The Long View
Reflecting on purpose, becoming, and the practices that form us • Monthly Muster
This sprint asked a question most of us avoid: what if goals, achievements, and milestones are fundamentally mismatched to the kind of creatures we actually are?
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.
So as we close this cycle: What would change if you started measuring your life by purpose instead of goals?
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.
This note by Andrew 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!
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
