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 had rocked him to sleep many nights before. But this particular night, but this time, my attention was different. I noticed the room was quiet, the air flowing through the vents. I could feel his breathing slow down and deepen. In that moment, I wasn't thinking of any plans, email responses, progress reports. I was simply...there.
I remember thinking "this is enough."
Nothing had changed in my life but somehow, in that moment, I was able to feel very differently about my life. So I thought to myself "how often do you get this feeling of enough-ness in your life?"
Why doesn’t it land?
I’ve worked with so many people who’ve done the hard thing. Healed a relationship, changed their diet, get more organized, landed a dream job. Yet, the satisfaction of their growth doesn’t stick. Life looks good and "should" feel good, but they feel muted. Like they’re moving forward, but not touched by the same movement.
... if you can’t receive the moment, it won’t register. Even if it’s exactly what you asked for..
Someone once said to me, “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.”
Having achievements that look great on paper but don’t move anything inside can be a confusing place to be. Like something’s missing and you can’t name it.
What actually shifts?
It’s easy to believe we’ll feel better once life looks better. But over time, I’ve realized that how we hold our life matters more than what it looks like.
I’ve had people describe their own reality like as an unbearable failure, then say they’d love to be in someone else’s almost-identical situation. It's easy to look at it as a contradiction but it's not. It's simply how perception works and shows how our internal lens filters meaning.
And no, I'm not suggesting toxic positivity or forcing gratitude or just change your mindset. I'm suggesting that the lens we look through matters, because if you can’t receive the moment, it won’t register, even if it’s exactly what you asked for.
...this is enough
A different kind of practice
There’s a concept in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) called psychological flexibility. It means being able to hold discomfort while still doing what matters.
Narrative psychology offers a similar insight, suggesting that it’s not just what happens to us, but how we relate to it that shapes how meaningful it feels. The story we tell about our lives often matters more than the facts themselves.
That’s what I'm pointing at in this reflection and what I’m trying to lean into personally.
I’m learning not to chase the high of a breakthrough, or to expect every decision or insight to come with an emotional payoff . Rather, to keep showing up to my relationships, work, my own thoughts, even when there’s no guarantee of clarity or validation.
That looks like letting a quiet day or period be just that, without assuming it means something’s wrong with me or my life. It means making dinner, responding to messages, doing the thing I said I’d do, without needing it to feel deep or transformative, while recognizing they matter.
Your drop still matters
Neil deGrasse Tyson once described how some of the world’s biggest scientific breakthroughs began as quiet, overlooked experiments. The research didn’t seem useful at the time, there was no clear outcome, no immediate benefit. Many dismissed it as wasted effort. But decades later, those same ideas became the foundation for medical imaging, renewable energy, and global communication. What looked like nothing became essential. The usefulness just hadn’t shown up yet.
That made me think about how emotional growth often works the same way. When you’re in the middle of it, it doesn’t feel like anything special. You show up to a hard conversation. You pause before reacting. You go for the walk, keep the promise, write the message you didn’t have to send. None of it looks groundbreaking. There’s no applause, or guarantee it’s working. And because it feels small, it’s easy to question whether it matters.
But here’s where narrative and posture come in. What if those quiet efforts are only invisible because we haven’t named their meaning yet? What if the story we’re telling, the one that says “this isn’t enough” or “this doesn’t count”, is what keeps us from seeing the value in what we’re already doing?
Posture means staying aligned with what matters, even when the payoff hasn’t arrived yet. It’s how we keep the door open for meaning, instead of closing it because we can’t see it yet. That's that’s the shift I keep coming back to, not chasing a feeling, but choosing to move as if the effort already counts. Because it does.
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.
