Letter 6

Hi folks, today I want to talk about “sitting in the quiet” and trust and recharge around others.

We’re sitting at the edge of a wood slat deck. There’s a log cabin right behind us and a view straight ahead. We’re at a lake with a long lawn that stops at the end of the beginning of the view. It’s just the sound of the wings of bees and a few birds in the distance.

I love log cabins. This one’s made of huge logs and has stood here for 30 years waiting for this family to arrive again. it’s got the character of a place that’s ready for 3 winter hunters or 3 full families with droves of kids launching water balloons like snipers behind pine trees.

But right now it’s just peaceful. There’s an abundance of quiet and an absence of noise. There’s the presence of trust.

And today that’s what I want to talk about; the presence of trust in the quiet. It’s a little moment that passes if a mind is too loud. It’s the kind of moment that a life well equipped is looking for but that only the bias of contentment or gratitude can notice.

In life, sometimes we leverage a mile of stress in trade for a moment of peace. So when it comes it’s pretty valuable. It’s the thing we expect to experience in our vision of “someday” and it keeps us going.

Social psychologists talk about this; they say that there’s a moment people can experience together that’s inadvertently an expression of trust. It’s when two or more can sit in reflection together, only to come out of it and notice each other again. It’s something that the outdoors is good at orchestrating. It isn’t about preparing to protect or preparing to respond. It’s about being together in the presence of something worth admiring.

We try to refuel our hearts and minds with Amazon 2 day shipping; it feels productive to imagine and buy tomorrow. It works for a moment but it isn’t how we’re designed to truly recharge. There’s something about quiet in the presence of the people you really care about that works from the root of us. Chaos is the debt we pay when we don’t know where to go; it’s those little moments of reflection and trust that help us see the way back, the right road through.

I hope this week you get to spend some time outside. It could be a walk or a hike or a fold out chair at a quiet lake. I hope you get to spend an hour with your heart open with people you trust. I hope this week you become a better version, that you push yourself to try something challenging, even if it means becoming a little more comfortable with a whole lot of nothingness.

Thanks for reading my letter. I’m going to go backpacking in the mountains this weekend and I’m excited to share what I come up with for the next one. Have a great week ahead,

-M