When my son Hudson was in preschool he was obsessed with garbage and recycling trucks. Mondays and Thursdays were sacred. We would wait for the trucks to come with excitement of a celebrity sighting. Hudson would jump up and down as garbage collectors arrived and wave happily to them.
We would occasionally arrive late to nursery school on those days if the garbage or recycling guys were running behind schedule. Luckily, he went to a preschool that supported his passion and welcomed his late arrival with open arms.
When we visited my brother and sister-in-law, they took us to a recycling facility where we could actually see them separating the recycling. I mean it was too good to be true! Heaven! When we were away with my extended family on vacation, my dad heard 4-year-old Hudson sneak out of our rental house early to watch the garbage collectors. My dad joined him as he watched. Thank goodness my dad is a light sleeper and an early riser.
Hudson’s interests were deep and intense. And they shifted without warning from loving guitars to garbage to construction to sports to politics. I don’t know how he knew when to move on and dive into something new, but he did with all of his being. There was no doubting, no questioning, he just jumped into the next thing and he didn’t look back.
His curiosity and his desire for a depth of knowledge about different topics remains. By following his lead when he was 3, I like to think he learned that his curiosities were important and worthy of his time and attention. We paid attention to his enthusiasm which was easy because he was not subtle about it. Whatever he felt when the topic of garbage/construction/sports/politics came up was organic and intrinsic.
We can all learn from this. We can listen carefully to what is interesting to us. We can follow breadcrumbs. We just need to pay attention. Push out the noise. I’m pretty sure Hudson didn’t worry whether others were equally interested in garbage. He didn’t question his choice. And we shouldn’t either. We should fill our life with what interests us as much as possible. If you can find a career doing it, fantastic! But if you can’t, there are other ways to lean into your passions and curiosities. The first step is to notice.
I encourage my clients to slow down and notice how things feel.
I encourage them to go down rabbit holes and follow their curiosity.
What do you want to learn more about?
What makes you sneak away to learn more?
Find people who support your passion like Hudson’s nursery school teachers. Find people who encourage your excitement and understand that your passion may sometimes interfere with life.
Don’t belittle what excites you. Listen carefully. It may be a quiet voice that needs attention. And then go all in.
Do you want to explore how to pursue your passions? Do you want to learn how to pay attention to your quiet voice? Do you want to go “all in” on something? I may be able to help! Set up a discovery call here.
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Too Beautiful to Miss
5 Tiny Leadership Acts that Matter Most
Why I’ll Never Buy Protein Popcorn
Scroll Down to find out What I Am Reading Now…
Too Beautiful to Miss
Such a beautiful reminder not to miss the present moment. Worth reading —possibly every morning.
5 Tiny Leadership Acts that Matter Most
“The opposite of loneliness isn’t having more people around you; it’s feeling like you matter to the people around you. That’s why just putting down our phones won’t reduce disconnection; what we do after we put down our phones will. The solution isn’t to connect more; it’s to relearn the skills to connect better by showing people they matter to us.”
And then the author goes on to give us tools for showing people how they matter. He uses leadership examples from the workplace, but this could be done anywhere and with anyone. Worth the read!
Why I’ll Never Buy Protein Popcorn: Why do we never learn from history
If you are seeking body liberation this is a great article to read to see what it is all about. And if you are like me and you have been rejecting diet culture for years, this article is a good reminder of why we do it.
“Diet culture has in many ways robbed us of the experience of food. It’s led a lot of us to forget that eating can and should be a pleasurable experience, not one riddled by fear of gaining weight. While it’s true that food fuels our bodies, it’s also so much more just that. When we think of food only as fuel, it discounts so much of the essence of food. Food is an experience. Food is culture. Food is memories. Food is pleasure. Food is a way to share love with one another.”
Memorial Days: A Memoir by Geraldine Brooks
A New York Times Bestseller
“Brooks tracks the geography of grief with patience and grace as she comes to terms with the ongoing nature of outliving the ones you love most. ... Her memoir is certainly a testament to her own unique loss, but it’s moreover a lifeline to others who will find themselves in this familiar, shattered landscape of grief.” —Los Angeles Times
“A rich account of marriage and mourning.” —Washington Post
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.