My books ‘The Mountain Is You,’ ‘101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think’ and ‘The Pivot Year’ are being released as limited-edition hardcovers — second slide for a little preview. They’re all available for pre-order now, and will ship out in early November — just in time for the holidays. 🤍
Other updates include the most perfect writing desk in Matera, my favorite sculpture at the Louvre, the bestsellers wall at a bookstore in Johannesburg, the last moments I spent editing the manuscript to my new book in Rome, a few of my favorite moments from the last month or so on the road, and my handwritten ‘Everything Is Temporary’ print, which is available in five different sizes and three different frame colors. You can find the links to everything in my profile.
Thank you as always for your love and support.
I am endlessly, overwhelmingly grateful for every one of you.
We are allowing life to be bigger than we ever thought it could be!
Eventually, you will worry about whatever is haunting you for the last time and you will not realize it is the last. Eventually, you will place down your fear and you will not pick it back it up. Eventually, what once was ritual will become routine. Eventually, you will stop feeling your phantom limbs, your thought-form afflictions. Eventually, what was once foreign will become familiar. Eventually, you will find yourself on the other side of doors you once only prayed would open.
It will happen slowly, and then all at once.
You do not have to instruct the flower on how to bloom. You do not have to will or affirm it into existence. You just have to arrange the environment so that growth is the inevitable outcome. You just have to allow it to do what it is designed to do at its deepest and most invisible levels. You do not have to feel deserving of a garden to have one, you just have to plant the seeds.
It will happen, even if you are afraid that it will not. You will get there, even if you feel like you won’t. Things will be different, even if it seems as though they have always remained the same.
You do not have to impose your will upon the outcome, you have to trust the process. You do not have to force a change, you have to engineer it phase by phase. You do not have to hope that things will be different, you just have to change them in the quietest, most unsuspecting ways, and then continue. The horizon is your inevitable destination as long as you keep walking toward it. We do not fail unless we stop, or until we do.
You don’t have to feel good enough.
You don’t have to be certain.
You don’t have to be without any fear or hesitation.
You just have to keep going.
You have to keep listening to the version of you that is waiting, that is calling to you from the other side.
You cannot miss what is meant for you.
You cannot lose what is yours.
Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period — a growth concourse — through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into.
And those things are very often intertwined.
The things that are right for us are not just the ones that make us feel something special, something rare, something otherworldly — they’re the things that make us believe in ourselves again. The things that instill a hope so far gone, we thought we had lost it forever. They are the things that make us feel like we are approaching a light at the end of the tunnel, as though all the pieces have come together, and finally make sense.
The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.
When we try to move away from them, we are faced with additional lessons that prepare us in a way that makes the detour seem almost an essential part of the path. Sometimes, we are simply not ready to hold all that the world is trying to offer us, and the process of cleaning out our old habits, thoughts and attachments begins to open a space for us to finally receive. And receive we will, because what is ours never leaves us. It is connected to us a through a golden, invisible thread, one that pulls us and inspires us and calls our attention back to it, again and again.
It is with us always.
Because what is meant for us is a part of us. Part of our calling, our life, our reason for being here. Part of the mystical, untouchable, unfathomable unknown upon which we will one day reflect back and say — of course, I knew all along.
Just me and my children dropping in to let you know that ‘101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think,’ ‘The Mountain Is You’ and ‘The Pivot Year’ have been re-released in hardcover and they’re out today! The link is in my bio to order. Either tap on the book you want and select hardcover from there, or grab the bundle of all three that comes with a discount.
Happy reading and gifting, friends. 📖🤍
This is my favorite book I have ever written, and I have been trying to write it since I was 19.
They say that if there is a book you want to read and you cannot find it, it’s the one you’re meant to write. I know this is that book for me.
For years I would think: “I wish there was a book with an index of my problems, like an encyclopedia of feelings.”
I imagined myself flipping to a table of contents and seeing a list of all the various things I had gone through, or was going through, or maybe one day would. I wanted to use it like a guidebook back to sanity when it most felt like peace was slipping through my fingers.
That’s exactly what I created for you.
Within these pages, you’ll find chapters like: “Read This When Your Heart Is Breaking And It Feels Like It Will Never Heal,” or “Read This When You Don’t Know What You Want,” or “Read This When You Want To Change Your Life But Don’t Know Where To Start.” No matter what crossroads you may find yourself at, it is my sincerest hope that there will be something within this book that can act as a sort of anchor for you, a North Star directing you back toward what you know is true.
This was one of the very first ideas I ever had for a book, and though I can’t believe it took me this many years to finish it, I also believe there’s something important in the timing. This version is imbued with something I couldn’t have accessed any sooner than I did.
Because what I know for sure is that behind the life you are trying to hold together, on the other side of the life you are forcing to work… is the life that is waiting. The life that finds you when you let go of everything that’s standing in its way. The life that’s been there all along. The life that sustains itself, the life where things come together, and stay. The life that you know, deep down, is meant to be yours. The life that’s always just one decision away.
If on your way to it, you lose your direction — I hope you pick up these pages.
And I hope you let them guide you home.
Available everywhere March 2025. Pre-orders begin today — link is in my bio.
