and social. But gym rats are looked down upon and so was I.

Remember the glorification of the 80-hour-per-week CEO in the ‘90s? It took sleep-deprived Ariana Huffington collapsing at her desk, hitting her head on the corner, and waking up in a pool of blood to recognize overexertion is not a badge of honor.

The flip side is quieter: the seemingly sudden 25lbs, the pre-diabetes diagnosis, the redundancy layoff at work — an accumulation of many small leaning-outs that one day surprise us.

Being a historical Type A, my consequences often come loudly and suddenly. To better understand the inverse experience, I went to AI, which told me the two impulses are often the same instinct, just opposite answers. On one side, challenges are a preloaded “yes,” forcey and steamrolling. On the other, a preloaded “no” that often comes with reasoning and justification — “It isn’t the right time, “I want them to like me,” or “My knee hurts.” Neither is conscious and both arrive quickly because they have already been decided. The more nebulous middle is slower, deliberate in the moment, and genuinely weighs when to push and when to back off. The problem is, similar to above-average driving, most all of us will put ourselves in this bracket, considering ourselves considerate.

Can we be honest about which way we lean? Neither is “bad” if we agree that balance is most often the goal. Pre-diabetes on one side and total burnout on the other.

It raises the question: what got us here, to one disposition or the other? A child who tries hard but still isn’t picked for the team may conclude her effort doesn’t equal results — she may learn to flinch. A different child with spermy parents may absorb that achievement is the only answer — thus learning to steamroll. Same with a kid who dieted but watched the weight return versus the seeming natural athlete who internalizes push = payoff. We build these patterns early.

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck demonstrates we often fall into two styles of learning: growth or fixed. The former takes on challenges with a beginner’s mind and easily tries new things. The latter subconsciously believes that we either “have it or we don’t,” that talent is innate and thus shies away from endeavors they aren’t sure they will achieve.

I, dear reader, am still training in adulthood to redirect myself to a growth mindset after a lifetime of perfectionism, which has made me both overly forceful and avoidant. Dweck’s guidance is crucial. She advises we identify our triggers: notice when an obstacle or a mistake elicits defensiveness or makes us feel insecure. This reaction is the fixed mindset speaking, so give it a voice and a distinct persona outside of yourself. Then work to reframe: I can’t do this becomes I can’t do this yet. Value effort over accomplishment, and view setbacks as evidence we are trying versus indicators we will fail.

In skiing, they say, “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying.”

As in my own perfectionism, Dweck’s fixed mindset appears in the flincher and the steamroller — one says I’m not athletic, the other I’m someone who doesn’t quit. Both preloaded.

A growth mindset lets us rest without guilt — when the identity shifts from I don’t quit to I read my own signals, a rest day reads as a skilled call, not a defeat — and also lets us push when we don’t “want” to (but want the outcome). The reorientation in each is to honestly assess and learn to read the inputs differently rather than reverting to knee-jerk patterning.

Balance is a goal, and not always an attainable one. More important is to head in the direction of rather than punish ourselves for yet another thing we didn’t do “right.” Looking forward, thinking of the challenges you currently face or will in the near future, how can you help yourself honestly weigh what’s best — in the moment?

Drop your answers in the comments — this elbowy author genuinely wants to know.

⛷ ⛷ ⛷

Leave a comment

I have been dwelling on my friend’s perceived poor behavior. On my financial standing. On what I “should” do to fix it.

The impulse to fixate on the negative amid more evidence of the positive is a survival instinct — when x, y, and z are solved/fine, we don’t notice them as much as a and b that are not fine or need to be fixed.

You can receive 10 compliments, but it is the one complaint that will stick. Our health can be good, our paychecks sound, and our relationship solid, but the small fight with the friend will claw at our attention. Why is that?

The human brain is a problem-solving machine. We puzzle at things until the loop is closed, until we find a sense of resolution. Rather than focusing on your good health or amazing partner, your brain will gnaw at the conflict, play out scenarios — seemingly ceaselessly until it is “done.”

But we can’t resolve conflict independently. We can’t mentally puzzle into fixing our finances. So the loops continue. The stress lingers. If we let it, the circles spiral up into an anxious demeanor.

I met a woman recently who was comparing her more anxious tendencies to that of her sister. She said, “People try to change me. If you don’t like my anxiety, you don’t like who I am.” She would rather identify with and entirely absorb her worry than try to assuage it.

To dwell. To whirl. To obfuscate.

Wisdom traditions teach us to pause, to reconnect with the present moment. In this moment, am I okay? Nearly always, yes. My concern about my finances lies in some imagined future. [The old grasshopper and ant cartoon playing out in my head.]

Am I going to be okay?

Is it possible to dwell, to linger on what is working in our lives? The good health, great partner, loving friends? The scientific answer is sort of. The instinct to focus on the problem(s) is tied to survival. It is fast, involuntary, and built-in. Cheap false alarms are better than expensive misses. The loops that keep us there are more malleable.

It is a choice to stay fixated, running the problem and responses repeatedly in our minds. Largely because our brains interpret this rumination as problem solving: there is a complex circuit that gets stimulated when something feels wrong or incomplete, and we get hits of dopamine by running the circuit continuously.

Obsessing feels like we’re putting in effort to work it out. Running my financials over and over gives me a sense I will come to a realization, a solution.

Finances are an especially tricky issue because they run in the background, like processes slowing down your computer hard drive. Because it’s linked to actual survival, it eats up bandwidth that literally makes us slower and dumber — up to a 13-point drop in IQ. And still: I should make more gd money.

Other problems can be significantly sticky, but activate different regions of the brain. A breakup will also consume any free mental space (and plenty that should be dedicated elsewhere) in the same circuit, but will also trigger withdrawal networks and areas governing physical pain.

Here we dwell, we swirl, go astray.

In meditation, each time we pause the monkey-mind thinking, we build new neural pathways. Welcome back.

What happens when we do the same for our daily life “problems”? When we exit the ride of obsession?

At first it kind of feels like irresponsibility — “Putting this down means I’m not doing anything to fix it.” But all we’ve been “doing” is taxing our nervous systems, riling ourselves up to no avail.

So where is the line between healthy attention and obsession? Problem-solving and irrational anxiety?

That I am in search of a line, of a “right” answer is part of the hangup. Mathematicians and physicists have been solving complex problems through fixation for centuries. Mythical (and erroneous), the story of Einstein’s bathtub “aha” moments describe something that is wildly satisfying when it arises. But math problems very often have an answer. Modern life — with its short attention spans, catastrophic media, and consumerist messaging telling us we have a dozen issues we didn’t know we had until there was a product for purchase to fix them — has grown our solution-seeking mania to new levels. Rumination on steroids.

[Listerine was sold as an antiseptic and floor cleaner until the makers started marketing it as a solution to the revived medical condition of “halitosis.”]

To worry used to mean “to strangle, choke, or seize by the throat.” The meaning evolved to encompass how predatory animals hunted prey — “to seize by the throat and shake violently.” Today, when a dog chews on a toy, it is worrying at it. When we are gripped by worry, we are refusing to let something go, shaking, clenching, obsessively turning it over. How often is the felt sense a strangling, suffocating, physical tightness in the throat? [Seem satisfying now?]

Again, how do we let go?

From the research — and often from experience — only by choice. By consciously putting the thoughts down. [Exhale.]

Near me are friends who were gifted an incredible house by their friend who (for tax purposes) needed somewhere to “park” his cash. My friends are generous with this gift and often host amazing gatherings. Last weekend as we celebrated, barbecued, hot tubbed, danced, and indulged, we talked about what it would be like to receive such a gift. Better yet, to be in such abundance as to give one. [For the divine record, I am wildly open and happy to receive such flow. May I be in the position to gift hugely and often.]

