And my heart broke.

I couldn’t stop the tears.

Which might seem strange considering I never met her.

She didn’t know my name.

We never sat together.

I never got to tell her what her songs meant to me, or what happened inside me whenever I caught her out of the

corner of my eye on a television screen … that hair, that laugh, that completely unmistakable voice, and

immediately felt a little better about the world.

But maybe we misunderstand what it means to know someone.

Because Dolly Parton has been there for almost every stage of my life.

The 70s.

The 80s.

The 90s.

The 2000s.

And all the strange years that followed.

Different houses.

Different versions of me.

Different people I loved.

Different people I lost.

Different things I believed.

Different things I stopped believing.

And somehow, Dolly was there.

Singing.

Laughing.

Smiling.

Telling some ridiculous joke at her own expense before quietly saying something so profoundly wise you wondered

whether the rhinestones had been a diversion all along.

…

There are people who entertain us.

And then there are people who somehow accompany us.

They become landmarks.

Little lights along the road that tell us:

You’re still here.

Keep going.

There is still goodness.

Dolly was one of those lights for me.

Maybe for millions of us.

From Coat of Many Colors, teaching us that poverty and richness were never necessarily opposites.

To I Will Always Love You, somehow understanding that sometimes the deepest expression of love is letting go.

To Little Sparrow.

To Eagle When She Flies.

To the Honky Tonk Angels with Loretta and Tammy.

To 9 to 5.

To Jolene.

To Light of a Clear Blue Morning.

My God.

That clear blue morning.

She just kept appearing.

Across generations.

Across genres.

Across political divides and cultural ones.

Always unmistakably herself.

Never requiring someone else to become smaller so she could remain large.

That may be what I loved most.

She seemed to understand something we are forgetting.

You can have conviction without cruelty.

You can be powerful without making someone else powerless.

You can disagree without dehumanizing.

You can be glamorous and serious.

Funny and wise.

Sacred and completely irreverent.

You can be all of it.

You can be complicated.

You can be human.

…

She once said:

“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”

I’ve heard that quote a thousand times.

Today it sounds different.

Because eventually the living stops.

And what remains is the life.

And hers remains everywhere.

Not simply in records or movies or Dollywood or awards.

In children who received books because she remembered that her father couldn’t read.

In artists who learned that you could own your songs, your image, your business and yourself.

In queer kids who heard this glamorous Southern Christian woman make room for them when others were busy

building doors to keep them out.

In women who watched her turn every assumption made about her into another piece of the empire.

And in people like me.

People she never met.

People sitting somewhere today crying harder than they expected to cry.

Because some light they assumed would always be there suddenly isn’t.

…

And that is the part I can’t quite get past.

An angel on earth.

I know how sentimental that sounds.

I don’t care.

She was.

Not because she was perfect.

I don’t need my angels perfect.

I need them human.

I need them to show me what humanity might look like when we choose generosity over cynicism.

Humour over bitterness.

Curiosity over judgment.

Love over fear.

She made goodness look intelligent.

She made kindness look powerful.

She made joy look like an act of defiance.

And lately I find myself wondering:

Are there any of those people left?

Where are the lights?

Where are the people who make us believe we might still be capable of becoming something better?

Because this old world really does feel like it has gone to pieces sometimes.

…

After September 11, Dolly released Hello God.

I remember hearing it.

A song reaching upward because looking around wasn’t providing enough answers.

Hello, God?

Are you there?

Can you hear us?

Can this be fixed?

Are we too far gone?

And today that song keeps running through my mind.

Except my heart keeps changing one word.

Hello, Dolly?

Are you out there?

Can you hear us?

Because we could really use you down here.

We need that laugh.

We need that ridiculous hair.

We need somebody who can walk into a room covered in rhinestones and somehow leave us thinking about

compassion.

We need someone reminding us not to take ourselves so damn seriously.

We need someone reminding us that being good doesn’t require being dull.

That faith doesn’t have to mean exclusion.

That success doesn’t require abandoning where you came from.

That strength can be tender.

That you can build an enormous life without forgetting to actually live one.

Hello, Dolly?

This old world has gone to pieces.

Can we fix it?

Is there time?

…

Of course, I know she can’t answer.

At least not in the way she used to.

And perhaps that is what grief eventually asks of us.

Not simply:

How do we live without them?

But:

What did they leave inside us that we’re now responsible for carrying?

Maybe that is legacy.

Not being remembered.

Being continued.

Maybe the light doesn’t disappear when the person carrying it does.

Maybe it scatters.

Into millions of people.

Into whoever was paying attention.

And perhaps those of us asking where all the lights have gone have missed something.

Maybe it’s our turn.

Maybe every time Dolly made my heart lighter, she was handing me a little of that responsibility.

Every song.

Every laugh.

Every outrageous wig.

Every bit of wisdom delivered with a wink.

Every reminder that the world was still worth loving.

Perhaps none of it disappeared today.

Perhaps it simply changed hands.

…

Still.

Today I don’t particularly want the lesson.

Today I want Dolly.

I want one more song.

One more story.

One more laugh.

One more interview where somebody asks a complicated question and she answers it with twelve words, a joke

and more wisdom than the rest of us could find in an entire library.

I want to catch her out of the corner of my eye again.

And feel that thing I have felt since I was a kid.

That little lift in my chest.

That reminder of what my own heart song sounded like.

That faith in humanity.

That light.

…

There is one thing she gave us that feels almost unbearably right today.

Not Jolene.

Not 9 to 5.

Not even that coat of many colours.

Love.

Above everything else.

Love.

The kind that doesn’t disappear because someone does.

The kind that can say goodbye without withdrawing itself.

The kind that somehow survives the person who gave it to us.

And so, Dolly …

I wish you joy.

I wish you peace.

And above all this,

I wish you love.

Because you gave an extraordinary amount of it to people you never knew.

Including me.

And somehow, across fifty-one years of my life, whenever I needed reminding that there was still goodness here …

there you were.

So wherever you are now,

laugh loudly.

Wear something completely inappropriate.

Find Carl.

Find Loretta.

Find Tammy.

Sing something.

And if there’s any way at all to send a little light back this direction …

please do.

We really need it.

Hello, Dolly?

Are you there?

We’re listening.

Last year at this time, I was surrounded by people who had, at some point, had proximity to my path.

People from different chapters.

Different versions of me.

I gave a little reflection that night.

Eat Pray Love made its way into it, naturally.

If you’ve been subscribed to Fieldnotes long enough, you’ll know I’ve watched that movie enough times that I should probably be receiving residuals.

This year was different.

Until two days ago, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to celebrate with anyone at all.

…

Today is also my tenth wedding anniversary.

Twenty-eight years together.

Ten married.

We weren’t legally allowed to marry for much of the time before that.

But that’s another Fieldnote for another time.

This one is about 51.

And what I thought it was supposed to look like.

…

I was supposed to own a house by now.

I think I was supposed to be retired.

There should probably be grandchildren somewhere.

I was definitely supposed to look considerably older than I do.

There were supposed to be medications lined up beside the bathroom sink.

Blood pressure.

Cholesterol.

Something for something else.

There was supposed to be an increasing amount of beige.

Instead, I’m lying in bed writing this while a blue jay outside my window squawks for peanuts.

Apparently neither of us got the memo.

…

The strange thing about aging is how much of what we imagine it will be was never ours to begin with.

It came from looking at our grandparents when we were children.

Then our parents when we were young adults.

Then television.

Advertising.

Doctors.

Culture.

The endless parade of diets and breakthroughs and things we were told would save us.

Fat was going to kill us.

Then carbohydrates.

Then sugar.

Then sitting.

Then stress.

Something has always been the enemy.

Something else has always been the answer.

And now, increasingly, aging itself seems to be treated like a condition requiring intervention.

A needle.

A procedure.

A protocol.

A way to make sure nobody discovers the terrible secret that you have continued to live.

I have no interest in that.

Getting older is a privilege.

It isn’t given to everyone.

And getting older healthy enough to still be curious about what comes next feels like an extraordinary one.

…

I don’t say that because I think I’ve somehow done aging correctly.

I haven’t.

Sometimes I catch myself in the mirror and think…

Well.

When did that happen?

But inside?

I don’t think I feel fundamentally different than I did at 25.

What I have now is evidence.

Fifty-one years of it.

Things I believed and stopped believing.

People I loved.

People I lost.

Places I lived.

Things I built.

Things that fell apart.

Things I thought would destroy me and somehow didn’t.

Things I desperately wanted that I’m now grateful I never received.

I have learned backward what I can now live forward.

Perhaps a little more comfortably.

…

My life probably doesn’t look particularly successful through certain lenses.

I don’t own the house.

I didn’t build a traditional family.

There are no grandchildren.

I haven’t accumulated all the recognizable evidence that says:

See. I did adulthood correctly.

But that was never really my goal.

My goal was to experience as much as I possibly could while I was in this meat-suit we call a body.

To develop.

To grow.

To explore spirituality.

Relationships.

Food.

Places.

Ideas.

To meet people unlike me.

To change my mind.

To make things.

To destroy a few things.

To begin again.

To refuse, as much as possible, the Groundhog Day version of being alive.

I think some part of me would have died a long time ago if I hadn’t.

…

But 51 does feel different.

More serious than 50 somehow.

Fifty was a milestone.

51 feels like I’ve tipped over something.

Not toward an ending.

Toward an awareness.

Time isn’t theoretical anymore.

Neither is the body carrying me through it.

And perhaps that’s what I feel most this morning.

I want to take better care of it.

Not because I’m afraid of getting older.

Because I want more time.

Much more.

So, Universe, if you’re listening:

I have much, much more life to live.

People to meet.

Places to see.

Things to try.

Places to live.

Things to learn.

Ideas to change my mind about.

Meals I haven’t tasted.

Conversations I haven’t had.

Versions of myself I haven’t met yet.

I’m not finished.

Not even close.

…

Which brings me back to spending my birthday alone.

For a while, I thought maybe that was what I needed.

A boundary.

Self-care.

Quiet.

My husband and I have had an extraordinarily busy few months.

We opened another business.

And I quietly opened another one of my own.

One that brings together the skills I’ve accumulated and the gifts I’ve been fortunate enough to discover along the way…

supporting people, brands and ideas as they come to life.

I love it.

But love requires energy too.

Everything does.

And somewhere in all of that I thought:

Maybe 51 means choosing myself.

Maybe I should spend the day alone.

And then I realized something.

Choosing myself doesn’t necessarily mean choosing solitude.

…

I love people.

I love relationships.

My friends are quirky and eccentric and loud and occasionally uncomfortable.

Perfectly imperfect.

They inspire me.

They lift me up.

They irritate me.

They trigger me.

Which teaches me.

They bring everything unlike me into the room so I can see myself more clearly.

I grow.

They grow.

Sometimes we grow apart.

Sometimes we find each other again.

None of them are perfect.

Neither am I.

And none of our lives look quite the way we thought they would.

So two days ago, I spontaneously invited some friends to my patio for Indian food tonight.

Last minute.

I’m certain I’ve forgotten someone.

My family isn’t coming.

I didn’t invite them.

Mostly because none of them like Indian food.

And I do.

Very much.

It is, after all, my birthday.

…

There’s something almost comical about the fact that even writing this, on my birthday, I can feel myself accounting for everyone else.

Making sure nobody feels excluded.

Explaining why.

Softening the edges.

Making sure everyone understands that I love them.

I do.

But here’s another truth:

None of them invited me anywhere either.

And I don’t say that with anger.

Or even disappointment, really.

Because this week friends have taken me for brunch.

Offered to take me for dinner.

Offered another dinner for another night.

Stopped by with flowers.

Reached out.

Thought of me.

And maybe at 51, I’m finally learning that I don’t have to turn any of that into a story.

Not the people who showed up.

Not the people who didn’t.

Don’t make assumptions.

Don’t take anything personally.

Be impeccable with your word.

Do your best.

Four agreements I’ve known for years.

Fifty-one years, however, has given me enough evidence to understand why they’re so difficult.

