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: desire rightly ordered, sight restored, imitation consciously chosen. 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…

Read more

12 days ago · 45 likes · 5 comments · Liz Bucar

Download

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…

Read more

10 days 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…

Read more

3 months ago · 72 likes · 14 comments · Clara

Museguided

Erotic Decisions

Read more

a year ago · 8014 likes · 521 comments · Tamara

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,

Subscribe now

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,

Subscribe now

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!)

Share

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,

Subscribe now

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

Book a 15-Minute Curiosity Call

5

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,

Subscribe now

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,

Share

1

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?

Share

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,

Subscribe now

1

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…

Read more

4 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,

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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,

1

Use this worksheet to take notes!

R21

385KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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

Subscribe now

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.

Explore How It Works

1

Use this worksheet to take notes!

R21

385KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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

Some email providers may cut the text in your inbox. Fully visible on the web!

Subscribe now

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.

Learn More

1

Use this worksheet to take notes!

R21

385KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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,

Subscribe now

1

Has it been a crazy week? Feeling a bit overwhelmed and discombobulated?

Here, have a SloDo.1

SloDos are an invitation to mindful communication, an opportunity to open channels of awareness within ourselves, between each other, and with the divine. Grab your favorite note-taking tools and take a few minutes to turn aside from the noise and listen for the clear signal. Here’s this week’s prompt.2

What vision of the good life animates your daily habits and goals—not the life you say you want, but the one your actual practices reveal you’re pursuing?

What are you tending? What small, growing things have you committed to care for, regardless of whether they make you impressive?

What have you been practicing for so long that it’s simply become who you are?

What did you find most helpful in this reflection? Most challenging?

Let these questions serve as invitations to awareness - follow the thoughts that resonate most for you and see what comes up.

Sometimes our awareness reveals systems that aren't working—communication patterns that drain us, routines that fight our design rather than support it. If this prompt surfaced a specific frustration you're ready to address, Systems Therapy might help.

Explore How It Works

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

Shalom,

Subscribe now

2

Use this worksheet to take notes!

R21

385KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Lately, there’s a couple of words that keep tumbling around in my mind, refining how I think about purpose, living well, and becoming ourselves. They’ve become especially insistent the last few months, as I keep sensing this low-grade anxiety humming beneath contemporary life right now. Not panic exactly, but something more pervasive and persistent. We sense the ground shifting beneath our feet, and nobody quite knows where to step. Yet rather than sitting with that uncertainty, we are bombarded with takes. Sometimes, we’re the ones bombarding everyone else with takes. Every platform, every pundit, every algorithm has a confident explanation for what’s happening and what comes next, each one more bold, more loud, and more certain than the last.

Most of us are just wondering: WHAT is going on?1

The In-Between

This uncertainty isn’t accidental. In almost every area of life, the structures and stories that got us here are revealing their limits, their brittleness and insufficiency to handle the very change they made possible. The promise of connection without the substance of it. Institutions that look solid until they don’t. Leaders who appear strong but foment chaos. A realization that the old maps no longer match the territory. The pace of change outruns our ability to process it, to make sense of what we see and experience.

There’s a word for this kind of transitional moment: liminal. From the Latin limen — threshold. It describes the disorienting in-between space when what was is clearly ending, and what comes next hasn’t taken shape yet. It’s not crisis exactly, though it can feel like one. It’s more like standing in a doorway, unable to go back, unable to see clearly forward.

Transitional experiences all follow the same three stages: a separation and an ending; disorientation and the liminal; and, re-formation into new identities and structures. We’ve been experiencing the ending of a lot of things, and we’re trying to find an answer to the question that last stage raises: who or what are we becoming? With all the voices shouting ideas into the mic, so to speak, no one’s ideas are truly leading (or rather, the worst ones are).

Because there’s no clear, coherent, compelling vision, we’re traveling this liminal ground in desperation, following some back toward the known past, and others toward the unknown future. But in both cases, we’re in a posture of resistance: we do not like it here, we do not want it, and we cannot be done with it soon enough. We miss both what we’ve lost and what isn’t yet real or true. We miss what felt like control over our lives, a control we owe to the familiar, the routine, the predictable. When that routine becomes irreparably disrupted, we experience confusion, frustration, impatience. Especially, we experience grief.

The bigger the change, the greater the loss.

Normally, something absorbs some of the shock: a community, a tradition, a trusted voice that helps pace what we’re experiencing. But right now, those buffers are either gone or disintegrating. We’re absorbing the loss in real time, making sense of it alone, and trying to envision a way forward without much guidance. That’s an enormous amount to carry.

