A Practice of Staying
On not abandoning yourself when things get uncomfortable.
Every uncomfortable feeling comes with an exit sign glowing above it. Check the phone. Open the fridge. Start a new project. Leave.
Staying is the practice of noticing the sign and not walking through it. Not heroically — just for one more breath than usual. Then maybe one more.
What I keep finding on the other side of that breath is not the catastrophe the leaving was protecting me from. It’s information. The discomfort almost always knows something I don’t.