Because we are storytelling machines.

Someone doesn’t call and we write a story.

Someone does and we write another.

Someone misunderstands us and suddenly we’re standing in the imaginary courtroom of their mind, presenting evidence for the defence.

Exhibit A:

I am actually a very nice person.

It’s exhausting.

…

Recently, I was watching Shania Twain lying on Bella Freud’s couch on Fashion Neurosis.

She was talking about wisdom she’d learned from Dolly Parton.

And she said something that landed differently than it might have at 25.

Or 35.

Maybe even 50.

Expect people to take responsibility for their opinion of you.

There it was.

Fifty-one years of experience reduced to one sentence.

Their opinion.

Their responsibility.

My intentions.

Mine.

I can love people without managing their experience of me.

I can notice who shows up without making villains of those who don’t.

I can be grateful for the flowers without turning the absence of flowers into evidence.

I can invite who I want.

Eat what I love.

And resist the astonishingly persistent urge to explain myself for doing either.

Maybe that’s 51.

Not caring less.

God, no.

I think I care more.

Just understanding, finally, which parts are mine to carry.

…

So yes.

I love my family.

I love my friends.

I love the people who will be sitting around my patio tonight.

I love some people who won’t be.

Everyone gets to have their own experience of that.

Apparently, they are even responsible for it.

And after 51 years of trying to understand people, relationships, myself, boundaries, forgiveness, expectation, belonging, responsibility and what any of us owe one another—

I have arrived at wisdom.

I’m choosing naan.

The Prophet.

It has lived there long enough that I don’t really think of it as a book anymore. More like another object in the room. Something I occasionally reach for between making coffee, talking to someone, wiping down the counter, getting on with whatever apparently important thing needs doing next.

I pick it up often.

The other day I opened it to Pleasure.

“People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.”

And I thought…

Well.

There it is.

The bee has no shame in taking the pollen.

The flower gives it without regret.

Neither appears particularly concerned about what the neighbours think.

There is no negotiation over whether the bee has worked hard enough to deserve the flower.

No flower whispering, I really shouldn’t.

No bee promising to work it off tomorrow.

No one sets a timer.

They simply participate in the exchange.

Pleasure given.

Pleasure received.

And, rather inconveniently for everything we’ve been taught about self-denial, the whole thing is necessary for life.

Symbiotic.

Then there are humans.

We have managed to make the whole thing considerably more complicated.

We dress for desire and scowl at the attention it receives.

We sell desire and shame people for wanting it.

We eat the ice cream, but rarely with complete freedom. Somewhere between the first spoonful and the bottom of the bowl, morality gets involved.

I shouldn’t.

I’ve been bad.

I’ll make up for it tomorrow.

We take an afternoon off and spend half of it thinking about what we should be doing.

We frolic in the proverbial field,

but with a timer.

Pleasure, yes.

But only after the work is finished.

After the emails.

After the dishes.

After the deadline.

After we’ve earned it.

Which is curious, because the work is never finished.

So pleasure becomes something permanently postponed.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to sell it back to us.

Sex sells.

The oldest trick in the book.

But sex isn’t really what sells.

Pleasure sells.

The suggestion of it.

The possibility of it.

The perfume, the car, the vacation, the body, the bottle, the dress, the restaurant, the house.

Buy this and perhaps, finally, you will feel that.

We have built a culture that markets pleasure relentlessly while morally distrusting anyone who actually takes it.

The contradiction is useful.

Because someone who is actually satisfied is considerably harder to sell something to.

Someone who knows how to experience pleasure without purchasing it is downright inconvenient.

So we are taught to desire constantly…

and receive cautiously.

Even our rest has been organized.

“What is a weekend?”

The Dowager Countess asks it in Downton Abbey because, of course, to someone of her class and time the very concept is foreign.

It’s funny because it’s absurd.

Except…

what is a weekend?

A relatively recent invention in the long history of being human that we now spend five days waiting for.

We took something that didn’t exist, institutionalized it, and eventually organized enormous portions of our lives around enduring one period of time in anticipation of another.

Monday.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

Thursday.

Friday.

Almost there.

And then Saturday arrives carrying an extraordinary amount of responsibility.

Rest.

Recover.

Have fun.

See friends.

Clean the house.

Run errands.

Go somewhere.

Make memories.

Enjoy yourself.

Quickly.

Sunday afternoon arrives and already Monday has begun colonizing the imagination.

Even pleasure has a deadline.

I wonder sometimes how far back this goes.

Industrialization certainly sharpened it. Colonialism carried particular ideas about labour, morality, discipline and deservingness across the world. Religious traditions have had their own complicated negotiations with the body and desire.

But perhaps it is older still.

Perhaps humans have been suspicious of pleasure for as long as we’ve been capable of imagining that wanting something says something about whether we are good.

Kahlil Gibran understood the problem.

Earlier in the same passage, Gibran writes:

“Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.”

That line interests me.

Because denial doesn’t make desire disappear.

It gives it a basement.

And whatever we keep putting in the basement eventually starts making noise.

Desire becomes resentment.

Resentment becomes resistance.

Resistance creates tension.

Tension creates friction.

And friction, left unattended long enough, has an extraordinary habit of becoming projection.

We begin becoming irritated by people who allow themselves what we have forbidden ourselves.

Too loud.

Too indulgent.

Too lazy.

Too much.

Look at her.

Look at him.

Look at them.

How dare they be so unashamed?

I’ve written about this before.

Probably because I keep finding it everywhere.

The things we most aggressively police in other people are sometimes worth examining for evidence of something we’ve imprisoned in ourselves.

Which makes me wonder whether pleasure isn’t the opposite of discipline at all.

Perhaps pleasure is information.

The flower doesn’t seduce the bee as some act of moral weakness.

The bee isn’t exploiting the flower by wanting what it offers.

There is attraction.

There is appetite.

There is exchange.

There is life.

No shame required.

And yet somewhere along the way we disconnected pleasure from its intelligence.

We made it reward instead of relationship.

Something to earn.

Something to purchase.

Something to postpone.

Something to hide.

Something to feel guilty about tomorrow.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether we indulge ourselves too much.

Maybe the more interesting question is why something so intrinsic to being alive became something we felt compelled to justify.

Why pleasure became suspicious unless it had been earned.

Why rest required exhaustion.

Why deliciousness required guilt.

Why wanting something for no reason other than the pleasure of it became something we felt the need to explain.

Why doing absolutely nothing needed to be preceded by doing absolutely everything.

Because we have built a culture that markets pleasure relentlessly while morally distrusting anyone who actually takes it.

And perhaps that’s why the things we most aggressively police in other people are sometimes worth examining for evidence of something we’ve imprisoned in ourselves.

The person who rests without apology.

Who eats without penance.

Who dresses beautifully simply because it delights them.

Who dances badly.

Who changes their mind.

Who spends an afternoon doing something with absolutely no measurable return.

Who follows delight without immediately demanding that it become productive.

There is something strangely provocative about a person enjoying their own life.

Maybe because somewhere along the way we confused deprivation with virtue.

And productivity with worth.

And pleasure with reward.

But the flower doesn’t bloom because it finished everything on its list.

The bee doesn’t apologize for wanting what is sweet.

Neither asks whether the exchange is productive enough to justify itself.

They participate.

Perhaps pleasure was never meant to be the thing waiting for us at the end of a life well managed.

Perhaps it is part of what makes the life worth living while we’re here.

Be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.

Not someday.

Not once everything is finished.

Now.

“Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

It’s usually attributed to Bird by Bird, and every time I see it, people are enthusiastically agreeing underneath it.

Yes.

Exactly.

THIS.

And I understand why.

There is something deliciously liberating about the sentence. Especially if you have spent any part of your life protecting people who did not protect you. If you learned early to keep secrets, smooth things over, preserve the family mythology, make excuses, keep the peace, or carry somebody else’s shame because everyone somehow decided it would be less disruptive if you carried it instead.

I know something about that.

I first spoke about what had happened to me when I was seventeen years old.

Speaking saved something in me.

So I am certainly not going to write an essay suggesting people shouldn’t tell their stories.

Tell them.

Tell the truth.

Tell the thing everyone agreed not to mention.

Open the curtains.

Turn on the lights.

But lately, when I see this particular quote, another thought keeps arriving.

What exactly does “behaved better” mean?

And who gets to decide?

…

I should probably say something important here.

The sentence we pass around isn’t Bird by Bird.

It is a sentence from Bird by Bird.

There is something before it.

There is something after it.

There is an author speaking from a particular place, inside a particular conversation, about something larger than the little rectangle we’ve extracted and turned into philosophy.

Context.

Funny thing, context.

We demand it immediately when someone tells a story about us.

That’s not what happened.

That’s not what I meant.

You don’t understand what was going on.

You’re leaving out the part where…

You should have seen what happened before that.

And sometimes those aren’t excuses.

Sometimes they’re context.

Yet we’re remarkably comfortable denying other people the same complexity we instinctively demand for ourselves.

I keep thinking about something I’ve written about before.

The face of the sphere.

Imagine a sphere between us.

I’m standing here.

You’re standing over there.

Someone else is underneath it.

Another person is looking down from above.

We are all looking at the same object.

And we are not seeing the same thing.

This does not necessarily mean one of us is lying.

It means we are standing somewhere.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Because so much of what we call truth is actually truth from where I was standing.

And those are not always the same thing.

…

I have apparently been writing the same essay for months.

I just keep changing the title.

The Way We See.

THE FACE OF THE SPHERE.

Sofa Fleas.

Nothing More to Prove.

It Ends With Me.

We’re Not Arguing About Facts.

The Quiet Return of Personal Authority.

The Machinery of Character Assassination.

The Constant Low Grade Threat of Other People’s Unfinished Business.

We’d Never Pick Up a Stone Again.

Forgiveness: The Candle in the Dark.

Mirror, Mirror: On Love, Abandonment & the Canoes We Keep Jumping Out Of.

The Epigenetics of a Witch Trial.

The Anatomy of a Soap Box.

Mirror, Mirror: Internalized Homophobia and the Projections We Carry.

It Wasn’t You It Was What You Reflected.

Different doors.

Same room.

What happens when perception mistakes itself for truth?

And perhaps more dangerously:

What happens when perception gets an audience?

Because then something changes.

A feeling becomes a fact.

An interpretation becomes evidence.

A memory becomes testimony about somebody else’s character.

And eventually:

This happened to me

quietly becomes

This is who you are.

Those are not the same sentence.

I am becoming increasingly interested in the space between them.

…

There are actual victims.

I need to say that plainly because nuance has become strangely suspicious in a culture that seems increasingly comfortable sorting people into boxes marked GOOD and BAD.

Children are abused.

Women are abused.

Men are abused.

People are exploited, manipulated, abandoned, assaulted, discriminated against, lied to and betrayed.

Power is abused.

Terrible things happen.

Sometimes there isn’t another perspective that magically makes the harm disappear.

The sphere is not an argument for moral relativism.

And context is not an eraser.

I know this personally.

But I also know something now that I could not possibly have understood at seventeen.

Speaking the truth about what happened to me and building my identity around the person who did it are two entirely different forms of storytelling.

One liberated me.

The other could have kept me attached to them forever.

And maybe that’s the question I’ve been trying to ask in all these essays.

Where is the healing in continuing to make it about them?

…

There is a stage of healing where we need to name.

I think there is.

Name what happened.

Name what it cost.

Name the thing everyone else keeps pretending didn’t happen.

Sometimes anger is the first language available to a person who has spent years without one.

But perhaps there is another stage after naming.

And maybe that stage is quieter.

Less satisfying to the algorithm.

Less quotable.

Because eventually I have to ask:

Who am I without the prosecution?

Who am I when I no longer need a jury?

Who am I when I don’t need everyone else to agree that you were wrong in order for me to know what happened to me?

That, to me, feels much closer to personal authority.

Not winning the case.

Leaving the courtroom.

…

And then comes the considerably less comfortable question.

What if they wrote about us?

Not the monsters.

Us.

The people who believe ourselves to be thoughtful and evolved and decent.

