As I half-know myself down the path into each of the 18 chapters, some sentences are ahead of me. They say what I don’t understand yet. Other sentences are behind me, still catching up to what I mean. You write the first bad, bad, not very good draft to deal with what you find about yourself. Eventually, an editor will get to it next and do the painful, beautiful work of making it better. But before that happens, I want you to see it like this — unfinished.

The book is a book about trusting oneself and the wonderful reluctance we all have to be seen and known by the world. The working title is The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story, and I’m writing it with wonderful Jordan Soliday. It’s about the fear of being seen, the cost of staying hidden, and what becomes possible when you let yourself be visible by articulating your life story. It’s the most personal thing I have ever made.

Here are eighteen passages, one from each chapter, in order. No explanation or setup, arriving at you the way I hope the whole book arrives: experience first.

If something lands, tell me. If something pulls, pushes, or puzzles you — I want to hear it. The comments are open. Your response can help me find my voice and shape the book! Thank you.

The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story

Samir Selmanovic with Jordan Soliday (18 Excerpts)

Part 1: The Unstoried Life

Chapter 1: The Fear of Being Seen

This Eastern Bloc car held us the way a fist holds dice or seeds — tight, dark, shaking with something it couldn’t contain. We were boys who couldn’t yet live the life we could already feel. We sensed life the way you sense a sound before it reaches you, in the bones first and then the ears. What can one do with all this glory bursting inside?

Chapter 2: Larger Than Your Life

I know this when I wake at three in the morning, caught in a recurring dream of the same shape. Usually, there’s something I want to prove. Or there’s something that has to be a certain way. Sleep returns only when I let the world have a story larger than mine. The joy I’m talking about here is in experiencing the world not being the way I want it. It is the joy of participating with, and often being defeated by, the forces greater than the life of my body, my emotions, and my oh-so-important ideas.

Chapter 3: Your Epic Ordinary

You go to work, you are at work, you come back from work. You eat, sleep, and talk with friends. You kiss him, he kisses you back. You say sorry. You say thank you. You say things you regret and say sorry again. All of it — the mundane, the repetitive, the Tuesday of it — is more magical than fiction. The other world is in this world.

Chapter 4: Living the Whole Time

An experienced heart surgeon and his apprentice are hunkered over an open heart when the teacher says, “Now you have to perform this sequence of actions before the heart gives up and the patient is gone. You have 60 seconds.”

“So, take your time,” he adds.

Hurry is not the same as urgency. Hurry keeps you on the surface, away from the depths where life quietly springs.

Hurry will slow you down. Hurry will force you into hiding.

Chapter 5: Harvesting on Time

Our lives change gradually, then all at once. When the time is right, they turn abruptly and completely, whether we can name the turning or not. Every four to six years, something recalibrates. When we miss the harvest of these seasons, we let the fruit die on the vine.

Chapter 6: Creating an Artifact

Between subway cars, when the train is running, the noise can swallow whatever you bring into it. I would step into the gap between cars, hold onto the chain, and scream with full lungs. Everything. When I walk back into the car to find my seat, my face is calm, and, at times, I catch a glance from a seated passenger, a small nod that says: I get it. What I was doing between those subway cars, without knowing it, was making an artifact.

Part 2: The Epic Ordinary Way

Chapter 7: The Act of Coming Out

This time, I was in a national park in Colorado, in the middle of my adult life. This time, the forest said nothing. It listened to me instead. After everything that had happened in those twenty years, after all the becoming and unbecoming, the moving and the staying, the years when I could not trust my own story, I spoke back to the forest. I am. So there.

Chapter 8: What Makes You Beautiful

The polished version of you is hard to see. The explained version of you is harder to hear. The version of you that has been carefully kept is, by that careful keeping, slightly out of reach. On the other hand, people experience your honesty as presence, the felt sense that you are actually in the room, no longer manipulating the distance between yourself and the world.

Chapter 9: The Decoy of Knowledge

Knowledge protects us from the danger of being seen before we believe we are ready and from the experience of showing up unfinished, uncertain, mid-sentence in our story. As long as we are still figuring things out, we have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why now and here are not the time and space to risk being seen. Knowledge is never complete. Knowledge is a room with very good locks.

Chapter 10: The Decoy of Happiness

The cruel irony of the Western world today is that it forces you to want to be happy. If you’re not happy, you are under suspicion. “How are you?” has never been a question. You’d better be fine. For my first five years in the United States, this kept me from experiencing sorrow in public. I began to miss the sorrow.

Chapter 11: The Decoy of Meaning

We are meaning-seeking creatures. As far as we can surmise, animals don’t ask why. The stone does not ask why. We can’t help it. We wake in the morning, and the first thing the mind does, before coffee, before language, is reach for the thread.

Chapter 12: HEAR (Stop Talking)

About a million years ago, we invented fire. 780,000 years ago, we began cooking. We could rest. We could gather together and stare into the flame. With the scent of charred meat in the air, and in the hush after the communal chewing, we encountered something that later civilizations would treat as a problem to be solved, and the first doorway into human depth: boredom. Blessed boredom.

Chapter 13: IMAGINE (Enchant Yourself)

We imagine what is. Not merely what was or could be. We imagine what is. Say you’re watching a film with no sound. The same film, the same images, the same faces — twenty people watching together. Ask them afterward what they saw, and you will get twenty stories. Not twenty opinions about the same story. Twenty different stories, each internally consistent, each entirely plausible. Imagination is the way we receive reality.

Chapter 14: EMBODY (Make It Happen)

It is like a morning Catholic mass. But holier. Like a Protestant prayer. But holier. Like bowing down together in a mosque. But holier. Like a shaman dancing around the fire. But holier. This is the liturgy of ordinary life. Not a metaphor for it, but rather the thing itself, happening in a Harlem apartment, between two people who chose each other in a moldy basement in Chicago and have kept choosing their lif.

Part 3: Living Alive

Chapter 15: The Visible Life

The Solingen knife is in my kitchen. Gnarly but still cutting. When I pick it up for a special occasion, my father’s hands are on it. My mother’s hands. My sister’s reluctance to hand it across the ocean. The tomato salad and the amber light of a sunset on the Adriatic Coast, everything that was ever held by the thing that held it, all there. This is what the visible life makes possible. Not a monument, but an artifact that carries love into the future long after the initial lovers have passed.

Chapter 16: Give Us What’s Yours to Give

You have walked in the dark and sat on a chair that holds you. You have made a truce with fear. You have learned that, over time, your honesty becomes your story. You realize that your story is not a decoration of your life. You may have said to yourself: I want it all. Good. Have it all. Now here is the part you did not expect: your life story is not about you or your life.

Chapter 17: You in the World

Most people change their story when they get tired of it. That’s not a failure. That’s the organism doing what organisms do — growing past the container that held them long enough. The old story goes slack. You feel something is off before you can name it. You start thinking: I can’t keep repeating this story; I don’t like who I am when I’m telling it; others are tired of it; I am tired of it. All the while, you don’t even notice that the bigger and more honest story is already here. Its current is already floating you out.

Chapter 18: Lifelong Skill

Now close the book and test it: one scene, one conversation, one choice. The smaller the step, the better.

May you find the courage to let yourself experience being different. Count on undignified moments, welcome some humiliations, and discover you are made equal to it all. May you dance more so that the angels in heaven will find themselves lucky to work with you.

—

If something in you wants to tell your own story or a loved one’s, start by downloading our 5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story guide at www.epicordinary.com. It’s free, but you won’t feel like it.