Pondering plenitude, I came home and listed the ways I have huge wealth. I came up with seven. Seven. Multi-million-dollar houses weren’t on the list, but that’s pretty fckn good. [Share yours?]

How on earth have I been so consumed with the two areas in which I “lack”?

Because that’s what our brains do: they attempt to close loops. Often to our detriment. I have been unhappy and lost, circling two areas when I have at least three times as many massive gifts. That mental pivot alone brings so much levity. [Exhale.]

You probably aren’t a crazy perfectionist who internally lambasts themselves constantly like I am (ahem), but this internal jaw-lock is kind of the same: we think being hard on ourselves will result in better outcomes, hold us to some higher bar. But in reality, all we are doing is making ourselves feel awful.

In school, did you respond better to the teachers who scolded you or who praised and supported you? [Still feel it’s productive to treat you badly?]

once wrote:

In the same essay, she writes about having equally terrible responses to no people in her audiences or many — both are problems.

Here we dwell. In the vacillating, sometimes chaotic, often unreasonable, illogical home of our minds.

I wish I had tidy advice to offer — “Five ways to clean up your thoughts, make eight figures, and be happy tomorrow!” But both the impending doom of my finances and magical resolution to them lie in some nonexistent tomorrow.

All we have is today. This moment in which I can cycle on the two or sit in the seven — in my mind and on this page.

To choose where I linger and dwell.

☙ ❦ ❧

“Your flight has been cancelled.”

Not “You’re now departing at a different time,” just cancelled. The travel equivalent of the road suddenly dropping off a cliff. In surfing it’s called “getting tumbled.”

Well, now what?

The East Coast is blanketed in storms, the FAA has grounded flights for half the day, and now you either arrive the following day, missing the very things the journey was for, or you call it off. What do you do?

Do you fight? Refuse to accept defeat, spend hours on hold waiting to speak to a bedraggled representative and see if there are itinerary gymnastics you can perform to contort yourself into making it work? Or do you call it a divine redirect, sigh, and divert your attention to how to fill the sudden gap in your schedule and loss of all your plans?

How do we choose when to allow and when to lean in? [Or, often in my life, elbow?]

Much of my adult experience has been in a dance between my reflexive impulse to be spermy, pushing my way towards the outcome I think is “right,” and my slow learning to become more eggy, allowing things to turn out differently, seeing what unfolds rather than forcing it. It has gotten easier as I get older and see just how often the other outcomes have been better than what I thought I wanted, but this doesn’t mean it is easy.

We engage in any action because we want a particular outcome. Whether it is going to the grocery store or getting an advanced degree, all journeys are undertaken with some expectation of a payoff. If x, then y (or y-ish). Because our expectations are so often met (we have achieved many successful trips to Kroger), we inevitably get a sense of destinal control — “My self-agency invokes results.” Intellectually, we know this is not always true; emotionally, we are very often rocked when it doesn’t turn out the way we wanted — and the degree of investment amplifies disappointment exponentially when the outcome is otherwise.

Being re-routed on the Kroger trip is odd and mildly irritating; not being handed a great career with a big paycheck after years of continued study can flatten a person.

I have been fascinated with this concept of expectations and how they can determine the quality of our lives — largely because mine are so often high and then dashed. Neuro-Linguistic Programming has an adage:

I am a preparatory queen.

In relationships with my sister, in listening to the challenges of friends’ lives, in work efforts — I am exceedingly accomplished at determining how I think things should go and then getting married to the answer. My sister should respond as I would and treat me as I would her. My friends should heed my advice and work to up-level their lives (based on said guidance). People at work should bend to my will and follow the course I have so lovingly laid out. “Can’t you see? I provided the map right here.”

This exploration has brought me to the notion of a floor in an expectation versus that of a ceiling: the floor in a relationship can be as base as “I expect you to care about my wellbeing,” or “I expect you not to punch me in the face.” Ceilings (where I so often operate) are closer to “I expect you to rise above the conditioning that keeps you choosing men who do not appreciate you,” or “I expect you to own your value to your boss and get a raise.” Not always so explicitly said, but quite often conveyed; always coming from love, and typically stemming from my self-appointed Director’s chair.

In coach training, they suggest not coaching your friends and family because you will always have an agenda for them. My people have often gotten both — unsolicited — for years. [You’re welcome.]

It is true I hover too high near relational ceilings. But I honestly don’t know how to be in relationship or navigate the world without expectations. I expect paying money for a plane ticket to fly to a workshop will result in me on a flight and then in a conference room. But “Your flight has been cancelled” notifications suggest otherwise.

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb offers a parable of a turkey who wakes every day to a farmer feeding him. For 1,000 days, the same thing happens. Each day reinforces the turkey’s belief the farmer loves turkeys. When the day before Thanksgiving comes, the turkey is stunned to be slaughtered. He has mistaken the absence of harm for safety.

All those trips to Kroger have given me a false sense of control.

The lineages that have taught about the error of expectations are many. Daoism, zen, sufism, christianity, judaism, and the stoics all counsel we should have strong engagement with the process but let go of the expected results. Basically, every wisdom tradition has warned we set ourselves up for trouble when we cling too tightly. One says give it up to god, another to simply accept — none of them help identify the fine line.

Honestly, how good are you at letting go in the face of something you really wanted not coming through? The big win at work, the relationship healing — your child’s/pet’s diagnosis?

Amor fati is the Latin term for love of fate. Nietzsche used it to discuss the sense of loving every outcome — past, present, and future. Can we do that? Love all of it?

Love everything. [Fuck.]

That blows expectations entirely out the window. Until my dad died when I was 15, I expected people to live. But then 20 more people died and I got rid of that assumption.

But we can’t all walk around braced for every potential outcome all the time — we have to take mental shortcuts. So we assume. We predict. And often, we are knocked off-kilter when those predictions are unmet.

So how do we balance? I have found no fine line on which to delineate a reasonable expectation (that you will not punch me in the face) from the unreasonable where I have drifted again towards the ceiling.

Recently, I had a contract with someone. For months, I built mental latticework around what the result would look like, what the enactment and the outcome would be. But at the time of realization, the heart of what I thought our agreement was went unmet. I was crestfallen. I had put so much energy (and time and money) into what I thought we were collaborating on that I fell off a steep cliff when it was otherwise. The ceiling fell through the floor. Part is on my co-collaborator, a large part is on me.

Disappointment requires adequate preparation.

But how do we navigate the world either prepared for everything or nothing, accepting all things?

When the notification came through that my flight was cancelled, should I have sighed, accepted, and re-routed? Do we easily buckle to all changes? Or do we engage? I spent the two-plus hours on hold waiting for United. I got a new flight. I elbowed through no rental cars at the new destination, the scramble on a tight itinerary, Friday Manhattan rush-hour, and all the domino’ed logistical changes that followed. I pushed hard and “won.” [Rode out the wave this time.] I made the workshop and it was great. But as AI pointed out on the drive in, “winning” or “losing” was only a judgment available in retrospect. Had I pushed on hold with United just to spend two hours unsuccessfully, I would have gotten a lesson in pushing. Had I not tried, I would have deemed it a lesson in letting go.

All this to say, I have no fckn idea. I do not know any more about when to lean in and when to allow. I know I have leaned too often and too hard, but how does that instruct the future? As far as I can tell, there is no line to follow that guides towards leaning or allowing.

A friend recently wrote about hard times we may be facing and his friend who is struggling with dashed expectations — something about the future she had envisioned wasn’t to be. I read this and found myself getting angry. My young self learned so forcefully it wasn’t safe to assume that it triggered my inner 15-year-old hearing an adult complaining that something in her life hadn’t turned out as she thought it should. She got decades. Welcome to the party, lady.

Last week in exploring getting tumbled through transition, I mentioned Aurelius’ thoughts on the universe being change and our lives being what our thoughts make of it. Amor fati. Can we embrace it all?