What if everyone we’ve disappointed got a chapter?

Everyone we’ve misunderstood?

Everyone we abandoned when we didn’t know how to stay?

Everyone we snapped at because we were overwhelmed?

Everyone who encountered us during a year when we barely recognized ourselves?

Everyone who experienced our boundaries as rejection?

Our silence as cruelty?

Our confidence as arrogance?

Our fear as indifference?

Our self-preservation as selfishness?

Would they write warmly about us?

Have we always behaved better?

I don’t imagine any of us have.

And I suspect if somebody wrote the story of me entirely from the worst moment they experienced with me, I would hardly recognize the character.

I’d want to explain.

I’d want to provide context.

I’d want to say:

But you don’t understand.

Precisely.

…

This is where the quote becomes far more interesting to me than whether I agree with it.

Because perhaps we have done to Anne Lamott’s sentence exactly what we so often do to one another.

We extracted a fragment.

Removed the before.

Removed the after.

Detached it from the larger story.

Passed it around.

And decided what it meant.

We turned a sentence into a person.

Maybe that’s why it travels so well.

Certainty travels better than context.

Outrage travels better than complexity.

Villains travel better than humans.

A soap box is easier to build than a sphere.

And a stone is much easier to throw when the person standing across from us has been reduced to the worst thing we’ve decided about them.

I’ve written about that too.

The witch trial.

The character assassination.

The projection.

The unfinished business we quietly hand to strangers and ask them to carry.

The ways we make other people responsible for feelings that began long before they arrived.

The canoes we keep jumping out of and then wondering why we are wet.

The sofa fleas we carry from one room into another.

Different metaphors.

Same human habit.

We see something.

We feel something.

We decide what it means.

Then we forget that we were the one who decided.

…

Maybe “behaved better” is sometimes another version of:

behaved the way I needed you to.

Loved me the way I wanted.

Apologized the way I imagined.

Understood me without requiring explanation.

Stayed when I wanted you to stay.

Left when I wanted you to leave.

Reacted according to the script I had written for you without ever handing you the pages.

And when you didn’t?

I had a story.

Perhaps even a true one.

From where I was standing.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

Because perspective doesn’t mean something is false.

It means something can be true and incomplete.

I think we’ve forgotten how to hold those two things at once.

…

Forgiveness has become part of this question for me too.

Not forgiveness as absolution.

Not pretending something didn’t happen.

Not welcoming everyone back into the house because we’ve suddenly become spiritually enlightened.

Some doors should remain closed.

But forgiveness, as I have come to understand it, may simply be refusing to continue carrying someone else’s darkness around in my own body.

The candle in the dark.

Not for them.

For me.

And perhaps It Ends With Me means exactly that.

Not:

You finally admitted what you did.

Not:

Everyone finally knows who you are.

Not even:

You finally became sorry enough.

But:

I decided what happened next.

That is personal authority.

…

I still like the first half of Anne Lamott’s sentence.

Tell your stories.

God, yes.

Tell them.

But maybe tell them with enough humility to remember that memory has a camera angle.

Tell them knowing pain can sharpen some details and obscure others.

Tell them without sanitizing what happened.

Tell them without protecting people who required your silence in order to preserve themselves.

Tell them knowing your experience belongs to you completely.

But perhaps be careful when your story begins claiming ownership over somebody else’s interior life.

There is a difference between:

This is what happened to me.

and

This is who you are.

One is testimony.

The other is authorship.

And I’m no longer certain we have the right to write every character quite as confidently as we do.

…

Maybe that’s what all these essays have actually been about.

Not forgiveness.

Not projection.

Not character assassination.

Not personal authority.

Not witch trials or soap boxes or sofa fleas or canoes or spheres.

Perspective.

The terrifying and liberating realization that I am always standing somewhere.

So are you.

And perhaps wisdom isn’t finding the correct face of the sphere.

Perhaps it’s remembering there are faces we cannot see from where we’re standing.

That doesn’t make our experience less real.

It makes us human.

And maybe the final stage of telling our stories isn’t learning how to write more convincingly about the people who hurt us.

Maybe it’s discovering that eventually, they don’t need to remain the central character at all.

Because the story was never ultimately about how badly they behaved.

It was about what happened inside us.

What we carried.

What we believed because of it.

What we repeated.

What we forgave.

What we refused to repeat.

What ended with us.

And who we became when there was finally…

nothing more to prove.

Not whether people agree with me. I’ve largely made peace with the fact that some won’t.

Something quieter than that.

Whether I agree with myself.

It’s such a simple question that I almost missed it, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my life asking different ones. Am I doing enough? Am I kind enough? Masculine enough? Successful enough? Authentic enough?

Enough.

It’s such an exhausting word.

I wonder how many lives have been built trying to answer a question that was never really ours to ask.

For years I believed authenticity was the destination. I still love the word. I wrote an entire book around it. It changed my life. I don’t think I was wrong.

I think I was early.

Because words mature, don’t they? Or perhaps we do. We spend enough time living inside an idea that eventually it begins revealing another room we hadn’t noticed before.

Lately I’ve found myself opening that door.

…

Authenticity has become something we say about other people.

“She’s so authentic.”

“He’s really authentic.”

It’s a compliment.

And yet…

it’s still an observation.

It still depends on someone else seeing it.

Which made me wonder whether authenticity, at least as we’ve come to use it, can quietly become another performance. Another adjective. Another identity we hope someone else confirms.

Self-agreement doesn’t ask for confirmation.

It asks for alignment.

Those aren’t the same thing.

…

My mind has never been particularly interested in straight lines.

It wanders.

Not aimlessly.

Associatively.

One thought borrows something from another, and before I know it Rumi is sitting beside a neuroscientist, Esther Hicks has wandered into the conversation, Julia Roberts interrupts everyone with a line from Pretty Woman, and somehow they’re all talking about exactly the same thing.

Different centuries.

Different languages.

Same mountain.

I’ve stopped finding that strange.

If anything, I’ve started trusting it.

Perhaps wisdom has always been one conversation wearing different clothes.

…

Every decision is a vote.

That sentence has been following me around for weeks. Not because I sat down intending to think about it. Thoughts don’t arrive that way for me. They circle. They interrupt each other. They disappear for three days only to return halfway through a walk as though they’d never left. Sometimes they arrive in the middle of the night. Apparently they keep going while I’m asleep. Timm has become wonderfully accustomed to informing me over coffee what I spent the night talking about.

I rarely remember.

Apparently my subconscious doesn’t feel the need to wait until morning.

But this thought…

this one has stayed.

Every decision is a vote.

Every conversation.

Every invitation.

Every relationship.

Every opportunity.

Every moment your intuition quietly whispers one thing while your nervous system votes for another.

I’ve been wondering if those are the moments that shape a life.

Not the dramatic ones.

The microscopic ones.

The almost invisible moments where we quietly vote against ourselves.

Not dramatically.

Almost always…

politely.

One tiny concession at a time.

…

I don’t think we lose ourselves.

That expression has never quite landed for me.

Lose suggests we’ve disappeared.

I don’t think we have.

I think we’ve become difficult to hear.

There’s a difference.

One requires searching.

The other requires listening.

Or perhaps…

regulating.

Because I don’t think the nervous system is interested in truth.

Not at first.

It’s interested in safety.

Which is exactly what it’s designed to do.

The challenge is that safety and alignment are not always the same destination.

Sometimes they walk beautifully together.

Sometimes they couldn’t be further apart.

…

I’ve been thinking about children (and being one) as well.

Not in a nostalgic way.

In a physiological one.

Before we have language for boundaries, we have nervous systems reading rooms. We notice whose face changes when we cry. We notice when excitement becomes “too much.” We notice which parts of ourselves receive laughter, affection, silence or correction. None of this is manipulation. It’s intelligence. It’s adaptation. It’s survival doing exactly what survival has always done.

No one teaches us to abandon ourselves.

We simply become extraordinarily skilled at belonging.

And belonging is beautiful.

Until it asks us to leave ourselves at the door.

…

There’s a quote attributed to Rumi that has followed me for years.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Whether he wrote those exact words has become less important to me than what they continue to point toward.

I’ve been imagining another field.

Not beyond right and wrong.

Beyond agreement and disagreement.

A place where no one is trying to win.

No one is trying to convince.

No one is performing certainty because certainty feels safer than curiosity.

Only that almost imperceptible feeling that arrives when your thoughts, your intuition, your intelligence, your body and your life stop negotiating with one another.

Maybe that’s what alignment feels like.

Not certainty.

Agreement.

…

“Be still, and know…”

Scripture.

“Tuned in, tapped in, turned on.”

Esther Hicks.

“I say who. I say when. I say how much.”

Vivian Ward.

Regulation.

Neuroscience.

Different people.

Different languages.

Same mountain.

…

Healthy relationships don’t ask us to betray ourselves.

I’ve come to believe they make self-agreement easier.

The safest people in my life have never handed me answers.

They’ve handed me enough safety to hear my own.

There is a difference.

A profound one.

…

Maybe authenticity was never the destination.

Maybe it was simply the path that eventually led me here.

Because authenticity still risks becoming something we perform.

Self-agreement cannot.

It happens in the quiet.

It happens before the applause.

It happens long before anyone else has an opinion.

It is deeply…

stubbornly…

private.

No one else gets a vote.

And when the noise settles…

when your nervous system is no longer distracted by survival…

when the world has finished explaining who you should become…

there is only one question left.

Do I agree with the life I’m living?

gay enough.

Or perhaps…

I’ve just never been very good at joining clubs.

I’ve spent most of my life in the space between everyone else’s boxes.

Too gay for the straight guys.

Not gay enough for the gays.

It’s an odd place to build a life.

…

If you’re Generation X, you’ll remember Romper Room.

At the end of every episode, Miss Betty would lift the Magic Mirror and peer through the television.

“I see Michael… and Jennifer… and Christopher… and Amanda…”

Every morning I’d wait.

Maybe today.

Maybe she’ll say…

Shayne.

She never did.

Of course she didn’t.

The names were never personal.

But children don’t know that.

Children believe the mirror is magic.

Children believe someone, somewhere, can actually see them.

I’ve often wondered if that feeling quietly followed me into adulthood.

Waiting to hear my name.

Waiting to find the box that fit.

…

Growing up, the boys seemed to know something long before I did.

“You run like a fairy.”

Imagine.

Imagine hearing that before you even know what a fairy is.

Then spending years trying to work out whether they were seeing something…

or creating it.

…

Eventually you come out.

Everyone tells you you’ve found your people.

Have I?

Gay villages felt loud.

Not wrong.

Just…

loud.

Over-sexualized.

Performative.

Like everyone else had somehow received the handbook I never got.

I remember thinking…

Is this it?

Or perhaps…

Is this it for me?

They’re not the same question.

…

Then came the archetypes.

Twink.

Otter.

Bear.

Cub.

Someone once called me a Cub.

I remember thinking…

Does this mean I’m about to end up half naked in leather bike shorts and a harness?

Because…

respectfully…

that’s not my vibe either.

I couldn’t help laughing.

I’d finally escaped one set of stereotypes only to discover another waiting patiently with a clipboard.

Tick one.

Choose your category.

Collect your membership card.

…

I tried drag once.

Everyone should probably try drag once.

It answers all kinds of questions.

Mine was immediate.

Standing there, all I could hear was Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo.

“I’m just a boy in a dress.”

Exactly.

Not because drag wasn’t extraordinary.

Because it wasn’t me.

…

Then I started wondering something I’d never wondered before.

Who was my queer mother?

Not literally.

Who was the person who was supposed to quietly take me aside and explain that there wasn’t only one way to be gay?

Who says…

“You don’t have to love leather.”

“You don’t have to hate leather.”

“You don’t have to know what an Otter is.”

“You don’t have to become a Bear.”

“You don’t have to become anything.”

Maybe nobody says it.

Maybe everyone is too busy trying to figure out where they belong themselves.

…

I’ve never really identified with being a “woke” gay.

Or a “conservative” gay.

I’ve never understood why I was supposed to choose.