I was in Tillamook, Oregon, picking up an eight-week-old puppy named Lucca, and the trip was fifty years in the making. As a self-employed, screen-facing, wannabe writer, I needed the companionship of a sentient being. I remembered: when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home, and six months later, she was too much, and he took her away.

Now pushing sixty, I was six again.

Ahead of me was a two-hour evening ride to the airport, a six-hour flight, and two hours of local transportation to Harlem, New York City. I wasn’t worried. I had a lot of love to give. And a strategy. When she wails, I will be silent. When she stops wailing, I will talk to her.

I readied the car for her and hopped behind the wheel. Lucca directed her eyes at me from behind the mesh on the other side of the carrier screen. The wailing, honed by evolution to be unbearable, began. I waited until she stopped and started by introducing myself.

“Hi, pup. I am Samir, and I am human. As a result of millions of coincidences, you and I are here now, just the two of us. A two-species encounter in a black rented Kia. You’ve just lost your mom, dad, siblings, and a loving home here in this beautiful Cheese Country. Now, love, we are heading into the night.”

She was terrified, I could tell, and I was helpless.

While thinking of what to say next, she slipped back into the unbearable mode. The woman told me to consider her wailing a survival trick. It wasn’t a trick. Lucca was lost.

I told her about the new home awaiting her in Harlem. “It’s the most recognizable neighborhood name in the world!” I exclaimed. I described each room, each family member, and the streets awaiting her. When I stopped, she took it to another level with quieter, cuter, and far more unbearable sounds.

“I hear you, I really do,” I said, mirroring her voice. “You know, when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home to my eleven-year-old sister and me. We named her Lola, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. We did not know how to potty-train her or stop her from chewing my schoolbooks and my mom’s new white high-heeled shoes. My dad, without telling us, took her away. My sister stayed in her room for three days, my dad behaved as if the abduction didn’t happen, and my mom kept herself busy.”

This realization about my six-year-old self felt like the dark green night descending over us as we drove through Oregon. I became quiet. Lucca did, too.

Two creatures in a black rented Kia, heading into the night.

“Since I was six, a part of me has been sad and mad,” I told Lucca, “Until now. Now I have you. Would you have me?”

She stayed silent, and I took it as a yes.

At the end of the green night ride, Lucca and I got on the plane in Portland.

I had a problem. No matter how much I tried to cajole or coax her to go, she would not go. Hours were passing, and I thought that if I failed in making it happen, she was going to explode.

In the middle of the flight, I took her to the bathroom, spread a pee pad on the floor, and assumed a position with one leg planted at the door to prevent anyone from pushing it open and hurting the puppy, and the other planted behind the toilet.

When I lowered Lucca onto the pad, I was 100 percent sure that she would relieve herself on that damn pad.

She lowered herself onto the pad. And fell asleep.

After about thirty minutes of hovering over her like a drone, my leg muscles started twitching, and the flight attendant knocked. With my nose out the door, I described my predicament. People in line pitied me, and since there was another bathroom across the aisle, I was given a pass. But no business was done in our place. I tried the damn pad routine again at the Newark airport. To no avail.

A two-hour car ride, two hours at the airport, a six-hour flight, and one hour on the subway resulted in nothing.

Twelve hours after I picked her up, we came to our apartment, I took her out of the carrier, and while I was distracted with unfolding that damn, damn pad for her, she relieved herself on the wood floor, then the rug, then on the kitchen runner. This one-minute, three-stage shit show erased my idea of having an acceptable measure of control over a puppy.

Four weeks had passed. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t exercise. I met my work obligations, but only barely. I showered only when absolutely necessary. This was a standoff between the will of a grown man and the bladder, intestines, and teeth of a baby canine.

Further collateral damage came in the form of a stressed-out, late-for-work wife. She was completely exhausted just by watching me do this.

I looked out the window at the city streets and despised the dog owners prancing around with their perfectly tamed bags of shit. Why wouldn’t these neighbors have stopped me? Maybe put me in a kennel until my dream of having a puppy dissipated.

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Four months into it meant four months of our lives lost forever chasing a barking, biting, chewing, diaperless devil’s own baby, destroying everything she senses to be precious to us.

I wanted to sleep, I wanted to stand under the hot water in the shower. I wanted to cook a meal. I wanted to get back to my work. I wanted to, in peace, think about the meaning of life. And maybe, if the cosmos would have mercy, be happy again.

Then one day, I was cooking, just cooking. I was taken away by my thoughts for the first time since Oregon when I spotted her in the middle of the room and was startled by a realization.

“Oh gosh. I am a dog owner.”

She was sitting with her butt on the ground, front legs straight, tall back, fully alert, with those eyes of hers—not beady, but rather with enough white in them that you can’t help but believe there’s a person in there.

I had forgotten I had her. One sliver of a moment, the first in four months, of not watching her.

She was now watching me.

She was watching me with a patient steadiness I had earned. And in that gaze, without a word, without even knowing she was doing it, she said:

“I see your effort. I see how these months have cost you. And I am telling you: I am worth it. I come to you with a gift you do not yet understand. But you will.”

I went back to cooking.

She kept watching me for so long; her gaze became the gaze of life itself. The steadiness of her eye contact told me we are not talking about the costly months here, but years, decades, all the way to the beginning. Life said to me:

“I see your effort. I see every story you’ve told yourself. Every year you’ve spent becoming who you thought you needed to be. Every drop of sweat or blood, every scream and silence, every year of love and loss. I see it all. And I am telling you: I am worth it. Every bit. You don’t understand it all yet–but you will.”

On her first birthday, I calculated that she had taken me out for 1,000 walks I would not otherwise have taken. A million steps I would not otherwise have made. I am a self-employed, screen-facing, home-office man with excellent reasons to stay inside.

She gave me the street.

And the window.

We live on the third floor of a building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, with one wall entirely made of glass. From up here, you are part of street life without the city staring in or you staring out. It is the best place in the apartment.

Half Border Collie, she sits in front of that window like an old shepherd dog on an Irish hill. Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem is her valley, her domain, her responsibility. Every hour of the day brings something different, scurrying adults, children horsing around, yellow taxis, slow buses, the morning crowd, and the night crowd, all of them hers to watch over.

From up here, I began to notice the oak tree I had never seen before. It grew so big so fast. I began to see the people I had never paid attention to before. Working alone from home for years, I had given in to a quiet, private illusion: that I was essentially alone in the world.

Lucca took it away without an argument.

She just sat at the window. And the world was there.

She became a portal. Not into a philosophy or a revelation, but into the actual world, the one that had been outside my window the whole time. And in the subway, and in the tired, crowded veterinarian waiting room in the Lower East Side.

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She didn’t change my mind. She changed my radius. And inside that radius, I could see I was never, actually, alone.

I spent thirty years helping other people wake up. And now this.

I trained her with discipline. I disciplined myself to do it.

Sit. Down. Come. Stay. Four sessions each day, patient and consistent, everything the books told me to be. She didn’t understand what any of this choreography was for. But she knew I was engaged and that was enough for her. She was happy just to participate, happy to make me happy.

Though on the fourth sit, sometimes, she would look at me with those person-eyes and I could see the question forming, “Is this really necessary? Are you genuinely asking me to sit again, or are you now just asserting your power over a creature who loves you?”

Still. She sat.

I have spent years reading and thinking about transformation–how people change, what actually moves along our journeys of becoming. One night during those four months, I wrote a note to myself: if it were possible to open our skulls and use pliers to rewire ourselves into who we want to be, it would be a way inferior method of changing ourselves than having a puppy in your lap every day.

