Transition time

The Rhythm I Broke, the Mold That Won Round 1, and the Ghost of Ironmans Past

I missed writing here last week. Not because nothing happened - plenty happened - but because I no longer have posts written ahead. I used to keep a little stash of them, like emergency granola bars for the soul. Somewhere in the last several months, I quietly ate all the granola bars and didn't restock. I only noticed when I looked at my own blog and thought, "huh, who's been slacking" - and then remembered it's me.

So let's talk about it: the writing, the mess, the school bells, and the fact that I ran five miles this morning and immediately compared myself to a person who doesn't exist anymore.

What a Rhythm Is For

A rhythm isn't a schedule. A schedule tells you where to be. A rhythm tells you who you're being while you get there. When I had posts banked ahead of time, I wasn't just being a productive little content machine - I was giving future-me a gift. Past-me, back when she had it together (which is a rare thing indeed), was basically leaving present-me a note that said "you've got this, I already did the hard part." Then the notes ran out, and present-me has been improvising ever since.

The Mess as a Nervous System Problem

Right now part of my home looks like a renovation project that got paused mid-thought. Water leak, black mold, and all my Healing Touch and coaching materials shoved into a pile on one side of the room. It's going to get worse before it gets better, which is a sentence I really didn't need to hear about my own living room.

The thing is (for those of you who have ever done a home-remodel you know): a household mess isn't just a mess. It's a small, tireless presence in the back of my mind, tapping my shoulder every time I walk past that room to whisper unfinished. Multiply that by every doorway I pass in a day, and you get a very specific kind of tired - the kind where nothing has technically happened yet and you're already worn down, mostly by furniture.

And Then School Started

Just to keep things interesting, school picked this exact moment to start back up. Mornings got earlier, evenings got shorter, and the loose, summer version of my week got quietly replaced with one that actually has consequences if I ignore it. Any rhythm that was already running thin gets found out fast in and it is not even September (we started school EXTRA early this year).

The Ghost of Ironman Past

AND THEN, I ran five miles this morning (which is really a good thing BUT). It has been ages. AND before I even laced up, an old voice showed up that I didn't invite: an Ironman-training mentality, still living somewhere in my head, looking ahead at five perfectly solid half-marathon-training miles and quietly asking, "...that's it?" I carried that stress out the door with me - weight that had nothing to do with the run itself and everything to do with a version of me who used to train for something much bigger.

Half marathon training and Ironman training were never the same sport, or the same mileage, or the same season of my life - (but I did half marathons as training runs for Ironman training and so there is that layer) and some part of me is still running the old program like it never got the update. That's not motivation. That's just extra stress I'm generating for free, for races that ended years ago.

I'd like to retire that voice. Five miles was a good run, and I'd like to be allowed to enjoy it as exactly what it was.

Where Coaching and Healing Touch Come Into It

In my coaching and Healing Touch work, I talk about four energy bodies - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual - that all emanate from a person and all affect each other. None of them operate in isolation, which is a nice way of saying: of course the mold pile is showing up in my sleep, and of course an old training voice is showing up in my running, and of course a missed blog post is showing up as guilt at 6:30pm. It's all one system.

The mess is physical, but it's also emotional weight I'm carrying room to room. The Ironman voice is mental, but it lands in my body as tension I didn't need to add to a good run. None of this is a character flaw - it's just how energy moves through a person. The work isn't to muscle through on willpower; it's to notice where the load actually is and tend to it there, rather than white-knuckling through one body while three others quietly carry the bill.

Getting Back On It

So here's what I'm choosing, out loud, so it's harder to quietly let slide again:

• Writing ahead again. Not a huge backlog - even one week's cushion is the difference between a hard week and a hard week where I also go quiet and worry everyone.
• Let the mess be a signal, not a verdict. That pile isn't proof I'm failing at life. It's proof I'm mid-repair. and that I have a plan to cull some of the excess.
• Build the rhythm for the season I'm actually in. July's pace doesn't fit September, and an old Ironman pace doesn't fit this year's half marathon. Carrying an old rhythm into a new season isn't discipline - it's just extra weight I don't need to carry.

If you're behind on something, living next to a mess you can't fix yet, adjusting to a new school-year clock, or quietly measuring yourself against a version of you from a few years back - you're not failing. You're just between seasons. The plan isn't to fix it all today. It's one written-ahead post, one cleared corner, one mile that gets to just be a good mile, at a time.

And if you need someone to walk with you through whatever season you're in - I'm here.

