Yep. It’s me again. Writing about this. Again.
Because apparently, I’m not done learning it—and because it’s a skill most of us were never taught but deeply need. So here we go.
Sharing the process so we can grow together.
I find myself, yet again, in a season of creating new rhythms.
Recreating my business. Recreating my life. Turning over the soil of a familiar routine and asking — more honestly than ever, this time — what actually wants to grow here?
When the kids were young, this happened on a bit of a schedule. New school year. New sports season. New demands — like the season we shifted to homeschooling and had to rebuild everything from scratch.
Over the years I got pretty good at seeing change coming and giving our family room to settle in. Transitions aren’t easy for many members of our household, and I learned that the hard way.
As for me — I actually enjoy the energy of a good puzzle. How do I make this new thing work? There’s something that comes alive in me when I’m figuring that out. I always say my brain loves figuring out how disparate things fit together!
But I’ve also learned that I need time to settle in, too.
Whether that’s arriving early enough before a presentation to get oriented, re-read my materials, and drop into something more meditative–or seeing my husband’s retirement on the horizon and recognizing I needed a few months to figure out the new household rhythms before I could function well in them . . .
I’ve developed a deep appreciation for lingering in liminal spaces until something new emerges.
I was not always that way.
I am, at my core, a person who likes decisions made.
Ask my friends from my corporate days. When the three of them would get into the where are we going for lunch debate for the fifth day in a row, I would hit my limit fast. If no one was going to decide, I would. Pizza buffet. Let’s go.
Part of this is just how I’m wired — I have a lot of energy, and without direction it scatters. A hundred exciting possibilities, not enough fuel to finish any of them. Decisions give my energy somewhere to land.
So learning to be comfortable in indecision — in the in-between — took some deliberate unlearning.
My husband helped. He contemplates from many angles. And while yes, sometimes I just have to declare a direction because it genuinely doesn’t matter to me whether we choose grill cover A or grill cover B; I’ve come to deeply respect the level of consideration he brings to things I don’t have the patience to linger in.
My children taught me, too. Each of them needed different amounts of time to settle into something new, and if I didn’t learn to honor that, life got harder for everyone.
And then yoga and meditation gave me the actual fortitude for it. The practice of honoring where you are? Yoga. Allowing options to emerge rather than forcing them? Yoga. Slowing down enough to recognize what you actually need in ill-defined spaces? Yoga. Treasuring the built-in pauses as places of rest and reorientation rather than problems to solve? Yoga, yoga, yoga.
That’s the practice, and I keep writing about it because there’s always more to discover here.
Right now, in this particular season, the discoveries are rich.
I have learned — finally and officially — that I am not a morning person. For years, I held dearly to the belief I was. What I was, in fact, was a well-trained performer. An alarm going off became a full-body signal to jump into gear — zero to sixty before I’d even taken a breath.
These days I’m giving myself a good half hour to ease in and out of awareness in the morning without an alarm or agenda. I just savor the slow return to consciousness. It turns out this is not laziness. It’s how I actually function best.
I’ve also learned that I am not, at heart, a five-day workweek person. When I do something different on a Wednesday — even if it’s work-adjacent (like studying, writing and consulting), or a change of scenery (reading about EMDR on my deck or learning about IFS on a hike) — the rest of the week is noticeably more alive and productive.
I don’t fully understand the mechanics of this yet, but I’m done arguing with the data. The midweek slump turns into an unbearable three days if I don’t do something different come Wednesday!
Adventure, it turns out, is not optional for me. It’s absolutely fundamental. I’ve always known I needed it, but I’m only now starting to ask the real questions — how often? How big? Is weekly enough, or is it something I need to weave into the fabric of every few days? Every day? I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m paying attention.
And I’m remembering what makes life feel lived (rather than merely consuming content). Reading. New foods. New cultures. Learning that engages me. For instance, I’m realizing my online learning has to shift back toward in-person again.
There’s something about being in a room with people, with ideas moving through actual air, that a screen has never quite replicated for me.
A good project grounds me, too. Right now it’s a garden going in and an outdoor living space coming together. I’m even contemplating learning to install tile — one DIY frontier I haven’t crossed yet. There’s something deeply satisfying about making something with my hands, about having a visible, tangible result at the end of a day.
I even had the thought this morning that artists understand this in a way that former engineers — ahem, myself — plowed right past. It’s another excellent example of why cherishing liminal, transitional, and what I once considered non-productive spaces needs to be learned by so many of us (even as they come completely naturally to others).
All of this is pointing me toward the same recognition: I needed more than the quarter I gave myself just to figure out what this phase feels like.
That’s not even about optimizing it — though that does seem to be happening naturally on its own. It’s more about feeling it from the inside and letting something real emerge.
That’s a longer transition than I used to allow myself. But it’s the honest one. And it’s turning out to be one of the richest seasons of self-discovery I’ve had in years.
How about you?
Are you in a season of transition right now — or does one feel like it’s coming? What are you learning about what you actually need, underneath the habits and the training and the pace the world expects from you? How might you bring greater intentionality to it?
I’d love to know.
Love, Renee