A short list of unfinished essays 🫠

Today I am arriving in your inbox on a Monday morning, heavily unpolished.

Good morning from the cozy darkness of pre-dawn Tucson where I’m curled on the sofa with a coffee and a Maddie and it’s somehow 46 degrees outside. This happens every year, the desert chill’s arrival, and yet it still takes me by surprise. Who knew? Anyhow, it’s a delight to wear a puffer when you can take it off by 9 am (and when you actually don’t really need the puffer).

Before I get into this week’s letter, did you know that I am co-hosting an intentional yoga retreat for New Year’s next month, and that there are still 3 spots left?! Learn more here, and if you know anyone that might dig it, please pass along.

I intended to write this letter yesterday but got stuck doing my 9-5/M-F job on a Sunday, which is blasphemous, but rather than stew in resentment about that for the next week, I decided to make a list on a Monday morning. It’s a list that started months ago from a coffee shop in Asheville while drinking a chai latte, which seems to be the only way that most of these newsletters get made (come through, chai tea company sponsors!!). The list continued to grow on walks, while laying in bed, as I threw the ball to the dog, and while dancing around my home office/virtual yoga studio space. So here are a bunch of essay ideas of topics I have been ruminating on but failing to flesh out, in list-form…

A list of unfinished essays:

• Embracing being a C-student in the second act of life. Or, “What if you just let yourself be average/sometimes good/sometimes bad at things you’re trying so hard to be constantly above-average at?” - a question I’ve been asking myself

• Sharing a house with a romantic partner for the first time in adult life and realizing how much time alone I used to spend and how little time I spend alone now and that…wow, I really need and crave alone time.

• Could psychedelic experiences even exist without music? (I have theories, but need to do more research.)

• One about scar stories

• Going to Kirtan after many years spent not chanting or singing in a circle and realizing what an incredible experience it is and how it prompted me to remember a long and intricate mantra I assumed I’d forgotten that was passed from my teacher’s guru almost a decade ago. Brains are extremely cool.

• Will I mother? And, if I use a book written by a clinical social worker and do all the exercises and homework to help me make this decision, will I be able to relax in the decision without wondering and stressing daily about the ghost ship life, or are some of us just destined to live in the tension of wondering and that is what makes us humans with intense imaginations so just deal with it and move on and pick whichever and accept the circumstances both good and bad? Or, perhaps, a secret third thing?

• I think I’m going to start a paid tier of this newsletter next year, not necessarily to develop a life-changing income stream, but to shift back to the feeling I miss that this is an intimate email and not a blog that anyone can read even if they are not subscribed, which is causing me to hold back here (I think). Still mulling over it as I don’t really believe in making people pay for that access either, so perhaps I’d just migrate all subscribers to a free “paid tier,” then offer another for folks who want to financially support in exchange for other offerings.

• Journaling is not just one kind of modality/practice and isn’t always just a free-writing exercise, but can be many different types of exercises that serve a wide array of different purposes and perhaps therefore when I say journaling, I should be more specific. I also think it could be cool to write a list of different journaling techniques and dig into any published research on the benefits if it exists.

• Can you shift the toxic culture of 9-5/M-F corporate America “from the inside” or is the toxic culture so pervasive and ingrained that we just have to find a place to work that allows for flexible work or less work or build our own work/business to jump out of the toxic system entirely? Or ugh, is it a secret third thing again?

• When your partner is not a spiritual person and much of your identity hinges on being a spiritual person

• Does it even matter what we do for our job or is it much more important who we work with and spend time around every day and if we enjoy spending time around and working with those people?

• Transitioning to a low-alcohol lifestyle, reconstructing what moderation means and relearning lessons of good/bad labeling or elimination of entire food categories, developing a flexible mindset around all-or-nothing diet/consumption choices, finding freedom and ease in knowing these choices are always my own, getting curious about why I ever felt like they weren’t so that the relearning can happen slightly less often.

• Er, supplements? Is it the vitamin D that’s helping my skin? Is it the chaste tree berry that’s helping my cramps? Is it the magnesium that’s helping my mood? How much do we need to trust only in data versus trust in our lived experiences even if they are potentially influenced by our cognitive biases

• About how developing a mind-body practice in the form of yoga (but it could have been a variety of things, it just happened to be yoga) most likely saved my life (or at least made life a lot easier to live)

• Many of the big tech platforms are hijacking our attention and hurting our mental health with the algorithm design. Spotify’s Discover Weekly algorithm, however, is a blessed gift that I am forever grateful for.

• Something kind of cool involving parallel, paradoxical, seemingly oppositional truths about life, but written with the help of my favorite song lyrics. Ambitious but do-able perhaps!

Some of these may not even need to become essays. Perhaps I have said what I needed to say already, just thrusting a thesis out there and onto a page. Now it’s time to go as the sun is up. I’ll never get to wear the puffer now…