Conditions for Be(com)ing provide prompts for returning to the work of becoming.

Time these days frequently feels like an obstacle, an enemy to vanquish in the work of transcending or escaping limits. And it’s true: time is the absolute constraint on our lives. The speed at which our hours pass, the rapid cycling of years, feels both commonplace and surprising. Not to mention: we have no idea when our years will end, but that they end is no surprise. We feel the boundary of time every day.

Time is a condition of our becoming in that it brings us to make choices, to narrow the fields in which we will live, work, play, and relate to one another. We can either rage against the dying of the light, or we can make friends and collaborate with this reality.

It may help to understand time as three different layers: the macro, meso, and micro. Most productivity advice implicitly holds all three, without always making clear which layer does what work in your life. Talking about why, what, and how helps us notice and do particular things at the appropriate layer.

Macro is the lifetime layer. It holds our purpose, direction, and values: the stars by which we steer our lives. Some find this in a faith tradition; others find it in a set of fundamentals or principles. The macro layer is the long view, the higher vision. It allows us to be reflective and divergent, seeing what’s possible before narrowing anything down. What lives within this layer changes slowly and provides you with a lodestone for your journey. Advice and practices that focus on “finding your why” live in this layer.

Meso is the seasonal layer. This could be months or years shaped by the commitments you’re carrying or considering. It holds rhythms like a new professional role, school schedules, or a kid’s sports season. It’s where you discern which opportunities are actually yours to take, which projects get built and when. Things change seasonally (hopefully proactively). Strategy, habits, and commitments live in this layer. When we talk about “what,” we’re talking about the structures and commitments that hold your life for a limited period, that reflect how you’ve chosen to live out your “why.” Tactics and techniques that focus on project management work at this layer.

Micro is the immediate layer. The weeks and days that get all of your energy, that sometimes seem like the whole of life. Choices here reflect the macro and meso layers: what you’ve decided to say yes and no to, how you practice staying present to what’s in front of you. Changes happen quickly here, and sometimes we respond without remembering our why and our what. Many productivity tools and techniques such as to-do lists, time blocking, and distraction management work at this layer.

These three layers of why, what, and how aren’t separate management problems. They’re meant to stay in conversation with each other.

When you’re lost or scattered in the day-to-day, that’s not a micro problem to solve with better task management. It’s a signal to scale back up to macro and re-clarify what you’re actually oriented toward. And once you have that clarity again, you scale back down: the vision has to inform this week, this hour, or it isn’t doing anything.

You’re not working with three separate tools, but rather, one instrument that you keep tuning: asking, at any given moment, which layer you’re actually operating on, and whether the frustration or stagnation you’re feeling belongs there, or on another layer.

Sometimes it feels like we should make these choices once and be done forever. Communicating across layers takes energy and time. But it’s this back-and-forth conversation that creates who you’re becoming. Discerning your why, what, and how invites a constant return to the practice of listening to your life and noticing what it tells you.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

Think of this as a library you’re free to wander through at whim and will, browsing and exploring whatever catches your eye. It’s more serendipitous than premeditated (as all good libraries should be), and constantly expanding (as all the best worlds do).

All we can ever do is create the conditions for learning and transformation, hoping and listening for that magical intersection when desire, capacity, and opportunity align. When I think about designing prompts, guides, tools, and processes, I’m always asking: How can I create the best possible opportunity for ideas, people, and practice to connect? I think that the most effective learning experiences come together as a result of thoughtfully-arranged information integrated with practical action and sustained reflection.

Conditions for Be(com)ing will include free and paid options, tools and concepts, frameworks and practices designed to help us notice, name, and befriend our lives.1 In a moment when so much urges us to speed up and do more, I hope that this library offers some encouragement to slow down and meet ourselves again. We act, then we make sense of it, then we find out who we’re becoming. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Please check it out, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see in the library!

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Plant CEDAR in Your Daily Routines is my contribution to that work. It’s a self-paced course with a guide and a workbook, designed to help you gain clarity on where you experience frustration, confusion, and procrastination in the practices, habits, and tools that comprise your routines. In doing so, you can cultivate rhythms of listening, growing, and doing in your daily life.

Though self-paced, the course is designed to unfold over five weeks, 10-15 minutes per day. Over those five weeks, you’ll learn about each stage of CEDAR and the five key skills that will enable you to make effective changes in your habits or tools. Each day, you’ll engage the process of

• collecting information about how you currently utilize habits and tools,

• explore what’s not working for you at the moment,

• discern how you can improve a key skill by identifying your desired results,

• act by writing down the changes that you want to make in that stage,

• and reflect on what you’ve learned that week.

By the end, you will have created your own “outline of practice” to implement immediately, one that encapsulates your vision for strengthening the habits and tools that make up your daily routines.

Though the course focuses on personal productivity, CEDAR is a framework that applies to many areas of life: research, decision-making, creative making, and more. It’s also a practice of attention: learning to notice what’s in your life, naming it honestly, and befriending it with compassion and consistency. It’s about connecting with who you are right now, and with the person you want to become over time.

When you’re ready for that practice, you can click the button below to purchase Plant CEDAR in Your Daily Routines.

Purchase Plant CEDAR

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

How can you listen to your life so that you can grow into your truest self and do your most significant work in the world?

By paying attention to the tools you use to do that work, day in and day out. Tools exist to extend who you are into the world and help you do the things that only you can do.

Our tools support our work - not the other way around. But too often we get into the trap of “well, I’ve invested in this tool, so now I have to keep it up” or “I don’t even know why I’m using this tool this way, but I don’t know what to change.”

Additionally, tools are never neutral; they reflect the ethos, intents, and goals of their makers, the ways in which those individuals construe the world and why it exists.

When we use those tools, those implicit perspectives shape how we move through the world: what we conceive as possible, likely, or valid. It’s an inescapable reality of being homo faber: human makers.

You can use your tools, or your tools will use you.

So how do we make good changes to our toolkit?

That’s what this guide exists to help you figure out. By articulating and evaluating the digital and analog tools you use regularly, you can:

• reduce “shiny tool syndrome,”

• identify a clear purpose for each tool in your toolkit, and

• choose your best tools for doing what matters most to you.

If you want to see the tool in action, check out this video!

When you’re ready to audit and define your best tools for your most significant work, just tap the button below to get your workbook!

Purchase Reduce STS

More prompts for returning to the work of becoming.

Conditions for Be(com)ing

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me!”1

If the image of a sulky five-year-old with arms crossed and a stamping foot comes to mind, that’s understandable.

Except this was my inner self (who apparently really is five years old) talking to my adult self reviewing her plans for the last cycle, and realizing that those plans were kinda falling apart.

A few years ago, I came up with the idea of commitment spheres2 when working with a client who truly had a lot on his plate, encouraging him to be more aware of scope/project creep. I’ve since come to find that thinking of my life as a Venn diagram of distinct but connected spheres orbiting around my purpose helps me filter what projects I choose to work on within each sphere.