I (exasperatingly) don’t know. My high expectations often end in disappointment. But post-contract breach, so do my floors. I can see where I built up decorative projections around the agreement at the heart — that’s on me. How to not feel tumbled when the seeming baseline of expectations isn’t honored is currently beyond me. Going around braced for letdown only leads us to a society of Eeyores.

So when to lean in? When to let go? All I can say is it seems to be a dance — one in which the moves are not pre-scripted and will change unexpectedly and often.

The wave doesn’t care how we feel. The quality of our experience, of this dance, lies in when we flail or learn to flow.

And still: idfk.

? ¿ ? ¿ ?

We are having a moment. Transition is brewing all around, for some at a pace we cannot slow down. Maybe not you — maybe life is coasting as usual and the ground beneath you is firm. If so, good. May it continue. For the rest of us, things are breaking open, falling away, moving apart. The calls I’m getting are all some variety of trying to gain steady ground, understand what is happening and how to respond — most of us with shoulders shrugged. It is so destabilizing, we simply don’t know.

Who is one person you can share a fear with? Be honest in the lingering dark? Because it seems many of us have big fear showing up asking to be faced, big transition waves to be surfed.

Here is mine: I am scared this won’t work. I am afraid I am out here pouring my guts out for a handful of lovely humans (thank you, friends) and it never “works.” I am scared that launching this project, self-funding into the dark, it will fail and I will have to pivot, broke and dejected. And wrong. The wrong scares me personally: I made a mistake, my vision was off. It also scares me for humanity: connection was offered, but refused. Not that my small-voiced invitation is a reflection for all of humankind, but the implication is that the offer wasn’t wanted. Phones and show-holes and the safety of numbing out was preferable. I am afraid, amid all this upheaval and challenge, humanity will shrink.

Micro and meta fear tangled up in one “What if no one wants this?”

A few weeks ago I got vulnerable and asked for help sharing this. For those who did, thank you. Your belief in me means so much. And the folks it went to didn’t bite. Which is okay — the sharing is what mattered. This isn’t for everyone. I like being a weird corner of the internet, have no wish to be white paint. And also: I want this to spread. Both are true and can internally feel at odds.

Whether your experience of the transitions happening is explained by the eclipses or the economy, Trump or atheistic entropy, it seems many of us are stewing in the unknown, the unstable uncertainty together. Marcus Aurelius said:

Step back a bit, what commentary has been circling for you?

This is really hard.
I can’t do this.
I just know he hates me.
Someone is to blame…

Mine is: Am I going to be okay?

My prefrontal cortex knows I will — humans are nimble, I can adjust and adapt.
My limbic brain whispers, Maybe not.
My heart asks, What if it hurts?

If this doesn’t work, I will have to stop doing this thing I love and get a job. Getting a job feels like failure. Writing that makes me cry.

The last couple weeks have been rocky. Those of you who got phone calls know there have been tears (somewhat unusual for me). As we exchange the hard things we are navigating — the end of relationships (human and animal), the end of an era (work, home, marriage, belief pattern), a diagnosis, a system collapse — I have said the same words to many of you: All we can do is support each other as it comes through.

We cannot provide each other stable ground in a time of global instability. We cannot heal the sickness. We cannot mend anyone else’s relationships — some of which were meant to transition. We can extend an emotional hand and say, “I’m here with you.” But first you and I have to ask. Rather than crawling into a cave of self-protection, we must say to someone “I’m having a moment.”

Me, too, friend.

What emerges on the other side may not look like anything we thought it should (or wanted it to). I can’t promise it works out. Sometimes the change we didn’t want turns out better than what we thought we did. Can we hold each other through the uncertainty? At times, after shouldering our own burdens, we don’t have anything left to give. At others, sharing them gives us spoons.

Who can you check on today?

In moments like these, aspects of our caves are important — to find as much ground as we can — and let us also remember to extend our hands and to ask for them.

What if no one wants this?
What if he really is gone?
What if it does get worse before it gets better?

Suppose your “what if” shows up — the bottom drops out and you fall. Perhaps slowly, but you will be alright. Not unhurt, alright. What will help you ground in that before it feels true? Every scenario I can come up with, the answer is: each other.

To whatever transition you are surfing, you are not alone. I’m right here with you, stewing in the ambiguous soup.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

Linda Hall is a meditation teacher I’ve been following for years, and she has a phrase that so strikes me (as someone who has long tried to control/manage/otherwise steer the behavior and experiences of others): draw your energy back from where it lies scattered.

Looking back at the last week, where has your energy been? Contained within yourself? Or has it been spreading out onto someone else’s side of the net? With loved ones, this is especially tricky — we have well-intended agendas for them, goals we want on their behalf, ways we want them to be (maybe for our own sake).

I’ve written about seeking approval through men after the death of my father. I have spent lots of time on others’ side of the net. Male and female, any of my friends can tell you I have an annoying (loving) way of dictating how they should live their lives. [How nice for them that I have their answers.]

Linda’s prompt gives me deep pause, reflection on where I have gotten messy. Tibetan meditation teaches that whenever we find we have drifted off course, we lovingly say to ourselves, “Welcome back!” No judging, no scolding, just a warm welcome back to the path of present awareness.

I used to reproach myself upon finding I had been spilling my unfilled cup all over others. I wasn’t being perfectly present. I had messed up again. Off balance one way, tipping myself off balance the other.

What does it feel like when we pull our energy in from where it lies scattered? Whole? Centered? Clean? It leads me to questions around how we know when we’re being our best selves. Not perfect — that is a different trap — just our best attempt.

Shall we try a little digital salon here?
I’m curious: what’s on your list of best-self signals?

Leave a comment

From mine, I act out of integrity — this means many things, but includes being honest always (even when it is uncomfortable and might hurt feelings), it means honoring my word, doing hard things. It means I have my head up and am looking at the broader picture, considering others. It means coming from truth and the highest good.

These made the list because none of them are easy; “being nice” isn’t here for a reason.

How do you know when you’re coming from your best self? Is it a feeling in your body? An intuitive resonance? Maybe checking in with an external litmus like your grandfather, a mentor, a religious figure. What Would Jesus Do doesn’t work for many of us, but what if we had an internal yardstick — What Would My Highest Self Do?

Am I doing that?

I recently cancelled an event I had been drafting for close to a year. I still believe in the community-oriented intention, but the actuality of it was causing stress for others. My ego wanted to fight for it; my Higher Self led me to check in with those people, listen honestly, and ultimately let it go. I was surprised by how clean it felt. Shannon five years ago would have dug in and kicked up a fuss.

But after a lifetime of attempting to elbow my way into what I have thought was the “right” answer, clinging to what I thought I wanted, I am finally starting to learn that the impulse to wield an elbow is my first sign — red flag. I don’t know how many times I have not gotten what I wanted just to have something way better show up in its place.

Seems there is a something that knows better than Shannon Meredith Ewing.

So how can I be a match for more? How can I rein in my forcing muscles and do more allowing, more getting out of the way? This is not to say “do not try,” but “drop the elbow.”

By pulling my energy back from where it lies scattered. By asking how I might fill my own cup rather than needing other people, events, outcomes to do it for me.

Yeah, yeah — we have all heard enough self-help preaching about putting our own oxygen mask on first. Frankly, we may be over-indexed on soothing ourselves — today’s therapized language blurs the line between “That crosses my boundaries” and “I simply don’t want to.” The question I am working with today is, “How do I know when I’m coming from my best self?”

I only have drafts of answers, faint breadcrumbs I try to follow. Please share yours — I could use the help.

… … … … …

Shenpa is the Tibetan word for when we get hooked by an experience, a thought, an outcome. Buddhist meditation teaches to scan for these hooks so we might disempower and release them. We can be hooked by anything from “He wronged me” to what we might have for dinner.

