A Moment of Clarity
I remember a few years ago when my first son was only a couple months old. This time in my life was filled with uncertainties and pressure. I was a new dad, learning the ropes of a role at a new company that was expanding quickly, all in the middle of covid. I had put him to sleep many nights before. But this particular night, my attention was different. It was more aware and present. I noticed the room was quiet, the sound of the air flowing through the vents. I could feel my son's breathing slow down and deepen as he drifted into his sleep. In that moment, I wasn't thinking of any of my many problems, future plans, email responses, annoyances or even the fact that I was sleep deprived. They all seemed to take a back seat and left me with a rare sense of clarity. I was simply...there.
I remember thinking "this is enough."
It fascinated me that in a matter of moments, I was able to feel so content with a life that had felt so frantic, without changing a single detail in it. That was freeing.
Admittedly, this wasn't the first time I was feeling this way, but it wasnt happening often enough. And while I was grateful for that experience, a part of me wondered why I didn't have this experience, more often.
Many would answer with the usual suspects- social media, FOMO, evolution, new parent syndrome. Maybe, but that wasnt quite it.
I'm Not Alone
In my life and practice, I meet people, like me, who’ve built meaningful lives. They’ve worked for the lives they have. Cultivated relationships, changed habits, landed jobs they would have dreamed about. They've reorganized their lives from the inside out. Yet, when asked, they see none of it. They stay convinced that they are stagnant. That, or they refuse to admit to themselves or others that they have done anything worthwhile.
Their lives looks good and could feel good from most accounts but somehow, they are convinced that their efforts are subpar or insufficient.
... if you can’t receive the moment, it won’t register. Even if it’s exactly what you asked for.
Someone once put it this way “It’s wild. I got here. I thought I’d feel it. But it’s like I skipped the part where I get to enjoy it.”
This sentiment isn't uncommon. Many of us can relate to this feeling where you worked hard for something, only for the feeling of satisfaction to falls flat. This is what Tal Ben-Shahar termed Arrival Fallacy - an illusion that success will bring lasting satisfaction, but instead it often leaves people disoriented or flat. When this happens, most of us start wondering if maybe, we just need to push a little further. So we keep chasing.
What actually shifts?
Maybe the problem isn’t that something’s missing, but that we haven’t learned how to hold what’s already here.
Let me explain.
Our experience of life is shaped not just by what’s happening, but by how we relate to the events. What we notice, and the story we tell about what it all means is how we respond to that event.
When I was rocking my son to sleep, the environment allowed my nervous system to sift from its sympathetic state to a more relaxed state. This in turn, shifted my perception.
When your internal lens is fixed on what’s missing, even a meaningful life can feel incomplete. Progress starts to feel like a checklist instead of something you actually get to live.
Let me reiterate, I am not forcing gratitude or pretending everything is growth. I'm suggesting learning how to meet your life as it is, without rushing past it, or constantly looking for proof that it’s enough. This means slowing down enough to actually notice what’s unfolding, even if it’s quiet or doesn’t feel like much yet.
...this is enough
A different kind of practice
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), there’s a concept called psychological flexibility. It’s the ability to hold discomfort without disconnecting from what matters. It doesn’t mean you stop feeling pain or doubt, it means you don’t let those feelings decide what you do next.
Narrative psychology offers something similar. It reminds us that facts are only part of the picture. What shapes our emotional reality, and often our behaviour, is the meaning we assign to those facts. Two people can experience the same moment and walk away with entirely different understandings of what it meant. That meaning or story is what drives us forward, or keeps us stuck.
The practice is learning to recognize when your life has started to shift, even if your old narrative hasn’t caught up. The gap is real. You’re not where you used to be, but it hasn’t registered yet. Not emotionally or cognitively. So you keep scanning for problems, bracing for what’s already passed, solving things that may no longer need solving.
The shift is easy to overlook because so much of the work you’ve done has been quiet. For instance, you've subtly changed how you respond to your partner. Started to give yourself a little more space between an trigger and an emotional spiral. Started to more before you respond in conversations. But when change doesn’t arrive with noise or clarity, it’s easy to miss it, or doubt it.
When you start training your attention to notice what’s already different. When you give weight to what you used to dismiss, you'll gradually learn to trust the shift, even before it feels transformational.
That's where your perspective starts to work for you and the little drop begins to matter.
Your drop still matters
Neil deGrasse Tyson once described how some of the world’s most important scientific breakthroughs began as quiet, overlooked experiments. There was no dramatic moment. No obvious success. Many people dismissed the work as a failure. But years later, the same research became the foundation for medical imaging, renewable energy, and global communication.
What looked like nothing had actually changed everything. The usefulness just hadn’t shown up yet.
It made me think about how emotional growth often works the same way. You show up for a hard conversation. You pause before reacting. You make the call you’ve been avoiding. You do the thing no one asked you to do. None of it feels groundbreaking. There’s no applause. No sign it’s working. And because it feels so small, it’s easy to doubt that it matters.
But what if it does matter—and the story you’re using just hasn’t caught up yet?
This is where narrative and posture come in. The story you tell yourself—about what counts, what progress looks like, what deserves credit—can either highlight the change or hide it. Posture is what helps you keep going anyway. It’s how you stay aligned with what matters even when you can’t yet feel the result. You don’t wait to believe it. You act like it counts. Because it does.
That’s the shift: not waiting to feel the payoff before you move, but choosing to move as if the effort already matters. Because quietly, it already does.
It’s tempting to measure progress only by what feels different. But clarity and calm aren’t the only evidence of change. Sometimes the shift is subtle—a decision you made faster, a spiral you caught sooner, a conversation you entered with a little more presence. It’s not dramatic, but it counts.
Neil deGrasse Tyson once explained that the International Space Station doesn’t stay in orbit by making one big adjustment. It stays on course through thousands of micro-corrections—constant, quiet work you’d never notice from the ground.
The same is true here.
These small shifts matter because they tell a different story. They’re signs that your nervous system is adapting, your patterns are loosening, and your sense of self is expanding—whether or not it feels that way yet.
The drop matters because it’s real. Even if it hasn’t made a splash.
A life that holds
We spend so much time trying to reach a version of life that finally feels like something. But maybe that feeling isn’t waiting at the end. Maybe it’s built in the way we walk, or in the way we hold our routines and ourselves.
The meaning we’re hoping to feel might not appear all at once and it might take shape slowly, through a series of quiet decisions that no one else sees. That doesn’t make it less real, but it certainly makes it easy to miss.
So, maybe the whole point is to stop waiting for life to hand you meaning, and start living like you’re already building it.
Before you move on
If you've read to this point, my hope is that you've resonated with this reflection has resonated on some level. So I'll leave you with some questions to keep you going.
- Where have you been quietly showing up, even if it hasn’t felt like progress?
- What would shift if you trusted that those small, unrecognized efforts are already shaping something solid?
Let that thought stay with you, even when the feeling doesn’t.