I was born this way.

Not into an ideology.

Not into a voting bloc.

Not into an aesthetic.

Just…

this way.

…

After fifty years…

Therapy.

Personal development.

Spirituality.

Enough honest conversations to know the difference between my projections and someone else’s…

I can finally say something that took me half a century to learn.

The confusion wasn’t mine.

People kept trying to solve me because I refused to become easy to categorize.

There’s a difference.

…

I watched The NeverEnding Story again recently.

I’d forgotten the ending.

The Childlike Empress doesn’t ask Atreyu to save her.

She asks him to give her a new name.

Imagine.

An entire world waiting…

for someone brave enough to say your name.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been looking for all along.

Not a tribe.

Not a stereotype.

Not another box.

Just someone…

who could see me clearly enough to call me by my name.

…

Then again…

Perhaps that’s been my work all along.

To stop waiting for someone else to say it.

And finally…

say it myself.

Substack (Pangram) analyzed it.

100% AI.

I stared at it for a second.

Then I laughed.

Not because I thought it was absurd.

Actually…

because I thought it was fascinating.

The more I looked at it, the more I realized the detector wasn’t measuring the same thing I had written.

It was measuring the final arrangement of words.

I had been writing about something that happened long before the words ever arrived.

Which, now that I think about it, feels strangely connected to the essay itself.

The Ecology Required for Originality wasn’t really about social media.

Or algorithms.

It was about our growing habit of mistaking the visible thing for the thing itself.

The flower…

instead of the forest.

Perhaps this is simply another path through that same forest.

⸻

People have asked me whether I use artificial intelligence.

I do.

Almost every essay I’ve written this past year has been refined through conversation.

Not written for me.

Written with me.

In that sense, my process isn’t especially new.

Writers have always worked with developmental editors.

Editors.

Publishers.

Philosophers have tested ideas with colleagues.

Scientists with peers.

Artists with trusted friends.

Conversation has always been part of creation.

What’s changed is that this kind of conversation has become available to almost anyone.

At almost any moment.

I arrive with an observation.

Sometimes a sentence.

Sometimes an image.

Sometimes a feeling that hasn’t yet found its language.

I write.

We reflect.

I write again.

We keep walking around the same thought from another angle.

And another.

Until I recognize it.

Not your words.

Mine.

Not your cadence.

Mine.

Not your questions.

Mine.

Not your life.

Mine.

The conversation doesn’t decide.

I do.

⸻

The more I sat with that word, the less interested I became in artificial intelligence.

Instead, I found myself thinking about language itself.

The words aren’t mine.

They never were.

Every word I know was borrowed.

Handed to me by parents.

Teachers.

Books.

Friends.

Strangers.

Entire civilizations I’ll never meet.

Language has always belonged to all of us.

We’ve been borrowing from one another since the first story was told around a fire.

What becomes uniquely mine isn’t the vocabulary.

It’s the life those words are trying to translate.

⸻

We’ve always translated.

Pain into poetry.

Light into photographs.

Stone into sculpture.

Movement into dance.

Thought into language.

Every artist is translating something that existed before the work itself.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve always confused the medium with the maker.

The piano doesn’t compose the sonata.

The violin doesn’t write the concerto.

The paintbrush isn’t the painter.

The pen never wrote the novel.

Neither did the typewriter.

Or the computer.

Each changed how ideas moved through the world.

None changed where they came from.

⸻

Then another thought arrived.

Maybe there are no truly new thoughts.

At least not in the way we often imagine.

Every book.

Every film.

Every painting.

Every religion.

Every philosophy.

Every conversation around a campfire.

Every post you’ve ever stopped to read.

They’re all circling the same handful of mysteries.

Love.

Loss.

Belonging.

Identity.

Fear.

Power.

Meaning.

Death.

Wonder.

We keep telling the same stories.

Because we’re still trying to understand them.

Perhaps originality was never about inventing a brand-new idea.

Perhaps it’s encountering an ancient one…

through a life that has never existed before.

Every human being becomes another translation.

Not another invention.

⸻

Which also made me realize something.

I’m not especially interested in whether artificial intelligence can write.

I’m much more interested in whether it can live.

Can it lose a brother?

Can it spend twenty-eight years discovering another human being?

Can it become unexpectedly fascinated by crows for reasons it can’t explain?

Can it sit in silence after a difficult conversation because it doesn’t yet have language for what just happened?

Can it spend decades slowly changing its mind about what it thought it knew?

Those aren’t prompts.

They’re encounters.

The writing comes later.

⸻

Maybe that’s what the detector couldn’t detect.

Not because it failed.

Because it wasn’t built for that.

It recognized patterns in language.

It couldn’t recognize patterns in a life.

Those require a different instrument entirely.

⸻

Perhaps that’s becoming one of the defining habits of our age.

We measure.

Then mistake the measurement for understanding.

We classify.

Then mistake the label for the thing itself.

Not just writing.

People.

Ideas.

Politics.

Relationships.

Again…

The flower.

Instead of the forest.

⸻

Like every technology before it, artificial intelligence contains both possibility and danger.

So did the printing press.

So did photography.

So did the internet.

The tool has never been the story.

Our relationship to the tool is.

Alan Watts once observed that we are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself.

Whether you hear that as philosophy, poetry, or metaphor, I think there’s something profoundly human hiding inside it.

We don’t merely arrange language.

We encounter the world.

The language comes afterward.

Perhaps that’s what every work of art has always been trying to translate.

⸻

It reminds me of another essay I wrote recently.

Truth often depends less on where you’re standing…

than on whether you’re willing to walk around the thing you’re looking at.

Perhaps this is no different.

⸻

And perhaps every meaningful piece of art has always been doing exactly the same thing.

Not telling us what to think.

Inviting us to remember what it feels like to wonder.

That may be the only thing I’ve ever really been trying to write.

Not conclusions.

Invitations.

Not certainty.

Possibility.

I’m not writing to tell you something you’ve never thought before.

I’m writing to invite you to explore a possibility from somewhere you’ve never stood before.

Because the best essays don’t change your mind.

They make you curious enough to notice it.

⸻

Or perhaps…

that’s why I laughed.

Not because it was measuring the wrong thing.

Because it was measuring only one thing.

It recognized patterns in language.

I had been trying to describe the experiences from which language emerges.

It saw the words.

I had been writing about the life that came before them.

Not suddenly.

Quietly.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

My only social media is Substack and YouTube.

And even there…

I’m losing interest.

The only thing that consistently holds my attention anymore is animals.

Who are not performing.

A crow.

An octopus.

A fox crossing a road.

A dog asleep on a porch.

None of them are building a personal brand.

None of them are optimizing a thumbnail.

None of them are trying to become someone else.

They’re simply…

being.

I’ve written about this before.

Enough, probably.

Even I’m getting bored writing about it.

Which tells me this probably isn’t about social media anymore.

It’s about something underneath it.

No algorithm.

Just rhythm.

Human rhythm.

⸻

Here we go again.

Another person romanticizing the past.

Except…

that’s not what I’m doing.

I’m not interested in going backwards.

I’m looking backwards to understand what moves us forwards.

Not as consumers.

As human beings.

I love technology.

I love thoughtful tools.

I hope artificial intelligence becomes extraordinary.

I hope medicine continues to evolve.

I hope technology quietly disappears into the background, solving problems so humans can spend more time being human.

I’m not interested in a simpler life.

I’m interested in a richer one.

Not a more performative life.

A more human one.

There’s a difference.

⸻

Lately I keep finding myself daydreaming.

Not about the past.

About pace.

A picnic table.

Coffee.

Not good coffee.

Just coffee.

Maybe instant.

With chicory.

Pages spread across the table because the wind insists on participating.

Real photographs.

Does anyone still develop film?

Don’t get ageist with me.

Someone picks one up.

“Remember this?”

And suddenly the photograph isn’t the point.

The story is.

Vinyl.

Not because it sounds better.

Because it asks something of you.

Stand up.

Choose.

Place the needle.

Turn it over.

Stay.

The sun setting while nobody announces it.

Friends dropping by because they were nearby.

Storyboards spread across a table.

Crinkled paper filling a garbage can.

A printer humming in another room.

Books with folded corners.

Meetings around tables.

Coffee growing cold because nobody wanted to leave the conversation.

Overcooked muffins.

Far too much gluten.

Nobody cares.

Someone made them.

That’s enough.

Mosquitoes.

Night birds.

Affordable concert tickets.

Queen Street West.

The Chicago Diner.

People dressing like themselves.

Cool cats.

Not copy cats.

⸻

I’ve been wondering why all of these memories feel connected.

It finally occurred to me.

We confuse the artifacts with the ecology.

Vinyl isn’t the point.

The rhythm is.

Film isn’t the point.

The anticipation is.

A newspaper isn’t the point.

The pace is.

The picnic table isn’t the point.

The conversation is.

The ecology came first.

The originality followed.

⸻

Maybe originality isn’t something we manufacture.

Maybe it’s something an ecology allows.

Forests don’t produce orchids because they try harder.

They produce them because the conditions are right.

Maybe people aren’t so different.

Maybe originality has less to do with talent…

and more to do with habitat.

Enough silence.

Enough wandering.

Enough boredom.

Enough conversation.

Enough disagreement.

Enough laughter.

Enough paper.

Enough coffee.

Enough afternoons where absolutely nothing happened.

Enough room to hear your own thoughts before someone else’s arrived.

⸻

Maybe that’s why I’m losing interest.

Not in technology.

Not in progress.

Not even in social media.

I’m losing interest in performance.

We’re becoming exceptionally good at showing one another how to live.

Less interested in actually living.

One hundred people before breakfast telling us how to become ourselves.

The irony.

⸻

I don’t know how this essay ends.

Maybe that’s because life rarely does.

But here are a few endings I’ve been carrying around lately.

Maybe you’ll choose the one that stays with you.

⸻

Originality isn’t disappearing.

It’s becoming an endangered species.

…

Or…

The algorithm isn’t killing originality.

It’s replacing its habitat.

…

Or perhaps…

We’ve been trying to optimize the flower…

while slowly destroying the forest.

…

I’m not sure which one is true.

Maybe all of them.

Maybe none of them.

But I keep coming back to the same question.

Not…

“How do we become more original?”

But…

What kind of ecology produces an original human being?

Perhaps that’s the better experiment.

Perhaps that’s the better question.

Or perhaps…

that’s where originality begins.

Yes, an experiment.

That’s what Timm and I have decided we’ll call new businesses, new ventures, new ideas from now on.

Experiments.

Because, in reality, that’s what they really are.

And it’s funny because we didn’t change the way we live. We simply found a word that finally describes the way we’ve always lived.

Businesses carry expectation.

Experiments carry curiosity.

One quietly asks,

“Will this work?”

The other simply asks,

“I wonder what will happen if…”

Those feel like two very different ways of moving through the world.

And if we’re courageous enough to keep experimenting, even after fifty, I wonder if that’s what eventually allows us to look back and quietly say,

“I lived well.”

Not because we accumulated things.

Because we experienced things.

Fully.

Courageously.

Because we squeezed as many experiences as we could into this tiny blip in time, on this tiny speck of dust, floating through a universe we’ve somehow been gifted the opportunity to explore.

You see…

this is where my mind goes.

One thought never arrives alone.

⸻

So back to the drive.

We decided to listen to an audiobook my EMDR therapist suggested.

The Polyvagal Theory.

I honestly think my therapist has a lot of faith in me because somewhere around Chapter One I looked over at Timm and laughed.

“This feels less like an audiobook and more like a medical textbook.”

Every few minutes there was another word we’d never heard before.

Another concept.

Another pause.

Another Google search.

And of course…

because this is us…

there were pauses for conversation.

Conversations that turned into the very misunderstandings being talked about in the first two chapters of the book.

Which made me laugh even more.

Here we were…

doing exactly what the book was describing.

Two people.

Listening to the same words.

Having completely different experiences.

Because the two of us come from two vastly different worlds.

Old patterns showed up.

Of course they did.

Patterns are deep.