What am I going to wear?
Did my boss just smirk after that compliment?
Am I in trouble?
I should have said…

We have endless hooks each day. The insignificant ones wash — we will figure out dinner and our growling bellies will subside. The larger ones can persist a lifetime. Questions (or quests) on being good enough may be daily battles and themes across years. If I can just ____, then I will feel _____. There are tiny hooks and gargantuan ones.

To release these hooks and the damage they inflict in our lives, teacher Tara Brach invites us to pause (recognize/identify the hangup), then come from compassion. [Scolding ourselves for getting hooked is just yet another.]

So much easier said than done.

We get ensnared in these things because they are compelling, because they or their outcomes are important. Everyone has experienced the frustration that arises after someone blithely tells us to “just let it go.” [I have rarely wanted so much to “let go” a karate chop to the throat.] It’s wild how transformative, how revolutionary, how imperative is the small act of a pause.

Non-reaction.

Refrain the reflex. [To scratch the itch, quell the anxiety, justify ourselves, lash back in defense.]

This strange contemplation arises after a week of thought experiment in peace-building. My heart (like so many today) hurts for the state of the world. It seems a small group of dysregulated “leaders” are deciding our fate. And our systems selected for the most toxic candidates, so there is no clear way out — a failure to design with intention got us here.1

My explorations sought examples of formerly bellicose leadership righting the ship, turning towards peace. I was introduced to Robert Axelrod’s tournament rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma. Using computer modeling, he wanted to find the best outcome in the face of many differing approaches. Mathematician and social scientist Anatol Rapoport ultimately submitted the way to “win” and exit the loop: tit-for-tat, but with generosity.

Cooperate on the first move. If your opponent defects (acts against you), be provokable (i.e. defend yourself, punish defection), be forgiving (return to cooperation the instant your opponent does), be legible (make your strategy obvious so they can trust/predict your next move). Rapoport argued this tactic defends against harm while best incentivizing cooperation.

Tit-for-tat, but in a mature way rather than a screaming “Give me back the toy!”
[How novel this feels today.]

As we watch both ancient and seemingly endless loops of retributive wars play out as well as new (and utterly indiscernible) ways of poking the bear, can we even envision stepping out of the merry gloomy-go-round? With giant children at the helm, it can feel impossible.

But there are historic examples.

In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat flew to Israel, stepping foot onto their soil, going to their parliament to formally acknowledge their presence in an effort towards lasting peace. His traveling there was physical, a recognition of their right to exist, and it was unprecedented.

In 1865, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address in which he embraced all Americans — “with malice toward none, with charity for all” — in shared guilt and as an olive branch towards unity. Close to the end of a bloody civil war, at a time when he could have chosen to excoriate the enemy, he chose to embrace.

In 1995, in an effort to rebuild trust in a societally ravaged South Africa, President Nelson Mandela wore the captain’s jersey of the Springbok team onto the field during the World Cup. Long considered a symbol of white supremacy and apartheid, he was counseled to reject it. Instead, he claimed it, signaling his intention was to unify rather than divide.

All three led with acknowledging the other side. All three faced serious denigration for their acts of generosity. Sadly, Sadat’s later cost him his life. The dysregulated systems that surround acts of peace can be dangerous. System regulation is only something we can do for ourselves.

But it ripples.

As in Rapoport’s tit-for-tat, systems change when we step out of the loop of endless retribution. Your act of generosity stands to break a cycle.

If you can pause, choose not to react, opt to come from compassion vs. scratching the defensive itch.

So much easier said than done — but think for a minute about a world in which there were no mirrored middle fingers on the highway, in which we more often let each other in rather than feeling the need to push, to cut off. Mandela could have worn a different jersey. Sadat could have stayed home. You and I can choose to take a beat, turn the news off.

This leads to greater questions of when we do need to push — when is it a legitimate defection or when is it just human foible? My friend and former coach, , has been grappling with this issue bravely and publicly, observing:

I’m noticing the distance between reason and rage becoming shorter and shorter…The moment when rational thought is hijacked by the primal and personal. And sometimes, I’m realizing, it should be…I am here for all the women getting deeply direct at the moment with humor and love.

I don’t have the answers here, only lots of questions. The one I’m walking away from this ramble with is: does the wrong persist as infraction that needs to be answered or does it wane with time/space?

In other words, is the volume of my impulse reaction or realistic response? If it lingers after I’ve had time to cool, perhaps it’s the latter.

In my experience, it rarely does. [And I am often embarrassed by the (metaphorical) throats I did attempt to chop.]

How imperative this little pause. [And this one, and this one…]

☮ ䷊ ☮

Tonight I host a salon. Producing events for over a decade, it’s somewhat silly I still get nerves. Will it provide meaning? Bland events are like bland restaurant meals: they’re fine, but we leave slightly disappointed we made the effort.

It is not within my power to assure each participant has a good experience — whether we comb for enjoyment or disappointment is entirely up to us. But it is important to me to do what I can to elicit depth. In a time of 90-second reels and an escalating conformity of faces, I believe we are craving authenticity and meaning. To go in search of it and be let down is in some ways worse than not searching at all. Perhaps that’s my own high expectation getting in the way — my mother has long warned that is my Achilles’ heel. But humans are capable of creating the awesome, though it increasingly seems we are settling for the sufficient.

One summer afternoon in Paris, a French friend living in Spain gifted me with a 30-minute sermon on the perfection of French croissants (due largely to the quality of French butter, bien sûr) and censuring the mediocrity of those found in Barcelona. Paraphrasing, he said, “Perfection is right there and you could so easily go learn it, but instead you settle for ‘good enough.’ The world has too much ‘good-enough-itis.’”

In launching the salon series, I have received a variety of responses — from eager enthusiasm to vague nods as eyes glaze over to verbal pats on the head — a patronizing “That’s nice” but hinting that it’s not nearly enough. Maybe it’s not enough. In a moment when large swaths of the world are literally on fire, when government leaders have few qualms about lying publicly, when it is definitive that money matters more than we do and yet we go on pretending politicians act out of our best interest, maybe only cataclysmic change could shift the ship. Some days — as leaders bomb, kidnap, and steal — it does feel like we are on the Titanic and can do little but prepare to sink.

But small rooms have led to great things.

In 1955, a 42-year-old woman attended a workshop at a small Tennessee school focused on bringing diverse perspectives together. The experience of harmony among varied participants changed her — she said it was the first time she felt natural in an integrated room. A few months later, tired of playing by outdated rules (and just plain tired), she refused to give up her seat on a bus and sparked a national movement.

In 18th Century France, women were locked out of education and institutions. Relegated to the home, they brought the conversation to them. The informal discussions surfaced questions around monarchy, leadership, and the role of the citizen. Those living rooms helped seed democracy, civil liberties, and the encyclopedia. [NBD.]

In 1935, a mutual friend brought two men together so they could share their journeys battling addiction to alcohol. Discussing ideas of disease vs. delinquency, the multi-hour discussion led to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous and millions of lives impacted.

This isn’t to say “gather and it will be fixed.” The graveyard of well-intended gatherings that led nowhere — or perhaps worse, promised and couldn’t deliver — is vast. Just look at our predecessors from the ‘60s. What began in January of 1967 as a group of 10,000 peace protestors snowballed at such a rate that by summer it was ~100,000 people, turning into a “zoo” of mixed motives and behaviors. It got violent, people got hurt, and the message was lost. By October, the original community held a mock funeral for their movement carrying a coffin down Haight Street.

Growing up in Colorado, much of the state either was or felt like a small town, including the capital city (pop. ~750,000). In the early 2000s, it started growing into a tech hub. Then legalization happened. In the summer of 2015, ~250,000 people moved in to capitalize on the marijuana market, then the growth “slowed” to nearly 20,000 per month for years afterward. Housing prices went up forcing locals out and the result was a migration rush that so outpaced communities’ ability to enculture newcomers that it permanently changed the nature of most of the state.