But just as we recently explored how desire is the energy that pulls us toward purpose, I’m becoming more aware of just how much desire shapes what I do on a day-to-day basis. It’s more than just the low-key whine of “ugh, do I hafta.” It’s about the eagerness—and the resistance—I feel when it comes to actually executing some of the projects or rhythms I set for myself.

So, back to the adult and child. It’s the end of my six-week work cycle. I’m reviewing two of the projects I had on my schedule. Both have clear rationales; they’re located within my commitments and connected to my purpose, structurally sound and well-scheduled within my constraints. One project didn’t move at all; it had a clear done-state, a reasonable investment of time and energy. I believed it was important. But on any given day: I just didn’t want to do it.

The other finished with real momentum. The planning quality was the same. The desire wasn’t.

Structure can support desire. But it can’t manufacture it.

The question that most of us ask when a well-organized project or plan doesn’t materialize is: “What’s wrong with my system?”

Planning tools and frameworks can map the terrain correctly and still leave you stuck. It’s not always enough to know where you’re going; sometimes you need to figure out whether you actually want to go there.3 Most of us never notice this should/want gap because we’ve been trained to understand structure and planning as sufficient. Call it a product of the Protestant work ethic: whether you want it or not matters less than the effort you put in to making it happen.

My cycle planning and review did exactly what it needed to do; it surfaced the gap between “yes, that makes sense,” and “oooh, let’s do this!” Just as we’ve learned to see a plan in terms of structure and success, we’ve also come to understand reviews in terms of completion or failure. My cycle review very clearly showed me what I hadn’t done. But more than that, and better: it helped me get honest with myself.

So when it came time to planning for the next work cycle, the question became: “Do I actually want to do this, or do I just think I should want to?” Ignore whether it makes sense. What are my body and soul telling me about it?

I looked at the projects that didn’t happen or stalled out in the last cycle, as well as a couple of rhythms that didn’t rhyme. I realized that one project really needed to be a practice within my rhythms, and that another project had competing desires. Both desires are valid; it’s more a matter of discerning which one I want more right now. (So far, the “exhaustion with organized religion” is winning.)

So I shifted to protecting time for the new practice, and left the project on the back burner for now. It’s on my radar; I have prompts to remind myself to check in with it. But I’m going to listen to what my desire and my resistance are telling me, because I know it will be easy to avoid this project and let it fall by the wayside. But that’s where discernment comes in; there may come a time when I need to listen to a different desire, and find a way to befriend the thing I’m most anxious to ignore.

The conversation continues.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

1

2

3

One of Megan’s Maxims is as follows:

If you’re focused on leaving a legacy, you’ve forgotten about doing the work. One of those things is not your responsibility.

I’ve watched more leaders than I can count make decisions based on what they wanted to be known for, how they wanted to be remembered. Decisions that utterly failed their communities; decisions for which the leaders themselves failed to show up in any substantial way.

They failed, and absolved themselves of responsibility for that failure. They made projections toward the future, bound only by “selfish interests,” as Wendell Berry describes, rather than promises. But promises, Berry goes on to say, “bind us to someone else’s future.”1 I’ve been thinking about this idea of legacy lately. I’m skeptical of the idea, clearly. But it prompted me to see that I’ve fallen into the same trap of only considering what’s immediately relevant to me in my lifetime: what effects my work will have, what I want to see happen, and so on. I’ve come to recognize that this is incredibly shortsighted, motivated by, if not selfish, then certainly self-interested reasons.

This promise-making posture is also found in “seven generations thinking,” a First Nations principle that decisions must be made with consideration for the well-being of those who come after us, one hundred and fifty years from now. When I can’t even decide or commit to what I want to do tomorrow, thinking generationally feels almost impossible. But. If I truly believe that lives of invisible faithfulness matter, that my daily choices matter and reverberate beyond my own life, then I need to ask, to have as a structural commitment: Where does the future actually come from? What promises am I making to it? What am I building that coming generations can grasp and use?

I have little expectation2 that my work will travel very far, but it is necessary to ask these questions, I think. What we experience now across communities and institutions are the consequences of our collective refusal to consider them. If we took this question of promises to future generations seriously, what would we imagine and build now?

Alan Jacobs, building on Wendell Berry’s insight about promises to the future, observes that, “we begin to make promises to others by having a secure, a substantial, a dense place of our own in the world.” Jacobs suggests that we increase our personal density by widening our temporal bandwidth, our sense of Now, by dwelling in both the long past and the long future. That means doing the work: of curiosity, of listening, of welcome and hospitality. Of reading the past honestly and generously, of pointing toward longer horizons and different futures. Of recognizing that before we can create new paths, we must first recognize and grapple with where we stand right now.

As in every age and generation, we contend with forces known and unknown, great and small, that shape us collectively and individually. We find ourselves being systematically formed away from a capacity to perceive with clarity and care the God who is present to us in our journeys. To recognize where we are means first recognizing that we are all a “part of the main,” connected to one another through genetics, culture, dreams, and life itself, even while we also try, on occasion, to stand outside that connection.3

Entering the House

I’ve come to name my work as a “formation house,” taking as my model The Last Homely House—Rivendell, the house of Elrond: a place for rest, renewal, creation, counsel, and committed action. Houses are buildings that can be made welcoming or hostile, warm or sterile, generative or dangerous. They are, or can be, places of respite and refuge. They can become homes, and they can also simply be temporary shelters in the midst of a journey. A house has many rooms, and creates many environments, and holds many peoples.

Our intersection here serves as a rest stop or way station: a moment to step aside from the path we’ve been on and reorient ourselves. To ask the questions and have the conversations that remove blinders, expand imagination, and change behavior. No small thing. The goal of my work, my hope for us all, is to live a located life: to know the place in which we stand at any moment, to find a “secure, substantial, dense” place of our own from which to observe, imagine, and act. To be able to say: ”I know what has made me, I know who I’m becoming, and I know what today asks of me.”

That is the work in which we are all invited to participate. That is the work we model for others. That is the work that we learn to do by imitating each other. The house becomes a place of encounter. Within a formation house, we begin the slow recovery of our capacity to perceive. The work that I am invited to do, have been invited to over a lifetime, is to change how we see, understand, and imagine our lives. It’s not about you entering my world; it’s about you re-turning toward yours and building with what you find there.

And well-built houses can stand for generations, serving as home, as beacon, and as encounter.

That’s why you’ll be noticing some redecorating within the house, mainly the building of two separate rooms.

Be(com)ing x MjR

I remain committed to keeping Be(com)ing x MjR as a free newsletter for everyone. Your returning presence here means the world to me. If you’re curious about additional ways to support this work, you can: share with family, friends, and socials; leave a “tip” for the ideas you underlined in your mind; or, consider a Wayfinding Session for yourself or someone who could benefit.