And then I hit her.

I lost patience. I was exhausted and frustrated, and I hit her. Once. And she looked at me with complete bewilderment in her eyes — not anger, not withdrawal, not fear. Bewilderment. As if she simply could not locate the logic of what had just happened.

I looked at my hand in horror.

How can I be capable of this? What gives me the right?

I have been learning about shame. Grappling with whether it can be something useful, something life-giving, something that protects rather than destroys. In that moment, looking at my hand, I had my answer. Shame arrived not to punish me but to help me. To say: this is not who you are. This is not how this works.

Because here is what I know about training a puppy: punishment takes you nowhere. Shame, yes, the shame that makes you look at your hand. But punishment? No. Only kindness moves anything. Only communication, only gentleness, leads anywhere real.

A dog doesn’t carry the verdict of every failure into the next moment. A dog does not need to earn its place in the room.

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Lucca trembles with delight. She quivers in her readiness to do everything she possibly can. She stands in one place and waits, and waits, and waits.

And asks a question I could not unhear:

“What would happen if you treat yourself like you treat a puppy?”

Not as sentiment. As a method. The same presence, the same return to the moment, the same gentleness after every mistake I make. What would it be like to say sorry to yourself, to forgive yourself, to respect and delight in yourself like you respect and delight in me? How about that, Mr. Transformation?

I should tell you about my wife.

She was bitten by a dog once — a chained, frightened animal outside a store, a crowd pushing it towards her. She agreed to Lucca the way you agree to something you have researched and accepted, but do not yet believe. “The studies are clear,” she said, “Dogs are good for your heart, good for your mental health, and good for your longevity. Fine. You can have your dog.”

Lucca’s greatest happiness, it turned out, is my wife’s arrival home.

In the morning, when Lucca has not seen us all night, she bypasses me entirely and leans into my wife. I have trained her, cleaned her, medicated her eyes, and done every undignified thing a dog owner must do. And still. She goes to her.

I don’t know what to make of this. I have decided not to.

Now let me tell you about the city.

I think about what would happen if, by some rapture, every dog in New York City disappeared overnight. I have come to believe the city would not survive it. Not the buildings — but the people. The mental health would collapse. The loneliness would become unbearable. The physical health, the order of daily life, the ten thousand tiny blessings people get when they leave their apartments and nod at strangers — gone.

In a city of asphalt and screens, dogs are our contact with the wild. There is still a wolf in them. A wolf who chose to adapt, to change, to come inside and learn our strange human ways and live in our cement buildings and walk beside us on our leashes.

That wolf looked at us and said: I am all in with you, my human.

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes — the book of Solomon, supposedly the wisest king ever — in which he grapples with how little we humans actually know. We are so deeply in the unknown, he says, so surrounded by uncertainty, that everything we live is essentially a hunch. A conjecture. A beautiful, vain, and desperate guess.

To illustrate this, at one point he says, “We humans do not even know whether dogs will inherit eternal life.” Whether they will go on and live forever.

The wisest king. And this is what kept him up at night.

I have been thinking about this.

What if this whole planet is not about us? What if the entire story — all of our religions, our philosophies, our self-importance, our civilizations built and collapsed and built again — what if none of that is the point? What if, in the witty and slightly insane way of the universe, in a genuine mystical twist, dogs are actually the species around which we evolve and revolve?

They are not destroying the planet. They love without condition. They are all in, always, for whoever wants them. They adapt to our world without losing their wildness. They tremble with delight at our returns. They dream their vivid, urgent dreams and make small, tender sounds in the night that awake your heart.

They do not carry shame past the moment that earned it. They do not shame us. They do not need to earn their place in the room.

Just because we know calculus, quote Shakespeare, and practice Zen Buddhism does not mean we are the point of all this.

What if our dogs go to heaven?

What if heaven is for dogs — and we are invited because we loved them?

Lucca is asleep beside me as I write this. She is going through something in her dream — I can hear it, small urgent guttural sounds, her legs twitching gently, a whole movie playing behind those closed eyes. Full of life.

Dark green Oregon night is a distant memory now.

Now we have each other, and life is all in.

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HAVE A DOG? Show us your dog (share a pic below) and/or finish this sentence: the moment I knew I was theirs, not the other way around, was when…

Headlines in the papers. Bills in our mailbox. Suffering on sidewalks and in our families. These daily dares challenge us to stay reasonable inside the unreasonable, calm while the house is on fire, and loving as love is mocked.

This particular kind of year has an additional texture. We are made to live inside an inordinate amount of information and the strange intimacy of AI. It’s not just “news,” but the constant, frictionless availability of explanations for everything. Synthetic confidence. The feeling that meaning is being produced for us faster than we can metabolize the experience.

So, I scroll at 11:47 pm, the ache at the top of my skull, and the sound of notifications landing like pebbles.

And yet.

New and better stories are being born in places invisible to us, like stars that are still too tender for our eyes to recognize. As our disoriented hearts grieve the myths that are dying away from our sight, new ways of being present to each other are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good humans, in classrooms, back porches, and midnight phone calls.

If you can feel that at all, even as a faint signal, then you already know you’re part of it.

The Fire and the Screen

Let’s turn to something embarrassingly ordinary: the glow of your screen. You open one tab on your browser. Quietly, you open another. Then another. Soon, your mind is living in a crowded hallway of possibilities. One tab offers learning. Another, entertainment. Another danger. In this environment, we look for ways to process our fear, grief, and sorrow, three unmistakable signs of holy ground where being fully alive matters more than happiness.

With the screen casting light on my face, I notice my hand resting on the mouse, like it’s a steering wheel, realizing this isn’t steering, this is bracing.

Some evenings, I stare into the screen and feel like I’m splintering. Anxiety in the chest, a tightness behind the eyes, the urge to find one more video from someone who gets it, to give me some modicum of certainty about the future. Oh, screen, give me something, anything, please!

This whole experience of gathering around light started a long time ago. About a million years ago, we invented fire. 780,000 years ago, we began cooking. As a result, more food and energy became available just in time when our brains were growing and needed more energy to keep going.

The miracle of cooking was not only nutritional. It was existential. We were no longer required to chew all day, to live in a continuous state of procurement and urgency. We could sit. We could sit and stare into the flame. We could hear ourselves think. With the aroma of smoked meat, and hush after chewing stopped, and with enough protein, fat, and carbs in our systems, we could experience something that later civilizations would treat as a problem to be solved, but which was actually the first doorway to human creativity: boredom.

Blessed boredom.

Around the fire, boredom did what it always does when it’s not annihilated by noise. It made us perplexed. Give a human being enough time, and eventually, they will turn from grunting and scratching to asking questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What’s going to happen next?

According to our ancient texts, God didn’t scold the agony of human self-discovery. He put that tree of knowledge in the garden, fully expecting us to eat from it. God blessed us, “Perplexed, huh? That’s good. Go on. Enter the unknown.”

Around that fire, we discovered two powers that have never left us.

The first is presence, the plain, startling awareness of being here in a world that is happening right now.

The second is story, the equally plain, equally startling awareness that we can remember the past and imagine the future.

Presence and story.

The first two tabs we humans ever opened.

If you strip away the obscure and sometimes exhausting teachings about spiritual growth and complicated modern theories of human development, much of it comes down to learning to live within these two capacities without letting either become a prison.