The Grief and the Joy Hiding Inside "Back to School"

The Grief and the Joy Hiding Inside "Back to School” (especially when it is early)

There's a particular ache that shows up this time of year (well generally in the midwest this  “ache” is a few weeks away - but here in SoCal we are moving into back to school), and it rarely gets named for what it is. There's also, right alongside the ache, there is a particular delight - new backpacks, fresh notebooks, a kid genuinely excited to see their friends - that doesn't always get named either.

We call it "getting back into routine." We call it "adjusting." We post the first-day-of-school photos and talk about how fast the summer went. (for us it was particularly fast as we are shifting the days of the school year). What we don't often say out loud is that transitions - even good ones, even "excited-for" ones - carry both loss and joy inside them at once. Every new season asks us to let go of the one before it, and to step toward something we're genuinely glad is coming.

I think about this a lot in grief and transition coaching. A transition isn't just the practical shift - new schedule, new backpack, new grade, new job, new chapter. It's an ending and a beginning happening in the same breath. The slower mornings end, and a kid who's finally ready for the bigger classroom arrives. A particular version of a child ends, and a new one - one you're excited to meet - begins, sometimes overnight. For parents, for teachers, for anyone whose year bends around September (even in early August), there's a quiet mourning and a real gladness both tucked inside the busyness of "getting back to it."

Transitions are grief and joy standing in the same doorway.

That's not a contradiction - it’s kind of the whole point. You can be genuinely excited for what's ahead and still feel the loss of what's ending. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out. If grief is unexpressed joy - love with nowhere left to go - then a transition is often the moment that love needs somewhere new to land, and hasn't found it yet.

The joy deserves the same attention we give the grief. It's easy to let excitement pass by unspoken - that pride, that hope, folded quietly into logistics instead of said out loud. We name the loss because it's harder to see. But the excitement is just as real, and it's worth saying plainly, not just implying through a first-day photo: I am genuinely happy about this. Naming the joy on purpose - not as a footnote to the grief, but as its own true thing - is part of what lets both live in you at once instead of one quietly outweighing the other.

A few ways to move through a transition instead of just through it:

• Name the ending, not just the beginning. Before you fill out the calendar, take a moment to say what's actually over. "The slow mornings are done." "That stage of parenting a five-year-old is done." Naming it doesn't make it sadder - it makes it real, which is usually a relief.
• Name the excitement just as directly. Say what you're actually looking forward to, in specific terms - not "it'll be good for them" but "I'm excited to see who she becomes in that classroom." Give the joy its own sentence instead of folding it into logistics.
• Expect the ambush - in both directions. Transitions often don't hit in the big moments (the first drop-off) but in small, unguarded ones - a wave of grief while folding away last year's too-small shoes, or a wave of pure delight watching them run for the bus. Let both catch you without judgment.
• Give the in-between its own space. You don't have to be fully in the old season or fully in the new one right away. There's a threshold in between, and it's allowed to take longer than a weekend.
• Ask what wants to come with you. Not everything from the last season needs to be left behind. Some rhythms, some closeness, some ways of being together are worth carrying forward on purpose.

Whatever transition you're standing in this month - a child heading back to class, (or to college) a schedule resetting, a life stage quietly closing - it's worth pausing long enough to say both out loud: what you're grieving, and what you're genuinely excited about. You don't have to pick one, and neither one needs to stay quiet to make room for the other.

If you're in a season of transition and could use a companion for it, I'd be honored to walk alongside you — through transition coaching, or simply a conversation.

The particular shape of each goodbye

I have been sitting with people in their grief my whole life. More intentionally for the last twenty years, as a pastor. More specifically still, for the last two years, as a grief coach. Across all of it, there's one thing I can say with real confidence: it is never the same reaction. Two people can lose almost the same thing - a parent, a spouse, a friend - and grieve in completely different ways. One goes quiet. One gets furious. One can't stop moving. One can't move at all.

That much, most people expect. What surprises people more is this: it isn't even the same within one person.

I have watched the same person move through loss after loss in their life, and each loss has its own weather. The grief for a parent doesn't look like the grief for a sibling. The grief for a spouse doesn't look like the grief for a friend. Even two parents, lost years apart, can be mourned in almost opposite ways by the very same person. Quiet the first time, and loud the second. Or the reverse. 

For a long time, I would watch how we move as we assume grief is something that happens in a person - a process they move through, a set of stages, a timeline that gets faster or slower with practice. But if grief were really about the person, it would look roughly consistent from loss to loss. It doesn't. Which tells me grief isn't primarily about the person grieving. It's about the specific, particular shape of the bond that's gone.

