“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

— Lao Tzu

This year, August played a different role in my life. For more than 30 years, after I graduated college, entered the workforce, and the natural rhythm of school-to-summer was no longer in play, August was just like any other month. My daily routine stayed intact despite the extreme heat, and I envied people who took time off, went to faraway places, or even just got away to the beach for a change of scenery and a different pace.

But this summer, we chose an intentional path. We carved out two weeks in Maine, our happy place filled with sunrises and sunsets, lobster, s’mores, ice cream, plenty of lake time, and even my favorite athletic endeavor of water skiing. We chose to slow down and savor early August, treating it as our own harvest time—not just for the gardens that would soon yield their final vegetables, but for reflecting on what had grown during these long, full and even playful days of summer.

What I’m Experiencing: The Way Life Should Be

Our time in Maine taught me about returning to a place, and to a way of being that values being over doing. Our family fell into a rhythm that prioritized presence over productivity: kayaking on the pond not to reach a destination but to just be on the water, reading in the afternoon not to finish books but to get lost in another world, picking blueberries for both the fruit and for the meditative repetition of search and gather. And the blueberry cobbler was delicious! I took in a sunrise and sunset in the same day, bookending hours not with achievement but with witness to the earth’s own cyclical process.

There’s something profound about living by dock time rather than clock time, measuring days not by tasks completed but by moments fully inhabited. Maine’s state slogan, “The Way Life Should Be,” suddenly made perfect sense. This wasn’t tourism marketing; it was a recognition that there’s a different way to organize a life around presence rather than productivity. But here’s what surprised me: this slower pace didn’t make me less effective. Instead, it made me more attuned to what actually mattered.

What I’m Listening To: The Why Behind Everything

I was intrigued by Arthur Brooks’ conversation with Simon Sinek on “A Bit of Optimism,” specifically the episode “Your Instincts Know What You Want.” Brooks shared something that deeply resonated with me: “The why of life is not because you liked the outcome. The why of life is that you were fully alive during the process.”

Brooks explains that happiness comes from three components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. But it’s that third element “meaning” that requires us to engage with what he calls the fundamental “why” questions that our right brain is designed to ask. Drawing from psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist’s work on brain hemispheres, Brooks notes that while our left brain answers the how and what questions, our right brain asks the deeper questions about why we do what we do.

My recent experience taking flute lessons exemplifies this right-brain engagement with meaning and process. Playing the flute is entirely about the process for me: feeling my brain work hard, fully using my breath, discovering what my fingers can learn, and juggling all of those things simultaneously. I have absolutely no plans to perform…yet. The joy is entirely in the doing, in being fully alive to the challenge and beauty of making music, imperfectly but with complete and necessary presence.

This focus on being over doing illuminated something I was already doing in my work with philanthropic families but hadn’t fully recognized. When I slow down enough to focus on how we’re being together rather than rushing toward what we need to accomplish, I consistently see more meaningful engagement and ultimately better results. My clients, although they may resist slowing down at first, come to discover that focusing on their “why” and how they show up actually creates more sustainable impact than chasing outcomes alone.

“We are human beings, not human doings.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

What I’m Learning: When Being Creates Impact

When I asked a client recently about measuring impact, approaching the conversation with curiosity about her process rather than assumptions about outcomes, she responded in a way that validated this insight. Rather than talking about grant dollars or program metrics, she said she wanted to measure how she was being as a funder. Her belief is that she can be an agent for providing resources to organizations that can tangibly measure their own impact. Her question isn’t just “What did we accomplish?” but “Who were we in the process of this work?”

For her, this means offering multi-year funding commitments that allow organizations to focus on their mission rather than constantly fundraising. Instead of requiring detailed reports focused solely on metrics, she schedules regular check-ins that begin with “How are you doing as an organization?”, “What’s keeping you up at night?”, and “What support do you need?” She’s learned that when grantees feel genuinely heard and supported in their process, they’re more likely to share both their challenges and innovations honestly, leading to stronger partnerships and ultimately more effective community impact.

This client’s insight represents something I’m seeing more frequently: a profound shift from transactional to transformational giving. When families focus on what really matters in their philanthropy, how they listen, learn, relate, and respond, they often discover that the outcomes naturally align with their deepest values. The work becomes more sustainable because it’s nourishing rather than depleting. It becomes more authentic because it flows from who they are rather than what they think they should achieve. Most importantly, it creates space for genuine partnership with the communities and organizations they support, rather than the traditional donor-recipient dynamic that can feel extractive or paternalistic. Accountability remains essential, but it shifts from measuring what organizations produce for funders to measuring how well funders support organizations in achieving their own missions. I’m seeing families ask new questions: How do we show up with curiosity rather than assumptions? How do we listen before we lead? How do we remain present to the long-term process of change rather than demanding immediate results? These process-focused questions are yielding better outcomes than outcome-focused strategies ever did.

What I’m Practicing: Seasonal Stewardship

As we transition from summer’s expansion to fall’s focused energy, I’m carrying forward what I’m calling seasonal stewardship, which is the practice of aligning our energy and attention with natural rhythms rather than artificial urgency. This means building regular practices of restoration into my work rhythm, not as breaks from meaningful engagement but as essential preparation for it. It means starting client conversations with presence rather than agenda, allowing space for what wants to emerge rather than rushing toward predetermined outcomes. In practical terms, this looks like beginning meetings with a moment of grounding, asking “How are you showing up today?” before diving into strategy. It means scheduling buffer time between calls to process and integrate rather than racing from one obligation to the next. It means ending workdays by reflecting on how I arrived rather than just what I accomplished.

As I write this, carrying the memory of sitting on that Maine dock, I’m reminded that we belong to slowness as much as we belong to speed. The earth has its rhythms of expansion and contraction, growth and rest, activity and reflection. When we align our work with these natural cycles, we don’t just create more sustainable impact. Instead, we remember what it means to be fully human in the process.

The cabin sign was right: we need to relax, breathe fresh air, make memories as preparation for meaningful life rather than escape from it. Not as luxury, but as the very foundation of sustainable engagement with the world that desperately needs our presence, not just our productivity.

“Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

—Henry David Thoreau