Over time, civilizations turned these two capacities into two essential spiritual teachings. The Eastern tradition asks, “What is real?” It pursues direct experience, inviting us to pay attention to what is arriving through the five senses, thought, and emotion. Stories, on the other hand, are not really real.

It treats the meaning of existence as something communicated through practices such as sitting and breathing, and through the experience of whatever else happens to happen, rather than through explanations.

I discovered this about fifteen years ago when I signed up for an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction class. During those weeks, we spent a comical amount of time on tiny things, like feeling your hands on your knees, feeling the breath enter your nose, and noticing how your mind runs from silence, as if it were a predator. Later, I got apps and amassed what I can only describe as a ridiculous number of hours of meditation.

Time well spent.

It helped me learn something both simple and profound: I can return to being here. This was never a perfect practice, and sometimes it was dismal. That didn’t matter. I could always come back to the simple fact and the permission to speak to the intimidating God who famously said, “I am,” with my own “I am.”

By contrast, the Western tradition asks: “What is good?” This tradition seeks meaningful participation in a story, treating life as something that requires imagination, purpose, and continuity. We tell ourselves and each other stories—not out of sentimentality, but because, without stories, our days would be a mere collection of particles flying around. Story is how we make our lives cohere. Narrative is how we find our place in a larger whole.

When you renew your story, you renew reality.

There’s a reason these two “modes” feel so distinct. Our brains are wired with a polarity that echoes this historical split. There is circuitry for direct experience and circuitry for narrative explanation, and the two work inversely. Like a toggle. When one becomes active, the other quiets.

You don’t have to master the brain map to understand this. You feel it every time you try to listen to someone while simultaneously preparing your answer in your head. We can’t fully do both.

To listen, you have to trust the moment. And to trust the moment, you have to trust the world. And to trust the world, you have to have a story.

When One Tab Becomes a Trap

This is the part where presence becomes difficult for the exact reason it’s valuable. When you start practicing presence, it can be painfully boring. You sit down, you try to watch your breath, and your mind behaves like a small animal being cajoled into a cage.

The body grows restless. The jaw tightens. The mind tempts you with errands, memories, grievances, daydreams, and a sudden desire to reorganize your kitchen pantry. Anything but this.

And then, if you stay, things get worse. The silence stops being empty. It becomes crowded with everything you’ve been avoiding. The shamed part of you. The grieving part. The part without a plan.

Presence is contact with what is.

Presence is about honesty.

It’s why I love asking people I coach the simplest question with terrifying sincerity: How does it feel to be you?

I once asked my wife that while we were on a road trip, and she answered, “It just feels.”

Exactly.

There are no words for the raw feeling of being alive. Words arrive later, and when they arrive too fast, they interrupt. They turn life into a story about life. They replace the lived with the narrated. And since I can’t do both at the same time, the moment I engage with the story about me, I cannot be me. It’s akin to one of the ancient wise men’s sayings, “I know God, until you ask me about God.”

And here comes the twist: Presence is not enough. If presence becomes only an exercise in accepting your circumstances without allowing your imagination to attach itself to a story and alter your life, it becomes a security guard of the status quo. Since the Big Bang or since God’s water broke (depending on your story), reality is in motion. Presence can make you calmer but not necessarily more alive. It can shrink your cognitive pupil from living in what shamans call “the whole time” to the mere present.

There’s more to life than the present moment.

There’s a story, many stories actually, and they are not optional. We are part of a world that is made of stories.

Meditation will not move a mountain.

Story will.

If enough people tell a certain story, they will organize themselves, gather tools, dig, build, destroy, liberate, colonize, heal, and invent. Story creates reality. “In the beginning was the word,” the old text says.

Even if, like me, you’re not religious, you know what these texts pointing at: words don’t just describe the world. They summon a world.

And because the story is so powerful, the story we tell ourselves can become our captivity, an old, tired path we keep walking because we do not know how to step outside of it long enough to have a new experience.

That hat no-story space of presence, that moment of detachment, is precisely where a new story can be born. Presence is an always-available clearing in which the nervous system stops rehearsing the current story.

When we are constrained by our story and feel like there’s a wall between us and the world, presence makes us available again. For a larger store, or a smaller one, or the one that is more true.

Presence is a delightful boredom that allows us to imagine something different and to dare to change the world through art, revolution, discipline, and fierce love for ourselves, for another, or for our vocation.

Epic and Ordinary

Religion is a God-management system. Politics is an influence-management system. An economy is a stuff-management system. In reality, all systems are story-management systems.

We come together, whether in person or through our screens, to help each other be present to it all, to encounter ordinary life in the here and now, and to remember that there is a larger story in which we all belong to each other and to the world.

We come together to be enchanted with stories old and new, to give, to grow, to restrain ourselves, to learn how to know, to learn how to not know, to be astonished, to find ourselves in the stories of others and find them in ours.

Presence and story are AI-proof skills of the future. They are two human capacities that are unoutsourcable to AI or whatever comes next. No machine can do your living for you, and no stream of information can bring your new story to life.

Presence and story are how we become less capturable by outrage, less manipulable by propaganda, less lonely inside our own heads, and more capable of the kind of connection that can carry us through social, political, and relational trouble ahead.

“Do not be afraid of life,” William James wrote.

The question then arises, “Where do these two capacities meet?” Historically, traditions have named that overlap “mystical experience,” when the whole mind and body light up and both neural circuits fire--being fully in the here and now while in the ecstasy of a story.

We are often told that mystical experiences are for special people. You know, mystics. And that we mortals have access to those states about twenty seconds or—in the most generous estimate—twenty minutes per year.

This framing misses something.

It bypasses ordinary life.

It misses cooking the dinner, cleaning the house, paying the bills, playing with kids, talking with friends, rolling a cigarette, knitting, births, deaths, and every single experience in between. We are allowed—nay, invited—to be fully present to and enchanted with it all.

We are still around the fire, but this time it is not a tribe, but whole humanity, gathered around the internet, looking at our screens, wanting to tell each other, “I’m here now. This is my story. Tell me yours. Maybe we can find, or be found by, better stories in which we belong to each other.”

Does this seem too simple?

Allow yourself to be seduced.

The other world is in this world, and the ordinary is the secret of the divine.

Presence and story are not exotic techniques hidden in the ancient pages or captured and dispensed via techno-futurist apps. They are stem-cell capacities each one of us already has. We know them.

The question is whether we will use them until they become strong enough to carry us into a larger life together. We have done this before.

You don’t need a new personality to meet this difficult moment. You don’t need a perfect plan. You don’t need to be in control. You already have what you really need.

Presence and story—a warm mug of tea in your hands and a keyboard awaiting you to write something true and kind, and press send.

I always love to know what you think. Let me know below… 🙏🏼

The original of the article below was recently published in the Developing Leaders Quarterly and is behind the journal’s paywall.

“He who travels gently, travels safely; and he who travels safely, travels far.”
~ Joseph Thompson, Scots Explorer in 19th Century

In his 1949 tome, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell synthesized his massively influential mythic model of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Even if you don‘t know it by name, you know it in substance. From the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh written around 2100 BC, through Homer‘s Iliad to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and almost every Hollywood movie, the Hero‘s Journey format endures in how we narrate our lives and decipher our leadership challenges.

The vast majority of stories in the West are one version or another of the Hero‘s Journey. Campbell, somewhat obliviously, labels it and praises it as a monomyth. The Hero’s Journey has incredible explanatory power of our experiences. Yet, human experiences can give rise to different explanations and stories. At the moment, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth. (Discover more about the strengths and drawbacks of the Hero’s Journey in this related article This Is Not Your Story).

