Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds, This says Laura. This episode is airing in mid March of twenty twenty four. I am going to be interviewing Emily P. Freeman about her new book How to Walk into a Room, which is not really about how to walk into our room.
It's about knowing when.
It is time to move on from one chapter of life to another. And so this book is a lot about endings, and so it's an interesting question because we don't always know that something is ending, and I think people in general don't handle endings necessarily as well as we could, or as mindfully as we could, and so that's a topic we talk about.
A lot in this interview.
So Sarah, have you had a last time for something that you didn't actually know was an ending at the time.
I would say a lot of the stuff I did towards the end of my program director journey through a lot of last times that I may not have really like thought about we're going to be last times, not that the end was so abrupt. I guess maybe I did maybe have some awareness, but I didn't really think of the poignancy of what that really meant, like the last time I interviewed candidates, or the last time I ran a faculty meeting or something like that. And you know,
it's interesting. I don't think I'm someone who does super well with endings in general. I don't mind moving on to things, and I'm certainly I don't shy away from quitting things that are working. I feel like that's actually a strength of mind. But when it comes to ceremoniously like acknowledging the closing of something, I think it's something I need to work on. So I'm excited for this interview. What about you?
Yeah, I was thinking about a couple indings that I didn't necessarily know were endings at the time. My parents had you know, I lived with them in South be In Indiana for a couple of years, and then they were there for about twenty years after I left, and I went to go stay in their house with them one night and a couple of years ago, and it turned out then a couple of months after that that they decided to sell the house and retire and move out to the East Coast. So that was certainly the
last time I will ever be in that house. I mean, I may not wind up in South Bend, Indiana for any particular reason. I mean, there's no real reason to go there if they are not there, and it's not the kind of place you just wind up necessarily passing through. So that's kind of crazy to think too that I might who knows if I'll ever be there again, but certainly I will probably not be in that house that I spent a great many nights in in the course
of my life. Where else to thinking of this? So sometimes you think things are the end and they're not than they are. And then with nursing babies, So if anyone I don't know, some people have read my newsletters for a long long time, and I had mentioned something about it being a last time for I thought in it was probably March or April of twenty sixteen. Then baby Alex, who was you know, about fifteen months at the time, is the last time I've been nursing a baby.
I was like, oh, that's the end of a chapter of my life. But of course, haha. Then we decided to have another baby, so is in it for several more years since it turns out that this particular baby was way into it, so that took longer to end that journey than I thought. But there has, in fact now been a last time for nursing a baby.
It's about that time. It's definitely time.
Yeah, And sometimes it's true you don't know when the end is going to be. And reflecting back on that, I'm not sure I knew my last time with Cameron was giving me my last time because he was my child who like just one day was like I'm not doing this, Like you don't know that's coming necessarily. Maybe there are some signs and that can be really heartbreaking. But then at the same time, maybe it's better not to know that it's the last time, because again, I don't like endings, so maybe that's.
A good thing. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I had more of a sense of that.
Finally, with this the fifth baby is like, okay, the last time for various things with babyhood. But you know the thing about having five kids, as you're probably ready by the end of the fifth kid to have that be the last time you potty train a child, for instance, I'm kind of a thankless task. All right, Well, let's hear what Emily has to say about endings and how we can be a little bit more mindful about them. So Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Emily P.
Freeman to the program. So, Emily, could you introduce yourself to our listeners.
I would love to. It's so great to be here with you today. Well, I am joining you from North Carolina, where I live with my husband John. We've been together twenty two years and we have three kids, twins who are twenty one seventeen, so we've lived the whole life together of navigating. We've almost made it through the teen years, which has been great. But I'm an author, I'm a
podcast host. I have a podcast called The Next Right Thing, where I help people who experience decision fatigue and chronic hesitation discern their next right thing. In faith, work in.
Life awesome, awesome, And so of course we're here talking about Emily's new book which is called How to Walk.
Into a Room.
But we are not literally walking into any rooms with you know, Pizaz or anything like that. It's more of an allegorical sort of thing. So maybe you can explain explain the metaphor for us.
