I asked about a word this morning — esoteric. It’s a word most people pass right over — it sounds too deep, too far from real life to bother with. But its root simply means inner. Belonging to what’s within.
I have always loved words this way — not for what they perform, but for what they carry, once you get underneath them. And this one, once I sat with it, was really just naming something I already believed. That there is a difference between what happened and what it reveals. Between the surface of a thing and the pattern underneath it.
Most of us move through our days answering the first question — what happened. Fewer of us slow down long enough to ask the second — what it reveals.
I think about this whenever I remember seasons of my life where I gave everything I had to work I believed in, alongside people I genuinely cared about — people devoted, as I was, to serving others at the highest level we knew how to reach. It never felt like hard work. It felt like heart work — devotion, grace through what was difficult, faith held out in front of doubt like a lantern. We understood. It was spoken. It was felt. Never assumed. Because it was lived — and growth like that was never about hustle. It was about heart.
We were, all of us, the kind of people who went the extra mile without being asked — over-giving, over-serving, unwilling to settle for anything less than our best. And somewhere inside all that giving, what we'd built together as a community slowly started to feel like a machine — because of what it needed every month just to keep from grinding to a halt. We were constantly shoring things up between one piece and the next, without ever quite naming it that way. When the calendar is full and the flow feels good, a machine like that can feel well-oiled — until you catch a glimpse of everything it’s actually taking to keep it running, and it becomes a pressure cooker instead.
And a pressure cooker is never a good place to lead from, or to serve from. Somewhere in there, the goals kept climbing — because the industry around us made the case that aiming higher was always better. Serve more people. Scale up. That was the whole conversation: larger programs, larger teams, bigger systems, wider reach. Build a legacy-based business — an asset with enough weight to it that one day it could be left behind, or sold for real profit. There was a lot of energy in that vision, at the time, and it did reach the heart, at least at first. But chasing every metric required to get there was not for the faint of heart, and somewhere along the way, the mind took the wheel — running the strategy, hunting the numbers — while the heart that had started it all quietly moved to the back seat.
There was a day I chose to clear my whiteboard — to walk away, to take a break from it all. I was certain, convinced, that I had seen the pattern clearly enough. That I was done with it.
Not even six months later, I chose to go back, when I was invited. Things had been refreshed — a reset, a positive pivot. Surely, I told myself, that meant the patterns that had caused me to pause, to clear the whiteboard in the first place, were gone as well. In my mind, it felt like a total refresh. I never considered that the pattern itself might still be there, quietly, underneath it.
I have sat with this for a long time. The true story is that seeing a pattern and being free of it are not the same thing. I only knew things from where I stood — my own vantage point. Just like everyone else on the team, they had theirs. And when we compared notes, things were quietly adding up, pointing us toward a larger change that was needed.
But in the thick of it — full days, calendars tight, pushing to scale and grow — we kept moving, so we could keep serving the people looking for our support and leadership. There simply was never enough time to step back, see the larger opportunity, and actually get it put into place as a team. That’s when endings can happen. And it truly is a gift when they do — because the shifts that were needed couldn’t be made in time, and the closing of that door, even one we didn’t choose to close, is still a gift.
And here is what I would want a woman standing where I once stood to know: what actually gave me peace was never about how things looked from the outside. It was knowing the people I cared about were being taken care of, getting what they needed to grow. When I believed that this was true, I was at peace. It was only when I could sense things weren't going well on that front that frustration would set in — not in an earth-shattering or alarming way, just as information quietly telling me something needed my attention.
That is what the ending gave me, eventually. Not because I chose to close the door. Because it needed to close. And once it did, I could finally see — this was exactly what I needed. This chapter needed to end, so the next one could begin.
Sometimes a pattern ends the moment we declare it’s over, that we’re done with it. But more often, it isn’t finished with us yet. There is more it still needs to teach us before it can truly close. My hand said I was done, once, clearing that whiteboard. And it turned out I wasn’t finished at all. Some patterns wait for someone else’s hand to close them, on behalf of everyone still standing inside of them. Either way, what is left in the space that opens after is an invitation — not to linger on what didn’t last, but to ask, with real honesty: what do I keep? What do I recycle? What do I finally release?
Nothing given with a whole heart is ever wasted. It is only waiting to be seen clearly.
So I would ask you gently — is there a pattern somewhere in your life? Perhaps it isn’t tied to a workplace at all. It could be tied to something else entirely — a relationship, a role, a version of yourself you’ve outgrown. Something you’ve already declared yourself done with. Perhaps more than once. And still, quietly, the same pattern rises back up and finds its way in again. It is easy to see what is happening. Far fewer of us stop to ask the harder question — why. Why does it keep returning? What is it still trying to reveal, or teach, before it is ready to be truly closed? Because when you finally close it, truly close it, it is not only you who is freed.
🙌