The Wayfinding Session

The Wayfinding Session is now open, and Purpose-Focused Productivity Sessions have been packed away. Rather than emphasizing productivity, the Wayfinding Session is a single formation session for those who sense a disconnect between between the life they’re living and the one they want to travel toward. Before discerning where to go, I help you discern where you are, and what being in that place asks of you. You can learn more by clicking the button at the end of this issue.

The publishing schedule for Be(com)ing x MjR will shift from the sprint-based to “when it’s ready.” I think I’ve proven4 that I can write and publish regularly. But truthfully, the schedule and format became a chain, rather than a generative constraint. The questions I keep returning to, the ideas that invite me to conversation: these all require a much slower, deeper rhythm that the previous format actively hindered me from entering. My goal is to publish one “deep dive” essay per six-week cycle, with “As It Turns Out” entries when they come up (because those practical, personal learnings are fun for me, and I hope, helpful for you).

People Watching

People Watching will have its own room entirely. Some of you have been kind enough to review previous iterations of my book proposal exploring what it looks like to become someone worth imitating. You’ve provided valuable and generous feedback over the last couple of years. If you’ve been wondering about that project, here’s where I’ve landed.

People Watching

Naming how imitation and influence shape what we want and who we become.

By Megan J. Robinson

The work of People Watching—of naming how imitation and influence shape what we want and who we become—needs to be in the world doing things more than it needs to go through the traditional publishing process right now. I’m still treating it as A Book, but published serially! And randomly!5 I have an outline, but do not expect it to be published in any kind of order, no siree. There will be a TOC page for that sort of thing. The goal is to also publish at least one essay per six-week cycle there.

People Watching podcast newsletter entries are relocated to the new room. YouTube and Apple Podcast links remain the same. If you were a guest on the show and would like updated Substack links, please let me know and I will send them to you.

The work of People Watching will also be free, but it will run on a patronage model. If you want to help make this work possible: the research, the conversations, the space to write it well and know it matters—you can support People Watching financially. Patrons who give monthly are invited into a quarterly gathering: not a bonus, just a chance to be in the room together. Monthly patronage is $5.

I hope you’ll explore the new rooms in the House of R21.5 x MjR, and that you’ll find items of interest and inspiration. Please do check out People Watching and support that work, if it resonates with you. Thank you again for being here.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

This essay is in conversation with:

• Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

• The Indigenous Foundation, The Seven Generations Principle

• Liz Bucar,

Religion, Reimagined

Caught Between a College Reunion and a High School Graduation

It didn’t occur to me until last week that reunions and graduations happen at the same time. Which is a little silly, given that I work in education and have been on both sides of both of those things at various points in my life. But last week it was much more in my face. My father…

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2 months ago · 45 likes · 5 comments · Liz Bucar

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5

The “back cover copy” is available for you to peruse 👇🏼

People Watching

Welcome to People Watching

Not a newsletter about a book. The book itself, opening one page at a time…

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2 months ago · Megan J. Robinson

In What Do You Want?, we explored something most of us were taught not to trust. Desire: the ember slow-burning in the belly, the longing that comes out sideways when we refuse to name it. We looked at what we were handed: desire as problem, as spiritual liability, as the thing to suppress or redirect or manage into submission. And we looked at what might be true instead: that desire is signal, not noise. That it points somewhere real, even when (especially when) we can’t yet see where.

We learned to name What Keeps Returning. It’s not the wanting that’s the hardest part. It’s the saying-it-out-loud, the locating yourself somewhere on the field of stones, and admitting you’re reaching for the stars.

And then there was Van Gogh and His Infinite Desire. Infinite desire, painful struggle. The tragedy wasn’t the desire: it was his refusal to see others as persons with their own longing, and the isolation that followed.

This cycle, we’ve been learning to hold the ember of desire without immediately trying to manage it. We recognize that our desire doesn’t resolve, but rather, develops and deepens, and begins taking shape in what we call purpose.

Recommendation

These two essays slayed me. I hope they help you notice and name the desire in your own life.

House of C

What Do You Actually Want?

I had so many conversations this week. With friends, with clients, with people I hadn’t seen in a while. And by the third or fourth one, I noticed a pattern that I couldn’t stop thinking about…

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Erotic Decisions

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Shameless self-promotion of my own YouTube channel - new video! I talk about journaling and honoring your everyday thoughts with beautiful tools.

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

I recently explored a bit further afield than I usually do, and enjoyed chicken tinga tacos and some of the best guac and chips while sitting in what might have been one of the most truly glorious, gorgeous days in recent memory.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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People Watching explores what it looks like to be a flourishing human through the relationships that shape us. I share conversations from real folks about the role models they’ve found in their everyday lives, and “character references” from historical, fictional, and contemporary folks who shed light on what it looks like to live with purpose in any age.

There’s the old proverb that you “should never meet your heroes.”

I wouldn’t say that Van Gogh was a hero, exactly, but I’ve always loved the energy of his paintings, and found what little I knew of his story intriguing. So at the end of last year, I decided to read Van Gogh: The Life, an exhaustive biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.

Vincent Van Gogh lived a tragic life. He grew up in a time, culture, and family that emphasized conformity, productivity, and religious piety, and that punished any perceived deviations with silence and ostracism. To be clear, Van Gogh did not make himself easy to get along with.

He romanticized and idolized various women in his life, putting them on pedestals then tearing them down. He berated his brother Theo in one paragraph then praised him as saintly and perfect in the next. He endeavored to launch a creative commune in Arles, France, and briefly lived with Paul Gaugin before driving Gaugin mad with his madness. Strangely, the one thing that everyone else knows of Van Gogh’s life (cutting off his ear) is the one thing I completely forgot.1 But every effort at connection with other human beings went sideways, made him appear strange and intense to the people he most wanted to love.

He was a voracious reader and observer of the world around him, and the sheer volume of his self-education in art over a lifetime astonishes when you consider that his available resources were produced and distributed at human speed. But for all his insight, he refused to do anything but graphite drawings in his early career, refused to listen to other artists and practice differently, refused to even consider that he might have something to learn. I was astonished at how long he resisted painting before it became the only thing he could do, before he became the “Van Gogh” we know today.

What struck me most as I read was his desperate desire to belong and be welcomed for who he was. Yet he appeared incapable of seeing another human being as a person, with their own longings and challenges. Everyone he met served an archetype: every rural laborer was a noble savage; every artist a priest of divine vision. This refusal to meet others as others left him bereft of relationships that would have helped him discern and navigate his desire.

If desire signals our capacity for the infinite, Van Gogh contained an infinite desire. He lived his life reaching for the stars, and found mostly stones. And I suppose found a purpose in the struggle to make something of his life with that desire. We can never know “what might have been,” but I closed his story wondering what could have happened had he gotten true help, or found one welcome.

Who models healthy or unhealthy desire for you?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been circling what may be a tender spot for many of us, something many of us were taught not to trust. Unfortunately, there’s no five-step hack for discerning our desires, only the slow, long practice of listening and responding to what is there.