You are not grieving "loss" in the abstract. You are grieving this relationship - its particular texture, what it gave you that nothing else gave you, what it asked of you that nothing else asked, what's now left unfinished because that one person is the only one who could have finished it with you. A parent who raised you and a parent who disappointed you leave two different absences, even if it's the same parent. A friend you saw weekly for thirty years and a friend you loved from a distance leave two different absences, even though both are real.

This quietly dismantles something people often expect of themselves: that grief should get easier to do, the more times you've done it. That having survived one loss should make you better equipped for the next - more efficient, less thrown, further along some invisible curve of expertise. I don't think that's how it works. Each grief is a first-time experience, because each relationship was a first-time relationship. There is no such thing as graduating into expertise at your own grief. You can be practiced at surviving loss in general and still be entirely undone by this particular one, because this one is asking something none of the others asked.

I think this matters most for the people standing next to a griever, trying to help. It's tempting to pattern-match - I remember how they were last time, so I know what they'll need this time. But if grief is relational rather than personal, last time doesn't reliably predict this time. The person you're sitting with may need something completely different than they needed a year ago, even though they are, on paper, "going through the same thing." The task isn't to remember and apply. The task is to actually watch. Actually ask. Actually meet this grief, freshly, as if you'd never walked beside this person's grief before - because in a real sense, you haven't. This one hasn't happened before either.

I haven't buried someone extra close to myself, so I hold all of this loosely - as something I've noticed, not something I've lived. But sitting alongside so many people, in so many different griefs, has taught me at least this much: love differently, grieve differently. Every relationship, its own touchpoint. Every loss, its own first time.

Sturdy Enough

I have traveled all my life. Nationally, internationally. By plane, by boat, by train. In groups, with family, alone. I know how to move through the world - how to read a departures board in a language I don't speak, how to talk my way onto an earlier flight (well not lately don’t get excited), how to sit still in an airport for six hours without losing my mind. Solo travel, in particular, I am good at. I trust my instincts. I make a decision and I move.

None of that prepared me for traveling with my seventeen-year-old daughter.

It's not the itinerary that's hard. It's not the packing or the layovers or the inevitable gate change. It's that she questions me - my route, my timing, my read on a situation - and I feel myself second-guessing decisions I would otherwise make without a flicker of doubt. Decades of competence, and one raised eyebrow from someone I love can still unsteady me.

For a while I told myself a tidy story about why: she pushes on me because I'm safe. Somewhere I read - or maybe just decided - that this is how it works. A teenager on the edge of leaving needs to test whether her own judgment is allowed to exist next to someone else's. She needs proof that she can disagree with me and the relationship still holds. I am, in that story, something like a trellis - not the target of the pushing, just the sturdy thing she's growing against. A trellis doesn't take it personally when the vine pushes on it. The pushing is the point. It's how the vine finds its own shape.

I still think that's true. I've watched enough people, in enough kinds of grief and change, to trust that pattern. It probably is safer to test your own compass against someone who loves you unconditionally than against a stranger who won't. In a year she'll be making these calls with professors and roommates and people who don't already know her heart. Right now, she gets to rehearse on me.

But the real part I don't want to skip past, is the part that lives underneath the theory: I wanted to be her friend (I know, I know…this will come later when she is an adult…I just need to be kind and true and dependable…but we are not in the future…we are in the present) And instead of being a friend…, I am the one she rails against, precisely because I am safe enough to rail against. And even though the explanation is true. It is NOT quite a comfort. It doesn't erase the ache of watching your child brace against you instead of leaning into you - even when you understand exactly why, even when some clinical, pastoral part of you knows it's healthy and expected and even a little bit an honor.

I don't think that tension resolves. I'm not sure it's supposed to. Whatever it is that I imagined I would be to her… I am her safe target instead, and I don't fully know how to feel about that yet.

What I do know is where breath comes in.

There is a half-second, on a train platform or in a rental car or standing in a security line, when she questions a decision I've already made - and I feel the whole old instinct rise up to defend it, or worse, to cave just to keep the peace. That half-second is where the practice actually lives. Not in the itinerary. Not in being right about the gate. In the breath between her challenge and whatever I do next. One breath, and I can choose whether I'm defending my competence or making room for hers.

Somewhere in my body, I can feel exactly where this lands - a tightening in the jaw, a held breath, a flush of something that wants to prove itself. I've learned, slowly, to notice that before I act from it. That's not a travel skill. It's the same skill I'd ask anyone to practice with a parent, a partner, anyone whose questioning of you cuts closer than a stranger's ever could.

I used to think I was only good at traveling alone. I'm starting to think that's not quite it. Solo travel and companioned travel are two different skills, and I've simply spent forty years building one of them and only just started building the other. That's not failure. That's just where I am - a beginner, again, at something I thought I'd already mastered.