Over the years, this has led me to imagine what could be another kind of journey and story conflict that we need now - one that is more accurate about our present condition and more generative for our times.

I have been experimenting with the concept of the Immigrants’ Journey in leadership development contexts with delightful results. It goes like this: We are immigrating into the future.

Stuck Heroes

When my daughter, Leta, was on her hero’s journey in the dragon-land of her high school, at the very same time, I was on my hero’s journey of slaying my dragon. I was to become a New York City teenage daughter’s parent. She, trapped in thinking this story was all about her dealing with the challenges of clueless parents and the magical yet treacherous world of her high school, and I, trapped in thinking this story was all about me dealing with the crowning mid-life task of protecting and passing on the wisdom to my posterity. Two stuck heroes.

I thought, “what if I cease seeing this as my journey?” So, I told her, “We have never had this relationship before. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t know what you are doing. Let’s help each other immigrate into territory that’s new for both of us.”

I told her, “Look, we are entering this world where I’m learning to be a teenager’s parent, and you’re learning to be an adult. It’s new for you. It’s new for me. I feel lost. You feel lost. What if there’s no need for this push and pull to see whether you can deal with me or I can deal with you? Let’s invite ourselves to immigrate to a new place where we both dare to experience being different. It would be a step into a new land where you and I would be displaced. Do you want to do this?”

Every story needs a conflict, and we had a better conflict. Instead of heroes needing villains and victims, the challenge was in us discovering and entering a new way of seeing, doing, and relating.

We crossed the threshold into the unknown. The heaviness lifted, and fresh air enveloped us. This was quite a different story. Mobilizing, sturdy, dangerous, and joyful. It was exciting! The new perspective affected my parenting from then on and fundamentally changed us. Today, we are still leading and following each other.

We took the Immigrants’ Journey. Notice the plural pronoun.

I now approach my life, love, and leadership differently. I adjust how I see who we are and who we are becoming. With heroes, villains, and victims in cameo roles, I found myself in a place of far more possibilities. I started using this concept in my executive coaching, consulting, and speaking. There were stuck heroes everywhere I turned.

Another Kind of Journey

In contrast to the Hero’s Journey, the Immigrants’ Journey is not sequential or neat. It resembles life more closely. We are all invited to live lives greater than we can control and lead others to learn to do the same. So, Campbell’s 17 steps have not fallen into place. There are no stages. Anything can happen at any time, anywhere and we find stability in our common human capacity to respond to life in real-time, re-interpret our past, and have grounded faith in the future. We do not roadmap. We wayfind.

Wayfinding is an irreducibly human capacity to live, love, or lead through uncertainty. It confronts us with the astonishing fact of being here now, insists on giving meaning to our experience, and meets our needs for belonging and becoming. In contrast to road-mapping or GPSing, which detach us from the landscape, wayfinding is a skill of leading as we go. There is always a new way.

Wayfinding, the earliest human capacity to move from known to unknown, has been well-researched by anthropology and neuroscience. Every species has its umwelt (one of those nifty German words) directly translated as “world-around.” It conveys the uniqueness of the species’ genius. We, humans, have this one thing that separates us from every other species: Left to ourselves, we walk into the unknown, befriend it, and learn to delight in it. We can’t help it. It took us a mere 20,000 years from grunting about our plan to catch dinner together to developing the theories about the universe’s consciousness. We are wayfinders.

Immigrant is a contemporary and more recognizable word for wayfinder. We continuously find a new home, take on new responsibilities, and become someone new.

Wayfinding has been our way since time immemorial. The very first human power was to find ourselves curious or frightened enough to get out of the confines of our shelters. Then we walked to the end of the familiar territory, then forward and forward again, learning to survive and thrive by finding a way we have never been on before. Walking, talking, inventing fire, the wheel, mirrors, juicing, soccer, computing all came as we went about our real business of befriending the unknown.

The true gift of wayfinding is not the arrival at the destination. It is who we become along the way. It is not that we have been finding a way out there; it is that we have changed as we did. Our wayfinding is as inner as it is outer. Yes, our world’s problems seem insurmountable. We know we cannot simply do what we have done in the past. But we are not doomed. Here is the good news: we are not the same humans we were back then and can do something we have never done before.

One more thing. In more personal terms, wayfinding is also about learning your particular way of traveling toward your horizon. Whenever we cross a critical threshold, we enter the unknown realm and temporarily disorientate. We become inner-life wayfinders as we discover the creativity that can only come with the experience of being a bit lost.

Immigrating is about knowing how to take your next very ordinary step, and then next, and then next, alone and in the company, always learning, always looking back to the pliable past and forward with our hearts tethered to the horizon that is calling. Knowing how to travel well may be the best definition of happiness. And to help others learn to do the same, the most rewarding view of leadership.

There is one non-negotiable quality of a leader. Having faith in the future. You have to believe that the unknown will not only serve new dangers and challenges but also supply you with new energy, truth, and joy. None of us have any business leading without this sort of faith in ourselves, others, and the world. As Michael Margolis, the leading authority on narratives for disruption, puts it, “Disruption sucks. So, give people faith in the future.”

You, an Immigrant

Before we go on, a clarification.

We think of immigrants as other people. Those of us who have been in a stable geographical configuration are not used to thinking of ourselves as immigrants. But we are. We all are.

We are all displaced. Whether or not someone is from this company, community, or country does not matter. Everything around us is shifting. It is not that we have moved into a different place; it is that a different place has surrounded us. Look back. We are not where we were a year ago or even a month ago. Transition upon transition upon transition. It is bewildering. In the new world of informational, political, and scientific “overwhelm” and escalating complexity, none of us feel at home as we used to.

We are all on the move from the known into the unknown - everybody. There is no home for the hero to return to. We are creating new homes as we go, and it is as scary as it is exhilarating. And we do it together. It is not that we are vulnerable. It is that we are vulnerable together. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is a part of our common humanity,” says Salman Rushdie.

Leaders with whom I have shared this invitation to see themselves as immigrants felt empowered, particularly if they were not geographical immigrants. “Now I know why I feel the way I feel. I am an immigrant too,” they would say. “This helps me lead others with more empathy and imagination.”

Three Skills That Matter

Let’s select and review three immigrant skills that can make our leadership more robust.

1. Perspective

It is entirely possible to change one‘s perspective.

Nobody knows this better than immigrants. Almost by definition, only immigrants know the meaning of having a new perspective.

As we immigrate, we change not only the answers to our questions but also the questions themselves. With the new questions, we change where our attention goes. And where our attention goes, our mind and heart follow.

If our perspective can change, everything can change.

Without embracing our status as immigrants, we fully invest ourselves in defending and perfecting our established views, which is another way of safeguarding the biases that have been running our lives in the known that is no more.

Immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to drop their old maps for a moment. They have to. As mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” Instead of looking for a villain, immigrants focus on learning a new language. Made of new words, concepts, or experiences, this language can be literal, nonverbal, emotional, cultural, business, or a new kind we don‘t even know yet.

Immigration can occur from country to country, from system to system, from this to the next epoch of our lives. In each case, it is a journey from one way of seeing to an additional way of seeing everything. Two ways of seeing are far more than double. It is experiential proof, a bodily experience and the memory of that experience, that there is truth, kindness, and beauty outside of the way we are used to being in the world. That is a mystical moment.