Depending on our faith tradition, family of origin, or current circumstances, noticing and naming our desires may not feel accessible or comfortable.

The practice this week invites you first to sit with the following questions, and notice what has surfaced for you in this cycle.

• What keeps returning to your awareness as a want or longing?

• What do you think this desire is revealing to you?

• What does this desire align with in your life? Where are you noticing resistance?

Feel free to interact with these questions in your preferred style or medium. Be gentle with your naming, but be honest and true.

After you’ve explored your responses (if you’re ready), share what you’ve named with one person you trust. Not to get advice or approval, but to honor your desire and let it be witnessed.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

Subscribe now

Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age. (Click through to read on the web if your email cuts off!)

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In our pragmatic, goal-focused moment, desire holds a utilitarian value, so long as it fuels a story of victory. It’s a problem and a solution, a way to say “I believed I could, so I did.” We mine our deepest selves for the treadmill of achievement, and lose what makes us alive to the world around us.

But desire is not a resource to mine, nor a path to triumph.

Desire is what makes us dream, hope, pursue. Makes us human.

What DO You Want?

The blind beggar Bartimaeus shouts from the crowd, shouts to be heard above the beggars, travelers, hawkers, and followers, shouts “Have mercy on me!” In the midst of the teeming, chattering humanity, he shouts and Yeshua turns. Turns and says directly to the blind beggar Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?”1

A woman approaches, kneels, waits amid the clamor and bustle, waits for the opportune moment when Yeshua notices her. Waits to ask for glory on her sons above all others. “What is it you want?”2

James and John, disciples, followers, leaders, separate themselves from the group, leveling a request, a demand: “Do for us whatever we ask. Give us thrones by your side in your kingdom.” Yeshua sits, gazes on them. “What do you want me to do for you?”3

The invalid of thirty-eight years waits, patiently and less so, for a spot at the pool, waits to be cleansed, waits for a moment of peace, waits to be noticed, for he never is. Until Yeshua notices and asks, “Do you want to be well?”4

What do you want?

This question was always there in the text, but I only recently had my eyes opened to it.

I hadn’t seen before how simple and profound that question is, hadn’t realized that Jesus actually cares about what we want, that he knows us as persons with lives and desires and dreams and challenges, and that he understands how desires can be simple or ridiculous, and also just ours.

And it’s not just, or only, that Jesus asks, but that we’re seen with our desires. It’s not just that he asks, “what do you want?” It’s that the question is the seeing. He’s already looking before he asks. He’s already curious about who we are. He doesn’t demand that we make a case for our desire first, that we justify it. He recognizes the person as someone with a real answer worth hearing.

He doesn’t wait for us to clean up, to get it right. He simply asks, “What do you want?” And he leaves the answer to be what it is.

What We Were Taught About Desire

But the message so many of us got, spoken or not, is that what we want isn’t trustworthy, isn’t good. That anything we could want should be supplanted by what God wants, or what society deems appropriate. We learned or assumed that these wants were directly opposed to each other.

So if desire was the problem — suspicious, selfish, spiritually dangerous, the source of human suffering — what was the solution? Some traditions, such as Stoicism and Buddhism, offer desire management; the shifts and changes of desire call for reduction, detachment, suppression. Avoid what you want, or resign yourself to never really getting it. Christianity holds both asceticism and intensification: either ignore or punish desire, or redirect and channel it toward divine ends. We also frequently mistake the sating of appetites for the enjoyment of desire, and we have a lot of history (and experience) to show us what happens when we follow appetite wherever it leads: want, get, repeat. These days, that following can sound like: “I want it, therefore I owe it to myself to have it.” All of these approaches are paths of refusal: to listen, to question, to live with the wanting. They treat desire as the end of the matter, a problem to solve, and then be done with it.

If the typical approaches to desire refuse to take it seriously, what’s left? What do we do with what we want? We take seriously that desire might actually be the beginning of things, that our desires might be telling us something worth listening to.

Among the Stars

I confess that I feel wary about approaching the heart of this essay. I feel as though I’m approaching what C.S. Lewis calls the “inconsolable secret” that each of us carries within: that deep-down glimmer and gleam in our spirit, that ember slow-burning in our bellies, that shapes and colors every experience we have in this life.

Desire, yearning, longing. Sometimes we experience this so keenly we feel sick with it, faint with the force of it. It drives us out into the world, seeking glory, following beauty, pushing the boundaries of what we know and feel.

Sometimes the only way we know to deal with desire is to acquire, amass, devour the resources that appear to quench and alleviate the feeling. Consuming often feels safer, easier to manage. If we can grasp it, wrap our hands around it, is it truly so powerful? If we can cut it down to size, then maybe we wouldn’t have to admit how risky it feels to hold such infinite desire within us, how vulnerable it makes us to admit that there may be nothing in this world that could satisfy such longing.

And that is true.

The ember that fuels our clay-made bodies comes from that first kiss at the dawn of time, when the God who shaped the heavens and set the stars in motion breathed a bit of those stars into the first human being. And that breath has moved through us all ever since. If we follow the word itself back to its roots in the Latin desiderare,5 we realize “our separation from the stars, and our quest to reach them again.”6

Mexican poet Octavio Paz once called desire “a shot fired in the direction of the world beyond,” for we are made out of and for divine desire. It is the place where God and human beings meet: a mutual reaching for “a horizon with the right amount of peril.”7 It acts as a signal, a doorway into the infinite, an attempt to punch a hole in the ceiling of a world that refuses to risk more than what we know.

In the end, all of our wantings move between the stars and the stones, a tether connecting the individual to the infinite.

Among the Stones

To think of desire this way feels inspiring; it feels overwhelming.

Life as a quest to return to the stars leads us to moments of beauty and connection, but life is also a trek among the stones, and desire can feel like a goad forcing us to cross those stones in bare feet.

Sometimes we try to make that crossing as though we barely even notice those sharp edges, the twisted ankles. We project strength, a facade of ease with every agonizing step, rather than risk the honesty of broken skin and blood-stained feet. We refuse to meet the hardness with tenderness.

Sometimes we find ourselves mired in grief during the crossing. The glimpses of beauty, the glimmer and gleam in our spirit, the wild yearning never finds its focus, its home. We grieve the loss of what never was, and never seems to be.

But as painful and risky as vulnerability and grief are, to feel and want nothing, to be indifferent to desire, turns that field of stones into a bed of poppies. We take the path of refusal once again, attempting to escape. We succumb to despair by telling ourselves that nothing matters, we’ll never make progress, things will never change, and we have only mindless, numbing distraction left to choose.

The Christian tradition borrowed the Greek word acedia, a sense of inertia or apathy, and connected it to spiritual health. At its core, acedia indicates “a lack of care, a failure of motivation and love.”8 And desire is, above all, love for a thing we can barely name.