They don’t disappear because you’ve been together for almost thirty years.

Or because you’ve done therapy.

Or because you’ve read a book.

They’ve been rehearsed for decades.

But recognizing them…

that’s deeper.

Not eliminating them.

Recognizing them while they’re happening.

Having the courage to stay in the conversation.

Having the curiosity to stop protecting your position long enough to ask,

“Tell me again…”

“Is that really what that feels like for you?”

And somewhere between one misunderstanding and the next…

it hit me.

The Polyvagal Theory wasn’t just teaching us neuroscience.

It was teaching us about each other.

I actually had to pause the book.

Not because I wanted to write that sentence down.

Because I wanted to sit with it.

Almost thirty years.

Think about that.

Almost thirty years of building a life together.

Seasons of profound joy.

Seasons of profound pain.

Moving.

Starting over.

Building.

Closing.

Grieving.

Celebrating.

Misunderstanding.

Finding one another again.

And after all these years…

we’re still discovering new countries inside one another.

I honestly don’t know if there is a stronger foundation for a relationship than that.

Not believing you’ve arrived.

Knowing there is still more to discover.

⸻

Somewhere after that the conversation drifted, as ours always do.

From neuroscience…

to relationships…

to purpose…

to businesses…

to childhood…

to what it actually means to live well.

People often ask us why we don’t own a house.

Why I left secure jobs.

Why we keep starting over.

Why we’d choose uncertainty at fifty.

Those questions don’t bother me.

What fascinates me are the conversations that follow.

Because I’ve sat in enough of them over the years to realize they were rarely conversations at all.

They were conclusions.

People absolutely convinced there was one responsible way to live.

One sensible path.

One definition of success.

One definition of security.

And they weren’t really curious about ours because they already knew theirs.

The conversations almost always began with,

“You should…”

You should buy.

You should settle.

You should think about retirement.

You should stop taking risks.

You should…

You should…

You should…

Until one day I realized something.

Almost none of those sentences ever began with a question.

No one ever asked,

“What kind of life are the two of you actually trying to build?”

Or…

“What have all these experiments taught you?”

Or…

“What makes the two of you come alive?”

I’ve stopped trying to convince people that our life makes sense.

It doesn’t have to.

It only has to make sense to us.

Please don’t misunderstand me.

This isn’t an argument against houses.

Or retirement savings.

Or Florida.

Or mowing the lawn on Saturday morning.

If that’s your adventure…

I genuinely hope it’s beautiful.

The question isn’t whether your adventure looks different than mine.

The question is…

did you choose it?

Or did it quietly choose you?

There’s a profound difference.

How many of us inherited someone else’s definition of a life well lived before we were old enough to realize we had a choice?

Parents.

Teachers.

Advertising.

Culture.

Entire generations handing us maps they themselves never thought to question.

And then handing them to us.

Not because they wished us harm.

Because they wished us safety.

Projection, as we’ve written about before, is often protection.

Not protection from another person.

Protection from another possibility.

Because another possibility quietly asks a dangerous question.

“What if there isn’t only one way?”

⸻

As all of this was unfolding another memory surfaced.

I’m a little boy again.

Standing at the Toronto Zoo.

Watching a tiger.

I don’t remember its face anymore.

I remember its feet.

Round and round.

The same circle.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Its footsteps had worn a visible groove into the earth.

When I was little, I thought the saddest part was the enclosure.

Today…

I think it might have been the groove.

And I can’t help wondering…

How much of my own life have I mistaken for safety when it’s really just a well-worn path?

Not because someone forced me onto it.

Because I stopped noticing I was walking it.

⸻

My favourite books as a child were the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Looking back…

maybe they were preparing me for life.

Turn to page 42.

Or page 91.

One decision.

An entirely different story.

This may be the first journey Timm and I have taken together.

At least the one we’re aware of.

If you believe in past lives…

perhaps we’ve done this before.

Perhaps we haven’t.

Either way…

this is the only chapter I know I’m living.

No one is getting out alive.

Time is passing whether we participate in it fully or not.

So why wouldn’t I experiment?

Why wouldn’t I remain curious?

Why wouldn’t I keep turning the page?

⸻

We’re only two chapters into The Polyvagal Theory.

Almost thirty years into our marriage.

And we’re still pausing an audiobook because one sentence leads to another conversation we’ve somehow never had.

Still misunderstanding.

Still recognizing old patterns.

Still choosing to stay.

Still discovering.

Still discovering new countries inside one another.

I don’t know where this experiment ends.

None of us do.

Life keeps going.

The conversation keeps going.

The experiments keep going.

And maybe that’s why I’ve stopped trying to arrive anywhere.

Because I don’t think this life has ever been asking me for conclusions.

Only participation.

If one day I look back and ask whether I lived well…

I don’t think I’ll count houses.

Or promotions.

Or investment accounts.

I’ll remember the experiments.

The conversations.

The people.

The places.

The risks.

The moments that undid me.

The moments that put me back together.

Because perhaps…

a life well lived isn’t measured by what we accumulate.

It’s measured by what we’re still willing to discover.

By four o’clock this morning, I was awake.

Not because the book kept me up.

Because an idea did.

There are mornings when I wake because my mind won’t stop talking.

This wasn’t one of them.

This was one of those rare mornings when something inside me had quietly connected two dots while I slept.

Coffee in hand, I opened the PDF again.

Outside, the sun was trying to rise through a veil of smoke drifting south from the wildfires burning across Northern Ontario.

It was there.

I knew it was there.

But the atmosphere had changed the way I experienced it.

The light was softer.

The edges less defined.

The sun hadn’t become less real.

The conditions through which I encountered it had changed.

I don’t know whether it was the smoke or Baudrillard, but suddenly those two things began speaking to each other.

⸻

Within minutes I found myself arguing with a philosopher I’d never met.

Not because I thought he was wrong.

Because I thought he stopped one step too soon.

Baudrillard believed we have become so surrounded by representations… brands, media, politics, social media … that the representation increasingly becomes more important than the thing itself.

I understood exactly where he was pointing.

Then something in me resisted.

Not because I disagreed.

Because I thought he had mistaken an amplification for an invention.

Human beings have always performed.

We’ve always mistaken stories for reality.

Technology didn’t invent that.

It amplified it.

⸻

Somewhere between the coffee and sunrise, another realization arrived.

Not about Baudrillard.

About myself.

There’s something strangely beautiful about realizing you’ve been writing the same essay for weeks without knowing it.

Watching Ourselves Live.

Are You Doing What You’re Sold?

The Face of the Sphere.

At the time, they felt unrelated.

Now they feel like three paths leading to the same place.

I just hadn’t seen it yet.

⸻

Then another thought arrived.

One I couldn’t shake.

Maybe social media isn’t really a communication platform.

Maybe it’s an emotional slot machine.

Pull.

A notification.

Pull.

A comment.

Pull.

A new follower.

Pull.

A promotion.

Pull.

Validation.

Not every time.

Just enough.

Because intermittent rewards are the most addictive.

And beneath every pull sits the same ancient hope.

Maybe this next one will finally tell me I’m enough.

The technology isn’t ancient.

The longing is.

⸻

That’s when I realized Baudrillard and I weren’t asking the same question.

He was asking an ontological question.

What has happened to reality?

I found myself asking an epistemological one.

What is shaping the way I experience reality?

Those are entirely different questions.

I don’t believe reality has disappeared.

I think our perception of it has always been shaped.

A week ago, while writing The Face of the Sphere, I found myself reflecting on how each of us encounters the same world through a different sphere of perception.

Not because reality changes.

Because we do.

Not different realities.

Different ways of meeting the same one.

⸻

Alan Watts once wrote that we are apertures through which the universe experiences itself.

I’ve always loved that image.

Lately I’ve found myself wondering about the aperture itself.

Not changing it.

Cleaning it.

Trauma.

Fear.

Memory.

Love.

Success.

Grief.

Culture.

Algorithms.

Some things clarify the glass.

Others quietly cloud it.

Perhaps the work of a lifetime is simply learning to refine the lens.

⸻

Perhaps the greatest threat isn’t misinformation.

It’s unexamined perception.

We spend enormous energy asking whether something is true.

We spend far less asking:

What is shaping the way I’m seeing it?

One question investigates the world.

The other investigates the instrument through which the world is experienced.

⸻

Curiosity, I’ve come to believe, is the antidote.

Not certainty.

Certainty often replaces one lens with another.

Curiosity asks another question.

It follows the roots instead of pulling the weed.

Because if you pull a weed without removing its roots…

Another one grows.

I wonder if that’s true of beliefs too.

One ideology replaces another.

One tribe replaces another.

One addiction replaces another.

Without ever asking what the roots were feeding on in the first place.

Maybe curiosity doesn’t simply change our minds.

Maybe it changes where we’re looking.

⸻

Lately I’ve been wondering if the work of a lifetime isn’t becoming someone different.

Maybe it’s becoming a better observer.

Of ourselves.

Of the stories we inherited.

The fears we mistake for facts.

The lenses we’ve been looking through for so long we’ve forgotten they’re there.

Every time we recognize another lens, we gain a little more freedom.

Not freedom from reality.

Freedom from confusing our perception with it.

Not because reality has changed.

Because we’ve become more conscious participants in it.

None of us stands where we can see all of it.

We each describe the face turned toward us, often mistaking that partial view for the whole.

For a long time, I thought writing was about arriving somewhere.

Having something worth saying.

Something complete.

Something definitive.

Now I wonder if I’ve misunderstood the assignment.

Perhaps writing isn’t about arriving at certainty.

Perhaps it’s about becoming more intimate with uncertainty.

Not the uncertainty born of indecision.

The uncertainty born of humility.

The quiet recognition that whatever I know today is inevitably shaped by where I’m standing, what I’ve lived through, what I’ve loved, what I’ve feared, and what I’ve yet to discover.

Every essay I write is simply an attempt to describe the face of the sphere turned toward me today.

Not because I believe it is the whole truth.

But because it is honestly the part I can see.

Tomorrow, life may move me.

And if it does…

I hope my writing moves too.

Because I’ve come to believe something that feels increasingly unfashionable.

Changing your mind isn’t weakness.

It’s evidence that you’ve kept walking around the sphere.

⸻

Lately I’ve been reflecting on conversation.

Or perhaps more accurately…

our growing inability to have one.

I arrived at Substack believing I had finally found a slower room.

A place where essays could breathe.

Where curiosity mattered more than certainty.

Where disagreement wasn’t a threat but an invitation.

A digital salon.

People pulling up chairs rather than drawing battle lines.

Instead, I’ve begun to notice something uncomfortable.

Algorithms aren’t the only things shaping behaviour.

Humans are.

We carry certainty with us wherever we go.

Even into spaces built for contemplation.

I’ve noticed how quickly another perspective is mistaken for opposition.

How often adding nuance is heard as contradiction.

How easily conversation becomes defence.

And then it struck me.

Everyone was simply defending the face of the sphere turned toward them.

Including me.

That realization changed everything.

Because it reminded me that no one wakes up believing they’re protecting only a fragment.

We almost always believe we’re protecting the whole.

⸻

That realization has quietly reshaped the way I think about projection.

About politics.

About religion.

About identity.

About trauma.

About creativity.

About almost everything.

Our greatest distortions are rarely out there.

They’re usually the lenses through which we look.

History.

Hope.

Fear.

Identity.

Love.

Loss.

Each one subtly turns the sphere before our eyes.

This doesn’t make our perspective false.

It makes it partial.

There is something deeply freeing about that.

It means I no longer have to defend my perspective as if it were absolute.

I can simply offer it.

⸻

Ram Dass once invited us to learn from the trees.

We don’t ask why an elm isn’t an oak.

We simply appreciate each for what it is.

Perhaps the same grace belongs to people.

Perhaps the same grace belongs to ourselves.

⸻

Rumi wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that field.

Maybe it isn’t a place where differences disappear.

Maybe it’s the place where differences are no longer frightening.

Where curiosity becomes more important than agreement.

I don’t actually need you to see what I see.

