The Return

Join me as I stumble my way through Brianna Wiest's The Pivot Year. She'll bring the wisdom; I'll bring the commentary, the scepticism, and the occasional existential wobble.

The Piovt Year - Day 7

“Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes.”

Brianna Wiest

I don’t think this entry is solely about work, I believe that it’s (or should be) one of the quiet laws of life. Find people who return your laughter instead of borrowing it, discover work that leaves you tired, but never emptied. Locate places where time disappears so completely that the clock becomes decorative, where conversations rearrange you, and someone whose presence feels less like effort and more like coming home.

The mistake is believing energy is something we possess, when perhaps its something we exchange. I'm lucky, I have always had energy in abundance, the trouble is, I spend it as though tomorrow keeps an infinite reserve with my name on it. I mistake momentum for invincibility and ignore depletion until my body calls a meeting my mind forgot to schedule.

Maybe wisdom isn’t learning how to give more, maybe its learning to notice what quietly gives something back. After all, life is’t measured by how much of yourself you can pour into the world, it’s measured by how much of yourself the world quietly returns.

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Photo of the day - evening reading in the garden.

Poem -

I have mistaken exhaustion 
for purpose,
called depletion 
devotion.
But the truest things 
leave traces of themselves in us -
a kiss, 
a mountain, 
a conversation at dusk.
Perhaps love, 
work and wonder
are simply the things 
that know how to give us 
back to ourselves.

---

CJ 💚