From Mitch
I spent over two decades pouring into people.
Phone calls. Zooms. Small towns and big ones. Stages across the country. Thousands of conversations with thousands of people about living better. Leading better. Living more aligned with who we are.
I loved the work. Deeply.
And somewhere inside all of it. Without ever seeing it coming. I stopped living what I was teaching.
Not from a lack of heartfelt intention. From overextension. I took on more than any one person needs to carry. By choice. Convinced I could hold the weight while waiting for reinforcements that never arrived. Or perhaps that I never quite let in.
In 2021 that chapter started to wind down. And what followed I honestly had no framework for.
Business began to implode. My oldest friend was dying. My best friend diagnosed with a terminal disease. We had all been thick as thieves since childhood. Three became two. And two was becoming one.
And now my own body had begun to speak in the only language it had left. The kind of breaking down that arrives slowly and then all at once from carrying the weight of overresponsibility.
Chronic pain every single day. Osteoarthritis in my neck. Glaucoma. Neuropathy. The kind of brain fog that doesn't lift. That makes the room feel further away than it is. That makes you feel further away from yourself than you ever thought possible. Isolated inside your own body. Inside your own mind.
And then cancer.
And then something magical appeared as a result of the darkness. What I often would refer to as a sucks so good moment.
Sitting on the couch in our quiet desert home. Waiting for my cancer surgery. My amazing wife. Our daughters. Our dogs close by. I awoke to the realization that I had broken my own cardinal rule. Of learning to give it away. Without giving yourself away.
It wasn't a call to judgment. The skill to use everything for my growth hadn't escaped me. It was a call to remembering. And to what I had forgotten. That decades of practice can't always solve. My own humanity.
That couch turned out to be one of the most honest places I had ever been.
What followed wasn't a healing plan.
It was a reawakening. Not starting over. Starting from everything I already was.
It was a choice to change.
I stopped treating myself as a collection of symptoms to be fixed one at a time. And I started seeing myself as whole. Physical. Mental. Emotional. Spiritual. All of it connected. All of it asking to be remembered at once.
Not just me broken into tiny pieces. But me as one person. Already complete.
Not long after. As I began to transform. To change. And ultimately to heal. I was walking to the market. Deep in thought. Wondering how I could make greater sense of all of these life experiences and what would come next as an offering of contribution and service.
And then I heard her.
A little girl. Giggling infectiously. Fully present. In her moment of unbridled play. Chasing bubbles floating past her in the breeze.
A smile spread from ear to ear across my own face as I watched.
And then I noticed. I wasn't the only one. Around me people had stopped too. Young and old. Men and women. All walks of life. A community unto itself. Celebrating this young girl.
I was reminded in that moment that community is what we hunger for. Joy. Play. To be seen. Felt. Appreciated above all else. A place to go when we forget and need to remember.
I stood there and felt something open in my chest.
We had built a world that asks us to forget moments like that. And underneath all the hurrying. A world quietly aching to remember them.
I knew in that moment what I was building. And why.
I spent over three years rediscovering and finding my new Self. That little girl reminded me in thirty seconds why it was so worth it.