Perspective is today’s leader’s defining asset not more information, not more time, and not more power. When the tsunami of information, knowledge, and wisdom is drowning us, people follow the leaders who will help them get on a hill.

How do you see?

That is what matters. Your perspective determines how you show up in every moment and what stories you tell.

2. Practice

It is entirely possible to change one‘s practice.

Immigrants embrace the role of apprentice again.

Instead of observing change and talking about it, chasing an illusion of managing change, or indulging in calling themselves change agents, they learn to inhabit change.

This is humbling. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a poem, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Immigrants acknowledge the forces larger than their own lives and are finding their way to survive and thrive in a story larger than their own.

We live and lead in a reality far larger than what we can control. Yet, there is one thing we can control: our practice. While navigating the new landscape, our previous views become difficult to maintain. Our new experiences no longer fit our old explanations. New experiences and new experiences make new and more useful explanations possible.

We are entering a new landscape with old maps, gravitating to answers based on the intuition that has sustained us in the past. Our intuition is our capacity to have a lucid moment that helps us deal with complexity.

However, it is based on our experiences up to the present moment. That is why we have to recalibrate our intuitions with new experiences. Without updating them as we go, our intuitions deteriorate into biases.

On a more personal level, we can never control the outcomes the way we can control what we do day-to-day, the rituals, the habits, and others routines.

The artists stand with one foot in the known and one in the unknown, communicating from that place to us. They do not have control of their communication‘s impact, but they do have control of their process and practice. A painter cannot paint six masterpieces at will, but she can create her masterful practice of showing up in the shop and doing her thing her way six hours a day.

The results are not up to her, but the process is.

This is the case with the change artists, too, which is another name for leaders.

Controlling results is daunting personally, professionally, and spiritually because it is impossible. Even if it were possible, control would render our lives deathly dull. We live in a complex system made of complex systems. But complexity does not have to be complicated. It is possible and critical to respond to complexity overload with some form of radical simplicity. More likely than not, such radical simplicity will be in the form of practice.

A thought leader on how to live in complex times, Jennifer Garvey Berger asks a helpful question we can use: “Who have I been, and who am I becoming?” I think this is less of a question of pondering and more of a question of observing. You will not become who you wish or strain to be. You will become who you practice becoming.

What is your practice of becoming?

We want our life and leadership to produce something of great value, and here is the kicker: The practice is that something. In economics-speak, the practice is the product.

3. Participation

It is entirely possible to change how we relate to the world.

We begin our adult journey when we finally cross the threshold called ‚’ I’m enough’. Once we utter this with conviction, it is a joyful new beginning with a wide-open floodgate of confidence and accomplishments. That is what lots of leadership coaching for people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s is about. Later in a leadership career, the path of growth leads through realizing something quite startling: Actually, I am not enough.

Everything that matters to us, lasting and meaningful, cannot be done alone. In some ways, our early career resistance to saying ‚ “I am enough” is a premonition of the future discovery that, in some fundamental way, ‘I am, in fact, not enough’. ‘As Carl Jung puts it, ‘The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego’, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. ‘

Hero‘s epiphany: I am enough.

Immigrant‘s epiphany: I am not enough.

Both are necessary. This is one of the reasons we cannot afford to live with a monomyth.

What is it that you want but can never accomplish alone? Go and give your best to that, and you will soon realize that your best is not enough. You merely (and gloriously!) participate.

When the time is right, cross the threshold called ‘I‘m not enough.‘ Then, ask for help and offer help. This is one of the most crucial thresholds one has to cross on the way to executive-level leadership. Your participation is not what you do when you cannot do leaderly things. Your participation is the highest calling and experience of leadership.

Being an immigrant never resolves. You continually take the risk of trusting the unsafe world. Which is the only way we can walk into the future.

I play the role of leader as needed. Others play the role of leader as needed. We all participate. The story is largely not about me. It is like the meaning of Ubuntu: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.‘

The Invitation

Leadership at its best is modelling followership. A leader is a lover. We love and care for something deeply, so much so that we are willing to get lost in order to find it.

We are willing to enter the borderland where we continually leave and arrive. It is not a phase. It is a place where we are learning to make our home now.

We live more than our own heroic story. We discover other stories, participate, and sing our songs, old and new, perhaps all night long, as immigrants do.

The unknown is dangerous. It is also a place where our not-yet-known collaborators, questions, and answers await to be found. It is all so exciting!

Unlike the Hero‘s Journey, the Immigrants’ is not a story of defending our perceptions until the strife teaches us otherwise. We are not blinded to the ordinary mysticism of being where we already are. Instead of bending others to fit our story, we invite them to our story and let them invite us to theirs.

Often, we don‘t need or even want to be heroes. With all its dangers, the unknown is also waiting for us in friendship. We don‘t know who we will become but are not frightened because whoever we become will catch us.

Leaders who learn to articulate a new way of journeying to their people in a plausible, felt, and pragmatic way will touch them the way the Hero‘s Journey used to touch people, eliciting a nod of recognition and giving expression to a new and newly alive language that can meet the challenges we face.

Let‘s summarize our three leadership tips:

1. Perspective: Watch over the way you see.

2. Practice: Do what is yours to do.

3. Participation: Enjoy leading and being led.

Leadership is an invitation. Whether to our daughters, organizations, teams, board members, friends, or enemies, we say, “Let‘s not go where I am, as beautiful as that place seems to me. Let‘s not go where you are, as wonderful as that place seems to you. Let‘s go together to a place that neither you nor I have been before.”

👇🏾 I would love to hear from you about anything in the article that has resonated with you. Please leave a comment below. Thank you!

This year has had the texture of speed. Headlines, polarization, wars, elections, migration, fires, AI slop everywhere, loneliness everywhere. Many of us are living with a low-grade hum of dread and a high-grade demand to function. We’re tired. We’re disoriented.

I believe it will begin (and it is already beginning) with the practice of seeing differently.

There’s an old image I return to: when the storm comes, cows turn away, hunker down, and prolong the pain. Buffalo run toward it, then walk into it, shortening the suffering. Seeing differently isn’t a spa day from the world. It’s choosing the buffalo move: turning toward what’s here so that we can meet it with courage and creativity.

Twenty years ago, on a whim, I went to a Jewish Mysticism Seminar at 92Y (a venerable public learning institution in Manhattan). I was in the front row, a teacher’s pet at the edge of my seat, when Rabbi Lawrence Kushner looked at us and said, “You. Are. Mystics.”

“Who, me?” I blurted out, startling myself.

“Yes, you,” he said.

I staggered onto the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue during the seminar lunch break, drunk with the discovery of human power to see differently. This mystic courage went beyond what I’ve experienced in my home, educational, religious, or professional life. (Mystic courage: the willingness to perceive what is without recoiling)

I was still dizzy when we reconvened. The rabbi went on to say that “for most people, their mystical experiences occur for about twenty seconds, about every two years.” That seemed about right.

What if, I asked myself, the twenty seconds became a daily minute?

Soon after the seminar, the angular life of computer screens, city streets, and filing systems of our modern minds took over. I got back to familiar worries that have been squatting in my head ever since I can remember.

But that’s not how the story ends. My muscle of astonishment warmed up, relaxed, and awakened, and I found some long-needed rest from the numbing sanity of my strategic mind and defended self.

After the experience, a new sense of freedom would rarely appear. It happened while taking my daughters for a walk. I would sometimes blurt out, or even scream, “Joy, joy, joy!” to them (As kids, they were a bit embarrassed on the street. Now, as adults, they see it as a tic of their aging dad). Then, while running, cooking, or cleaning. A brave step forward was trying it while paying bills. Then, while feeling worried, sad, or anxious. Then, the latest, while enraged.