She only pushes back because she's watching that closely. Because she trusts me enough to test her own read against mine. Because she is, in her own way, getting ready to leave — and something in both of us already knows it.

I don't have a clean ending for this one. Just this: I am learning to breathe through being loved in a form I didn't expect, on my way to a departure neither of us is ready for yet.

Breath on the Journey

 

Before anything else - before the plan, before the practice, before the next right step...there is breath.

It's so constant we forget it's there, until something happens that reminds us: a wave of grief that steals it, a moment of fear that shortens it, a long climb that has us gasping for it. Breath is the thing we notice only when it's disrupted. And maybe that's exactly why it deserves our attention before the disruption comes.

The Oldest Companion

Every tradition of contemplation, in every culture, eventually arrives at the breath. And it is not because it's mystical or exotic, it is because it's the one bodily process that sits at the crossroads of voluntary and involuntary - the one place where we can reach in and touch something that usually runs on its own. You can't will your heart to slow down. You can breathe slower, and your heart will follow.

That's not a metaphor. It's physiology. It's also...if you want it to be... a kind of prayer.

What Breath Does on Hard Ground

When grief moves through a body, it often moves through the breath first. It works though the held inhale, or the shallow chest, or the sigh that comes out of nowhere. When anxiety takes hold, breath is usually the first thing to go ragged. And when we're pushing through something physically demanding, breath is the whole story: how you breathe determines how far you go.

This is true whether the "hard ground" is at mile 20 of a long race or the twentieth week of a long grief. The instinct in both is to clench, to hold, to brace. But the wiser move - the one that actually creates capacity - is to breathe into the hard place rather than around it. A long exhale doesn't erase the difficulty. But it may make room to carry it.

A Few Ways to Return to Breath

You don't need to have a special posture or a quiet room, though both help. You do need a moment and a willingness.

The extended exhale. Breathe in for a count of four. Breathe out for a count of eight. The longer exhale signals safety to the nervous system - it's one of the fastest ways to shift out of fight-or-flight and back into your own body.

Breath as bookend. Before a hard conversation, a hospital visit, a race, a decision - three slow breaths (inhale and then take an extra inhale before a long exhale - three times and let your shoulders fall away from youthful ears). Not to fix anything. Just to arrive where your feet already are.

Breath as companion, not fix. When grief or fear shows up, the goal isn't to breathe it away. It's to breathe alongside it - one hand on the feeling, one hand on the breath, both allowed to be present at once. (if you need a physical way to help think about this place on hand on the top of your chest and the other hand just below your navel - this helps to feel your breath and bring your consciousness to your self)

The Long Exhale of the Whole Journey

Maybe this is the deepest thing breath teaches us: that every inhale is followed by a release, and that this rhythm - take in, let go, take in, let go - is not just what keeps us alive. It's the pattern grief asks of us, the pattern growth asks of us, the pattern any long journey asks of us.

You don't have to hold your breath to get through the hard mile. You're allowed to breathe. In fact, it's the only way through.

Wherever you are on the path today - take a breath. (and release it) Then take the next one. (and release it) That's the whole practice, and it's enough.

One Small Step at a Time

 One Small Step at a Time

There's a myth we tell ourselves about change: that it should look dramatic. 

A leap. 

    A breakthrough. 

        A before-and-after with nothing in between.

But most real change ... the kind that lasts ... doesn't happen that way at all. It happens in steps so small you almost miss them while you're taking them.

The Body Already Knows This

Ask anyone who's trained for endurance sport, and they'll tell you the same thing: the athletes who blow up are the ones who go out too fast. The ones who finish, the ones who actually get to cross the line, they are the ones who found a pace they could sustain long before they needed to.

It's a strange thing to learn in your body before you learn it anywhere else: that slow and steady isn't a consolation prize. It's the actual strategy. The fast start feels better for about a mile. The sustainable pace is the one that gets you home.

Grief works this way. Healing works this way. Growth works this way. We want the mile-one feeling ... the burst, the certainty, the sense that we're really doing something now. But the nervous system, the heart, the spirit, well... they don't do bursts well. They do rhythm. They do return. They do one foot, then the other, for longer than feels reasonable, until one day you look up and you're somewhere new.

Why We Resist Slow

Slow doesn't look like much from the outside. There's no dramatic photo, no clean narrative arc, no moment you can point to and say that's when it changed. And in a culture that rewards visible transformation, that can feel like failure … like you're not really moving if no one can see it.

