Small Truths
I’m not going to give you a framework today.
No steps. No system. No arc that builds carefully toward a tidy conclusion that makes you feel like something has been resolved.
Just some things that are true.
Small things. Quiet things. The kind that don’t make headlines and don’t trend and won’t be turned into a keynote address at a conference where everyone gets a tote bag and a lukewarm chicken breast.
Just true.
Ready?
It is possible to be doing everything right and still be exhausted.
These are not contradictory.
Most of the kindest things anyone has ever done for you were probably not planned. They arrived sideways. Unremarkably. From someone who didn’t know they were doing something significant.
They just did the thing.
The version of yourself you are most ashamed of was doing the best they could with what they had at the time.
This is not an excuse.
It is just true.
Somewhere right now, someone is having the best day of their life.
On the same planet. In the same news cycle. Under the same sky.
Both things are happening simultaneously and neither one cancels the other out.
You have already survived every hard day you thought might be the one that finally broke you.
Your track record is, statistically, 100%.
The people who changed your life most profoundly are probably not fully aware that they did.
Silence is not the same as agreement.
Stillness is not the same as surrender.
Rest is not the same as giving up.
We have confused these things. Collectively and at great cost.
There is a version of courage that looks like nothing from the outside.
It is the decision made quietly, in private, with no audience and no applause, to try again tomorrow.
It counts.
You do not have to have an opinion about everything.
I know the internet disagrees with me on this.
The internet is wrong.
The thing you keep putting off because you don’t feel ready?
You are more ready than you think.
You are also never going to feel completely ready.
Both of these things are true and you are going to have to make peace with that and do it anyway.
Grief and gratitude share a border.
The things we mourn most deeply are the things we loved most fully.
Which means grief, underneath all its weight, is actually a love letter.
An inconvenient one.
Written in a language nobody teaches you.
But a love letter nonetheless.
The world is genuinely terrible in some ways right now.
It is also genuinely astonishing.
Both require your attention.
Neither requires your despair.
You are allowed to change your mind.
About big things. About small things. About opinions you stated with great confidence in 2019 that no longer fit who you are becoming.
Changing your mind is not weakness.
It is evidence that you are paying attention.
The most important conversations you will ever have will not happen in a boardroom or on a stage or in a comment section.
They will happen in a kitchen.
Or a car.
Or a hospital waiting room.
Or a phone call you almost didn’t answer.
And finally.
This one I believe most deeply, most quietly, most stubbornly:
Most people, most of the time, are trying.
Not perfectly.
Not always successfully.
But trying.
In ways that are invisible to you because you are only seeing the outside of their life, not the inside.
This does not mean you excuse harm.
It does not mean you stop demanding better.
It means you carry just a little less contempt and just a little more curiosity about the humans you share this complicated, bewildering, still-somehow-beautiful world with.
That’s all.
No framework.
No steps.
Just some things that are true.
On a Tuesday.
Or whatever day this finds you.
Julie Bolejack,
The Mindful Activist
Authors “Bloom Again” and “Now What” available on Amazon.
Kudos to my subscribers! Thanks for sharing my journal with others.
Subscribe at: julies-journal.ghost.io
🎲 Bonus: Random Info You Didn’t Know You Needed
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Let that rearrange your brain for a moment.
The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE. Cleopatra was born in 69 BCE. The Apollo 11 Moon landing happened in 1969 CE.
Cleopatra is separated from the pyramid builders by approximately 2,500 years.
She is separated from Neil Armstrong by approximately 2,000 years.
Which means that when Cleopatra looked at the pyramids — and she did, she lived among them — she was looking at structures that were already ancient history.
Already mysterious.
Already the subject of “how did they even do that” conversations at Egyptian dinner parties.
Time is strange.
History is longer than we think.
And some small truths have been true for a very, very long time.