Living without closure or resolution starts to feel without purpose. We want out.

This is where we are right now, personally and collectively. And it raises the question: what does it take to navigate a moment like this well?

Most of the answers are just more of what got us here: faster tools, louder voices, more boldly asserted takes. But I think this moment is inviting us to something quieter and more demanding.

We’re being invited to discernment.

About the First Word

We use the word “discernment” a lot, but rarely in its fullest sense. It’s come to be a sophisticated synonym for choosing well, a kind of careful, unbiased decision-making available to anyone willing and able to think clearly enough. We use it to describe the ability to see people, situations, or problems without distortion, to cut through the noise and arrive at the right answer through careful reasoning.

But that’s not quite it.

Discernment isn’t primarily about decision-making. It isn’t grounded first in logical analysis or rational discussion, and it doesn’t assume that we have the capacity to understand and solve every problem if we just think carefully enough. That version of discernment is really just optimized thinking. And optimized thinking falls prey to the same limits, blindspots, and noise that got us confused in the first place.

When we feel uncertain, we instinctively want to meet ambiguity with a decision, A Plan. We rush to convert the discomfort of not knowing into the relief of clear outcomes and concrete actions. The desire for control isn’t wrong. But here’s the thing: a plan for outcomes assumes we already know what we’re dealing with. In a liminal moment, that’s precisely what we don’t know. Much of the noise we’re hearing is really the sound of that frantic attempt to resolve uncertainty through confidence, control, and motion.

The last few months of my life have been a slow reckoning with such frantic attempts. I recently wrote about how my own productivity systems broke open just how tightly I clung to the illusion of control: control over process, control over outcome. The more I wanted a specific result, the more I tried to engineer every aspect of my day and effort to gain it. The same pattern kept showing up in every area of my life: lock it up, lock it down. If that doesn’t work, try harder.

Over time, without realizing it, I’d become someone I didn’t recognize. Someone whose every action arose out of anxiety and fear, for whom the idea of genuine rest sent me into a spiral of panic. I could not trust that I was trustworthy if I wasn’t proving it to myself every minute of every day. Eventually my body began to break down in ways I couldn’t ignore or engineer my way out of. There was no try left.

Noise and Signal

I heard artist Scott Erickson say on a podcast that whenever he’s in a dark period, he asks of himself and of God: “What’s the only thing I can learn by being here?”

I’ve come to think that this is the question we’ve all been avoiding, that we must begin to grapple with if we’re going to make any real changes in life, in society, in the world.

Because this question invites me to listen to what my life is telling me, to notice what God is calling me to pay attention to. Old things have passed away; new things are coming. But the dying and the arriving are incomplete and not yet, and here feels like a boggy swamp. The question doesn’t get me out of the swamp any faster. But it reorients me toward something other than my frantic efforts at control.

The word “discernment” itself points somewhere different. Discernment comes from the Latin discernere — to separate, to distinguish. In the Christian tradition, it has a long history in the spiritual life of both communities and individuals. The goal of discernment is, first and foremost, to learn to see the work of the divine in the world, to separate the signal of God’s movement from the noise of human activity.

Discernment implies hiddenness, something undisclosed or yet to be revealed. It hints at insights we can uncover, names we can bestow or receive. These days, we experience what can only be called an “information surplus,” and bemoan what feels like an insufficient quantity of attention to adequately filter and select what we need. But attention is not a quantity; it’s not a resource we can spend or save. Attention is meeting, it is revelation, it is an encounter with the reality before us. Attention is the prelude to discernment.

What discernment requires, before anything else, is not better thinking. It’s deeper listening. Attending. Noticing.

Noticing requires a name, because to name something is to enter into relationship with it. Naming, like noticing, is not a one-time act but a sustained one, a repeated return, because to use a name requires memory, connection, attention over time. We find it hard to love what we cannot name. And what we do not love, we will not tend.

About the Second Word

Befriending enacts what naming requires: curiosity and care unfolding over time. But it also suggests something about posture: a turning away from aggression and toward relationship. For a long time, I have treated my body as a problem to be solved, an enemy to be vanquished. As it started breaking down faster, all I knew to do was try harder, which just made everything worse. Befriending became the only alternative left to me. Not fixing, not forcing, but learning to listen to, to notice what my body was actually telling me. Befriending invites me to actually inhabit my body.