But consistency is quiet by design. The step you take today doesn't have to prove anything. It just has to happen, and then happen again tomorrow. That's the whole secret, and it's also the whole difficulty, because consistency asks for patience with a process that refuses to perform for you. (oof…shoot)

What Small Steps Protect

There's something else slow, steady movement gives you that speed never can: the ability to notice. When you move at a pace your whole self can keep up with, you stay in contact with what's actually happening, in your body, in your grief, in your relationships. You catch the signal before it becomes a crisis. You adjust before you're forced to.

Moving fast often means moving past; past your own limits, past the quiet ache that was trying to tell you something, past the people and practices that could have supported you if you'd had time to notice them. Moving slowly is how you stay in relationship with your own life while you're living it.

A Practice, Not a Performance

If you're in a season that calls for change, whether it is grief, transition, healing, or growth of any kind … you do not need a bigger step. You need a repeatable one. Something small enough to do on your worst day, meaningful enough to matter on your best.

Ask yourself: what is the smallest true step I can take today? Not the most impressive one. The truest one. Then take it. Tomorrow, take it again.

This is not a lesser way to change. It is, in fact, the only way that ever really holds.

One small step at a time. That's not a compromise, that is the path.

Being Present in the Life We Are Living

 

I've spent a lot of words, in this space, talking about grief. About how it moves through us, what it asks of us, how it deepens us if we let it. I've said before that grief is unexpressed joy -  that the ache we feel in loss is proportional to the love we were lucky enough to have. That insight has held up under everything I've thrown at it.

But lately I've been sitting with the other side of that equation. If grief is what joy looks like when it has nowhere left to go, then presence is what joy looks like when it's still here. Still available. Still asking to be felt, right now, before it becomes something we only access in retrospect.

This is harder than it sounds. I am, by training and temperament, someone who lives ahead of the moment - planning the next pastoral visit, the next coaching call, the next season. And I am, by circumstance, someone whose household is mid-threshold: a daughter about to leave for a life of her own, a body asking for different care than it used to need, a business taking shape one contract at a time. There is a pull, in seasons like this, to keep one foot already in the next chapter. To love the present loosely, as a kind of insurance against how much it will hurt to lose it.

But that's a trade I don't want to make. Because the things I'd be protecting myself from feeling now are exactly the things I'll grieve later - and grief, when it finally arrives, doesn't give back what presence withheld. It only confirms what was always true: this mattered. This was good. I was here for it, or I wasn't.

So I've been practicing something simple and not at all easy: staying in the room I'm actually in. Tasting the meal instead of planning the next one. Hearing my daughter's voice instead of already missing it. Letting a Tuesday be a whole Tuesday, not just scaffolding for some better day ahead.

This isn't about gratitude journals or forcing gladness. It's closer to what I do in Healing Touch work - a kind of attentiveness that doesn't try to fix or hurry the moment, just meets it. Hands resting on what's true right now. Most of what we call "being present" is really just refusing to abandon the now in favor of the next.

If grief is the receipt joy leaves behind, presence is the chance to actually spend what we have before it's gone. I don't think we get to skip grief by being present - loss still comes for everyone. But I do think we get to choose whether we lived fully in the meantime, or just managed to survive it while waiting for something else.

I'm trying, this season, to choose the first one. One ordinary, unrepeatable day at a time.

A Small Practice

If you want to try this with me, here's a simple way in - no journal required, no major life overhaul, just a few moments of attention reclaimed from the future.

Name one ordinary thing, out loud or in your mind, before it ends. Not the milestones - those announce themselves. The unremarkable ones: the specific way the light comes through the kitchen window at 7am, the sound of someone you love moving around in another room, the particular weight of a Tuesday with nothing dramatic in it. Say to yourself, this is happening now, and I am here for it.

Notice when you've already left. Several times a day, check in: am I actually in this conversation, this meal, this drive - or am I three steps ahead, already managing what comes next? This isn't a judgment, just information. Awareness alone starts to loosen the grip.

Let your hands tell the truth your mind keeps skipping past. This is something I rely on in Healing Touch work, but it translates anywhere: place a hand on your own chest, or on the surface of whatever you're doing - the steering wheel, the kitchen counter, someone's shoulder - and let that contact be the anchor. The body doesn't live in next week. It only knows now.

At the end of the day, ask one question instead of making a list. Not "what did I accomplish," but "what did I actually notice today?" If the answer is thin, that's not a failure - it's just a nudge to look a little closer tomorrow.

None of this prevents grief from eventually arriving. It isn't meant to. It's meant to make sure that when grief does come, it's grieving something we were truly present for - not something we were too busy outrunning to actually live.