Naming as Reorientation

“What do you want?”

We return to Yeshua’s question. Whether they sought a miracle or glory, answering it required the person to specifically describe what they wanted, to locate themselves somewhere on the field of stones, to acknowledge their reaching for the stars. Notice that the question doesn’t guarantee the response they’re seeking; Yeshua doesn’t promise a magical resolution to All the Things. But the question affirms the goodness of our wanting, the aliveness of our desire.

The question encourages us to name our longing.

For those of us who grew up in traditions that dismissed or denied desire, we have no idea what to call that ember within, the yearning that comes out sideways. The energy we burn trying to contain or redirect such yearning, the pressure of unnamed longings, begins to consume us.

Unless we name our desire, we cannot enter into relationship with it. And if we cannot name it, we cannot love it.

In naming what we want, we acknowledge that life among the stones has wounded us to the quick, made us vulnerable to a brokenness that overtakes all our efforts. In naming our desire, we refuse to let that brokenness have the last word.

Because we don’t desire the dull or inadequate, the wounds or the brokenness. We long for the way things are supposed to be, for what is good, true, and beautiful, for what desire tells us is coming.

Notice how Yeshua responds to the namers in these stories: he meets them where they are. And he points them in a new direction.

This naming and reorientation doesn’t just change journeys. It connects us to ourselves, makes it possible for us to share both the ember and the wound. By inviting us to live with our desire, Yeshua assumes that we have “infinite capacities for life and love.”9 Capacity for signals possibility of.

Desire, once named, begins to take shape in what becomes purpose: our longing to see all things made new, our glimpse of eternity breaking into the present. Desire signals our capacity for the infinite; purpose is the struggle to make something of our lives with that desire.

When we make a home for ourselves, for our communities, our countries, we’re making a claim about what’s worth wanting, worth pursuing, worth creating. Every system we inhabit arises out of what we make of our collective desire, what we decide is worth enduring a barefoot walk through a field of stones, what we find in the stars worth reaching for.

Desire invites us to navigate between the stones and the stars, between despair and hope, between indifference and love. That work helps us define our purpose and the commitments we’re ready to make to ourselves, to each other.

A quick-drawn breath. A stillness in the world.

Yeshua waits.

Waits for us to listen to the question, to notice the invitation, to name our desire. He waits for us to love our journey to the stars, the stones we pick up along the way, the paths we make out of our longing. Every lunge, leap, twirl, shuffle, skip, hop, dip, and crawl toward the infinite horizon is a movement of hope, a refusal to quench desire, and the insistence that it meet us on the way.

He waits for us to befriend our desire, and build something new.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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This essay is in conversation with the following:

• “The Weight of Glory,” by C.S. Lewis

• “Evening,” by Rainer Maria Rilke

• “What I Learned About Expressing My Desires to God In Three Conversations with Dallas Willard,” by Trevor Hudson

• The Soul of Desire, Curt Thompson

• Poetic Theology Ch.1-2, William Dyrness

• The Gift of Thorns, A.J. Swoboda

• The Restless Heart, Ronald Rolheiser

• The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser

• Becoming By Beholding, Lanta Davis

• Our Unforming, Cindy S. Lee

• Desiring the Kingdom, Pt. 1, James K.A. Smith

• “Longing,” Consolations, David Whyte

• And this song played on repeat: “C.S. Lewis Song” by Brooke Fraser

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Fun fact: the original quote made a boo-boo; it used the Latin word desidere, which I discovered actually means to sit, withdraw, or defecate. Which sent me into a tailspin of confusion until I learned that desiderare is the word related to the stars. From the lowest to the highest reaches…I’m sure someone could explore the tensions of that etymology.

SloDos are an invitation to mindful communication, an opportunity to open channels of awareness within ourselves, between each other, and with the divine. Here’s this week’s prompt.

What did you find most helpful this week? Most challenging?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Welcome to As It Turns Out, occasional field notes on the constant experiments I’m running in the background. Sometimes I move too fast and break things I shouldn’t, and sometimes I discover a really cool idea that’s worth sharing. If it don’t break, I’ll try not to fix it?

If you’ve been here long enough, you may remember the Meaning Map.1 It’s a visual I’ve been playing around with for a couple of years, a bunch of ideas that haven’t quite solidified into something I could point at and go, ta-da. 👋

Writing The Only Thing, my essay on discernment and befriending, changed that a little. The map kept coming back to mind. The ideas in that essay—noticing, naming, befriending where you are—seem to ask for some kind of practical exploration, somewhere to land. I think the Meaning Map might be that place.

So I made a video! It’s an introduction more than an explanation—I’m still figuring out what this is and what it wants to be. But I wanted to get it out there and see how it lands with you.

Where are you on the map right now? I’d love to know.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Welcome to As It Turns Out, occasional field notes on the constant experiments I’m running in the background. Sometimes I move too fast and break things I shouldn’t, and sometimes I discover a really cool idea that’s worth sharing. If it don’t break, I’ll try not to fix it?

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Working from home, starting a business, making your own decisions… There’s a lot to love about it. It can feel a bit lonely, but that’s not quite the word for what’s missing.

In a previous life, I worked with a team. A real one, not just people who showed up and did tasks, but persons who each brought something the others didn’t have. I’m a 4 on the Enneagram. Another teammate was a 2, and another a 6. Between the three of us, we built a team and rhythms that worked, and being intentional about the gaps was part of why it worked. When we added new people, different tools, changed processes, we looked at what we were missing and tried to solve for that.

The 6 on the team kept us honest. She could read the undercurrents of the larger organization: who was nervous about what, where a proposal would snag, how to introduce ideas in a way that would actually land. And she was relentless about asking the question I didn’t always want to hear: Love the vision. But if you do X, Y and Z are going to happen. Are you ready for that, and what’s your plan?1

Sometimes I was like, “Why you harshin’ my flow?” But if you’re going to build a team to cover your gaps, you have to be willing to listen when those gaps get called out.

Now, I’m on my own. Which I chose: the freedom, the clear vision, the work that’s fully mine. And I love that. On the one hand, I own all of it. On the other hand, I own all of it.

The thinking. The ideation. The execution. The planning. The reading of the room when there’s no room to read and no one else in it. It’s all mine, baby.

I noticed the gap more recently when I came across the concept of an “AI boardroom,” an LLM prompt to trigger a set of AI personas that stress-test decisions, give different perspectives, and push back. What resonated for me wasn’t so much the novelty of the tool or the specific personas. Rather, it was the principle beneath. I already had clarity about my direction. What I didn’t have was coverage: the angles I can’t see from inside my own head. The questions I don’t think or want to ask.