To inhabit is to be where you are, to be nowhere, nowhen else but here. Inhabiting my body means recognizing that I can only meet the world through my limits, my finitude. Finitude isn’t a problem to overcome; it’s the shape of a human life. Befriending finitude means learning to work with those limits rather than against them, to let them tell you something true about who you are and what you’re for. Befriending is the recognition that many things in life don’t need try. They need rest.

Tending the Signal

God knows the world feels more chaotic and uncertain all the time. Every day comes with a demand to notice, to care, to act on what’s happening out there. And of course, to observe is to feel a reflexive compassion for another human being’s plight, a desire to do something that helps.

But we inhabit here.

To befriend, to tend, to care within our limits means to take responsibility for our part in the relationship of what we have noticed and named. As Sarah Hinlicky Wilson so beautifully states: “everything real and everything that heals is personal and local.”

If we cannot or will not be in relationship with what we have noticed, we are free to turn our attention to what we can name and befriend. We gain this freedom through discernment. Discernment is more than a practice of self-knowledge or choosing well. To discern is to notice where God is already at work — in the world, in others, in the texture of our own lives. It’s coming awake to the persons we are, and to who we’re designed to become. Befriending our limits, our finitude isn’t resignation, but rather, preparation. We tend what we love. We participate in what we name. And we can only name when we’ve learned to be still enough, present enough, to notice.

And only then, we act.

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

Shalom,

Subscribe now

This essay is in conversation with the following:

• Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation by Cindy S. Lee

• How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season by Susan Beaumont

• Note to Self: Creating Your Guide to a More Spiritual Life by Charles LaFond

• The Enneagram of Discernment: The Way of Wisdom, Vocation, and Practice by Drew Moser

• Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation by Lanta Davis

• Worth Doing: Fallenness, Finitude, and Work in the Real World by W. Davis Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski

• “If Your Attention Isn’t a Resource, What is It?“ by P.J. Anderson

• “When Attention is the Coin of the Realm,” by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson.

→ This song kept me company: Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes.

1

In this sprint, we explored the phenomenon of zombie projects: the things that never quite finish, never fully die, just keep shambling forward consuming mental energy without ever releasing us. They’re not dead. But they’re not really alive either.

The deeper question turned out to be about us, not our to-do lists. We’re being asked to become zombies ourselves—perpetually available, endlessly productive, with no off-switch. But we’re not machines. We have seasons of capacity and seasons of depletion. We can’t maintain the same energy output regardless of circumstances, because that’s not how creatures work.

We started with our SloDo “Mostly Dead Means Slightly Alive,” an invitation to inventory responsibilities, obligations, and relationships—noticing what feels urgent versus important, what brings joy versus dread, and asking “What feels alive here?”

We then took a Deep Dive into “When Your To-Do List Becomes a Zombie Horde.” Built around Rachel’s coaching session—a working mom navigating 200 minutes of daily driving, unpredictable sports schedules, and the dread of hitting December unprepared—we identified “zombie projects.” We took a look at the cultural expectation that we become “undead workers”—perpetually available, never saying “enough,” also realizing the proactive paradox: we can only plan ahead when we have capacity before chaos hits. We then revisited how purpose serves as a filter: helping us choose between equally good options based on who we’re becoming, as well as providing us with a call to honest assessment of creaturely limits rather than optimization.

We followed up with Focal Things, with tactics for getting ready “Before the Horde Arrives: The Project Brief.” This is a pre-commitment tool that I adapted from the idea of creative briefs and Tara McMullin’s goal-setting work. It offers a practical way to identify three projects for your next major milestone—not ten, just three—and either complete them or shoot them in the head. Use the project brief to think through each one clearly—outcome, stages, resources, troubleshooting—then give yourself permission to let everything else wait.

Columbus from Zombieland served as our Character Reference: “Cardio, Double Tap, and Evening Prep” He modeled this for us surprisingly well: pre-decisions made when you can think clearly, simple rules that evolve as circumstances change, all rooted in knowing what you’re actually trying to protect or accomplish.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of being able to knock zombie projects off the board feels incredibly freeing. It gives us space to sit with the question “Who are you designed and called to become?” Let your answer guide what deserves your attention—and what needs to be left in the rearview mirror.

Recommendation

If you found the idea of a project brief interesting, and you’d like to dig into the book that inspired me, check out Tara McMullin’s What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting. She goes into the systemic factors that shape how we typically understand goals, while also offering practical solutions at the personal level.

I’ll be digging into more into this idea of challenging the language and practice of goals here in the near future, so stay tuned!

