| Dear Amy,
March (and into early April) was “in like a lion, out like a lamb”, except it was unpredictable at best. On Wednesday of this week, it was 84 degrees and, in spite of all the doors in the house open to let the fresh air in, we almost needed to turn on the a/c. On Thursday, it was 49 and raining and I was bundled up again. I’ve read that Mark Twain once counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours in spring, and I believe him.
Spring in Philadelphia doesn’t arrive so much as it negotiates. It makes a generous offer, then reconsiders. It asks you to trust it, and then reminds you that trust is the whole practice.
I have made a conscious effort to stop interpreting the cold snaps as setbacks. They are simply part of how a Philly spring works: unevenly, at its own pace, on no schedule but its own. Some plants and trees come forward early. Some of the heartier trees take until May to show off their best blooms. Some perennials were planted last fall and nearly forgotten, and then one morning I expect to walk outside and they will simply be there. |
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| What I’m Holding: Space for Growth
Our Passover Sedar was small and intimate this year, just a few of us, an abbreviated Haggadah, the traditional food that we have come to know and love. As is the tradition, we retold the same story we tell every year. The exodus from Egypt. The plagues. The journey from bondage to freedom. And this year, more than perhaps any year I can remember, the story landed differently. It felt heavier, more complicated, less resolved. I am aware that many Jewish families sat at their Seder tables this year deeply divided about Israel, about Gaza, about what the story of liberation means when the people telling it are no longer aligned on who deserves it or what it costs. The ancient text holds still. The people reading it and the circumstances do not.
And yet we gathered. We lit the candles, asked the four questions, dipped the bitter herbs. We did what Jewish families have done for thousands of years: we showed up for the ritual even when the ritual couldn’t answer the questions we were actually carrying. Somewhere in that tension, I found something revealing. The Seder isn’t meant to resolve anything. Its purpose is to bring us back to the same story, year after year, from wherever we happen to be standing, and to let the distance between where we were and where we are now show us how far we’ve traveled.
What might feel like a loop, isn’t. It’s a spiral. |
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“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You constantly come back to things you thought you’d understood and see deeper truths.”
-Barry H. Gillespie
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| The words of the Haggadah are the same. The people reading them are not. As I sat at that proverbial table last Passover, I had not yet had the winter I just had, had not yet arrived at the particular understanding of freedom that this spring is quietly offering. The story holds still. We move through it differently each time. While we may think when we sit down, “Well, here we go again”, we have all experienced forward motion that may not be visible or even apparent, but it’s there. And progress, while not linear, has indeed been made. |
| What I’m Witnessing: The Power of a Shared History
Last month I spent four days in La Jolla with six friends I’ve known for nearly fifty years. Among us, we have raised children, buried parents, navigated marriages and careers and losses and reinventions. Between us, a lifetime of shared history and a fair amount of earned wisdom (and still learning!).
The moments I keep returning to were in the early mornings, coffee mugs in hand, no agenda, nowhere to be. We talked about the day-to-day news of our families back home from who is struggling to who is thriving and what the next chapter holds for the people we love. The ordinary and the tender, unhurried and present.
After landing in San Diego and on the way to meet my friends on that first evening, my Uber driver asked about my plans and who I was going to see. When I told her she smiled, immediately got it, and said, “you know each other’s souls”. She was exactly right.
One of the “girls” spent much of the weekend suggesting that I stop telling people that we’d known each other for fifty years. It felt like too much to claim, perhaps, it made us sound too old. And then, by the end, something shifted. She recognized not just the fact of it, but the beauty of that statement. Fifty years. Still here. Still showing up for each other and the early morning coffee.
That, too, is a spiral. We had been to this place before, not La Jolla (which I highly recommend!), but this particular quality of ease and recognition, of knowing and being known. And yet something was different. We were further along than we had been the last time. The roots of fifty years had quietly done their work, and we could now see, each time we gather and spend real time together, what they have made possible. |
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| What I’m Listening To: How to Discover the Meaning of Your Life
I’ve been sitting with a recent episode of Oprah’s podcast featuring Arthur Brooks, “How to Discover the Meaning of Your Life,” and I keep returning to one idea in particular.
