Helping busy people do inner work.
I often find myself stuck Somewhere in the middle Of capture and surrender Of live now and remember Of render and let it be I don’t often feel Like I get it quite right Like how to remember What wasn’t captured Or fully absorb What’s seen from a screen But every now and again I capture a moment Or surrender to a scene And briefly find my footing As I rebalance to the rhythm Of life’s precious beat
P.s. This poem was inspired by this picture.
The season you’re in right now—of your life—is perfect.
Just like how winter is the perfect season for bundling up, going sledding, and drinking hot cocoa…
And how summer is the perfect season for swimsuits, beach, and getting your vitamin D on…
Where you are right now… is the perfect place to be. You only have to realize it.
Maybe you’re single, don’t have kids, and work a lot… you could dwell on this or you could see this as the perfect opportunity for spontaneous adventuring and solo tripping.
Maybe you’re in a serious relationship, have kids, and are a stay-at-home parent… you could dwell on this or you could see this as the perfect opportunity for deepening your family’s roots.
Maybe you’re in a “complicated” relationship, the person you’re seeing has a kid, and you have a part-time job… you could dwell on this or you could see this as being the perfect opportunity for introspection and identifying exactly what it is you want (and how you can get it) in life.
Learn to stop seeing the current season you’re in as “wrong/bad/invalid.”
And start asking yourself, “what is this current season I’m in the perfect opportunity for?”
Cursing the current season because you want to be in another is an excellent way to never be happy.
Maybe it’s time we stop trying to control seasons and start embracing the one we’re currently in.
P.s. If this is your first email from me and you joined a while ago… I apologize. There was an email import error I just became aware of. Here’s a backlog of the daily posts you might’ve missed. And welcome to the squad :)
When we rush To save time We end up wasting The time spent rushing Saving time happens When time is taken
Every time my dog poops she takes a victory lap around the yard.
She celebrates her small victories.
You should, too.
The average pace of today’s world is fast.
Most of us are sprinting to and from and mostly because that’s what everybody else is doing.
It’s like when you’re on the highway and everybody is driving 69.5mph in a 55mph zone—you don’t want to be THAT guy (just me?).
The question is: are we running because we’re enjoying or because we’re trying to quickly get to a different place where the enjoying is supposed to happen?
Which makes me wonder: does enjoying ever sprint? Or does enjoying cruise so as to not miss a moment as life sprints by?
Running a marathon is hard.
Taking one stride, however, is easy.
The reason marathons are hard is because they are composed of around 39,733 consecutive strides.
Taking that many strides in a row will take an incredible toll on even the most fit amongst us.
And to those who aren’t fit, prepared, or mentally calloused enough (as David Goggins would say)—taking that many strides in a row simply isn’t possibly.
Until it is.
See, most of us are smack in the middle of marathons right now.
They are the marathons of our life. For example:
And we have a lifetime of strides ahead of us.
If we start running too fast on any of these days, we’ll impact our performance on the following days.
If we succumb to distraction and comfort and stop taking strides at all, we’ll never finish our marathons.
And while cheering other people on from the sidelines can be fun and rewarding—it pales in comparison to the joy and reward that comes from crossing the finish line ourselves.
The average person lives 25,915 days.
This is your marathon.
Once you identify what you want your strides to represent—your life’s task becomes easy.
Just one stride each day to contribute to the beautiful accumulation of strides that is your marathon.
And no sense in rushing to this ending (your death).
Better would be to find ways to maximally align with and enjoy each stride.
Godspeed.
Not in a hurry is an excellent sign of being committed to the process.
Being in a rush is an excellent sign of being committed to the destination.
Being committed to the destination without being committed to the process is an oxymoron of sorts. Because arriving to a destination isn’t possible without undergoing the process.
Which is precisely why so many people fail to arrive at their destinations.
They’re in a rush. They’re forcing things along. They’re definitely in a hurry.
The general goal seems to be to arrive without having to go through the work of traveling.
Which, of course, isn’t how arriving works.
What if, instead of trying to rush, force, hack, hurry, or expedite your way to a far and away destination—you found ways to make the goal more about enjoying the process?
Because the thing about rushing is that it implies you don’t want to be where you are or doing what you’re doing. It implies you’d rather be somewhere else (in a future fantasy scenario).
And the reality is, we’re going to spend the sweeping majority of our time traveling and only but a micro-fraction of it arriving. And to spend anything more than a moment in a state of misery, contempt, or hate is wasteful—let alone a few years (or *gulp* decades).
And so the question you should ask yourself is: am I enjoying the pace of my process or am I actually just rushing to arrive?
Because being in a rush might counterintuitively prove to be far more wasteful than not being in a hurry after all.