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

It’s not a taco in the traditional sense, but it does involve a tortilla. Grab a large tortilla (I like Mission Gluten-Free), heat some oil in a skillet, throw your favorite sliced meats, cheeses, and condiments in there, and make yourself a dang quesadilla.1 Simple but effective.

And if you’re curious about how to create sustainable systems in your purpose-focused life (or you want to get away from zombies), book a free Curiosity Call with me! We’ll take a look at what’s broken, missing, or confused in your processes, tools, or practices, and then see how I can help.

Just Book It!

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

Shalom,

Subscribe now

1

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.

I couldn’t resist this week’s Character Reference: Columbus from Zombieland. This dude and his rules, I tell you.

In a world overrun by zombies, Columbus survives through a deceptively simple system: pre-decisions. His famous list of rules—‘Cardio,’ ‘Double Tap,’ ‘Beware of Bathrooms’—aren’t about being perfect. They’re about knowing exactly what to do when chaos hits.

What makes Columbus’s approach sustainable? Three things:

1. Pre-decisions: He decides his responses before the crisis, when he can think clearly.

2. Simplicity: The rules are memorable and actionable, not elaborate.

3. Evolution: Rules #1-31 eventually make room for new realities (like Rule #32: Enjoy the little things and Rule #17: from “Don’t be a hero” to “Be a hero”).

One more thing about Columbus’ list: it’s rooted in a clear purpose—to find his parents. Every rule makes sense when you realize that Columbus wants to survive to reunite with his family. And when that purpose expands to include his found family, the rules adapt in response.

This is what tactics like evening prep and project briefs do for our human-sized lives. They’re not about controlling everything—they’re about having clear responses ready when the zombie horde of September arrives. And like Columbus, we can adjust our rules as we learn what actually works.

Who models this for you?

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

Shalom,

Subscribe now

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

A Tested Template for Life’s Actual Complexity

“My concern is we’re going to hit December and I’m going to hate myself again.”

Rachel said this in August, looking ahead at three months of overlapping soccer schedules, cross country meets, birthdays, and holidays. She could see it coming—the moment when she’d need gifts and plans and mental space but wouldn’t have any capacity left to create them.

She’d been here before. We all have.

The question isn’t whether chaos arrives. It’s whether we planned for it when we still had the bandwidth to think.

Curious about working with me to become a zombie project master? Check out Systems Therapy: single-session productivity consulting that honors how you’re designed, not how machines work.

Get Some Zombie Zen

The Problem with Most Planning Systems

Here’s what typically happens: We identify something that needs doing. We add it to a list. We work on it when we have time. It stays on the list. We work on it more. Months pass. It’s still on the list. We feel vaguely guilty about it but also aren’t sure if it needs doing anymore. We keep working on it occasionally. It never quite finishes.

Welcome to zombie project management.

These undead projects consume mental energy without ever releasing you. They make you the person everyone asks about dinner plans or curriculum schedules or birthday logistics. They create decision fatigue at exactly the wrong moments—when you’re already maxed out and can’t think clearly.

Most planning systems fail because they assume consistent capacity. They give you elaborate workflows for ongoing project management. But if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need help managing projects—you need help deciding which projects to kill and which to actually finish.

You need a way to think through a project once, clearly, before you commit to it. And you need a way to recognize when a project has become a zombie so you can shoot it in the head and move on.

The Project Brief: Your Pre-Commitment Tool

I adapted this idea from professional creative briefs and Tara McMullin’s approach to goal-setting in What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting. It’s designed for one reason only: forcing the “can I actually do this?” conversation before you add another thing to your plate.

This isn’t project management. It’s project evaluation. You’re not maintaining this brief throughout the project—you’re using it to decide if the project deserves space in your life right now.

I’ve developed various versions of this template with clients like Rachel, and today I’d love to share it with you.

G-Docs Project Brief Template

Part One: What and Why

Before anything else, get clear on the outcome and the why.

The Outcome: What does complete look like? Not “work on Sunday school curriculum” but “Have 12 weeks of curriculum planned, with discussion questions and activities ready to go.” Not “think about Christmas gifts” but “Purchase and wrap gifts for immediate family by December 15th.”

If you can’t articulate a concrete completion point, you’re creating a zombie project.

The Why: How does this connect to your actual commitments? Not your aspirational commitments—your real ones. The things you’ve already said yes to, the people you’re already responsible for, the work you’re already doing.

Some projects are just administrative reality: you have kids in soccer, so soccer logistics must be managed. That’s fine. Name it clearly.

Other projects need stronger justification: Why this curriculum approach? Why these specific birthday plans? What makes this worth your finite energy?