What I hope is that you’ll remain curious enough to tell me what you see.

⸻

I’ve never wanted to become anyone’s guru.

Or life coach.

Or healer.

Those titles have always felt strangely complete.

Life has taught me to distrust completion.

I’d rather remain a student.

Writing, for me, isn’t leadership.

It’s contemplation made visible.

I don’t write because I have answers.

I write because I can’t not write.

Because there are questions that only reveal themselves somewhere between one sentence and the next.

These essays are not declarations.

They’re field notes from a contemplative metamorphosis.

Evidence of a life still unfolding.

If something I wrote three years ago no longer feels true today, I hope I’ll have the courage to write differently.

Not because I was lying then.

But because I’ve kept walking.

⸻

So if you’ve found your way here…

Pull up a chair.

Not because I have something to teach you.

I don’t.

I’m simply describing the face of the sphere turned toward me today.

Perhaps tomorrow it will look different.

Perhaps yours always has.

I’d love to hear what you can see from where you’re standing.

Maybe, together, we’ll discover another part of the sphere neither of us could have seen alone.

Not in dramatic ways.

Not from burning buildings or sinking ships.

From themselves.

From bad decisions.

From wasted potential.

From the consequences that seemed so obvious to me and somehow invisible to them.

I have extended invitations.

Opened doors.

Made introductions.

Given opportunities.

Spent time, energy, money, patience, and belief.

Sometimes I have carried people further than they were willing to carry themselves.

And for years I called this kindness.

Sometimes it was.

But kindness is only part of the story.

The more uncomfortable question is this:

Why was I so willing to pick up what wasn’t mine?

Why did I keep volunteering for a job nobody assigned me?

Why did I keep stepping into stories that weren’t asking for a hero?

Or maybe they were asking, in their own way.

Through the constant complaints.

The recurring crises.

The bad luck that somehow kept repeating itself.

The familiar patterns.

The tears.

The struggle.

The endless retelling of the same unfinished chapter.

Not asking for a hero directly.

But inviting one.

Offering a role that someone like me was all too willing to accept.

The easy answer is empathy.

And empathy is certainly part of it.

When you can see someone’s pain, their fear, their insecurity, their hidden gifts, it is difficult not to want to help.

Especially when you can see what they could become.

Potential is a dangerous thing.

Not because it isn’t real.

Because it is.

I have often seen people’s potential long before they could see it themselves.

Sometimes I saw it more clearly than they did.

Sometimes I believed in them more than they believed in themselves.

And that feels noble until you realize something.

Potential is not destiny.

Potential is merely possibility.

And possibility belongs to the person carrying it.

Not the person witnessing it.

That realization arrived late.

Because beneath the empathy was something else.

Something more personal.

A younger version of me.

A version that spent years wishing someone would see him.

A version that wanted encouragement.

Protection.

Recognition.

A hand on his shoulder saying:

“I see who you are becoming. Keep going.”

Perhaps that is why I became that person for others.

Not consciously.

Not strategically.

Instinctively.

I became what I once needed.

Many of us do.

The neglected become attentive.

The unseen become observant.

The unsupported become supporters.

The wounded become healers.

It is one of the beautiful things human beings do.

And one of the dangerous things.

Because eventually a line gets crossed.

Helping becomes carrying.

Encouraging becomes rescuing.

Supporting becomes managing.

And somewhere along the way another person’s growth becomes your responsibility.

Or so it seems.

Psychologically, the saviour believes love can prevent suffering.

The truth is much harsher.

Love cannot prevent suffering.

Love can accompany suffering.

Witness suffering.

Sit beside suffering.

But it cannot spare another person from the lessons that belong to them.

The saviour’s deepest mistake is confusing compassion with responsibility.

Compassion says:

“I care.”

Responsibility says:

“I’ll carry it.”

These are not the same thing.

One creates connection.

The other creates exhaustion.

What makes the pattern even more complicated is that it requires participation from both sides.

The saviour needs someone to save.

The saved needs someone to blame.

At first, the arrangement feels wonderful.

One feels needed.

The other feels protected.

Until reality arrives.

Because eventually the burden becomes too heavy.

The saviour grows resentful.

The saved grows dependent.

Or angry.

Or ashamed.

And then something strange happens.

The very people we have carried sometimes begin projecting their unworthiness onto us.

Not because they are evil.

Because dependence is humiliating.

Nobody wants to feel incapable.

Nobody wants to feel like a project.

And so the discomfort has to go somewhere.

Often it lands on the person holding the weight.

The rescuer becomes the problem.

The helper becomes the oppressor.

The gift becomes evidence of control.

And everyone walks away confused.

What happened?

Nothing happened.

The arrangement simply reached its natural conclusion.

One person was living another person’s lesson.

And eventually life demands the lesson be returned to its rightful owner.

This is the part nobody talks about.

The saviour is often trying to finish something unfinished inside themselves.

A childhood need.

A longing.

An old ache.

A belief that if they can save enough people, perhaps they can finally save the younger version of themselves.

But that child cannot be saved retroactively.

He can only be loved.

Seen.

Accepted.

The unfinished story does not end by rescuing others.

It ends by grieving what was missing.

And then choosing not to recreate the absence through endless acts of service.

This is the moment in Poltergeist when someone says:

“Step into the light, Carol Anne.”

The invitation is not for the helpless person.

It is for both people.

The one being carried.

And the one doing the carrying.

Step into the light.

Take back your responsibility.

Return what isn’t yours.

Stop asking others to become who you need them to be.

Stop believing you are responsible for their becoming.

Trust that life can teach what you cannot.

Trust that consequences are not cruelty.

Trust that growth requires ownership.

Trust that potential is not your project.

Perhaps maturity is learning that every person has a path.

And every path includes lessons.

And every lesson has an owner.

Even now, I am not entirely free of the impulse.

I still see the potential.

I still want to help.

I still feel the tug.

But increasingly I understand the difference between offering a hand and carrying a body.

One is generosity.

The other is interference.

One honours another person’s agency.

The other quietly steals it.

Perhaps the goal is not to stop caring.

Perhaps the goal is to care without possession.

To love without managing.

To help without rescuing.

To witness without carrying.

To believe in people without becoming responsible for their becoming.

Maybe that is what freedom looks like.

Not becoming less compassionate.

Becoming compassionate enough to let people walk their own road.

Even when they stumble.

Especially when they stumble.

And perhaps that is how the saviour finally saves himself.

It took me back to prayer.

And to the different perspectives on religion that shaped my childhood.

Baptized Anglican.

Then again Pentecostal.

Influenced by a Christian grandmother who attended whatever denomination happened to be wherever she was standing.

Childish jokes.

A bop on the head.

“You are healed.”

Prayer through tears.

Prayer over bread.

Watching my grandmother baptized in the lakes of the Haliburton Highlands.

Followed by tuna noodle casserole and a cigarette snuck in the car on the drive home.

Religion was embodied by living life in balance… but living life, none the less.

Not despite the contradictions.

Through them.

I miss my grandmother with more depth than I have the words to explain today.

Maybe another day.

Or maybe it’s something that only exists between her and me.

But one thing reading The Prophet reminded me of this morning was this:

Prayer is not about getting something from God; it is about becoming more fully present to life, to yourself, and to the sacred… whether you arrive with tears or gratitude.

Perhaps that was the lesson.

From The Prophet.

From my grandmother.

Perhaps prayer has never been about changing the world around us.

Perhaps it has always been about arriving more fully inside it.

…

As I’m writing this, Elvis suddenly starts playing.

She loved Elvis.

I love Elvis.

And then another completely random fact wanders into my head.

Elvis only ever won Grammys for his gospel recordings.

Random facts.

Random memories.

Thank you, Grama.

I was at a pre-teen dance.

Footloose was playing.

For a brief moment, I was exactly where a kid should be.

Dancing.

Laughing.

Holding a cold Cherry Coke.

Suspended for a few hours from the chaos I was growing up inside.

The music was loud.

The room felt alive.

And for once, so did I.

Then I saw her.

Sitting alone on the stairs.

Crying.

Without thinking, I put down the Cherry Coke.

I left the dance floor.

I sat beside her.

I listened.

I comforted.

I walked her home.

I spent the rest of the evening carrying what she could not.

The next day, she ignored me.

Forgot I existed.

And if I’m honest, forty years later, I’ve been repeating some version of that moment ever since.

Different people.

Different circumstances.

Same staircase.

Same Cherry Coke.

Same dance floor abandoned.

If there is a squirrel trapped in a fence, I stop.

If there is a friend in crisis, I answer.

If there is an artist struggling, a neighbour spiralling, a stranger lost, a business failing, or a dream hanging by a thread, something inside me instinctively reaches toward it.

Not because I’m noble.

Not because I’m particularly selfless.

Because I genuinely care.

I always have.

The trouble is that caring and carrying are not the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to confuse them.

Looking back, I realize that dance may have been one of the first times I stepped into a role I would occupy for much of my life.

Emotional Sherpa.

The one who notices.

The one who stays.

The one who carries.

Psychologists might call it hyper-responsibility.

A tendency often found in people who grew up in unpredictable environments.

When chaos is familiar, we become exceptionally skilled at sensing it.

We learn to scan rooms.

Read faces.

Anticipate needs.

Detect shifts in mood before a word is spoken.

The adaptation is brilliant.

Until it follows us into adulthood.

Then what once protected us begins recruiting us.

Every wounded person becomes a puzzle.

Every struggling person becomes an invitation.

Every crisis feels oddly familiar.

Not because we enjoy suffering.

Because we know exactly what to do with it.

What we often don’t know what to do with is ease.

Sociologically, there is another layer.

Most cultures celebrate helpers.

Rescuers.

Caregivers.

Mentors.

Community builders.

The person who gives.

The person who sacrifices.

The person who always shows up.

We celebrate these people so enthusiastically that we rarely ask a more difficult question.

Who is carrying the carrier?

The emotional Sherpa becomes valuable because they can shoulder weight.

People become accustomed to this.

Some become grateful.

Others simply adapt.

Like water finding the lowest point, people often place their burdens where they are most easily held.

Not out of malice.

Out of human nature.

And this is where things become complicated.

Because if I am being completely honest, my frustration is rarely about the carrying itself.

I like helping.

I always will.

The deeper hurt arrives when I realize I have been carrying someone who never intended to walk beside me.

Not because they are bad.

Not because they are selfish.

Because they were simply accepting what was being offered.

The painful truth is that many of us give what was never requested and then quietly hope it will be reciprocated.

Not necessarily in money.

Or opportunity.

Or praise.

Something simpler.

Recognition.

Consideration.

The sense that if I reached out my hand, someone might reach back.

But gratitude is a complicated emotion.

Not everyone was taught how to express it.

Not everyone experiences it the same way.

Some people are overwhelmed by receiving.

Some are embarrassed by it.

Some avoid it entirely because acknowledging the gift would require acknowledging their dependence.

Others are simply surviving and cannot see beyond their own immediate needs.

All they can be is what they are capable of being at that moment.

Which raises a difficult question.

Why isn’t that enough for me?

I have spent years asking why others disappoint me.

Lately, I’ve become more interested in another question.

Why do I keep expecting them not to?

Perhaps because every time I help, some younger part of me is still standing on that dance floor.

Cherry Coke in hand.

Wondering if this time will be different.

Wondering if this time the person on the stairs will eventually turn around and say:

“Thank you.”

Wondering if this time someone might ask me to dance.

The older I get, the less interested I become in assigning blame.

The girl on the stairs wasn’t wrong.

Neither were most of the people who followed.

The real inquiry lives elsewhere.

At what point does compassion become compulsion?

At what point does generosity become overextension?

At what point does helping become a way of avoiding our own unfinished work?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all:

Who would I be if I stopped carrying everyone else for long enough to discover what I am supposed to be carrying for myself?

I don’t know the answer yet.

This essay isn’t a conclusion.

It’s a checkpoint.

An observation from somewhere along the trail.

What I do know is this:

I no longer believe community means carrying everyone.

I think community means walking together.

Sometimes I carry you.