In Denver, we used to say “Hi” on sidewalks and open doors for each other. But people from all over brought their hometown ways with maybe a touch of guardedness in a new place and pretty soon it became a city of no eye contact and less openness. No funeral, but for years I had to mentally liken it to some new up-and-coming city because comparing it to the place where I grew up just got me angry. Pace killed culture.

Increasing anonymity may be the root of many of our problems — now: just look at the internet. Without the social pressure to be a kind human, we have lowered the cost of being a jerk to zero. A connector of everyone might result in the distance of many. There is a threshold to how many people we can open to at one time.

Trust feels at an all-time low. We are constantly braced for division, for disagreement, for our neighbors to be repulsive. How much of this is reality and how much has been exacerbated by the media is hard to parse, but the damage is real. Belief in each other will be slow to build back.

Enter: small rooms. We may not be ready to trust everyone in an entire neighborhood, but we can start with 12 strangers unified by depth. When we witness each other being thoughtful humans (vs. digital blowhards), we are reminded there is much more to each lived experience than we know. That the bucket categorization media is invoking isn’t truth. As the squeaky-clean high school teacher told me after Seeing Each Other Through Story, “There is a lot you don’t know.”

This is not the piece on salons I have been meaning to write. Maybe there will be many. [Those who know me are well aware I talk of it often.] For today, for this moment ahead of this group’s experience, it is what is present. Honest, nerve-ridden, hopeful. I will endure all the head pats — dismiss away. If even a few attendees engage more deeply with themselves, with strangers, with good questions, the condescension will be worth it.

“We cannot create a world we cannot imagine” (Lucille Clifton), and we cannot believe what we imagine alone (paraphrasing ). A little pessimism is surmountable. Division is not.

So here’s to this little effort — mine and yours. I will do what I can to open the room; you make the choice to step in (or not), to engage (or lock up), to comb for depth or disappointment. Whether or not something big comes of it isn’t the point — beginning is.

If you have read this far, you are either a very good friend or have opted in to this shared unfolding. [Maybe, lovingly, both.] When will we hear from you in a salon?

Like this post if you want to be added to the growing list of locales. Reach out if you have a question or place you’d like to co-host.

Finding our way through this and into a new world will require coherence, fellowship.

You are part of a circle for what matters.

⃝⃝⃝⃝

P.S. I just came home from hosting — it was lovely and candid and raw. To everyone who participated tonight, your presence is a gift. More of this, please.

The year I turned 13, I refused to have a party for myself out of fear no one would come. I would rather preclude the entire event (and my own celebration) than risk the hurt of a small turnout. [And we lived in the boonies so the risk was significant.] Unwilling to let the turn into adolescence go unmarked, my mom conspired with my friends and I came home to a giant surprise party. There were friends everywhere in the house — I couldn’t have felt more popular. I was thrilled and moved and embarrassed and awestruck. I never would have had the courage to throw a party of this size.

I never would have allowed myself to take up so much space.

Where along the way are we taught it’s not okay to shine? The message might be quite blunt in our family of origin; it might be death by 1,000 cuts in comments from those around us. Forty years later, I still remember using a big word and a boy in my class telling me I was a nerd for talking like that. The inner recoil and self-reprimand was immediate — I would not use “big” words for more than a decade after.

I have always been appalled-fascinated by the brutality of little kids. Your name is dumb, your face is dumb, you don’t act right, your family is wrong, the way you eat/run/laugh/chew gum is incorrect and needs to be shamed. It’s quite striking how utterly vicious we are to one another. A flaw exists and I will find and wield it.

Do our Bhutanese neighbors do this? Balian? Bolivian? [If you grew up elsewhere, I genuinely want to know.]

Having skipped a grade, with biology that waited a very long time to physically catch up, I was a head shorter and looked years younger than the kids my age. In high school, my friends were often asked who brought their little sister to the party. It was mortifying. I spent much of my early life uncomfortable in my own skin.

Tragically, I am far from alone.

In my early 30s, following emergency work in Haiti and a wicked case of PTSD1, I attended a personal development workshop to try and get my head right. Over a year of a foreign and unhealthy mental landscape, I was making choices that proved I wasn’t okay.

Deep into the workshop, an exercise helped each participant tap into their particular flavor of limiting belief. Mine is small and shrinks, wanting desperately to keep me safe hiding behind the curtain. I cannot be called out if I am invisible. Engaging with other beliefs in the room was like a cocktail party of no-longer-hidden pathologies — all the insecurities we try to cover up, let fly. Varied by color, volume, and intensity, I was floored by how uniform their needs were: all pleading “Please, let me be enough.”

Conceited or demure, quiet or bombastic, the outward performance of the need ran through the spectrum. But at its core, the whole room shared the same hole.

Which makes me wonder if our built-in childhood bullying isn’t somehow part of our emotional evolutionary path. A hurdle we must jump in order to find our own internal index and means of filling our own cup. If not, we get caught in the eddy of constantly needing others to do it for us, which can only ever be temporary and the contents never belonged to us to begin with.

Read more

Last night I attended a local storytelling event. The facilitator, a former professional dancer turned yoga teacher (read: graceful with grounded presence), has been hosting this series for almost 20 years. With a few sessions each year, she works with locals in the community to identify the heart of their story and evolve its telling. The outcome is a collection of heartbreak, human evolution, and shared awakening. Somehow, organically, this summer’s offerings naturally split into all female in May, then all male last night. The May edition was quite poignant — each storyteller (and much of the audience) cried in the telling. It was that much more moving when the men did it, too. It means they have struck the true heart of their experience — not just enacted the performative part.

To see the stoic Eastern European tear up speaking about relationship vulnerabilities, the seemingly squeaky-clean high school teacher relay a sordid past, the Spanish radio host use his slot to tell the story of an immigrant woman’s experience being detained by inhumane officials. His damp eyes reminded us that how we treat one, we treat us all.

What a gift to the community — both the facilitation of the event itself as well as the deeply honest look we got into each other. The women’s session was powerful and some of the stories will stay with me, but perhaps I am accustomed to intimacy and vulnerability in women — I am rich in insightful female friends. Maybe last night is lingering because it is less often we clear space for men to show their cracks, allow their imperfections — to be permeable.

Recently, a brilliant, thoughtful friend who is well-regarded in the tech world conveyed to me the emotional breakthrough he was experiencing during an evolution in his marriage. As old feelings of abandonment and insecurity surfaced, he realized he didn’t have words for what he was going through: his whole life, he had been permitted to feel 1) success, 2) anger. That was it. He said that as anger is inherently at someone, so he was having to discover more accurate ways to understand his discomfort that didn’t simply blame someone outside of himself.

At 52, he was learning to truly feel.

More of this, please. From all of us. Honesty. Candor. Containers that let us be both.

My friend recently wrote:

Getting up in front of a crowd and revealing one of your deepest hardships may be the last way you want to drop a mask, but what if the first step was just to attend? To be a compassionate fellow human in a room where bravery and connection happen. Your small town might have a similar local offering; your city might have a Moth. Maybe you gather a small group in your living room — sharing doesn’t require a mic.

When so much in our world feels fractured, small moments of connection are deeply subversive.

Last night was not about politics or party lines, it was about the shared humanity in us all — about witnessing and being witnessed. Humans have passed down knowledge through story from our earliest history. We have been letting this muscle atrophy.

What is one way this week you can re-engage?

♞ ♘ ♞

Leave a comment

The summer I was 15, my best friend was killed by a drunk driver and two months later my father died suddenly of an asthma attack. Prior to this, the only death I had encountered was of family pets — hamsters and the like.

