A lot of my old notes are instructions to myself.

Be fierce and unstoppable AND sensitive and thoughtful.

Build capacity within myself.

Dig deeper and go further.

Be a tower of strength and a bastion of reliability.

Quiet confidence, not compulsive worry.

There is a version of me in those pages who is constantly preparing herself to carry more.

Learn more. Become stronger. Become more disciplined. Become more capable. Develop the skill. Understand the system. Make yourself reliable enough that when something important arrives, you can hold it.

I recognize her.

She built most of my life.

But there is another voice in the notes that keeps interrupting.

Relax!!!!!!

Relax more thoroughly.

Relax more frequently.

Apparently my journals weren't the only ones trying to tell me this.

A few years ago, around Christmas, my team staged an intervention.

There were maybe eighteen of them at the time, and they had apparently reached a collective conclusion: I needed a hobby.

Not a side project. Not another thing to learn for work. A hobby.

They were worried that work was all I cared about. This was not entirely unfair. Work is one of my special interests. I can happily spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about organizations and systems and problems that other people seem perfectly capable of putting down at the end of the day.

But there was something else in what they were telling me. The people whose work I was responsible for were looking back at me and saying, essentially: we think your life needs more in it than this.

And I had to decide whether to listen.

For a long time, I understood growth primarily as capacity.

What can I learn?

What can I endure?

What can I solve?

How much can I hold?

Receptivity is not passivity

There is something seductive about capacity, especially when being capable has made you safe.

If I can figure it out, I don't have to depend on someone else.

If I can carry it, I don't have to risk it being dropped.

If I can anticipate the problem, I don't have to be surprised by it.

If I can make myself useful enough, maybe there will always be a place for me.

Strength is real. Competence matters. I don't want to romanticize helplessness as an antidote to over-functioning.

But capacity has a shadow.

The more I demonstrated I could hold, the more I held.

Sometimes because people asked me to.

Sometimes because nobody else was.

Sometimes because I was good at it.

And sometimes because I had quietly confused being able to carry something with being responsible for carrying it.

Those aren't the same.

This is probably where stewardship has become more useful to me than strength.

Stewardship still asks something of me. It isn't passive.

But it changes the question from "Can I carry this?" to "What does this require from me?"

Sometimes the answer is a lot.

Sometimes the responsible thing is to intervene, build, protect, repair, insist.

Sometimes it is to make sure the thing does not depend on me.

Sometimes it is to leave.

And sometimes it is to receive.

That last one is still harder for me than I would like.

There are notes about receptivity too: receiving help, gifts, advice, clues, opportunities. They read almost like instructions written in a language I was only beginning to learn.

I did, eventually, take my team's advice.

I took sailing lessons.

For almost a year, I spent nearly every weekend on the Columbia River. Sailing turned out to be an unusually good hobby for someone accustomed to believing that effort and competence could solve most things. You can learn to read the wind. You can adjust the sails. You can get much better at responding to what is happening.

You cannot make the wind blow.

There is probably a very tidy metaphor available here about receptivity. Unfortunately, I eventually bought a boat, which suggests I remain perfectly capable of turning relaxation into infrastructure.

Still, something changed.

I know how to pursue.

I know how to make.

I know how to solve.

Receiving asks for something different.

Attention, maybe.

Enough stillness to notice what is already coming toward me.

Enough trust not to immediately convert every gift into an obligation.

Enough humility to let another person know something I don't.

Enough room in the system that everything does not have to originate with me.

I used to think agency meant being able to alter reality.

I still think it includes that.

But maybe agency also includes the ability to be altered without experiencing that as a loss of self.

That is a different kind of strength.

The younger version of me seemed to be asking: How do I become powerful enough to meet the world?

I think I am asking something slightly different now.

How do I remain powerful enough to act without becoming so defended that nothing can reach me?

I don't have a framework for that yet.

Maybe I shouldn't.