What assets do you have right now that you are not taking advantage of? What answered prayers are going unacknowledged, what glimmers of progress are going unrecognized? What little sparks of interest, or possibility, are attempting to grasp your attention, and which heavier weights of fear and decided failure are bearing down upon them and extinguishing your consideration before they have really been seen?
In what ways are you shortchanging your potential, in what ways have you taken yourself out of the arena before you were ever really in? In what ways are you guarding your heart by hurting it, as though you could safeguard by desensitizing, when your disproportionate focus upon the ways in which you might not be enough are scar tissuing them into your head enough to start fighting with your heart?
In what ways are you already playing dead?
If you could imagine that it was all taken away from you tomorrow, what would you most regret not being grateful for? Not seeing for what it was, while it still was there? In what ways are the doorways of opportunity outlining themselves along the closed walls of your perception, and what courage might you need to muster in order to realize that this very moment contains within it the unlikely entryway to what you’ve been asking for all along?
We live as though it’s all a given, an endurance game — that life is something that is only to be tolerated. As though we could shield ourselves from the hurt by not taking the risk when the only real risk is not giving it all, while we still could. Failing to live on the edge of our hope, our faith. Not doing what we wanted to do, while we could still do it. Not loving the people who were in front of us, while they were still there. Not being who we had the capacity to be, while we were still in the moment.
No longer waiting for the breakthrough, but understanding that it is only a micro-shift that can set off a domino effect within our lives — that the biggest things begin with the smallest ones, and they’re all around us, quietly asking us to realize. To see.
A book you read this weekend can teach you something that changes your life for decades to come. A decision you make tomorrow can do the same. When you get better at relationships, your entire life becomes more connected. When you get better at managing your emotions, your entire life becomes more leveled-out. When you get better at managing your money, your entire life becomes more stable. When you get better at managing your reactions, things last. They last because you know how to take care of them — because you first learned to take care of you.
You are the most constant relationship in your own life, you are the most constant presence in your own life, you are the most common denominator in every experience you have ever had, and will ever have. Investing in yourself is an evergreen task, the ripple effects of which are often greater than you can imagine. You have to decide how you want to be. What you are going to value, what is going to matter. You have to choose, and cultivate, the kind of person you are going to become, because a beautiful life rarely happens on accident. You are your own vessel, and the way you build it changes the way you experience everything — every last thing that will ever come your way.
You have to decide which version of you is going to show up to the days you are dreaming about. Which version of you is going to meet the love of your life, which version of you will create your legacy project, which version of you will step on the flight or open the door to your future home for the very first time. And that work will not instantaneously click into place just because you have arrived at an end-goal, or a milestone. You are the foundational element of every single thing you will ever touch and see and feel and know, and that is why it matters.
The variable is not whether or not the future will arrive — the choice is what version of you shows up to meet it.
If you’re going through a hard or uncertain time, leave a question. If you’re someone who has come out on the other end, answer a question, or leave the piece of advice you wish someone would have given you. 🤍
Send this to someone who needs it. 🤍
I hope this is the year you change your life.
Not in the superficial way. Not in the way of moving things around on the surface and wondering why nothing feels much different underneath. Not in the way of conformity. Not in the way that aligns you most closely with all of the traditional emblems of success, the ones that leave you smiling beside your accomplishments but feeling so pinched with regret.
I hope this is the year you change your life in all the ways you have always secretly wanted to. The year you discover that those quiet dreams that have lingered for so long are actually echoes of parallel lives, sister stories, asking you to tell them, to leap toward them, to move them out of your mind and into a touchable, physical reality.
I hope this is the year you stop dancing around the perimeter of who you intended to be, of what you came here to do. I hope this is the year you learn to defy what’s reasonable and build sense into a world of your own design. I hope this is the year you discover that the floor does not only hold up if you remain where you are standing. With each step you take, and wherever you may go, it will rise to meet you — as it always has, and always will.
I hope this is the year you find the bravest, boldest kind of courage. I hope this is the year you walk into the life that was always meant to be yours.
Within you lives a great vision for your life, quieted over time by the world.
It is once again time to listen.
It is once again time to live.
Please, take this life while it’s still yours. Our time is too short, too fragile, to spend it imagining that our dreams will have a half-life, that somewhere along the line, we’ll get to pick up all the things that went untaken. We cannot save our presence for a better time; there are no future roots if there are no current threads.
You are not meant to get comfortable somewhere you are not supposed to be — so go.
You are not meant to have someone you loved pulled away from you — so trust.
You are not meant to plant roots somewhere you will not blossom — so change.
When we say to not settle, we often don’t account for how exhausting it is to keep going, how much it takes to keep mustering up the fortitude to keep trying, to keep grieving the losses of what we must place down in order to pick up what is ahead. But the alternative is that we spend our lives lukewarm, never quite initiated to go forward, but never quite able to settle all the way in either.
Can you remember how it felt when you’ve gotten it right before? It’s not overthought. There’s an offhandedness about it. It’s a simple yes, not a complicated yes. Not a yes that’s arrived at or rationalized to. It’s not a yes that is a conclusion, it’s a yes that’s an initial knowing, the details of which surround and fill with time. There are no justifications. There is no inner nagging, no pulling away. You are simply in a state of arrival, and then your gears switch. The days become about living, not deciding where to land.
The pieces become more beautiful than their parts, and you realize — every loss was a lesson that made this possible.
Every step was meant to be.