The idea that seemed so brilliant at 3am launches to crickets three months later. The sunk costs of building a tool that appeared to solve all the problems only to create a headache when it breaks down and the bug can’t be traced. The service offer that flattens like a whoopee cushion when presented to a business coach, who gives you hard but necessary feedback.2 When four out of your five strengths on the Clifton StrengthsFinder all fall with in the strategic quadrant alone, these are the kinds of pitfalls you encounter.3

So I took this idea of the boardroom and built something a little smaller and more focused: I distilled the idea of eight personas into four lenses, each designed to surface what I haven’t examined (not to tell me what to think). It’s a rough substitute for my former co-worker’s stress-testing instinct, but it nudges me toward the tactical and operational consequences I might miss because I was too close to the idea.

There’s a lot of to’ing and fro’ing about whether AI is good or bad these days. I understand it; I do. But it’s also a frustrating conversation, because the tool doesn’t remove the need for us to bring ourselves to it. As put it: “If the responsibility for bad AI output belongs to you, then the credit for good AI output also belongs to you. Think about that for a second.”4

The panel doesn’t make the decision for me. But it does help me to have the other half of a conversation I need, and can’t have alone. In the end, I still have to choose what to do and how to act on those choices.

The panel also doesn’t replace the ambient presence of other people working, what’s known as body-doubling. There’s sometimes just something about the low-grade pull of a shared environment: everyone’s at their desks, so you’re also at yours. That’s a different gap, and the panel can’t close it.

It also doesn’t replace the lived experience of knowing an organization’s history and dynamics. The relational intelligence, the reading of undercurrents, the sense of how something will land in a group: that requires people, not prompts. It requires someone who knows your whole situation, remembers what you said last month, and will ask the question you’ve been crossing your fingers no one asks.

The AI panel is a workaround for me right now, a way to generate the other of half of a conversation I’m always having with myself, especially when I’m not doing the best job at it. But I’ve learned something from needing it: what I miss isn’t just company. It’s a particular kind of thinking that only happens between people with different perspectives and skills: the colleague who reads what’s underneath, the friend who catches what you’ve stopped seeing.

You can build for that when you have the people. You can approximate it, imperfectly, when you don’t. I think the approximation is worth building, not because it solves the problem, but because the alternative is making decisions alone at 10pm and finding out six weeks later where you went horribly wrong.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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We started with our SloDo by looking at our daily habits, not to judge them but to notice what they reveal. That gap between the life we say we want and the one our practices show we’re pursuing? It’s not failure. It’s data.

Then our Deep Dive essay explored why that gap exists—how we lost eternity as our measure and replaced it with goals that promise fulfillment but can’t deliver. The arrival fallacy isn’t just a psychological phenomenon; it’s a theological problem. We’re desiring creatures oriented toward becoming, and goals assume we’re achieving creatures oriented toward getting.

The practice audit in our Focal Things helped us see this pattern in our own lives. Where are we being formed by rituals we haven’t named? What cultural forces shape us more than we’d like to admit?

And then our Character References Sam and Galadriel showed us what the alternative looks like: Sam tending his garden regardless of whether it makes him a hero; Galadriel spending three thousand years becoming someone who could pass a single test. Purpose gives direction without demanding specific outcomes. It sustains us through failure because it’s not about achievement—it’s about becoming.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: becoming takes time. Not the optimized, hacked, 90-day transformation kind of time. The boring, repetitive, day-after-day kind. The kind where you might not see results for years, or decades, or millennia. The kind that requires believing there’s a measure beyond productivity metrics and quarterly reviews.

Recommendation

This article by Liz Bucar is super interesting, but I especially loved learning about training an “analogical imagination”:

Tracy argued this analogical imagination isn’t some mystical gift you either have or don’t. It’s a trained capacity. A learned skill for seeing possibilities embedded in the present moment, for recognizing patterns that point toward transformation.

Religious traditions, he’s saying, have been teaching people how to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in their minds what it could become. Not through fantasy or denial. Through what he called “disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible.”

Tracy called this “the one finite hope of liberation to the essential.” I’d call it: the ability to work for something you can’t yet prove will happen.

Religion, Reimagined

What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion?

A month ago, I heard something I can’t shake…

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6 months ago · 3304 likes · 467 comments · Liz Bucar

This note by popped up in the feed at just the right time, too.

And maybe the bravest thing we can do in an age obsessed with being exceptional…is choose to be rooted, grateful, and present— and let that be enough.

Other Things I’ve Worked On

• Chat with Marie Poulin and Ben Borowski about what it looks like to reimagine being human

• Using a discbound planner designed to be trashed, and what I learned from experimenting

• The Chaos Club finally enters 2026 with C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet and Project Hail Mary (the book)

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

When I lived in Northern VA, my family and I loved to go to this hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant for the best nachos on the planet: the Nachos Grande platter. Truly, they were well-named. We moved from NoVA years ago, and I discovered that the restaurant became a casualty of COVID, so there’s not even the hope of a visit to top up on Nachos Grande someday. I do sometimes pause in silent honor of this fallen hero.

I share this minor elegy in order to set up just how jubilant I am to have discovered my NEW hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant with very, very good nachos indeed. They’re not quite Nachos Grande (that might be impossible), but they deliver that same somnolent, sated, all-is-well-with-the-world feeling that you get with the right combination of seasoned beef, luxurious queso, fresh guac, and kicky salsa. I’m trying to decide how soon is too soon to go back; I don’t want to seem too eager. Or gluttonous. Or do I?

Aren’t the small local hole-in-the-wall places the absolute best?!

I’ve done a little rebrand of my coaching services recently. Systems Therapy is now Purpose-Focused Productivity.

Same single-session, personal guidance from me; more focus on helping you connect your purpose to your daily systems. Be sure to check it out!

Purpose-Focused Productivity

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Every time we check the feed, it’s a new crisis, a new outrage, a new burden to carry. That’s on top of everything else you’re already dealing with. And beneath it all, there’s the question that won’t stop asking itself: who am I becoming in the midst of all this?

If that question won’t let go of you, and you’re not sure how to answer it, let’s talk. In a Curiosity Call, we’ll name what’s resonating, what’s not, and where you’re finding friction in connecting your purpose to your daily systems. This is a free 15-minute conversation that you can book by clicking the button.

I'm Curious!

And, I had so much fun on my first podcast appearance that I want to keep doing it. If you host a podcast, or have a favorite show that you think I should check out, message me!

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

People Watching explores what it looks like to be a flourishing human through the relationships that shape us. I share conversations from real folks about the role models they’ve found in their everyday lives, and “character references” from historical, fictional, and contemporary folks who shed light on what it looks like to live with purpose in any age.1

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True confession: when it comes to Lord of the Rings, Frodo (the literal, actual main character) has never been my favorite. It’s always been Sam.

I love that Samwise Gamgee has this bedrock knowledge of self; he knows exactly who he is. This knowledge isn’t arrogance, but rather, a hidden confidence: he sees through the seductive promises of the Ring because he knows what he actually wants (his garden, his home, Rosie). This knowing enables him to stay true to the why of the quest, when Frodo can’t see or remember it.