Is it possible to think these thoughts of joy and feel these feelings of surprising appearance, belonging, becoming, and then glorious disappearance? To live alive, everywhere and always?

Seeing differently doesn’t make us float above the mess. It makes you more available to it. It changes what you do in meetings, in conflict, in parenting, in voting, in the way you spend, in what you refuse, in how you apologize, and in what you build. It makes you harder to hypnotize and easier to mobilize.

It’s an intoxicating prospect for those who want to change the world: Learning to see the world as ordinary mystics, urban monks, suburban wizards, or corporate shamans (How would you call yourself?). Not biannually. Daily.

You and me. Daily.

To be clear: I’m not talking about using wonder as anesthesia. If “seeing differently” makes us less honest, less accountable, or less willing to face suffering, then it’s not seeing, it’s sedation. This is not about feeling better while the house burns. This is about seeing the fire clearly enough to carry water with steadier hands.

We want to change the way we see the world and help those we love and lead to do the same. So let’s set down Mevlana Rumi, Theresa of Avila, and Albert Einstein for a moment. Let’s set down Anne Frank, Mr. Rogers, and David Whyte, too. Let’s even set down our compassionate teachers, life-nourishing artists, and family members who showed us how to be in love with life. They are fantastic guides, and we owe them our lives.

Yet, they have all been saying, loud and clear (here in Rumi’s words):

Don’t be satisfied with our stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth

Our steps toward a safe and thriving future do not have to be as difficult as we imagined. We don’t have to control the process from start to finish. You can begin with the mystic courage of seeing differently and learning to fully inhabit a life you cannot control, and do your life’s work that has no competition.

Before you answer the question below, try a tiny inventory of the year: one or two moments you shrank to stay safe, and one or two moments you expanded without knowing the outcome. Don’t judge them. Just name them. That’s already the practice.

What was a recent occasion when you’ve hazarded yourself experiencing life greater than what you can control? Perhaps starting a conversation with a stranger? Or by giving more than you can afford and noticing more than you can take in? Or by your bold stand for justice? How about a vulnerability? Or letting go of what you know and asking a more beautiful question?

May you find yourself surprised, in 2026, by the ways you can see the world.

Every five years or so, I turn to a poem that grows deeper, truer, and more joyous every time. A Caribbean poet and playwright wrote this poem, Derek Walcott (b. January 23, 1930), a poet of such extraordinary depth that his 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature is a wholly inadequate measure of his mesmerizing words.

He wrote long, complex poems about history and the place of his Chile. And this one!

I have come to believe that his brief, luminous, and unexpected gleam of human life in this poem, “Love After Love,” (Collected Poems: 1948–1984), is the greatest adulting poem ever written.

Take a calming breath and let the words in. Thank you for all the good wishes and vibes you have been sending my way today.

Cheers from Harlem friends!

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Some mornings, it feels like walking on a cliff edge. Other mornings, like resting in a harbor and making up my mind about what this life is all about.

Into this mix of vertigo and gratitude, my daughter Leta has come home.

After a year in Italy studying gastronomy and six months in Amsterdam foraging for new professional experiences, the lil’ one is back in New York City, in our family kitchen, in my line of sight, where I can hug and kiss her to my heart’s delight.

She has brought something with her that I didn’t expect: language for a feeling I’ve carried my whole life.

In her Substack, Leta Selmanović: Nourishing, Questioning, Dreaming, she just published a piece called foraging, grief, nostalgia: part 2. This is not about making a please-like-her call to smash that subscribe button. This is just a sixty-year-old father saying: Read her, and if you like what she helps you find, follow her there. She is a great guide.

Diaspora and the lives we didn’t live

In her essay, Leta writes about the movie Past Lives and about the diaspora of our heart—grief for all the versions of our lives that could have been.

The life in Croatia that might have been hers if we had not stayed in the United States.

Then, there’s life in Italy that could have been. Perhaps meeting a democratic socialist guy named Paulo who lives in Perugia and makes polenta. Then there’s life in Amsterdam that could have been with great friends she met there.

Every choice, every “yes” to this life, she reminds me, is also a “no” to a thousand other lives. Some part of us grieves those no’s, even when we’re deeply glad for the yes.

My dad moved from Montenegro to Croatia. My mom moved from Slovenia to Croatia. I then moved to the United States. I also moved from one profession to another, and then to another. And from one religion to another, and then to another. Each migration held the ghosts of lives my parent, I, and my kids didn’t live.

At sixty, these ghosts are real presences in the room. Some feel like regrets, some feel like relief. It is tender work to nod at them all, and say: Thank you. You helped make me. And it is even more tender work to nod at yourself, and say: Through this life, I have lived them all.

Memory within a memory

In her piece, Leta retells a story I once told her: my memory of Bajram, the feast at the end of Ramadan, hosted every year in Zagreb at my aunt’s place.

She notices something I hadn’t quite named. As I remembered the feast—its smells, tastes, the feeling in the room—I was having a “memory within a memory.”

The food on the table in Zagreb once carried me back to my father’s childhood village, where I had visited when I was ten or so. Now, re-telling it to her, the story carried me back there again. Layers on layers. Plates on plates. Generations nested like bowls.

My parents fed me food and stories, and I fed my daughter food and stories. My daughter now feeds me back language for what the stories have been doing to me all along.

Food has been my way home. For decades, I have walked into kitchens to regather myself, to let chopping, stirring, and tasting reassemble my scattered attention. I like to think that the kitchen was the original temple, the first and constant school of human transformation.

Watching Leta move in the world—through kitchens in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, and the Philippines, through forests with ramps (wild onion) and ramsons (wild garlic) in her hands—I realize she has taken my ancestral thread and woven it into her own life.

And into mine.

Foraging as remembering

In Amsterdam, Leta spent nights picking magnolia petals on her bike ride home, and days slipping into forests to forage tiny amounts of wild food. When she visited us in Harlem, she would take me to Central Park to show me a dozen plants we could eat, like a parent would take a child.

She writes that foraging isn’t really about what you collect—there’s not much in the bag. It’s more like getting to know your neighbors, both flora and fauna. Bending down. Watching. Touching bark and soil. Learning who grows where.

She calls it a way of tracing lost ancestry.

For her, foraging is another way of remembering—an embodied way of saying: I still belong to this earth. I still have a relationship with this place, even if my passport, accent, and rent contract say otherwise.

In my forties and fifties, I tried to think my way into belonging. At sixty, watching my daughter, I wonder if I could forage my way into belonging.

The Garden of Love (and a man with emerald eyes)

When Leta comes back to Harlem, she goes straight to a community garden in our neighborhood called the Garden of Love.

Other kids coming back to New York like to “hit the city.”

She?

She needs soil.
She needs neighbors.
She needs a place that smells like life.

She plants cucumbers, tends wine cap mushrooms, and gets to know the people who move through that little patch of earth in the Harlem country of black asphalt. That garden is not quite street, not quite home. It’s a konoba in New York drag. A room between inside and outside, where people and stories and land meet.

One day, as she and a neighbor stand outside the garden gate, a man stumbles into them. He has just been stabbed. There’s blood, panic, sirens on their way. And also, his eyes. Leta notices his eyes are a luminous, startling green.

Her neighbor compliments him on them as they wait for the ambulance. Maybe to distract him from the pain. Maybe because beauty has its own emergency.