Brooks describes what he calls a “doom loop”: we reach for technology, for distraction, for anything that will quiet the discomfort of loneliness or anxiety, and in doing so we deepen the very thing we’re trying to escape. The digital life we curate to feel connected leaves us, paradoxically, more alone. The loop closes. Nothing moves forward.
The antidote he proposes is not a strategy but an orientation. A meaningful life, he argues, is built on three pillars: coherence, the sense that your life makes sense and that you understand why things happen; purpose, having something to move toward; and significance, knowing that your life matters to someone. Simple to name. A lifetime of work to actually live.
But what stays with me most is his own story. Brooks walked the Camino de Santiago (on my bucket list). He walked hundreds of miles, day after day, the same repetitive motion, physically grueling, spiritually unanswered. For days, nothing seemed to be happening. And then, slowly, the walking broke something open. He described becoming tender, like a lobster that had molted. And it was only after that long, invisible process of being worn down that meaning was finally able to find him. The Camino looks like a straight line on a map. It isn’t. It is, in every way that matters, a spiral.
Brooks would say the difference between the doom loop and the purposeful spiral is this: one returns you to the same place, unchanged and increasingly depleted. The other returns you to familiar ground, but you arrive each time with more. The difference is whether you are reaching for distraction or reaching for depth. I choose depth. |
| What I’m Learning: Family Systems
I’ve been doing a deeper dive into family systems theory, and one idea keeps surfacing alongside all of this thinking about spirals and invisible progress.
Roberta Gilbert, in Extraordinary Relationships, writes about what Bowen called differentiation of self: the capacity to stay rooted in your own identity, your own values, your own clarity, even when the people around you are anxious or reactive or pulling you toward old patterns. The undifferentiated person lends and borrows the self, merging with others’ emotions and losing their own footing. The differentiated person can be fully present without being swept away.
Gilbert describes how families get stuck in their own loops, repetitive patterns of conflict, distancing, and anxiety passed down through generations, each person unconsciously repeating what they inherited. Breaking out of those patterns doesn’t mean escaping your family. It means going back in, deliberately, from a higher vantage point. You re-enter the same system, but you bring a different self. Same coordinates. New elevation.
The Seder table. The La Jolla morning. The family that keeps gathering even when the gathering is hard. These are not loops. They are the slow, invisible work of people who keep showing up, keep working on themselves, and keep arriving, changed, if only slightly, at the same familiar place.
Small shifts, Gilbert reminds us, produce vast improvements over time. The work is invisible while it’s happening. The growth is only recognized in retrospect.
Which is, it turns out, exactly how spring works. |
| What Spring Asks: Come Gently
Spring will not be rushed. It arrives on its own schedule, in its own sequence, regardless of how many coats we put away too soon. I find that reassuring. We live in a culture that mistakes speed for progress and stillness for stagnation. But the most meaningful movement is often invisible while it’s happening. The friendship that deepens across fifty years of ordinary mornings. The family ritual that carries more weight each time you return to it. The self that grows clearer, slowly, through the patient work of showing up.
You are, in all likelihood, further along than you think.
Sometimes the most important thing we can do is trust that, even when it’s hot, then cold, then just right; even in the weeks when nothing seems to be happening, even when the path feels suspiciously familiar. |
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“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
-Lao Tzu
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| What are you working on that you cannot yet see? |
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Essential Leadership
Essential Leadership works with individuals and families to crystalize their values, magnify their voice, and create their vision for how they will positively impact the world.
What is essential? .
When you identify what is really essential to you, you can eliminate everything else, and make the execution of what really matters as effortless as possible. Knowing what is essential is the disciplined pursuit of less. It allows you to channel your time, energy and effort toward making the highest possible contribution to what really matters.
Why leadership?
When you know your essence, you will identify what speaks to your soul. You rise as a leader in your own sphere of influence, even if you never saw yourself as or aspired to become a “leader” in the traditional sense of the word. You align your passions, your purpose, your life. When you are clear about your vision and strategies for action, you can become a potent force for good. In doing so, you will motivate and inspire others to engage in that vision.
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