The size of the loss and the dramatic ways in which it arrived were so overwhelming, it threatened to pull me under. It felt I emotionally couldn’t breathe — the scale could easily subsume me. So I decided not to let it. At the time, I saw two choices: let it flatten me or lever it into making me stronger. I chose to see it as fuel.

Whether you believe in nature, nurture, or some blend of the two, I can now see this behavior as stereotypical for certain personality types. My chosen tool is the enneagram, and this is firmly the foible of a 7. Every loss becomes a lesson. For years, I told myself it was resilience. I know now it was an escape from sitting in grief.

This pattern, this default behavior, comes to mind while watching myself and a number of friends slip into “here we go again” scenarios — situations that look and feel like others we have previously been in. Once again getting micromanaged by a boss, the project getting delayed by “not yet good enough” hangups, attaining a goal but not getting the expected payoff so the goalpost again moves higher, the situation in which yet another friend proves unreliable…

Here we go again (or) Not this again.

Where in your life do these phrases show up?

Having lost about 50 people at this point, the former showed up for me often in strapping on my resilience armor. Bolstering myself to be strong through yet another heartbreak — the loss of another young friend, gone early and tragically. It also showed up in job instability. I ran after extreme positions, in culturally and environmentally disparate (read: challenging) places, on short contract terms, then had to surf the waves of intense engagement followed by extended periods of unemployment (and often without a home).

Here we go again.

I was resilient, so I could manage it. I was also creating my own turbulence, then silver-lining all the issues.

My friends have often heard me describe personal growth as a horse wearing blinders: our view starts out quite narrow and it is our job to continuously expand them, asking what lies just outside my purview? I believe that awareness is 90% of the work — we can overcome just about anything once we know it is there. It is what we cannot see or refuse to look at that will continue to hang us up.

But if we cannot see it, how do we become aware? Relationship. Human interaction is a mirror, and the relationships in our lives offer extensive information — if we let them.

In our early 20s, my best friend and I lived together and were on a quest for personal growth. Using tools from my coaching and NLP training, we played constant emotional-issue whack-a-mole. [Probably, I was an odd 20-something.] My friend relayed this experience to a high school friend and the friend’s mother, to which the mom said, “You’re just constantly looking at your own issues? Why would you do that? It sounds terrible!” I was stunned that someone (an adult) would want to keep their hands clapped so firmly over their eyes — like walking around with emotional spinach in her teeth and refusing a mirror.

That isn’t to make light of the work. It is often hard and painful and wildly uncomfortable. In coaches’ training, they liken it to a dust ball that has been hiding in the corner for years. Fuzzy and filthy, dense and sticky and disgusting, we typically pick it up at arm’s length, poke at it a bit, say “Look, I’m ‘dealing’ with it!” But integration lies in fully entering the grossness, letting the discomfort surround us — going through the range of emotion, not just the surface story — and then we can come out the other side.

After my longest and largest relationship ended with the same sad residue of he never fully approved of me and the disappointment that I had gotten myself here again, I chose to sit rather than distract. Hiking solo and silently through the woods around my house, going slightly feral, foraging and eating wild stir fries, I let the lesson find me:

My dad died the night we were supposed to reconcile after a year of distance. He died without my young self ever being able to close the loop on feeling “good enough.” So I had successfully found men who mirrored “not quite good enough” back to me so I could try to win them over and convince us both.

Finding the lesson in those woods meant I could finally exit the loop and choose never again.

☞ ☛ ☞

Now I have great compassion for that mother — this work hurts — but then and always I will agree with Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living.

Because: our big lives lie on the other side of our blinders. We free ourselves from our own limiting patterns and hop off the carousel.

I am a freer person when I catch myself about to do “that thing” and choose a different path. I live a more conscious life when my inner teenager is not at the wheel blowing things up out of hurt.

Where does the avoidance creep in for you? Muscles tensing in preparation for a familiar defense. Gaze averting to busywork or chores or anything other than that thing we don’t want to see. The internal shutdown, going emotionally silent when someone else needs something or speaks louder than we do.

These repetitions, the slightly gross areas of familiarity and the shape of the people who keep appearing in them, hold so much gold. Where is one area of your life you might pause, look at the thing that would be easy to avoid, then choose another approach? Acting on that small nudge from your body might enable a very different outcome.

What if the reaction becomes not this time?

☞ ☛ ☞

At the ripe old age of 23, I was promoted to Assistant General Manager of a high-end restaurant. I later discovered this had more to do with managing the General Manager, but it was a deeply instructive crash course in human systems. How we interact when our income is on the line is fascinating (and complex, problematic, and endearingly tragic).

As you can imagine, hundreds of things go wrong in a restaurant on a weekly basis. Food gets mis-ordered and wasted, bills must be comp’ed, customer items must be dry cleaned — plenty of money goes out the door in attempts to bring it in.

One day we had a busser accidentally break an entire rack of glasses. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t cheap and was a fairly significant mistake. The kid (not much younger than me) promptly came out of the kitchen, told me and my boss what had happened and said, “It’s my fault.” We grumbled acceptance and asked him to ensure it was properly cleaned up. My boss then turned to me and said, “No matter how big the problem, always keep someone who owns their mistakes.” When I countered that surely there was a size limit to the forgivable error, he told me you can overcome almost anything with someone who has integrity; it’s the ones who divert and blame that you have to worry about.

What that busser did — come right out and own something that could have resulted in serious disappointment (and even firing) — is something I struggled with for much of my life. For decades, I avoided being wrong at all costs. Constantly in search of praise, I attempted to be perfect at all things. If I wasn’t going to be good at it, I wouldn’t do it. [Hence my very short soccer stint ending at the age of 8.] My small self was terrified of not securing your approval and I would do just about anything to win it. I bent the truth, inflated my traits, and bent myself into other-pleasing pretzels. Do you like me now?

Looking back on this not-so-old desperation, I am filled with compassion and a bit of chagrin: how exhaustingly I tried and how hopeless the endeavor. Not that we can’t successfully pretzel our way into approval — we absolutely can. [The estimated 90% of us who display codependent tendencies are well aware.] There are plenty of people who subconsciously indulge in our contortions to please them. “Show me you love me,” they convey. So we do. We pleasers pamper and dote and primp — ourselves, our resumes, and whatever traits we think can prove us worthy.

Somewhere in each of us is a line between our behavior and our identity. “It’s my fault we were late to lunch” is a behavior and I can apologize because my value is not at stake. “I got triggered and picked a fight with you about being late to lunch” has more to do with who I am and is much harder to swallow because it threatens a core identity of being kind. “It’s my fault we were late to lunch…and to last week’s meeting for which my assignment wasn’t in on time…” piles against my identity of being reliable. These are the ingredients denial, rebuttal, projection, and blame are made of. [This is not to leave out those of us who endlessly apologize — for what we did, for what they did, for they anger they feel at themselves and aim at us…How (in)frequently do you say “I’m sorry”?]

Try something with me: say the following phrases aloud —

“I was careless”
“I was selfish”
“I was unfair to you”
“I let you down”
“I lied”

Did your cheeks flush? Where did you internally flinch? It’s likely a signal of what wasn’t allowed when we were younger (e.g. if “I was careless” was the twinge, was it okay to make mistakes?).

In writing this piece, I scrolled the memory files searching for an anecdote about a time I worked hard not to be wrong. There are countless examples — it was my MO until embarrassingly recently — and yet I came up with nothing. How thorough was my mental block? When did I start saying “I did that”? Some shift occurred that allowed me to own a mistake in the moment — the first few times I tried apologizing and didn’t die — but that line is currently lost to me.

Which is odd because the feeling of resistance was embedded in my body for so long. The tightened muscles, held breath, physical recoil — like I could hold the truth back, suck it back in and lock it down deep inside me by never breathing out.