Sometimes you carry me.

Most of the time we carry our own packs.

And perhaps maturity is learning the difference.

The dance floor is still there.

So is the staircase.

The question is no longer whether I will stop helping.

I won’t.

The question is whether, for once, I can finish my Cherry Coke before I put it down.

Astrologers will tell you Saturn represents responsibility, boundaries, maturity, consequences, and the lessons we are here to learn.

Cancer governs care.

Home.

Protection.

Nurturing.

Belonging.

In simple terms, Saturn in Cancer often arrives carrying a single curriculum:

Learn the difference between caring for people and carrying them.

The moment I read that, something settled.

Not because it was new.

Because it named a lesson life has been trying to teach me for decades.

I have spent much of my life helping people.

Offering opportunities.

Opening doors.

Making introductions.

Providing refuge.

Listening.

Encouraging.

Supporting.

Building.

Protecting.

Believing.

Sometimes before they believed in themselves.

For years I called this generosity.

And much of it was.

But increasingly I have come to understand that generosity was not the entire story.

Beneath the helping was something more complicated.

Part gift.

Part temperament.

Part learned survival.

Part longing.

Part genuine love of seeing people become more fully themselves.

I no longer know where one ends and another begins.

Perhaps I learned some of it through experience.

Perhaps some of it is inherited.

Perhaps some of it emerged from not always feeling seen, understood, encouraged, or supported in the ways I needed.

Or perhaps helping is simply one of the ways I naturally move through the world.

What I know is that I have always been drawn toward possibility.

Toward people in transition.

Toward unfinished stories.

Toward hidden gifts.

Toward the version of someone that exists just beyond their fear.

I see potential almost instinctively.

Not because I am trying to fix people.

Because I genuinely enjoy witnessing what human beings are capable of becoming.

The problem was never the seeing.

The problem was what sometimes followed.

Somewhere along the way, witnessing became carrying.

Encouraging became managing.

Supporting became responsibility.

And possibility quietly became a project.

Looking back now, I can see the pattern repeating across friendships, partnerships, creative projects, business relationships, and communities.

Someone would arrive in a season of transition.

I would see their pain.

Their potential.

Their possibilities.

And before anyone consciously agreed to it, I had quietly accepted responsibility for helping them become who I believed they could be.

Potential is dangerous that way.

Not because it isn’t real.

Because it is.

I have often seen people’s gifts long before they did.

I have seen futures they couldn’t yet imagine.

I have seen strengths hidden beneath fear.

But Saturn’s lesson is ruthless in its simplicity:

Potential is not responsibility.

Possibility belongs to the person carrying it.

Not the person witnessing it.

That distinction may be the most expensive lesson of my life.

Because what often follows rescue is resentment.

Not immediately.

At first the arrangement feels beautiful.

One person feels needed.

The other feels supported.

One person feels purposeful.

The other feels protected.

But eventually something shifts.

The helper grows exhausted.

The helped grows ashamed.

Or dependent.

Or resistant.

Or angry.

Because no human being wants to feel like a project.

And no human being can carry another person’s lessons indefinitely.

Increasingly, I suspect the people I tried hardest to rescue were carrying lessons that did not belong to me.

Life was attempting to teach them through consequences, uncertainty, discomfort, failure, accountability, responsibility, boundaries, or self-reliance.

And each time I stepped in to soften the lesson, I unknowingly delayed it.

Not because I lacked compassion.

Because I confused compassion with responsibility.

Saturn’s wisdom is surprisingly simple:

Every lesson has an owner.

And maturity begins when we stop trying to complete assignments that were never ours.

For years I experienced many of these endings as betrayal.

Some of them were.

Some were not.

Some were simply unsustainable arrangements reaching their natural conclusion.

Understanding my role in a pattern does not require me to deny the reality of harm.

People project.

People rewrite stories.

People protect themselves from shame.

People externalize responsibility.

People turn gratitude into resentment when dependency becomes too uncomfortable to acknowledge.

Compassion requires understanding that reality.

Discernment requires not excusing it.

But increasingly I have become less interested in assigning blame and more interested in understanding the lesson.

Because beneath many of my acts of rescuing was an assumption I didn’t know I was making.

If I can help, I should.

If I can see the solution, I should offer it.

If I can prevent the suffering, I should intervene.

If I can see someone’s potential, I should help them reach it.

For a long time, that felt like compassion.

Increasingly, I see it differently.

Not every problem is asking for me.

Not every lesson is asking to be softened.

Not every struggle is asking to be interrupted.

And not every potential is asking for a steward.

Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is trust another person enough to let them wrestle with what belongs to them.

Not because we don’t care.

Because we do.

Because growth often requires ownership.

Because consequences are sometimes teachers.

Because experience is often wiser than advice.

And because every lesson has an owner.

Every person I tried to rescue was carrying a lesson.

But so was I.

Their lesson may have involved accountability, responsibility, uncertainty, consequences, boundaries, or self-reliance.

Mine involved learning that those lessons belonged to them.

In trying to protect people from life, I was often interrupting the very process that might have helped them grow.

And in doing so, I delayed my own lesson as well.

For a long time, I thought the lesson might be to stop helping.

To become less available.

Less invested.

Less generous.

Less hopeful.

But that doesn’t feel true either.

The world needs people who encourage.

People who mentor.

People who open doors.

People who recognize potential before it becomes obvious.

The lesson is not to stop helping.

The lesson is to stop carrying.

Young helping says:

“I see your potential. Let me get you there.”

Mature helping says:

“I see your potential. I believe you can get there.”

One assumes responsibility for the journey.

The other honours the traveller.

One manages.

The other trusts.

One carries.

The other accompanies.

And perhaps that is what Saturn has been trying to teach me all along.

Not through astrology.

Through experience.

Through repetition.

Through exhaustion.

Through heartbreak.

Through friendships that collapsed under unequal weight.

Through business partnerships that became emotionally entangled.

Through the recurring urge to enter someone else’s storm and immediately begin organizing the weather.

Again and again life has offered the same lesson dressed in different clothes:

Stop interrupting lessons that life is trying to teach.

Witness.

Don’t rescue.

Love people.

Don’t carry them.

Believe in their potential.

Don’t become responsible for it.

Offer a hand.

Don’t carry a body.

Because compassion and responsibility are not the same thing.

Compassion says:

I care.

Responsibility says:

I’ll carry it.

One creates connection.

The other creates dependency.

One honours agency.

The other quietly steals it.

And perhaps maturity is simply learning the difference.

Not becoming colder.

Not becoming detached.

Not becoming cynical.

Just finally understanding that every person has a relationship with life that does not require my management.

Perhaps wisdom is learning to sit beside suffering without immediately trying to solve it.

To trust consequences.

To trust growth.

To trust experience.

To trust that life is often a better teacher than I am.

These days, I still feel the impulse.

I still see the potential.

I still want to help.

I suspect I always will.

But I am learning something new.

Something Saturn has apparently been trying to teach me since birth.

Every lesson has an owner.

My job is not to complete someone else’s assignment.

My job is to witness it.

To offer encouragement when invited.

To share what I have learned.

To walk beside people for a stretch of road.

And then trust the lesson to find its rightful owner.

Perhaps that is what wisdom looks like.

Not withdrawing from the world.

Not becoming less compassionate.

Not becoming less generous.

Simply learning the difference between carrying a life and believing in one.

And perhaps, in finally releasing responsibility for other people’s becoming, I can return to the unfinished task that was always mine.

Not saving others.

Learning how to belong to myself.

“Sofa fleas.”

And I nearly spit out my drink.

Not because it was mean.

Because it was funny.

The kind of funny that’s only funny because it’s true.

Or true enough that two people who have spent nearly three decades navigating friendships, family, business, community and life together immediately know exactly what the other means.

You know the people.

Or perhaps you are one.

And before anyone gets offended, this isn’t really about fleas.

Fleas have a purpose too.

Every ecosystem has a purpose.

No, this is about patterns.

Because over the years our sofa has hosted an impressive cast of characters.

People navigating divorce.

People escaping relationships.

People rebuilding careers.

People recovering from loss.

People trying to figure out who they were after life dismantled the version of themselves they’d spent years constructing.

For a season, our home became refuge.

And if I’m honest, I wouldn’t change much of it.

When someone you care about is drowning, you throw them a life preserver.

You don’t ask for a résumé.

You don’t ask for references.

You don’t ask how long they’ll need it.

You just help.

At least that’s what we’ve always done.

But somewhere between laughter and memory, I realized we weren’t actually talking about the people.

We were talking about the pattern.

The older I get, the less interested I am in the individual stories and the more interested I am in the pattern.

Because the sofa is merely the stage.

The pattern appears everywhere.

In friendships.

Families.

Business partnerships.

Mentorships.

Creative collaborations.

Community organizations.

Anywhere human beings gather long enough to need one another.

And that’s the thing.

We all need one another.

Despite the mythology of the self-made person, none of us arrived here alone.

Someone opened a door.

Someone made an introduction.

Someone gave us a chance.

Someone listened when we were falling apart.

Someone extended grace we hadn’t earned.

Someone offered a sofa.

Yet something fascinating can happen after the crisis passes.

After the divorce is finalized.

After the business recovers.

After the new relationship begins.

After the grief softens.

After life starts feeling manageable again.

The chapter closes.

And suddenly the generosity that once felt lifesaving becomes more difficult to hold.

Psychologically, this makes sense.

Most human beings want to experience themselves as capable, independent and self-reliant.

To fully acknowledge how much another person carried us through a difficult season can create an uncomfortable tension.

Not because the help was unwanted.

Because it was needed.

And needed deeply.

That’s a vulnerable truth.

One that not everyone knows how to carry.

Some people transform that realization into gratitude.

Others transform it into guilt.

And guilt is a curious thing.

Guilt doesn’t like to sit still.

It wants relief.

An exit strategy.

A way to settle the account.

Sometimes that looks like distance.

Sometimes it looks like avoidance.

Sometimes it looks like silence.

And sometimes it looks like something else entirely.

A revised story.

Not necessarily consciously.

Not maliciously.

Humanly.

The help becomes a little smaller.

The generosity becomes a little more complicated.

The relationship becomes a little less significant.

The person who carried part of the load becomes easier to place at arm’s length.

Because if the gift becomes smaller, perhaps the debt feels smaller too.

And before we’re tempted to point fingers, I think the more uncomfortable question lives elsewhere.

Because that is where agency lives.

Not in diagnosing others.

In recognizing ourselves.

Why do some of us keep becoming the refuge?

Why do some of us continually attract people in transition?

Why do some of us feel more comfortable giving than receiving?

Why do some of us struggle to let people experience the consequences of their own choices?

Why do some of us confuse generosity with responsibility?

Why do some of us leave the door open long after we are exhausted?

Those questions interest me far more than the sofa fleas.

Because the moment we stop asking:

“Why do these people keep showing up?”

And start asking:

“Why does this pattern keep showing up?”

Everything changes.

Maybe some of us learned that being needed keeps us safe.

Maybe some of us learned that rescuing others gives us value.

Maybe some of us learned that gratitude feels vulnerable.

Maybe some of us learned that asking for help feels shameful.

Maybe some of us learned that boundaries are selfish.

Maybe some of us learned that love means making room, no matter the cost.

Most of us are acting from adaptations we never consciously chose.

Then we call it friendship.

Or family.

Or mentorship.

Or community.

And the pattern repeats.

Different faces.

Different names.

Different sofas.

Same ecosystem.

Which brings me to the question I can’t stop sitting with.

What if people could acknowledge their dependence without shame and their generosity without self-sacrifice?

What if gratitude replaced guilt?

What if boundaries replaced resentment?

What if support didn’t require indebtedness?

What if receiving didn’t require shrinking the gift?

What if giving didn’t require abandoning ourselves?

What if nobody had to become the villain so somebody else could feel whole?

Because perhaps that is what so many of these stories are really about.

Not fleas.

Not sofas.

Not even friendship.

But our complicated relationship with vulnerability.

Our discomfort with needing one another.