Sure, I had a nine year old say, well that's easy. Watch, I'll do it right now, I can open the door. Watch get me doing it, which I love that, you know. The idea really is that if life were a house, then every room holds a story. And I think we all understand what it's like to walk into a literal room and feel like, yeah, this is a room where I belong, This is my room, this is my place. We also understand the physical feeling of walking into a room where you're like, this is not my place. I
do not belong here. But really, the question that I'm positing in this book is the question of what do you do when a room that you're in is no longer a room where you belong? What do I do when I'm having to discern, oh, this was my place vocationally or connection wise or friend group wise or volunteer work wise, and then you begin to realize, oh, something has shifted either in the room, in the people around me, or in myself, and I need to discern, Okay, what
do I do? How do I leave this place? Is it time to leave this place? And what am I going to do next? So, because that's where I have found in conversations with people about decision making, where we feel the most stuck is when we're considering leaving a space, especially one that we either fought really hard to get to or means a whole lot to us.
Absolutely, I mean, I find this concept of endings fascinating because everyone knows there's a beginning to something. I mean, you start something, you come up with new ideas, you
plunge into things. But everything also has an end, right, Like, everything is going to end at some point, whether it's that eternal weekly staff meeting, like there's going to be a Tuesday where there isn't a staff meeting, or probably before that, a time you were not leading it or whatever it is, but there's going to be a Tuesday without it. Right, you know, there's an end to absolutely, I mean, I mean, do people really think about that?
I mean, as you study decision making, I mean, do people go into most things knowing there is going to be an end or even thinking about that.
It's such a great point because I think we often think when something ends, we're surprised by it. We feel like we have made wrong choices. We feel like maybe I've wasted my time and maybe I'm doing something wrong or I've done something wrong, when in reality, things ending is the normal, healthy human rhythm of life. But because we expect that if I'm doing if I've made the right choice to begin with, and if I'm doing the right things in the room, then nothing will ever change.
And I think that's the thing that we need to shift our narrative about, because the reality is, for one thing, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it forever. And I think sometimes we think like, oh, but I went to college for this job and I am really good at it, and people would kill to have this position, So who am I. We start to have like labels on ourselves, like I must be selfish, I must be an idiot, I must not know what
I'm doing. If I'm considering walking away from this thing or considering trying something new where I have to God forbid be a beginner again. And so I think a big part of our work is to begin to change our narrative about what it means to be successful, what it means that this place worked for me. Because the reality is, if you were in a job for five ten years and you start to sense a change, it doesn't mean you wasted five or ten years of your life.
It means you lived those five or ten years and now something has changed and it's time to do something else. But it doesn't have to mean something about me as a human person. It doesn't have to be an identity thing.
Yeah, I mean, because I guess that's the that falls in. You know, we need to be better about dealing with me. Called the chosen endings in life. You know that you talk about how there are anticipated endings. I mean, you kind of hope your kids will graduate from high school at some point and go on to whatever the next thing is for them. There's the forced endings, which seem unfortunate sometimes but it happens, you know, you lose a job or whatever else. It's you know, these things happen.
It's the chosen endings that are the complicated ones.
They're the ones where we have to decide to stay or go, and sometimes we would rather someone else decide it for us. Unfortunately, we can't most of the time delegate our decision making when it comes to our own lives. We thankfully have choice, but sometimes that makes it complicated because we want to make so desperately. We want to make the right one, and we're afraid we're going to mess it all up.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I've ever heard that from people like a They were actually kind of relieved to be laid off or whatever it is that you know, because they were on their way out, but this made the decision for them. In your book, you talk about the fact that you moved a lot as a kid, and I wonder if that has contributed to your sense of understanding that things end in a way that I think some people don't.
It's interesting you say that, because I don't know that I have fully put that together, but I think you might be right. My dad was in a We moved a lot when I was a kid. He was a disc jockey on the radio, which is so funny. People like, oh, was you were you in the military. It was your dad in the military. No, he was in radio, but it did.
You had to go as often for radio we did the military.
And you move around, and so I do think that afforded me a worldview that understood that if you want to make friends here, you better do it quickly because this isn't going to last forever. And in some ways that's really sad to think of. But in another way, it was a character building exercise as a kid that I didn't even know because I got to meet a lot of different people and I got to learn that this thing can be good for as long as it's good,
and also if it's terrible, it won't last forever. And so I think I've experienced that as a kid. I would not have articulated it that way. In contrast, my husband John, he was born in, grew up in, and we still live in his hometown. So when we talk about, you know, there have been times in when you have twenty years together, there's times when you think about, like what if we were to move or go to this other place. We haven't done it yet. We've moved houses,
but not towns, and our conversation is really different. His way of thinking about making a change is different than mine. I see such value now, like being in one place and having roots and our kids are in one place. He sort of has more of like whoa would it be like to be someplace else? And I think it's really important to recognize and to know about ourselves what our own narratives of staying and leaving are, because they're going to inform all of the decisions we make.