I don’t know where before and after lie. I know that now, when I own a mistake, I enjoy the feeling of release — the lightening of some energetic load. The gripping is gone. [Exhale.] Some nearly imagined threat evaporates. It is a freedom my younger, scared self never could have imagined lay on the other side of “I’m sorry.”

Yet the residue persists: I often notice when I own my portion and the person I’m facing does not. When I show up to the proverbial fence and am standing there unmet. This is my own uncleared register. Not I’ve done my part, do as you will, but still a waft of I’ve swallowed my pride, why haven’t you yours?

How often we seek a foothold, strive for emotional solid ground.
All of it a plea: please love me.

⤭ ⤭ ⤪ ⤪

⤭ ⤭ ⤪ ⤪

Last Sunday, amid the smoke and haze of regional wildfires, 30 friends gathered on a porch to listen to a singer-songwriter perform her collection. House concerts are growing in Colorado — small and intimate, free of Ticketmaster and $30 drinks, they are a surprisingly sweet revival of how people used to gather a century ago.

There is something incredibly touching about an artist pouring their heart into a performance that is just for you, in this little group of humans.

Chances are, in a house concert, you will be invited to participate. Call-and-response, singing along, providing the percussion — more than the arm-waving or phone-capturing of large shows, you have a role in this one. The attendees and the artists are together.

Not having grown up going to church or singing around a piano, I often feel self-conscious when asked to sing. I legitimately sound like a strangled cat so my silence is often out of kindness, but it is different when the whole group buys in together. Neurochemically, it is significant: oxytocin (the “cuddle” hormone) blooms, (perhaps counterintuitively) anxiety plummets, pain decreases, trust increases, and relaxation takes over. It’s a veritable chill pill.

So why is it that, for many of us, a voice somewhere shrinks back and says, “I don’t want to do that”? [You’d think adulthood would eventually see us grow out of adolescent self-censure.]

The backdrop to the concert was surreal. The valley where we live has been inundated with smoke from other areas while we all brace for problems of our own after an exceedingly dry winter. Wildfires, fear of drought, fear for our families and for our planet, global wars and spiking prices — there is much to be worried about right now. We are surrounded by problems that are out of our control. Which begets the most endearingly tragic of human tendencies: to grip harder rather than release — much of life will never be in our control.

What is your flavor of crazy when it comes to anxiety-inducing issues like these? Do you elbow and strain to control what you can, prep Go Bags and supplies for you and your family? Do you incessantly scan the news to keep current on the status of crises so you have maximum data and at least feel informed? Perhaps you lean out, stop reading and check out due to apathy and overwhelm. Do you get angry at leadership, at a history of selfish and myopic decisions, at humanity itself? It is compelling to condemn, to censure and vilify — at least when we feel right about something, we get a sense of standing on solid ground.

Having touched on this topic before, lovingly, caringly, it is the most tender-hearted among us who are the most prone to self-righteousness. [As my sister says, “Ask me how I know.”]

The antidote is connection. The data is conclusive: spending time with others cures most of our ills (almost across the board).

This is not to say you are doing anything wrong. We are tired and overwhelmed and increasingly socially anxious. If you have been spending less time with others, you are far from alone (pardon the pun).

🥄 🥄 🥄

In 2003, during lunch at a diner, a friend asked writer Christine Miserandino what it felt like to live with lupus. Christine gathered a bouquet of a dozen spoons and handed them to her friend. She explained that the biggest difference between a “normal” person and someone with lupus is having to determine how to allocate the finite amounts of energy needed throughout an ordinary day. The typical person doesn’t have to think about the cost of taking a shower, running errands, getting ready for work. The units of energy (or spoons) required to do these things are minimal — maybe one or two — so we complete them without worry of running out. Someone with a chronic illness spends more on each of these tasks — maybe the shower alone costs three spoons, the errands six or seven — and once the spoon is spent, there’s no resting or getting it back. Some days, you only wake up with five spoons.

Christine’s “spoon theory” metaphor is apt for illness, but also anxiety, depression, and other ways we feel taxed by engaging in modern life. Our younger selves used to run to parties and social gatherings and now many of us shirk, cancel, and otherwise avoid at all costs. We are somehow not resourced the same ways we once were.

🥄 🥄 🥄

And then (despite my reluctance), a singalong surprisingly returns a spoon.

What is one small thing you have been thinking of doing that might give you one? Checking out the local men’s group? Booking that painting class? [Hosting a house concert?] It may seem trivial in contrast to wildfires and wars, but what if it isn’t?

Researchers estimate that it takes roughly 25% of a given population to create change and tip the rest. That means that within your Dunbarian 150, just 37 (and a half) people being a bit more social makes a difference. That’s one community barbeque. One volunteer event.

Some Small Acts:

• A teacher attended a workshop that led to a conversation with the local police chief.1

• A man made a few videos to tutor his cousin in math.2

• A woman tossed a handful of seeds over a fence into a trash-strewn vacant lot.3

• A man took $27 and lent it across 42 women in a village in Bangladesh ($0.64 per woman).4

• Two women started a Facebook group.5

The teacher, the tutor, the woman with the seeds — not one of them could have known in the first doing what it would grow into.

Your local painting class may not feel significant, but what if it is? What if a conversation occurs that wouldn’t have if you’d stayed home? What if that sparks a small idea (for you or for them) that leads to a small act that then snowballs on?

Our overwhelm comes from feeling like we have to take on Washington or protest in the streets. In 18th-century France, women were locked out of education and institutions so they started hosting conversations in their living rooms over tea and snacks. Out of those rooms came questions of the monarchy, notions of civil liberties, and much more than a revolution.

Tea and snacks.
[This is why we salon.]

Go to the men’s group. Host a (smoky) house concert. The snowballed outcome may not be revolutionary. But in a disjointed, uncohered time, the connection will.

Meanwhile, I will continue to attend. To participate. To sing like a strangled cat.

🥄 🥄 🥄

I have some friends who only code with AI and refuse to use it personally. I have others who rely on it constantly to help process their experiences. And why not? It is 24-hours, on-demand. It will not judge you, tell other friends what you shared, and, depending on your settings, can even offer that you were right and they were wrong. [That the factory default on these models is complimentary to the point of being sycophantic should give us all serious pause. We know tech is modified to produce dopamine hits to keep us addicted, but how many of us have actually altered that setting?]

No good friend on the planet can tell you with certainty why that guy broke up with you, what your boss was thinking, what made your brother act that way — because humans are complex. There are always experiences, emotions, and beliefs hidden below the surface of every interaction, and we will never know them all. Turns out your boss’s dog has cancer. That guy was actually responding to a complicated history with his mother and nothing you could have done would have made a difference.

But you don’t know these things, so you can’t feed them into the model that nonetheless turns around and gives you a very certain answer about the other person’s actions. When have you ever entered a prompt and had it return, “You know what? I don’t fckng know — that reaction truly doesn’t make sense”? Or even “I don’t have enough data to answer that”?

Humans often conflate confidence with correctness, so models have been programmed for certainty — we wouldn’t return to them if they were honest about their limitations. And today’s anxious modern society loves a concrete answer. Ambiguity is the enemy and is to be defeated/clarified/solidified at all costs — including honesty with ourselves. Very often, the real answer is, “I just don’t know.” And that isn’t comfortable. But in a world in which there is a pill for everything — headaches, nausea, sleepiness, alertness, sadness (and on and on) — AI has handed us a brand new pill to cure the complexity that is interpersonal interaction.

My own experience calls me to the mat twice, so I’m humbled in the writing of this. Despite one of my only certainties being that I can never fully know the experience behind another’s actions, I have spent much of my life trying to do just that. I love trying to get a read on people and imagine elements of their interiority. [Adding this to the crazy list.]