My other favorite character is Galadriel of Lorien. I love her humility. It’s hard-won but it’s true. She knows what it’s like to do things for the wrong or misdirected reason, and by the time we meet her, she’s lived into her purpose for so long. Frodo offering the ring was a test that truly tempted her, but her memory and her purpose were solid enough enough to anchor a real and costly choice.

Who models this for you?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.1

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Take a look at your current goals. If you achieved every single one, who would you become? Now ask: Is that who you actually want to be, or just who you think you should be? Are your current goals serving a deeper purpose, or have they become the purpose themselves?

We usually start trying to discern and articulate our purpose by looking at the big picture. This week, let’s approach this from a different angle. Let’s start by looking at what we do day in and day out. What do our actions say about what we live for?

This week’s Focal Things practice is inspired by James K.A. Smith’s “Practice Audit” in Desiring the Kingdom.

First, write down the habits or activities you do on a weekly or daily basis, whether it’s exercise, commute, app checking, watching tv, and so on. We often do things mindlessly, on autopilot, so be sure to take a pause to really think about your schedule and actions throughout the day. Make note of what you do, and how much time you spend doing different sorts of activities.

Next, revisit your notes in response to our SloDo: what is your vision of the good life?

With that in mind, take 20-30 minutes to audit your activities using the following questions. Pay special attention to what you’re tending—the small, daily practices you keep returning to regardless of whether they make you impressive.

• What are some of the most significant habits and practices that really shape what you think and what you do?

• What do you think are the most important ritual forces in your life? If you were honest with yourself, are these positive or negative?

• What do you think of some of the most potent practices in our culture or, if you have kids, what are the cultural forces that you don’t want your children shaped by?

• As you step back and reflect on them, are there some habits and practice you might’ve originally thought were neutral, but upon further reflection, you see as more formative or significant?

• Which of your practices have you been doing so long they’ve simply become who you are—not means to an end, but expressions of the life you’re already living?

This isn’t an exercise in judgment, but in noticing. We can’t change what we haven’t named. If your vision of the good life includes leisurely meals with good friends, but you find yourself more often than not eating fast food in your car on your commute, ask yourself how that came to be. The answers you discover in that gap are clues, not cudgels.

Let me know what you discover.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

Trying to figure out how this applies to your life? That's what Systems Therapy provides. One session gets you a personal guide with tested solutions ready to implement, plus two weeks of email support as you integrate them.

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Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age.1

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Ah, 2026. You’ve promised yourself that THIS is the year you make that change you’ve been wanting to make in your life—the reading change, the health change, the adventure change, the change to rule all changes. THIS IS THE YEAR.

Meanwhile, your workplace has already had its strategic planning sessions, and you’ve submitted your OKRs for the first quarter (possibly even all four quarters). You’re trying to figure out how to accomplish your personal goals alongside your professional ones. And all the while you’re thinking about how to quietly quit All the Things, because you’re just TIRED of being told to optimize and improve and stay on the fucking treadmill.

You may find yourself sitting in traffic on your evening commute, wondering what it’s all for. What is the point of goals and objectives and results, and all the hustle?2

That, my friends, is a fantastic question. We should ask it more often.

When this image popped up in my IG feed, I cracked up. I don’t know about you, but my brain does love that dopamine spike it gets from smashing the “Buy It Now!” button. But then I realized...there’s something a little deeper going on here, something a bit more insidious than we might guess at first.

Our desire to “do something” with our lives has been co-opted and commodified, trained to transform a desire to move toward purpose into an impulse to buy and acquire new stuff. Goals have become a mechanism for this transformation—and I think we need to ask what we’ve lost along the way.

What We’ve Lost

Lewis Mumford once observed that, in the transition to an industrialized society, “eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” There was a time when eternity—the full flourishing of human life and our ultimate home—measured and focused how we lived our lives. But somewhere along the way, we lost that horizon. And when we did, something else had to fill the void.

Before we get to what that was, though, we need to ask a more fundamental question: What kind of creature are we, anyway?

Every approach to living assumes things about human nature. The “goals” approach assumes we are primarily achieving creatures—beings whose fundamental orientation is toward acquiring and completing. But the Christian tradition suggests that we are, first and foremost, desiring creatures—oriented by love toward some vision of the good life. We’re not static containers for ideas; we’re dynamic, always on the move, pursuing something. I love how James K.A. Smith puts it: we’re like existential sharks—we have to move to live. We are becoming creatures, directed toward something, pursuing some larger vision of life.

Smith goes on to suggest that we are shaped far more by practices and rhythms than by ideas alone. Our deepest desires don’t show up primarily in what we say we want, but in what our daily life and habits reveal we want. You can tell what someone truly loves not by asking them, but by watching how they spend their time.

If we’re creatures oriented by desire and shaped by practice, then our ultimate orientation matters immensely. Where are we being formed to desire? What are we becoming? This is where eternity enters the picture—not as abstract doctrine but as the horizon of our becoming.

The Christian vision of eternity isn’t about endless tomorrows where nothing matters because there’s always another day. That’s the critique philosopher Martin Häggland makes—that a belief in, a life oriented toward, eternal life removes all stakes, leaving us with meaningless succession. And honestly, if that’s what eternity really is, he’d be right to reject it. A lot of us carry that image around, whether we’d admit it or not.

But that fundamentally misunderstands what eternity is.

Eternity is greater aliveness, not infinite extension. C.S. Lewis suggested something like this in The Great Divorce: we can think of our lives here as practice, and who we are now is who we will continue to be in eternity—only intensified, brought to full flourishing. This long view creates proper stakes. It gives us a measure for our actions that transcends the tyranny of the urgent, the anxiety of productivity metrics, the exhaustion of endless achievement.

Purpose—that sense of what we’re oriented toward, of who we’re becoming—expresses our longing to see all things made new.

But when we lost eternity as our measure and forgot our nature as desiring, becoming creatures, something else rushed in to fill the void. Goals—with their promise of achievement and their focus on getting rather than becoming—became the default measure for a meaningful life.

The problem is, they can’t bear that weight.

When Goals Become Our Measure

Goals now carry the burden that eternity once carried. What began as a theological claim about grace—that hard work signals divine favor—became an individualist achievement ethic. We lost “eternity as measure” and kept only the anxious striving. Goals have become the container for that anxiety.

They’ve become the answer to “what makes life important or successful?” But they’re too small for that role, too focused on acquisition rather than formation (though they do, in fact, form us). And perhaps most importantly, they take our nature as desiring and becoming creatures and warp it into unrecognizable shapes.

The clearest evidence of this failure is what psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls the “arrival fallacy”—achieving a goal we’ve pursued, expecting lasting fulfillment, only to find that happiness disappointingly elusive. You get the promotion, lose the weight, publish the book, buy the house—and then what? The achievement becomes the new normal almost immediately, and we set our sights on the next milestone.

