A new doorway

I love open houses. Not because I’m shopping. I rarely am. I go because I want to stand in someone else’s life for a few minutes and feel what it would be like to wake up here. To make coffee in this kitchen. To watch the light come through these …

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Reclaiming fear through reverence

I was five, maybe six. The crack in the cliff was about three feet across. The drop below it was twenty. I jumped. I didn’t know if I’d clear it. I jumped anyway. Because I wanted to belong, and the currency that I thought mattered was fearlessness. Flinching disqualified you. …

People

Room for the body

You cannot be embodied if there is no room in your calendar for your body. It’s almost too simple to say out loud. And yet I keep watching us try to find a way around it. A little tweak here. A little adjustment there. A new morning routine. A different …

People

Down to the studs

There’s a house on my street I walk past every day. Right now, it’s been taken down to the studs. No exterior walls. No interior walls. Just the bones of it, standing there in the open air. You can see straight through it, from one side of the lot to …

People

Reaching back across the Potomac

The Uber crossed the Potomac river, and something in me cracked open. I was on my way into DC last week to give a keynote. I hadn’t really been back since graduating with my MBA from Georgetown University in 2009. Three quick visits in seventeen years. And now here I …

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How a fence becomes a wall

The text from our agent came on a Sunday afternoon. The open house at our Portland place had just wrapped, and four different neighbors had stopped by to talk to him. Not about the house. About our privacy fence. I read it twice. These were neighbors we’d shared six years …

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The walk I forgot

We moved to LA for the aliveness. That’s the honest answer. Not the weather, not the career, not the proximity to anything practical. It was the energy—that particular vibration under a sun that refuses to clock out. You can feel it in the air here. It makes flow easier. It …

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The mental hamster wheel

It’s 3am. I’m awake before I even know I’m awake. And there it is. Already there. Like it never left. Like it was just waiting for the lights to go out and the noise to stop so it could finally have me all to itself. The thought circles. And circles. …

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The season I didn’t see coming

There’s something happening in my life right now that I haven’t quite known how to put into words. My parents are aging. I know. Of course they are. Everyone’s parents age. But there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually and actually living inside of it. And right now, I am …

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Let the script change

I used to think I knew what creativity was. You get an idea. You fall in love with it. You work, and you push, and you shape it until the thing in your hands matches the thing in your head. People talk about writing a book the way they talk …

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