If you can’t answer the why convincingly, pause. Maybe it shouldn’t be a project.

What Makes it Complete: How will you know when you’re done? What does finished look like?

Sometimes it’s binary: “Birthday party happened.” Sometimes it’s qualitative: “Kids engaged meaningfully with the material.” Name your success criteria before you start so you know when to stop.

Part Two: Stages and Tasks

Break the project into phases. Not every task—just the major stages.

This is one example taken from Rachel’s Sunday school planning:

• Stage 1: Research and reading (due: two weeks before teaching starts)

• Stage 2: Map out 12-week arc (due: one week before teaching starts)

• Stage 3: Weekly prep (30 minutes per week during teaching season)

Notice the due dates. You’re thinking ahead to when you’ll actually have capacity to do this work. If Rachel tried to plan curriculum in September when she’s driving 200 minutes a day, it wouldn’t happen. August is the window.

Within each stage, list the key tasks. Not everything—just enough to know what you’re committing to.

You can do this digitally or on paper. Don’t overthink it: we often make this too complicated.

Part Three: Resources

What do you need to complete this project?

• Financial: Do you need to buy books, supplies, tools, software? What’s the budget?

  • For Christmas gifts, name the actual amount you can spend. For meal planning, what ingredients need purchasing? Get specific.

• Time: How much time will each stage require? When do you actually have that time available?

  • Here’s where honest assessment matters. If you know September is chaos, don’t plan projects requiring deep focus for September. Slot them in August or October instead.

• People: Do you need input from others? Do tasks depend on someone else’s availability? Name those dependencies now.

• Tools: Do you need specific software, equipment, or materials? List them here so you’re not scrambling mid-project.

Part Four: Troubleshooting

There’s an old proverb about war strategy: no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, we are often our own worst enemy. But since we know this, we can also prepare ourselves for the low moments when fatigue, fear, and frustration hit.

Ask yourself:

• Where might I self-sabotage?

• What assumptions am I making that might not be true?

• What happens if my circumstances change mid-project?

• What’s the minimum viable version if I run out of capacity?

Rachel’s example: “What if my son gets invited to cross country the week I planned to work on this? What’s the smallest thing I can do then?”

Having a fallback plan means the project doesn’t become a zombie when life gets complicated. You just shift to Plan B instead of abandoning it halfway through and feeling guilty.

Part Five: Budget (if applicable)

For projects involving purchases, get specific about money.

Not “buy Christmas gifts” but:

• Four kids: $X per child

• Extended family: $X total

• Teachers/coaches: $X total

• Total budget: $X

• Purchase deadline: December 15th

When December arrives and you’re tired, you’re not also trying to figure out what you can afford. You’re just executing a plan you made when you could think clearly.

Part Six: Check-In Schedule

This isn’t daily project management. It’s periodic reality-checking.

Set 2-3 check-in dates between now and the project deadline. At each check-in, ask:

• Am I making actual progress?

• Is this project still necessary?

• Have my circumstances changed in ways that affect this project?

• Is this project too complex? Can I simplify?

• Should I shoot this zombie in the head and be done with it?

That last question is critical. Sometimes the best project management is recognizing a project should die.

Here’s a clip from a live coaching session with Rachel where I explain the project brief and zombie projects.

Your Three Projects

Here’s your implementation challenge:

Look ahead to your next big milestone–the event that you know will reroute your life for a time. Now, identify three projects that need doing.

Not ten. Not everything. Just three things that, if left unplanned, will make you hate yourself when that milestone arrives.

For each project:

1. Create a project brief from the template and fill it out

2. Schedule your stages based on actual capacity windows

3. Set your check-in dates in your calendar

4. Put the brief somewhere you’ll actually look at it during your check-ins

Then let everything else wait. These three projects get completed. Everything else either becomes a project next quarter or gets shot in the head as a zombie.

What This Honors

This system doesn’t assume you have consistent energy or predictable schedules. It assumes you’re human—with seasons of capacity and seasons of depletion.

It doesn’t demand daily project management. It asks for one clear thinking session per project, then simple evening or periodic check-ins.

It doesn’t optimize for doing more. It optimizes for finishing well.

And it gives you permission to shoot zombies instead of maintaining them indefinitely.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Think back to this month’s SloDo, where you reflected on the stories you tell about your capacity, energy, and organization. Think also about anything that resonated for you in reading this month’s Deep Dive. Use this worksheet to take notes!1

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

Shalom,

1

Reflection worksheet!

Worksheet R21

378KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download