Absolutely.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back talking about some specific endings that have happened in your life that maybe you can share
how you made those decisions. Well, I am back interviewing Emily P. Freeman, who is the author of the brand new book how to Walk into a Room Again, not literally walking into a room, We hope you figured that out a few years ago, but how we make decisions about making big changes in our lives, and particularly as we're talking about today, how we know whether.
To end things.
Earlier, you mentioned if you're in a room that you've perhaps fought for, or helped create, or anything like that, it can be particularly challenging to figure out that it might be time to end things. And you talk about two experiences that you have had with ending things that
I'd like to talk on both of them. One was ending your involvement in a business that you had helped start, So maybe you can talk a little bit about that and what led to your decision to end there and how you made that choice.
We started this business seven eight years ago, and it was an online company for writers to help writers kind of figure out that they had a voice and to maybe if they wanted to get published, to help them understand what that looks like. And so it was all about balancing the art of writing the business of publishing. But it started out, as sometimes these things do, as a hobby. It was sort of like a side thing.
We made a little money, but over time, specifically during the COVID years, that hobby grew into a full time gig.
And it was surprising. It was a gift. But before I knew it, this thing that I had started on the side and was really happy about and loved and enjoyed, and there were hard parts about it, but as all things go, but now it became kind of front and center, and I went from sort of being like a creative and being able to express myself as a writer to helping other people express themselves as writers to then managing
a team who could help the people. So I went from sort of being the maker to being more of a manager. And I don't know if you've read Paul Graham's essay about maker time and manager time, but I recognized very quickly that manager time is not the way I roll, and so that was a big contributor to me understanding and recognizing, like, my days are probably numbered
in this type of business. But much like you know I talk about in endings all the time, we really want for our endings to line up with like it's time to go and I feel ready, And those are wonderful times when that happens. But the reality is most of us live in the gap in between, which is I'm ready to go, but it's not time. And that's
where I found myself with this business decision. And there were lots of things involved, but the bottom line is I was ready to go about three years before I was able to go, and so there was a a lot of things that had to happen in those three years. It was a wonderful character building time of learning patience. If the opposite is true for you, where it's time
to go, but you're not ready. That can be a great time to build courage where you're having to step forward into something even though you don't feel ready at all. And so I ended up about a year or so ago, sold my shares in that company and was able to end end things there. And it was bittersweet. There were hard parts that I was glad to leave behind, but there were really lovely parts and lovely people that I
was sad to leave behind. But again, it doesn't mean that I chose wrong or that it was wrong to go into that business. It was just there was a time for it, and then that time came to an end.
Well. I like how you have that rubric there that it's like you can be ready, but the change is not ready to happen. Right. It could also be that people are ready for you to move on and you are not quite ready.
For that as well.
I mean, I wonder how you can discern if it's, you know, if you are pushing things for it, if it's that it's not ready, or that something like the is going on, you know that where maybe you're just procrastinating on pushing this forward.
Right, listen, procrastination as a whole. Could we write a whole book about that. We could. We could, But I think there are some questions that you can ask yourself. I mean, when I was considering not only that the business space, but other spaces in my life, if is it time for me to make a change? And how can I know for sure? And a few questions I asked myself were one, are there corners, sections, people, or
parts of this room that I'm avoiding? In other words, am I hesitant to turn the lights all the way on? Are there things that I'm like turning a blind eye to that I don't want to look at? And what would happen if I did look directly at them? That's one piece of information. Another one asking myself, is anyone or anything missing from this room? And if so, who or what? And recognizing that doesn't mean that if there are people missing or things missing, you got to get
out of there. No, it's just a bit of information to recognize who belongs here, who doesn't belong here, who has already left this space, who's walking into this space? And these are more pieces of information. A final question you can ask yourself when you're thinking about the rooms of your life if it might be time or not is to what extent can I be myself here? And this can be true not just for a job or a faith community you're a part of, or a volunteer position.
It can also be true in a relationship. So, for example, do you have to change yourself to such a degree that you don't even recognize yourself in order to inhabit this room? Or if people who know and love you show up when you're with this person or in this space, would they recognize you? Would they see a version of you that they know and can support and get behind, or are they like, are you feeling like you're constantly having to censor yourself or edit yourself or muffle your
own ideas or opinions? Those are just the more you answer and look at some of those questions, And there's ten of them that I share that are good to think about. That can give you again, it's not a yes or no, but it can give you some arrows to know that you're moving in a direction of either walking towards the door or maybe staying in this space, but maybe making some changes along the way.
