A Question I'm Sitting With
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Hello Reader, This week, I’m sharing something I noticed, and the question it left. I have walked the same path above the water for years. I know where it narrows, where the dog stops, where you can see the fishing boats coming back if the light is right. On Thursday I found a gate in a wall I pass every time I’m on the cliffs. Stone, old, half swallowed by a fig tree that has been losing its leaves all month. It has certainly been there the entire time I have lived here. I have walked past it several hundred times, and I have never once seen it. I stood there feeling faintly ridiculous, and then something else, which is what I am still sitting with. If a stone gate can stay invisible on a path I walk weekly, what else could I be missing? Not hidden. That is the part I keep turning over. The gate was never hidden. It was in plain sight, on a route I know better than almost any route in my life, and the reason I never saw it is that I already knew what was there. Knowing the path is what kept me from looking at it. I suspect most of what we cannot see about our own lives is like this. Not buried. Not repressed. Simply too familiar to register. The assumptions nearest to us do not feel like assumptions. They feel like the floor, and nobody examines the floor. Which raises the harder question, and this is the one I have no clean answer to. If the things I cannot see are invisible precisely because they are mine, then how would I ever find them alone? I have my own people for this reason. A mentor who has known me for twenty years and is unimpressed by me in the most useful way. A friend who asks one question and then waits past the point of comfort. I don’t think of this as a weakness in my seeing. I think it’s what seeing requires, past a certain depth. And yet I notice how reluctant people are to accept that. The women who come to me are competent beyond question. They have restructured companies, ended marriages, moved countries, buried parents. They arrive slightly embarrassed to need anything at all, as though not being able to see their own floor were a failure of intelligence rather than a fact of standing on it. One of them wrote to me afterward that I had shown her things she did not know she could not see. That sentence has stayed with me for years. Not things she did not know. Things she did not know were being kept from her, by her, in good faith, for reasons that had once made sense. There is a second part to this that I am also sitting with, and it has to do with how quickly seeing wears off. After a retreat, I speak with everyone again within a month of their going home. Not as a courtesy. Around the third week, the old life reaches back for you. The calendar refills. What was obvious on a cliff path starts to sound naive in your own kitchen, and you begin to explain it away with the same fluency you once used to explain away the gate. Having a realization is not the difficult part. Keeping one through an ordinary Tuesday is the whole of the work, and it is nearly impossible to do while alone with it. So the question I am carrying this week is not for you. It is mine, and I offer it in case it is useful. Today's Threshold QuestionWhat have I walked past several hundred times because I already knew what was there? If you find your own version of the gate, I would like to hear about it. I read everything that comes back. With care, P.S. As we near the season of giving, I'd love for you to check out my store where you'll find journals, mugs, clothing and more to inspire and bring a spark of joy to your life (or as a gift to someone who could use a bit of lightness in their life.)
Write Your Healing Story - November 7, 2026Saturday, November 7, 2026, from 9:30 am (arrival) to 6:00 pm. Location: Carvoeiro A one-day memoir writing retreat in the Algarve for:
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