This happens because we’ve made goals into absolute statements of identity. We invest them with the expectation that this achievement will finally make us who we’re meant to be. So when we don’t reach the goal, we haven’t just failed at a task; we’ve failed at being ourselves. And when we do achieve it, it becomes just another marker pointing to the next thing that really will complete us. This time. For real.

This identity problem shows up in two crucial ways. First, when goals carry our identity, every setback feels existential. It’s not “I failed at this specific thing.” It’s “I failed at being me.” Goals detached from any deeper purpose become either arbitrary (why this goal and not another?) or anxiety-producing (what if I don’t make it?). The finish line keeps receding, and we’re left exhausted, chasing something we can never quite reach.

Second, goals disconnect us from the very behaviors and processes that actually shape us. We’ve designed goals to end—you either fail or achieve them, and then move on. There’s no lasting satisfaction because goals aren’t designed for satisfaction; they’re designed for completion. This is the opposite of practice, which is ongoing, formative, and focused on presence rather than outcomes.

Ask me how I know.

I’ve tried the goal-setting thing faithfully. Quarterly planning, concrete OKRs, recording targets, linking them to monthly projects, delineating tasks, reviewing progress. The whole productivity stack. And you know what? It was demoralizing. I’d see all these tasks ticked off with no discernible effect on the results I wanted. The goals never connected to my actual behaviors, my contexts, my relationships, the daily life where I actually lived.

I realize now that goals effectively set their object apart from everyday life, as if to say: “This is a thing separate from your world BUT! It will reshape that world if you accomplish it. So accomplish it OR ELSE.” Goals became referendums on who I was, not projects in becoming who I’m designed to be.

Goals assume we’re achieving beings when we’re actually becoming beings. Achievement culture offers us this container for living without ever asking “toward what end?” We’re given tools for efficiency without any sense of direction, like being handed a high-performance engine with no steering wheel.3

We need something more stable, something that aligns with our nature as creatures oriented by desire and shaped by practice. We need purpose.

Purpose as Proper Measure

Purpose recovers our sense of what kind of creatures we are. Unlike goals—which change, shift, get achieved and replaced—purpose provides a stable orientation. It expresses our longing to see all things made new, our glimpse of eternity breaking into the present. Purpose “stains backwards” through our lives, as it were, reshaping what we see and imagine, claiming stakes in the world as it ought to be.

When we have purpose, we can act as if we live in that world already—and in doing so, we bring the kingdom of God a little bit closer to now. Purpose says nothing about specific outcomes, whether we’ll get what we want or like what we get. Instead, it describes something that doesn’t fully exist yet, but remains compelling enough to sustain us in the journey, like lembas bread for the long journey.

Here’s three ways that purpose functions differently than goals:

Purpose as Destination

Purpose orients us toward who we’re becoming, not what we’re getting. A destination isn’t the same as a goal, though. A goal is a specific, measurable outcome: “lose 20 pounds,” “make $100k,” “publish a book.” A destination is more like “becoming the kind of person who cares well for their body,” “becoming generous and free from financial anxiety,” “becoming someone who creates beauty and meaning through words.”

Goals are about getting. Purpose is about becoming. And becoming takes time, patience, attention to daily formation—all the things goals tend to short-circuit.

Purpose as Standard

Purpose also provides a measure by which we evaluate our choices and behaviors. It lets us ask whether our present actions align with our deeper convictions about who we’re designed and called to become. Remember: our deepest desires manifest in our daily life and habits, not just our stated intentions. Purpose connects the big picture to the daily practices that actually form us. It asks not “did I hit my target?” but “is this shaping me into who I’m meant to be?”

This asks a lot more of us than goal achievement, honestly. You can achieve a goal and still be oriented in completely the wrong direction. Purpose keeps asking the harder question: which way am I going?

Purpose as Filter

Finally, purpose helps us navigate the overwhelming smorgasbord of modern options. It helps us see which option better enables us to move toward our destination and which moves us away from it. When you’re facing several equally good options—this job or that one, this city or another, this commitment or a different one—purpose becomes the filter that makes the choice possible. Not because it gives you a formula, but because it reminds you who you’re becoming and lets you ask: which of these fits that becoming?

From Goals to Projects

So what do we do with goals? I’m not suggesting we abandon all structure or direction. Rather, I’m suggesting we dethrone goals from their position as the ultimate measure and make them subject to purpose.

When you have purpose as your north star, goals become experiments in living out that purpose rather than referendums on your identity. Failed experiments teach you more about how to express who you’re becoming; they don’t mean you’ve failed at being yourself.

In future essays, I’ll explore the practical framework—how commitment spheres help us locate purpose in actual domains of life, how projects and experiments become ways of honoring commitments in a given season without turning into identity referendums. But for now, the crucial shift is this: start with purpose, not goals.

An Invitation

So let me ask: What would change if you started with purpose rather than goals?

I won’t pretend discovering purpose is quick or easy. It’s not another productivity hack. It’s about recovering our nature as desiring, becoming creatures. It’s about taking the long view that eternity provides—not to escape the present but to measure it rightly.

Purpose is our glimpse of eternity. It’s the expression of our longing to see all things made new. It’s the measure and focus that our actions desperately need. Not so we can achieve more, but so we can become who we’re designed to be.

And that, my friends, sounds far more compelling than any goal.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

If this essay resonates but leaves you wondering how to actually live this way given your real constraints—the competing responsibilities, limited energy, complex realities—you're not alone. Systems Therapy helps bridge that gap with personal productivity solutions that honor your whole design.

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Also: A Note About AI

I use LLMs (or chatbots, or Clippy’s sophisticated older cousin) at the END of my writing process. This helps me edit the work, zoom out to find patterns I’ve missed, and generate social media posts, title ideas, and other related tasks that make me want to shrivel up in a corner and die. The blood, sweat, and tears are wholly my own.

To kick off 2026, we’re reading C.S. Lewis’ The Space Trilogy, starting with Out of the Silent Planet.

Then we start talking about everything else we’ve read so far, uniting in our minority position as readers who don’t get the hype about Project Hail Mary (the book, not the movie!).

Listen in, drop a comment, and enjoy!

Oh, gosh, y’all!

Not only did I get to meet a real-life role model last year, but I got to talk with her AGAIN!1 I was delighted to sit down with Marie Poulin and Benjamin Borowski on their podcast Grief & Pizza — and now it’s here.

Listen Now!

Marie and Ben are such hospitable hosts. They created a space for an intimate conversation about big questions — vulnerability, flourishing, and what it looks like to serve others well. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A few things that stayed with me:

“It’s not being driven. It’s not being pushed. It’s not brute forcing your way into something. It’s a conversation. It’s a conversation with your life. It’s a conversation with your community.”

“You actually have to be vulnerable in order to build trust.” — something a mentor said to me years ago that I still haven’t finished working out.

“There is nothing left to go harder with at this point. So what can I receive instead?”

I hope you'll go take a listen, and that you find something that resonates and stays with you.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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