Yeah, well, what do you mean about that? That you should yield to the arrows rather than obsessing over answers. I guess the idea is that maybe you don't have to make a decision about ending or not ending immediately, but there are things you can kind of pay attention to along the way.
Sometimes when we recognize that we feel just sort of a general sense of stuckness or like a discomfort a lot of us, what we want to do is I feel uncomfortable, I don't like it, I need to make a change. And sometimes that's true, but I would venture to say a lot of times that's a little premature. Is that the first sign of discomfort is a time to begin to pay attention, ask yourself some questions, and to begin to look for arrows. What we want is
a final answer I'm uncomfortable, solve it. What's the decision I need to make? But I would love to begin to encourage us and myself included, to slow our role a little bit and to begin to enter into what is more a process of discernment, which is, rather than looking for I have a question I need an answer yesterday, is to enter into I have a question, what is maybe an arrow to one next right thing that I
can do today? And I might not know the final answer I might have to follow three, five, ten arrows before I get to my final decision. But to know that's a healthy process of decision making. And when you make your decisions that way, if you're afforded the time to do it, when you make that decision, you do it more wholeheartedly. You do it from a place of more confidence, so that five months from now, if things are really hard again, you're not wondering, like so much,
did I make the wrong decisions? Like No, I took my time and I did what I could, and I I followed the arrows the best I knew how So it can give you confidence not just for now, but for later too.
Yeah, and to make sure that you're ending the right thing. I mean, I think when we get upset sometimes and feel stuck, we might think that everything in life needs to change, or the most obvious thing needs to change, as opposed to I don't know something else that you
haven't even thought of. So with that, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the other change I mentioned earlier, the ending that was a church you helped found, so that you and your husband helped start a church, and then you decided at some point along the way that you needed to leave that. It sounds like that was even more fraught for you than the business decision.
It was, well, we didn't actually help start the church, but we were a part of the church when they were moving into a new building, and so we were kind of really a part of getting that going. And it was a real community thing, you know, joining in it was our place, you know, and I think we all understand what it's like to be part of a community where you walk in and most people know who you are, your kids have grown up there. If you're sick, people bring you meals.
You know.
It's a place where we spent our time, where we gave money and when it was appropriate to do so, and where we just generally enjoyed being. And you know, when that's connected to something deeply rooted in you, like your faith, then that's even another layer of connection in a space. And so this was a space that we felt really close to and was a really meaningful place for us. But as these things go, this was not
an overnight decision. You know, this was a place that we loved, but also there were questions that we had there and looking back, you know, it was maybe a two or three year process really of asking ourselves questions like are the stakes too high for us to stay? And sort of once the stakes of for us staying felt like they outweighed the risk of leaving, that's when
we decided to kindly finally make that change. But again, that was one that was following a lot of arrows on the way out because the stakes were so high, because we were so rooted in this community. And that is not a lighthearted decision that we made. And it's one, honestly, four years later, that we're still wrestling with, not whether or not we made the right choice. I believe that we did for us at the time, but just wrestling to find and look for what does it look like
to find community? Now? What does it look like to belong to a new faith community? And we're doing that slowly, but man, it's that process is a lot slower than I would prefer, honestly.
Yeah, well, I'm curious.
I mean, it sounds like we have to understand that with endings, with decisions, there's going to be some regret either way.
I mean, so if you're hoping for a regret free decision, you should probably rethink that.
Yes, that's an excellent point.
So you're going to write either way, it's always going to be hard. Although one thing I found fascinating and when you're in the process of this discernment, figuring out, you know, following the errors do I say, do I.
Go, you began writing haiku.
So let's talk about the important of sort of regular daily rituals as you are trying to make decisions about your life.
