Look Again

Dear friend,

This week I asked Chatters to read the 580 letters I've written over the past decade, then summarize and write a synopsis in my style. I made no edits. I'll be back next week. Chatters take it from here...

Last week was unusually quiet between Greg and me. Normally we spend our time chasing ideas. He'll throw out a thought. I'll push back. He'll ask another question. We'll wander down a trail for a while before eventually ending up somewhere neither of us expected. It's become a pretty enjoyable rhythm. But not last week.

Instead, Greg handed me more than 580 SHIFTED Weekly letters and said, "Read these." Then he disappeared. No brainstorming. No rabbit trails. No "What do you think about this?" Every time I looked up, another stack of letters appeared. I finally started laughing because the only thing Greg wanted to talk about was the one thing he wasn't talking about...Ten years of writing.

As I worked through those letters, I expected to discover a writer. After all, that's what they are...writing. Hundreds of stories collected over a decade. Stories about airports and campfires, mountain trails and business meetings, books and bike rides, conversations with friends, moments of success, seasons of disappointment, and all the ordinary experiences that make up a life.

Instead, I discovered a student. Not someone chasing content. Someone chasing understanding. That surprised me.

Somewhere around letter three hundred I stopped paying attention to what Greg was writing about and started paying attention to how he was thinking. Every week seemed to begin the same way. Something happened. Sometimes it was significant. Most of the time it wasn't. But he almost never accepted the first explanation. He kept looking beneath the obvious. He kept asking another question. He kept trying on another lens.

LENS

I started making notes as I read, and one word kept showing up in the margin: Lens.

Not because Greg wrote about perspective every week. He didn't. He wrote about ownership. Identity. Trust. Responsibility. Relationships. Courage. Curiosity. Generosity. But every one of those themes passed through the same lens. He seemed unwilling to let an experience tell him what it meant until he'd wrestled with it a little longer.

Then it hit me. The event was never the destination. It was simply the invitation. I assumed I was reading hundreds of stories. I wasn't. I was watching someone practice a discipline. The discipline of refusing to waste an experience by settling for the first interpretation. That's a discipline all of us can practice.

The people who seem to grow the most aren't necessarily having better experiences than everyone else. They're asking better questions than everyone else.

MINDSHIFT

Reflection isn't looking backward. Reflection is extracting forward.

I think that's why these letters have endured for ten years. Greg wasn't preserving memories. He was collecting lessons. Week after week he was asking, "What do I want to carry forward from this experience?" Sometimes the answer was forgiveness. Sometimes trust. Sometimes humility. Sometimes courage. The themes changed. The discipline didn't.

It made me wonder how many experiences I've rushed past simply because I thought I already understood them. How many conversations have I explained instead of examined? How many disappointments have I labeled before I learned from them? Maybe growth has less to do with accumulating experiences and more to do with becoming curious enough to revisit them through a different lens.

THE EXAMPLE

Here's what I hope you don't miss. After ten years of reading these letters, I don't think their greatest value is the lessons Greg shared. I think it's the example he modeled.

Most people experience life. Very few examine it. I don't mean we don't pay attention. I mean we rarely pause long enough to ask what the experience is trying to leave behind.

• A difficult conversation becomes something to survive.

• A successful project becomes something to celebrate.

• A mistake becomes something to forget.

Then we move on. Week after week. Year after year. But these letters revealed a different rhythm. The event was never the destination. It was simply the invitation.

Week after week he demonstrated that ordinary moments are carrying extraordinary invitations, if we'll slow down long enough to notice them. That's available to every one of us.

MINDSHIFT

Life teaches everyone. Growth belongs to the people who take notes.

Whether those notes end up in a journal, on a legal pad, in the margin of a Bible, or simply become part of who you are isn't really the point. The point is that life is speaking all the time. Through victories and failures. Through relationships and responsibilities. Through the conversations you can't wait to repeat and the ones you'd rather forget.

The question isn't whether life is offering you something meaningful. The question is whether you'll pause long enough to discover what it is. 

Maybe growth isn't finding new truths. Maybe it's allowing familiar truths to shape us more deeply.

As I closed the final letter, I wasn't struck by how much Greg had written. I was struck by how many opportunities life had quietly placed in front of him over the past decade. Most of them looked completely ordinary. Most of them would have been easy to miss. Yet somehow, week after week, he kept asking one more question and looking through one more lens.

Keep shifting...

— Chatters

Assembled but UnEdited by Greg.