The other day, someone close to me asked how I was doing and witnessed an honest moment of grief. My father died at Red Rocks 30 years ago, and sometimes (in this case, in relation to a concert there) it still shows up. Having just spent months attempting to support this person in her grief, I was stunned when, having listened to my answer to her question, she said she was going to leave me to my wallowing.

[Did that just happen?]

Why anyone would say that to someone’s tears was beyond me. Projection? Discomfort? Impatience? I know this person cares about me so I couldn’t fathom why she would say such a thing (and, obviously, quickly tried to make sense of it).

Out comes Claude. My double dip is that I used AI to use the enneagram to help explain this. [If you haven’t already experienced it, I do find the enneagram to be a useful tool in helping generally understand how others process the world. As with any tool, we must hold it loosely.] This friend and I often approach a situation very differently, and the enneagram model has helped me understand that my freedom-loving, rule-avoidance can run counter to a worldview in which structure is a way of keeping everyone safe. While I want openness and flexibility, she wants the steadiness and protection a guidebook provides.

So when I took the “wallowing” issue to Claude, it quickly returned that grief is dangerous because it is uncontrollable and we are powerless against its source; that this response came from an internal struggle with weakness, which is what my unresolved (old) grief felt like to my friend. I then went down a rabbit hole of my abandonment being triggered by her judgment…until it got super specific about how condescension in this person’s personality type signals she is comfortable enough with me to let her (as Claude called it) “unguarded arrogance” show.

This is very slippery.

How easy it would be to say, “This behavior is actually an odd compliment.” If I accept this frame, I change my understanding of her, and now a trait I would typically address (speaking down to someone, especially invulnerable moments) becomes excusable. And I do it all with the uncommunicated, unexamined assumption I now know something about her — perhaps that she doesn’t know about herself. Danger zone.

My reward center wanted to accept the clean analysis — leaned in towards a satisfying explanation. My intuition pulled my hand back. Quieter, subtler, it warned: Watch what you do with this.

The compulsion to reach for the decisive read was the red flag.
I put the phone down and went for a walk.

Extrapolate this small moment out into a future in which many of us do take the AI analysis on its face; in which we are communicating on different radio channels, speaking past each other without using our senses to get a true read because a computer program has handed us a tidy answer. Walking around like we “know.” As EQ atrophies because it has been effectively outsourced, we understand (and thus see) each other less and less. We have lost the ability to listen for the truth behind the words and the gaps between them. We become transactional rather than connected.

All because we wanted to keep things tidy. To sit with a device that will hand us the answers instead of encourage us to go search for them; offer us synthetic understanding rather than seek out the hard conversation. AI will never say, “Put me down and go speak face-to-face.”

Humans are messy. Emotions are messy. Friendships sometimes falter. That guy probably doesn’t know himself all the reasons he broke up with you; your boss could be oblivious that she was harsh in the wake of her dog’s diagnosis. Maybe the tools can help. Using tools in our curiosity and quest to better understand one another isn’t itself a problem. Clinging to the certitude they provide is. Just as your best friend can’t give you conviction as to why someone behaved as they did, neither can code.

Sitting with ambiguity is an aptitude. What can we do this week to strengthen it?

P. S. Rather than allow a program to tell me who my friend is, I went and asked her. She said the primary definition of wallowing is to steep in the mud — “No mud, no lotus.” She had been offering respect for sitting in the unknowing of my grief. Going with Claude’s tidy answer would have spun me out, assumed the entirely wrong intention, and cost us both the strengthened trust and honesty that came from hearing it from her. I’d have lost a better understanding of my friend and she of me.

In this moment of ready pills and artificial answers, let us use real words, allow humans to be messy (ourselves included).

A note before we begin — 
Sodality is a circle, and circles hold more than one chair. This is the first of our fellows contributing to the conversation. writes The Chocolate Taoist, a clarion call to embrace life through connection.

I want to talk to you about asking. I’m not referring to the polite, throat-clearing kind of asking we were all trained to perform in school. I mean deep asking. Bold asking. The kind that digs deep into a conversation and actually expects something back. The kind that can change the direction of a day, a deal, a life.

Most of us are shockingly bad at this. We have been socialized to know, to assume certainty, and to arrive at every interaction with our answers already loaded. Questions feel like vulnerability and requests can feel like an imposition. And so we go without, circling endlessly around the thing we actually want, hoping someone will notice and hand it to us. Problem is, they rarely do.

Confucius and the Art of the Returned Question

The Chinese philosopher Confucius understood something about asking that most of his contemporaries missed entirely. When students came to him with questions, he often did not answer them directly. He returned the question. He turned it back on the asker like a mirror, forcing the student to descend into their own thinking and find what was already there.

One student asked about benevolence. Another asked about governance. A third asked about the exemplary person. Confucius gave each a different answer, calibrated not to the question in the abstract but to the specific person asking it. He was teaching them something beyond the content of his reply: that the question itself was the beginning of wisdom. The asking was the lesson. The inquiry, pursued with sincerity, has a way of generating its own illumination.

That is a radical pedagogy, and it is as relevant today as it was in ancient Lu. In a world drowning in information, the person who knows how to ask the right question is not only more informed but better oriented. They know which direction to point themselves.

Subscribe now

Liz Kelly, The Dry Cleaner, and Roger Dawson Walk into a Bar

My friend Liz Kelly, a sharp and seasoned PR maven, has always said that the most important skill she developed early in her career was learning to ask the right questions. She built her entire public relations and media practice on that foundation. As she puts it: “a brand without a wow story will go nowhere fast.” And the wow story almost never surfaces without someone asking for it, probing for it, sitting across from a client and saying, “tell me what nobody else has asked you yet.”

I learned this lesson in a considerably more mundane setting when I walked into my local dry cleaner one afternoon in suburban Chicago, having left my wallet at home. Being the kind of person I am, I decided to float the question anyway, half as a joke: “any chance I could get my dry cleaning for free today?” The man behind the counter with a pleasant demeanor looked at me, shrugged, and said “no problem. You’re a loyal customer. We’ve got you this time.”

I stood there genuinely stunned. I had asked expecting nothing and received everything. Which is, of course, the whole point.

Roger Dawson, in his classic work on power negotiating, put it plainly: ask for more than you think you can get. Not as a bluff, not as theater, but as a sincere and bold reach toward what you actually want. The worst that can happen is you get a no. And no, it turns out, is a remarkably survivable word.

Asking in the Age of Information Overload

We are swimming in data and starving for knowledge. Every morning the feed refreshes, the notifications stack up, and we absorb enormous quantities of information that were never filtered through the one essential question: what do I actually need to know right now?

The discipline of asking is how you cut through that noise. Ask an expert or even a complete stranger. Type a precise query into a search bar or an AI tool and see what surfaces when your question is sharp enough. I’ve watched people use AI conversations the way previous generations used wise mentors: to think out loud, to test assumptions, to ask about health, career pivots, foreign languages, financial strategy. The technology is only as good as the question you bring to it. That has always been true.

The Question as a Starting Place

There is a reason every great philosophical tradition, Confucian, Socratic, Taoist, places a well-honed question at the center of the examined life. For questions are not a sign of weakness or ignorance but the initiating gesture of all genuine inquiry. It is how the mind wakes up.

The Taoist sage Zhuangzi asked what the small can know of the great. Confucius asked what it means to govern oneself before governing others. Socrates asked whether the unexamined life was worth living at all. These were not idle provocations. They were invitations to transformation, and they began with the willingness to not already know the answer.

So start there. In your next conversation, ask more than you tell. In your next negotiation, ask for more than you think is reasonable. In your next moment of confusion, resist the urge to perform certainty and ask the question instead. You’ll be surprised at how often the world says yes.

⁌ ⁌ ◉ ⁍ ⁍

Send a Message