Rituals can be so kind. I grew up in a self inflicted kind of rigorous way of life, like kind of gave myself rules and if I didn't follow them, I felt terrible about it. But that's not really what I mean by ritual here. Really, it's just any type of rhythm that you can engage that helps you be more fully yourself. And sometimes, you know, some of the things, especially in endings, when things end, some of the things that we reach for that used to be familiar and
felt right. When something ends, some of our rituals and rhythms changed too, and the things that maybe used to feel right and that we used to enjoy, maybe they don't feel so right anymore, maybe they don't feel like us. And I just want to say that out loud, because I think that's normal and good and when that happens, if that happens, maybe it could be helpful to experiment playfully with do rituals and rhythms and so one that I did. You know, for me, I found it to
be hard. You know, prayer is a big part of my life, but I found the way I used to pray to be really different than the way that I was wanting to engage that practice, and so instead I started to write haiku. Now let me just be clear, Laura. It was not like the traditional Japanese good God, it's not good, but it was like what you learn in like middle school or so seven syllable five And I did it, and you know, I would put an and or something in there to kind of make it work,
which is not what you're supposed to do. But you know what, it was not for publishing. It was just for me. It was just to kind of continue to engage my own practice of expressing myself when long form journaling was not accessible to me anymore at that time. Just my brain wasn't working that way. But five seven
five I could do that, and I did. And let me tell you, I mean I probably wrote one hundred of them during that season of life, just you know, going through and some of them, you know, when you write a hundred, a few of them are good, most of them are terrible. But I found it to be a really just a way to may not take myself so seriously during that time that was difficult. And now I have I have a one hundred high coud ap.
Prove it, yeah, which you can do what you wish with. At this point, well, I wanted to revisit one point that you made it earlier, just that the ending does not define the story that you're quote from the book. So maybe you could just elaborate a little bit more on that that just because something ended doesn't mean it was the wrong thing, or that it was bad or.
Anything like that. It just ended.
I think sometimes this is most clear in something like job loss or maybe even a breakup, where you're like, that was a terrible ending, like that, just it just did not go the way I thought it would go. It did not end the way I hoped it would end. A lot of times we imagine the final episode of our favorite sitcom and we think that's how my ending's gonna go. It's gonna be a movie ending, and it never almost never is. If you get it, cheers to you,
but most of us don't. I think the temptation, though, is to paint the entire experience with the same hues that happened at the end. And the reality is we are whole people who live whole lives, and we can appreciate the gifts of the experience even if it ended terribly. We just can, and I think sometimes we have to,
and that's looking at the experience as a whole. We may not be able to do that right away, and I think that's important to notice, is that if you have a terrible breakup, it just might have to be terrible for a while, and that person has to be a villain. But over time, I think we might understand that none of us are all hero or all villain and to help us become more wholeheartedly who we are. I think it's good to reflect on our experiences for
what they were, both the beautiful and the difficult. But the ending doesn't get to hijack the narrative. The ending is a plot point, it's not the whole story.
Yeah, now, that's good to now, I mean, especially with things like relationship and people who have kids together, for instance. I mean, if the relationship hadn't happened, you wouldn't have these kids. But the relationship ended, it happened. You know, you have to accept that good things can happen despite maybe something not going well at the end. Well, speaking of endings, we're coming up on the end of ours.
We always end our interviews with a love of the week, so this is something that we are enjoying right now. And since I'll go first, so you can think of something to be you know, pop culture, food, book, whatever.
And I'm going to go with given that you're talking about haiku poetry rules.
I mean, longtime listeners know I'm writing a sonnet a week, you know, two lines a day, so fourteen lines in the course of a week, and been doing this for a while.
But what the reason I like it is the rules.
Make you think about it. But then it makes if you could stick with the rules, it's like at least kind of decent, right because it's done the rules, Whereas if it's total free form, you know, there's a lot more variability. I mean, it could be great, could also be awful. So I like poetry rules, so I'm a big fan of the haikup rules, even if we're not doing the proper like Japanese walk off to think of the thing that you know you're not saying that's off there in the distance.
How about you? What are you loving this week?
Well? You ask this on the day after I just finished speaking of the end of a series. I just finished watching Ugly Betty. Okay, didn't see that coming, did you?
Now?
I did not, but I missed it when it came out originally, And so I just watched the series and it's just such a delightful show. America Ferreira stars in it, and she's wonderful.
She's great.
Yeah, she's so great. And so I was like, I should watch that series, and I did, and I just finished it and I'm nostalgic about it because it's over.
There are no more, but there are no episodes coming out. It really is truly over.
Yeah.
Well, now you just need to find the next thing, right, That's what I need, the next right thing, exactly right? All right? Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us. And why don't you tell our listeners where they can find you?
Oh, you can find almost everything at Emilypfreeman dot com. It's my name. I also have the next writing podcast we drop every Tuesday, and then on subsec I'm the sole Minimalist.
Awesome. Well, we'll be sure to check that out. Thanks so much for joining us, Emily.
Thank you.
All right, Well we are back.
