I first fell in love with mountain biking 30 years ago. It was a new sport at the time, and I had just moved to the mountains of Colorado, surrounded by amazing bike trails. I can still remember those first rides, and the mix of joy and terror that felt like a drug. 

It wasn’t long before mountain biking became a central part of my life. My first date with the woman who became my wife was a mountain bike ride. All of my best friends have been my riding buddies. Mountain biking has featured prominently in most of my vacation trips. I started a little side hustle business selling mountain bike repair kits. And at the height of my riding, I had 5 different mountain bikes, all suited to different kinds of terrain, seasons, or challenge.

I’m an expert mountain biker now, and have been for much of those 30 years, but I certainly wasn’t in the early days. Back then, it only took a short time to see that if I wanted to get really good at the sport, I would need to learn how to fall. And I was all in. I wanted deep in my bones to get really good at mountain biking.

It’s a bit of an inside joke with my wife. I like to collect journals. I don’t actually write in them. Well, until last week I didn’t. But I love the idea of journals and artfully composing inspired reflections in them. It turns out I’ve had lots and lots of ideas about how a journal is supposed to look, how it’s supposed to work. So many ideas, in fact, that I’ve not actually written anything in any of these journals for years. 

At the beginning of last year, I thought it would be different. I got online and I ordered this custom leather cover for journal inserts. When it arrived I marveled at its beauty. I loved the soft leather, and felt a rush of something like self-importance to see my name embossed on the front. This is it. I’ll finally write in this one. 

But first, I need to research the latest ideas on journaling. 

I found a great system that would keep my ideas really well organized. I went ahead and numbered all the pages in the corner in my tidy little handwriting. Aaaaahhhh, progress. 

I dutifully carried my lovely new journal with the numbered pages with me to my office and back. But writing in it? Don’t be ridiculous. I wasn’t quite ready to go that far. 

Until last week. 

When you start to understand the inside-out nature of our experience of life, relationships get a whole lot easier.

You start to see that you’re creating your own experience with your thinking and that your thinking changes as often and as capriciously as the weather. You become skeptical of your own thoughts, about yourself, about others, about your partner.

It becomes second nature to disregard those insecure and judgmental thoughts that spring up unbidden when you’re tired when you haven’t made time for those long runs you love, or when they just do for no reason at all.

They no longer mean much of anything. They’re just transient, ever-changing, and usually profoundly unhelpful.

The real magic unfolds when you look away from thought altogether and find out that the stuff that’s actually real, the stuff you can count on, comes from a different part of you entirely.

There is so much hopelessness and despair in these strange times.

Young people are looking ahead to a future that looks bleak, seemingly stripped of opportunities and possibility. Older people have been deprived of time with their children and grandchildren, living in constant worry about contracting Covid. And then there are the parents, especially parents of young children, trapped at home, having to wear so many hats, with precious few opportunities to take a breath and find a quiet moment of ease.

Hope seems to be in short supply. And so we’re invited to ask the question: Where do we look for hope?

If you get only one thing from this article let it be this: We need to look for hope inside, not outside, of ourselves.

About once a year I need to take steroids for a sinus condition. My family finds this quite amusing, as the effect the drugs tend to have on me is that I go into hyperdrive, doing all sorts of long-neglected tasks around the house. And, inevitably, I end up organizing the cupboards and the pantry. Perfectly. 

The decluttering of these spaces has a peculiar effect. There’s a spaciousness. A freshness. Contentment.

Recently, fueled by curiosity rather than steroids, I decided to undertake a decluttering of my mind. And I can hardly believe how good it feels.

I’ve read about digital detox before, and have admired those who could put their phones away for weeks at a time, even if I wasn’t so envious of the circumstances that often brought them to that point. But, I reasoned, I’m not that badly addicted to my phone, and so maybe detox was taking it too far. So when I heard a podcast recently about a more pragmatic approach that recognizes the role of technology in our work lives and family lives – he called it digital decluttering – it sounded like something I might be up for.

Here’s why I was ready to try it…

In Part 1 of my letter to my younger burned out self, I described how an understanding of how our minds work points us away from effort and struggle. (click here to read Part 1)  Here’s Part 2…

Ordinary Jason,

Something about less effort sounds good right about now. But what does that have to do with mental speed?

Burned Out Jason

I’d always wanted to start an innovative school. So I did. And it’s an amazing school.  But after 10 years of blood, sweat and tears, I was so burned out that I couldn’t recognize my life anymore. I felt isolated and alone, totally exhausted, and nothing I tried seemed to make much of a difference. […]

Last night my 15 year old son told me he wants to flee the country. 

He said he saw the statistics about the number of mass shootings per year in the US vs the number of mass shootings in other major developed countries. The US  had more mass shootings than the next ten countries combined. In 2018 alone, we had 268.

And here we are again, faced with two more unthinkable tragedies. There’s so much pain, so much loss, so much senseless loss of life.

And as we feel that pain of it all, there’s an inevitable pull towards fear and anger, towards a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness. It sometimes feels like pushing play on an all-too-familiar toxic stew of feelings that look something like a big black tornado, waiting to suck us in everytime one of these senseless acts of violence happens.

So my question is: how does the inside-out understanding guide us as we watch the approaching tornado, or even after we’ve already been sucked into it and are trapped in it’s vortex of fear and anger?

How often do we hear about the value of “slowing down.” 

It’s a really important part of starting to invite a new experience of life.  It’s a beautiful thing to invite ourselves to slow down our minds, slow down the crazy pace of life, slow down our frantic doing, long enough for something new to emerge: a new thought, a new experience, a shift in our perspective on something that’s felt sticky for us. 

My husband and coaching partner Jason and I often talk to clients about mental “gears.” 

When we’re in 5th gear (or even 6th or higher!), we’re revving at super high speed and life can look and feel frantic, overwhelming, out of control, even impossible. When we slow down any amount towards 1st gear, we often experience a positive shift in how life looks and feels. Frantic becomes interesting or “full,” insurmountable becomes challenging or even fun, we go from stuck to unstuck and life seems to flow again.

Shifting to a slower gear can be truly life-changing, but what if there’s an even bigger shift available to us, a shift that people rarely talk about, but definitely should?

It’s high school graduation season in America.  If you have a graduate or are close to one, you know that it’s an exciting time of gratitude, hope and celebration. And fear. For many parents, it’s one of the scariest days of the year. Because graduation night in many places means graduation parties. Big graduation parties.

Our little town is no exception. Our high schoolers head way out into the woods and have a big, all-out, rowdy party to celebrate the grads. They’re out of cell phone range, there’s alcohol and marijuana involved (at the very least), they make a big bonfire, and they all spend the night in the woods. You can just imagine the scene.

As I was chatting with another mom about all this, she shared with me just how gripped with fear she was about the party. Her son and mine, both seventeen,  were planning on being at the there and she seemed truly terrified by the prospect of what might happen. She was already planning a miserable, sleepless night.

What really struck me as we talked was not that she was so worried, which seemed pretty standard,  but rather that I surprised myself by not being worried at all. And I mean really truly not at all.