Hello from sunny California! I'll get straight to what's been top of mind this week for me – personal growth in every aspect of life. Now that I'm approaching 40, I feel like I've finally settled into this idea of having a great baseline for different areas in life. Having a great baseline is a very good thing but in my experience as a human being, we never stop wanting more. We're constantly striving for better. It could be as simple as how can I make this corner of my living room better and as deep as I need to take a close look at patterns that I've been repeating all my life, rip them apart, and reinvent myself completely.
I think growth is a beautiful thing but with any type of personal growth comes resentment, guilt, uncertainty. When we start doing the uncomfortable work of looking into what needs tweaking, some things may come up that we're not yet ready to face. What I'm learning in this phase of life is how to navigate the uncertain, uncomfortable pieces that must be looked at in order for any amount of personal growth to happen. So, I'll leave you with this: the best way to grow in any aspect of life is to get really honest about what's coming in the way of that growth. Once you start being honest about it and get past the discomfort, you'll find yourself feeling a lot more free to express yourself and give yourself the grace to move forward without judging your past self for not knowing what only time could teach.
We don't remember experiences as they happened. We remember their highlights reel. The peak-end rule is a quirk of memory first named by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. When we recall an experience, we don't average out every moment of it, we remember the most intense point (the peak) and how it ended, and let those two moments stand in for the whole thing. A vacation with one perfect sunset and a rushed, stressful last day gets remembered as "stressful," even if the other twelve days were lovely and uneventful. A dinner party gets remembered by its best joke and its final goodbye, not the quiet stretches in between. It's a strange kind of editing our minds do without asking us and it means the ordinary middle of things, the parts we're actually living through most of the time, barely register in the story we tell later. There's something worth sitting with here: if endings and peaks carry disproportionate weight, then how we close things — a conversation, a trip, a chapter, a day — matters more than we tend to give it credit for. Not because the middle didn't count. But because memory, unfairly and reliably, decided it would count less.