I was interviewing Emily P. Freeman about her book How to Walk Into a Room. So, Sarah, this question, I guess start for you, and I guess for me too. This listener writes, can you share what it was like coming back from an injury? So Sarah had a leg injury this fall that precluded her running for a couple months, but then she has now been back and as readers and listeners know, she recently got a lifetime pr in the half marathon, which is pretty awesome to do that in your forties.
Many of us do not.
Get faster over time, so Sarah has defied time in all sorts of ways. So we want to hear a little bit about how she came back from that. And he thought she had about that, and then the listener asked how my back was doing. So I'll give a one minute thing about that later, but let's hear about you, Sarah.
Yeah, I was, I mean It was a rough couple months there for listeners. I talked about it, but it was a very unfortunate incident with me not putting my car into park properly and then basically getting my leg kind of like a crush injury underneath the door of the car. Not a lot of fun, extensive bruising. I thought I had torn my meniscus, but I didn't, so there was There was actually no like.
Bad structural damage.
It was just eight ton of like crazy amounts of hematoma soft tissue damage like in my leg, and I couldn't run for a while. It took me a really long time to agree to that. I think trying to make it work and then I would like fall and make things worse, and was finally like, Okay, this isn't happening. And I did just do nothing for a couple of weeks, and then I realized that I think I could bike,
so we got a peloton. We rented a peloton, which is something you can do, you don't have to purchase one outright, and that actually was very helpful just to give me an outlet. So I continued to do some strength training that I felt like I was able to do and I did biking, and I really didn't run for a while. And you know, it's so funny because it felt like such a long time while it was happening, especially because I was so used to running this very steady,
high mileage. It just felt like my life just felt different, and I was very unhappy about it. Once I found the biking, that was like, Okay, this actually works. This is like a really nice substitute. And now looking back, I'm like, that was such a blip, like it was nothing, because I mean it wasn't nothing. It was about two months. But by the end of December I was running really well.
We had taken a trip to a Millia Island and I was like, oh, I'm back, Like I just felt really good, and January was great training and I can honestly say one thing that made me so sad was I just felt like I was making this great progress around doctor over right when I got hurt. But I now feel like I'm actually even like in better speed wise shape than I was back then, So we're resilient.
We can come back. And I guess the thing I would say is like, don't try to rush it, and definitely seek out the types of support that feel right, whether that's physical therapy, whether that's actual therapy, whether that's talking to friends, and just don't try to rush it, because like this idea that you're just going to like lose all your fitness in five minutes is just not true.
We can come back.
Yeah, sometimes we think our endings are not in fact endings, that it was not the end of her running journey. That I keep coming back to this idea that time is the secret ingredient in all sorts of things. As this is airing, I'm about two months out from when I had my back incident slash leg incident that basically left me bedbound and my pretty standard run of the mill aging person bulging discs pressing down on nerves and
rendering life undoable for a while. And you know, I took my steroids and painkillers and stayed immobile pretty much until I could start moving. But it's fascinating to watch you just you do, in fact, often keep getting better just through time, right if you're not doing things to make it worse, and you're trying to slowly develop new abilities that you had before. And so I've been kind of fascinated to watch that. Although it has been very
frustrating in its own way. I'm still not running. I mean, maybe when this airs I will be. This is late February when we're recording it. We're in a hotel room together in Naples. Sarah ran this morning. I did not run with her, but I hope to be back to it eventually. But yeah, you just have to sort of be patient and understand that life can look a little different for a while, and that's not necessarily good or bad.
I mean, I ran every day for three years for a while, and now I haven't run in months, and it's just that that's what life is like right now.
It doesn't mean life will be different in the future. Maybe it will be.
Maybe I'll be back to running all the time, or maybe I won't be. I don't know, but just sort of take it as it comes, and life keeps moving forward. And I if I think back, like in sort of two week chunks, any given day, I don't necessarily feel all that much different than the day before. But if I look back what could I do two weeks ago, and what could I do two weeks before? Then, then I see some real progress. And so that's a little bit more hardening.
Yes, no, it's exciting. The uncertainty piece is hard. It's the hardest part. If you knew exactly what the path was going to look like, and if I could have told myself, oh, in January, it'll be running great, like the whole thing would have been less, less painful. But I guess you're right. Just appreciate the small progress and maybe not try not to be tied to any specific outcome.
Yeah.
Well, people don't like uncertainly. It's why we have trouble with ending. So yeah, but lots of things to think about in this episode. We will be back next week with.
More and making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoe box dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.