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.