Our difficulty receiving grace.

Our fear of owing.

Our fear of saying no.

Our fear of saying yes.

The older I get, the less interested I am in who occupied the sofa and the more interested I am in the patterns that brought them there.

Because the sofa was never the story.

It was merely the stage.

The story was always the ecosystem.

And ecosystems don’t change when we remove one organism.

They change when the pattern changes.

At first, they arrived as chaos.

Five in the morning. Cawing. Squawking. Squirrels protesting from the trees. Wings flapping. Territorial disputes. Tiny dramas unfolding before coffee.

The circle of life, repeating itself as it always has.

Villains to some.

Victors to others.

Talisman.

Messenger.

Nuisance.

Teacher.

As with most things in nature, the crow becomes whatever story we are willing to tell about it.

For many Indigenous peoples across North America, crows are not merely birds. They are messengers, tricksters, shape-shifters, carriers of wisdom, and beings that move between worlds. Their stories vary from nation to nation, but they are almost always regarded as intelligent, transformative creatures …reminders that life is often more mysterious than it first appears.

I find myself drawn to them.

Not because I understand them.

Because I don’t.

So one morning, in the spirit of neighbourliness, I left them a dime.

The next morning, another dime appeared.

Not where I had left it.

Perched strategically on the gate.

Now, I am fully aware there are rational explanations for this.

A squirrel.

A coincidence.

A previous dime I somehow overlooked.

I am what I often call a skeptical mystic. I question everything.

And yet.

I also want very much to believe.

Because dimes have followed me for more than twenty years.

Since my grandmother died.

Then my brother.

Then my other grandmother.

In an age of debit cards and digital wallets, dimes continue to appear with improbable persistence.

In my pocket.

On a doormat.

Perfectly centred on a sofa nobody sits on.

Waiting in places where they seem less discovered than delivered.

Little metallic interruptions.

Tiny reminders.

A small hello from the other side.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps simply an invitation to remember.

The older I get, the less interested I am in proving the source of these moments and the more interested I am in what they awaken within me.

Across from our shop lives a family of pigeons high atop one of the historic buildings.

One stands watch.

One gathers.

One leads.

Together they tell a story as old as life itself.

Belonging.

Partnership.

Survival.

The continuation of things.

Since Mr. Anderson and Oliver passed, I’ve found myself paying closer attention to the feathered and furry neighbours around me. They seem to be quietly kintsugi-ing parts of my heart I didn’t realize were still cracked.

The pigeons.

The squirrels.

The mourning doves.

And now, the crows.

Perhaps that is their real gift.

Not messages from beyond.

But invitations into the present.

A reminder that life is still happening.

That wonder remains available.

That grief and gratitude can occupy the same space.

The crows wake me before dawn.

The dimes appear where I least expect them.

And together they seem to whisper the same thing:

Pay attention.

You are alive.

What a miracle that is.

Whether the dimes come from ancestors, angels, coincidence, or simply a mind searching for meaning hardly matters.

Because every once in a while, when I find one glinting in an unexpected place, I think of the people I miss.

I think of the love that shaped me.

I think of the invisible threads connecting past and present.

And for a moment, the distance between here and there feels very small.

Just ten cents, perhaps.

But somehow worth so much more.

From Newfoundland.

“The best kind”, as they say.

The second set in the last few weeks.

Exploring old places with new eyes.

Things sometimes change rapidly here.

And perhaps not in Newfoundland.

We tend to move faster, have more diversity, more access, more choice, more everything.

And that’s either interesting to someone or uncomfortable.

Maybe both.

Change is inevitable, as the dragonfly has been showing us lately.

And wings do seem to give us a different respect for life.

A different perspective.

A different world.

I love visitors.

I love new perspectives.

And conversations over tea.

Tea buns with raisins in Newfoundland.

So here in Ontario, I ask my mother-in-law to make them without.

A small point of difference.

A tiny declaration of independence.

Then there was the sparkling Assam tea with peach, which one of our guests chose.

“Can I buy these in packs?” he said.

And just like that, new worlds and old worlds met across a counter.

But some things never change.

We connect over food and drinks.

How do you like your coffee?

How do you take your tea?

For me, it’s cold brew lately.

Rosemary and maple with a splash of milk.

I’ve seen what oat milk does when you froth it.

Scares me really.

It’s nice to welcome travellers.

Refreshing actually.

A new laugh.

An old one.

First about the weather.

Of course.

Then about this and that.

And eventually about everything.

I love Newfoundlanders…

“Stays where you’re at till I comes where you’re to.”

A sentence that makes absolutely no sense and perfect sense all at once.

And the shortest conversation in the world says everything it needs to.

“Arn?”

“Narn.”

Any fisherman from up the shore would recognize that.

But it’s more than the language.

It’s the energy.

The warmth.

The stories.

The way laughter seems to arrive before they do and linger long after they’ve gone.

There is something Newfoundlanders bring with them.

Something difficult to explain.

Not nostalgia exactly.

Although it feels a little like that.

More like a warm cup of tea held between your hands on a cold day.

More like being welcomed into a kitchen.

More like laughter arriving before the story and staying after it’s finished.

They carry a kind of familiarity.

Not because you’ve met them before.

But because it feels like you have.

The stories become your stories.

The laughter becomes your laughter.

And before long you’ve forgotten who started telling it in the first place.

And yesterday Ted brought the stories.

About sharpening lawn mower blades.

One story leading to another.

The way good stories do.

Until eventually he started talking about the owl outside his window…

“Hoo.”

Then on his walk.

“Hoo.”

Everywhere, he said.

“Hoo.”

“Hoo.”

And every time he told it we laughed.

Because we could all hear it.

And see it.

Ted and his owl.

A whole relationship forming.

Until somewhere later, over another tea and another story, we discovered that his “hoo” wasn’t a “hoo” at all.

It was a “coo.”

A mourning dove.

Not an owl.

A dove.

Something new.

And maybe that’s why I love visitors.

Because they bring other worlds with them, yes.

But they also help us see our own world differently.

The familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar.

The things we’ve stopped noticing return…

The street.

The café.

The garden.

The old building downtown.

The tea you’ve been serving for months.

The stories you’ve told a hundred times.

The person sitting across from you.

The life you’ve been living.

Suddenly they all feel new again.

Not because they’ve changed.

Because your perspective has.

It reminds me of when guests come to stay…

You find yourself seeing your life through their eyes.

And for a few days, your life becomes visible again.

And perhaps that’s the gift.

Not that visitors discover something new.

But that they help us rediscover what has been sitting quietly in front of us all along.

Ted thought he was listening to an owl.

Until he wasn’t.

And it made me wonder how many things in life I’ve become so familiar with that I no longer see them clearly.

How many people.

How many places.

How many ordinary miracles.

The thing we’re searching for is often already here.

Not in a self-help way.

In a lived way.

In the way a visitor notices the beauty of a street you’ve stopped looking at.

In the way someone asks where they can buy the tea you’ve walked past a hundred times.

In the way laughter around a table reminds you who you are.

Maybe that’s what visitors are for.

Not to show us their world.

But to return us to our own.

To remind us that familiarity and appreciation aren’t the same thing.

That sometimes we’ve been living inside something beautiful for so long we’ve stopped noticing its beauty.

And if we’re lucky, visitors help us hear the mourning doves again.

Postscript.

I finished writing this reflection.

Closed my laptop.

Walked out onto the back deck.

And there they were.

Not the hoo hoo.

The coo coo.

Two mourning doves.

Sitting quietly nearby as if they’d arrived for their own cup of tea.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

Then again, I’ve always liked the saying that coincidence is God’s way of acting anonymously.

Whatever it was, it made me laugh.

After all that talk about owls and mourning doves.

After all that wondering about familiarity, perspective, and the things we stop noticing.

There they were.

Waiting.

As though life had decided to underline the point.

Or perhaps just remind me one more time.

The thing we’re searching for is often already here.

Not because I’m looking.

Because people tell you things.

In late-night conversations.

In moments of collapse.

In whispered confessions.

In the space between who they pretend to be and who they actually are.

And if you’re not careful, knowing becomes its own temptation.

The temptation to expose.

To correct.

To vindicate yourself.

To finally get people to see what you see.

Especially when you’ve been hurt.

Especially when you’ve spent years carrying things that were never yours to carry.

I’ve thought a lot about this.

Partly because I hold a lot of secrets.

Other people’s secrets.

The third side of stories.

Things I’ve witnessed with my own eyes and later heard retold as something entirely different.

And partly because I know what it feels like to be wounded.

To want understanding.

To want acknowledgment.

To want someone, somewhere, to finally say:

“Yes. That happened.”

But I’ve learned something.

The nervous system doesn’t always distinguish between an event occurring and an event being repeatedly relived.

Sometimes the pursuit of vindication keeps us psychologically tied to the very thing we’re trying to leave behind.

At what point does seeking healing become maintaining attachment?

It’s a question I ask myself often.

Because if my identity becomes “the person who was wronged,” then healing starts to threaten the identity itself.

And that’s a dangerous place to build a home.

We live in a culture that rewards emotional activation.

Outrage.

Certainty.

Public shaming.

Moral performance.

Endless re-litigation of grievances.

The attention economy rewards all of it.

But what does it actually produce?

Does it heal us?

Or does it keep the wound open?

Hurt people hurt people.

We’ve all heard that.

But I wonder if the deeper truth is this:

Healed people don’t heal people.

They heal themselves.

And then their presence changes the room.

I’ve spent years trying to help people.

Trying to organize chaos.

Trying to make sense of contradictions.

Trying to carry things that never belonged to me.

But I’ve come to believe that healing isn’t something we do to other people.

It’s something we participate in ourselves.

That’s what therapy is.

That’s what EMDR is.

That’s what contemplative practice is.

That’s what writing is for me.

Not a discharge of pain onto unsuspecting people.

Not emotional contagion.

Not recruitment.

But transformation.

An attempt to metabolize pain rather than transmit it.

That’s why I write the way I do.

I’m rarely interested in proving what happened.

I’m interested in what it reveals.

About me.

About us.

About being human.

Because every experience, no matter how painful, eventually presents the same question:

“What is this showing me?”

And that is where inquiry begins.

The older I get, the less interested I am in proving what happened and the more interested I am in understanding what it taught me.

The algorithm wants us to want more.

More likes.

More subscribers.

More money.

More things.

More security.

More more more.

And yet I look around and think…

I’m rich.

Not millionaire rich.

But rich in the ways that actually matter to me.

I have a home.

Slow mornings.

Early evenings.

A beautiful marriage.

And most importantly …

the freedom to choose,

and the courage to change it all when it no longer makes sense anymore.

Because I’m not caught or bought by your ideas of what life “should” be.

What success should look like.

What security should look like.

What a “good life” should look like.

And I’m definitely not caught by the fantasy world the algorithm keeps trying to sell us.

This endless Instagrammable existence …

people banging on cherry blossom trees to create content about “presence” while overtourism destroys the very beauty they’re trying to package and sell back to us.

A performance of life.

Not life itself.

And I’m not caught by celebrities or influencers either.

I’ve been in the room with many of them.

Some of the biggest.

And believe me …

they’re just people.

Some of them confused that I’m not starstruck by them.

Some of them genuinely cool humans who happened to do what they love and it caught on in a big way.

But the common thread with the truly free ones?

They weren’t caught or bought by the world either.

And that kind of freedom scares people.

Especially muggles.

Because who are you to step outside the system?

Who are you to not chase what everyone else is chasing?

Who are you to live somewhere in the middle …

not hypnotized by ordinary life,

but also not seduced by performative extraordinariness either?

Just… here.

Aware.

Choosing consciously.

But this isn’t about bashing anyone’s choices or desires.

It’s about radical authenticity.

Again.

The permission to stop and ask yourself:

What is actually mine?

What do I actually want?

Not what your momma wanted for you.

Not what your daddy was scared for you to become.

Not what the algorithm keeps dangling in front of your nervous system every waking hour.

You.

Embodied you.

To learn backwards.

And choose forward.

On your own terms.