Doing All The Things: Mediocre Ramblings About Stuff

 Afternoon, Subheading: On Knowing and Unknowing.  There are people in life that you can look to as if they were the Northern Star. It's a cheesy analogy, but accurate. They will be shining their same familiar glow night after night, exactly where you left them last. You will not turn to them and find them suddenly in the south, or glowing purple, or ceasing to glow at all. We rightfully romanticize this steadiness, this reliability. When we need to center ourselves, we reach for these people. They restore balance. Regardless of the chaos unfolding around them, they do not waver in their beliefs, their support, or their way of existing. Tomorrow is another day, and it will be approached with the same level head of today. These are the people we want as our friends, partners, and family, because the world is a scary and confusing place and most people find comfort in having an anchor. I am not at all that sort of person- a Northern Star.  I am not a person that is easy to ...

Afternoon, Subheading: From Dreaming to Doing. "It's hard to jump from dreaming to doing. As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It's as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.      Women have sent me so many of their two-dimensional dreams over the years. They say: "For me, the truest, most beautiful life, family, world looks like..."     I marvel at how wildly different each of their stories is. It's proof that our lives were never meant to be cookie-cutter, culturally constructed carbon copies of some ideal. There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the ins...