Each year, our Q4 Season of Service centers on one of my favorite traditions: a panel of powerhouse women leading some of our region’s most essential nonprofits. This year’s lineup—spanning health, housing, arts, and workforce development—offered something rare: unfiltered honesty about what it takes to steer mission-driven organizations through budget cuts, political volatility, and nonstop need.

What emerged was equal parts sobering and inspiring: a reminder that while the work is grueling, the “why” still burns bright; that staff must be held as humans first; and that the real currency of leadership in a crisis is patience, grace, and connection.

“How are you?” has to be the worst small-talk prompt of our era. Who among us actually knows anymore? Lately I find myself answering by mentally sliding along a spectrum a meditation teacher once described—bliss on one end (“everything is okay”), anxiety creeping toward the middle (“something is not okay”), and despair waiting at the far edge, insisting nothing will ever be okay again.

And beneath it all, grief: not just the grief of concrete losses, but the ambient, anticipatory ache that the future we were promised may never arrive. It’s enough to make anyone want to shut down—but I’m learning that the only way not to get trapped in despair is to feel the grief fully, let it move, let it cleanse.

While I talked a big game about relaxation this summer, I mostly missed the mark. Thanks to both society’s dysfunction and my own, I spent the season swinging between indulgence and dissociation, never quite settling into the promised state of easeful presence.

Still, the summer wasn’t a total loss. Fallow spells do support growth, one way or another. It was an apt reminder that although self-centered hedonism feels good in the moment, it is ultimately depleting.

I’m thus ready to marshal my inner resources and make an impact, and have been contemplating how to best channel my energy outward.

Relaxation has never been my gift—especially at anything with “resort and spa” in the title. So there I was on Florida’s Gold Coast, trying to outrun my own anxiety by diagnosing someone else’s, when a philosophy major blindsided me with a Buddhist meditation instead. Four stark reminders of being human. And suddenly the real question surfaced, the one that’s been echoing as I listen to tales of our AI-tinged future:

Given that I will age, get sick, lose what I love, and eventually die… how, then, shall I live?

The work, I think, is learning how to hold the joy alongside the suffering – that definition of intelligence as holding two opposing ideas while retaining the ability to function.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a differentiated person – to have the capacity to garden and grieve at the same time. To have the internal wherewithal to allow sadness and pep to coexist, and the external awareness to remain compassionate to others without assuming undue burdens.

If I learned one thing from our recent “Orange Juice on Cereal” workshop about misfitting personal and professional lives, it is this maxim from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework.

When something in life isn’t working, you will get much further by taking steps to move toward what youdowant rather than attempting to avoid what you do not.

Most of us have had the experience of living a life that is not one’s own, of being out of sync with our natural tendencies. It is a mismatch that can only last so long. Sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, the question comes for us all: what the F am I doing with my life?!

Fortunately, there is a process to bring alignment. While it doesn’t mechanically and magically produce a single solution, it does offer a framework for navigating the terrain. Those oriented toward the mystical call this pilgrimage “vocational discernment.” Let’s unpack the components. 

True growth often requires more than therapy… it involves cultivating your spiritual side too. In this week’s Shop Talk column, Alexis dives into the theory of “psycho-spiritual development” to provide a holistic perspective on being a full and functional person in the world these days.

It was 2017 when I discovered the Morning Pages.

I was living in NYC. While life looked good superficially – I had a decent job, live-in boyfriend, and Rent the Runway unlimited subscription – inside, I was not exactly thriving. I felt despondent. My chief creative outlet was incorporating “I hate myself” into whatever song was playing on my Spotify.   

 While catching up with a brilliant (and relapse-prone) college friend, he mentioned Morning Pages helped him kick hard drugs. Fascinating, I thought. Perhaps the exercise could aid my anhedonia?

When I volunteered last week to write our post-election reflection, I admit I had a very different message in mind. Like many, I am still struggling to organize my thoughts. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere – underneath the angst, confusion, frustration, and dystopian visions. But wouldn’t you know, in rooting around in my psyche these last few days, I’m also finding glimmers of wisdom, understanding, and hope.

I don’t know about you, but with the election imminent, my screentime is smashing personal records. The doom-scrolling is nonstop: I can’t bear to look at the polls and headlines, yet I also can’t tear myself away.   

With the fast-changing coverage, my emotions cycle hourly from hope to despondency. When I find myself dwelling in despair for too long, I try to reground by remembering that action is the antidote to anxiety.