They tuck his belongings into the plants, allowing the garden to hold his belongings while he rides away in the ambulance. He never comes back for them.

“Perhaps the land remembers us more than we remember it,” she writes.

I had to put the laptop down after that line.

I have spent so much of my life trying to remember where I come from—village, city, language, religion, past roles, future plans. I am now coaching people who are trying to remember (or discover) what their life is all about.

And here is my daughter suggesting that all along, the land has been doing the remembering for us. We are all held by meaning we don’t understand, don’t have to understand, and let alone invent.

A word for this: solastalgia

Leta introduces a word: solastalgia.

It’s the homesickness you feel, not because you are far from home, but because you are watching your home change in ways you cannot stop.

City storefronts closing.
Storms. Flooding.
ICE and AI.

You’re still, but the home is shifting. We have all become immigrants, not because we have moved, but because everything around us is moving. We are displaced and have to immigrate over and over again.

At sixty, solastalgia feels familiar.

(I wrote about this tug-of-war between home, displacement, and getting lost in an earlier New Glossary entry, What Heart Wants.)

The body changes. The city changes. The world changes. The internet eats entire parts of our lives (years of my work disappeared in a hacked LinkedIn account). Systems we trust crack and fall apart, or attack, showing their teeth.

There is grief in realizing that the place you love will not stay as it is.

But if the land remembers us, then we are not the only ones doing the holding. If the soil keeps traces of our footsteps, maybe we don’t have to keep all of our stories straight in our heads. Maybe belonging is not a performance we must constantly maintain, but a relationship we keep returning to.

Glossary gains (for you, dear reader)

Let me end with an invitation.

What might learning about solastalgia mean for you?

1. Let the land remember you.
   You don’t have to hold all your history perfectly. Let a park bench, a kitchen table, a stretch of sidewalk, a community garden do some remembering for you. Visit them. Touch them. Say hello.

2. Notice your unlived lives with kindness.
   When you feel that ache for the life you didn’t live, treat it not as a mistake but as a kind of ancestor. It stood watch while you chose this one. You can honor it without abandoning yourself.

3. Practice tiny acts of foraging.
   You don’t need a forest. Pick herbs from a windowsill. Learn the names of two street trees on your block. Step into your kitchen and let chopping an onion from a local bodega be an act of “knowing your neighbors.”

4. Create a konoba corner.
   A threshold place, like Leta’s Garden of Love. A porch step, a stoop, a Zoom room, a recurring dinner. A place that is yours—and also belongs to others. A place where the door (literal or figurative) regularly stays open.

5. Apprentice yourself across generations.
   If you’re older, let yourself be taught by someone younger. If you’re younger, receive the stories coming your way—then give them back altered, deepened, made more true. That’s how memory within memory works.

If this resonates with you, I would love for you to read her full piece, foraging, grief, nostalgia: part 2, and, if you feel like it, subscribe to Leta on Substack.

From one Ordinary Mystic to another: Notice how meaning travels between generations—and how, somehow, the land knows all our names.

Thanks for reading The New Glossary. This post is public, so feel free to share it.

— Samir

👉🏼 Leta on Substack!

👇🏾 I love to hear from you in the comments. Where in your life do you feel solastalgia—and what places, people, or practices help you remember that you still belong?

We all know how it feels to be muted by other people, by ourselves, or by life’s circumstances. We cannot breathe. On the other side, there’s no greater joy than releasing our story into the world. Something magical happens when we let our lives speak.

Yet there’s more to it than our joy of telling. Your story does not belong only to you. It is sacred. You owe it to the world. Articulating your story—whether in the family, at work, or in a larger community—is one of the most potent and necessary catalysts for human transformation.

You might have a story about your diabetes, or about a daughter, or about a river, or about a place inside of you that you don’t even know how to name yet.

Looking back on helping hundreds of people tell a story that matters about a life that matters to people that matter, while they are still around to enjoy it, has taught me something.

Most of the time, when people “introduce” themselves, they hand over a headline: a role, a company, a city, lines that fit neatly on a screen or a slide. Leaders do it in boardrooms. Elders do it at family gatherings. Meanwhile, the actual story—the early chapters, the near-misses, the ordinary Tuesdays that secretly changed everything—remains unspoken.

Friends miss the origin story. Children never learn what happened before they were born. Colleagues see only the public pages. It all seems efficient and responsible. But there is a quiet cost: an enormous amount of meaning and beauty disappears.

I am one of the co-founders of Your Epic Ordinary Life. We are on a mission to turn life experience into a source of inspiration, connection, and purpose for others. We focus on the stories people are actually living, in all their contradictions, fears, humor, and grace.

Telling your present story—on purpose—is more powerful than any strategy, course, or framework you could buy.

Here are ten truths I’ve learned sitting with people at thresholds of change—leaders, parents, elders, grown children, people between chapters—who are ready to gather their lives into a story they can live from, live out, and share.

Which one of the ten truths resonates with you?

1. Your life is not a list.

Most of the tools we use to “capture” a life are list-shaped: résumés, bios, obituaries, LinkedIn profiles, family religious holiday letters. Sorted by achievement rather than meaning, they reduce a person to a list of bullet points.

A list can tell us what you did. In the breathing realm where we live, however, far more important things are happening.

Honestly, none of us is that interested in what you have accomplished. Whether in your family, your company, or a larger community. Have a list of values you uphold? Not interested. Your good deeds? Not interested. Your bad deeds? Not interested.

Here is what we are interested in instead: what you have done with what life has dealt you.

Tell us how you kept showing up at work while your marriage was falling apart in private, and what the cost was. Tell us about the late nights when you sat in a car outside the hospital, trying to decide whether to go back in. Tell us about the time you told your team the truth when a safer lie was within easy reach. Tell us about the ordinary evenings at the sink, when you chose to unpack your teenager’s half-formed anger instead of scrolling on your phone in avoidance. Tell us what you don’t want to tell us, and then we will hear everything you do.

That is the fierce heat of living. And of leading, and of loving. When you speak from there, we will all pull up a chair.

We want to know what courage looks like when your voice shakes in the boardroom or at the kitchen table, how responsibility feels when everyone is looking to you while you feel lost, how love behaves when the prognosis is bad, the deal falls through, or the person you trusted does not come back. However awkwardly, give us the moment, the tension, the small choices you made.

2. Silence is already writing your story for you.

We like to imagine that if we don’t tell our story, it simply remains untold. That’s not what happens.

If you don’t tell your story, your habits will. Your anxieties will. Other people will. Systems will. You’ll still be living inside a narrative—“I’m the responsible one,” “I’m the one who messed up,” “I’m replaceable,” “I’m the hero who holds everything together,” “I’m an impostor,”—you just won’t have chosen it.

In organizations, silence turns into lore: “She never talks about that time,” “We don’t ask him what really happened.” At home, silence turns into guesses: “I think Grandma was just always like that,” “Dad never really liked to spend time at home.”

When we don’t tell our story, we don’t keep it neutral. We leave it exposed and vulnerable to distortion. Silence makes it inevitable.

Telling your story is not self-indulgence. It’s the stewardship of your life. It is how you take responsibility for the experience and meaning your life has gifted you with and wants you to carry it forward—into your family, your team, and even your own future decisions.

3. The story decides what is possible.

We think we make decisions based on data: the behaviors, the outcomes, the budget, the calendar.

We stand on those things, but underneath those things, there’s always a story, and the story invariably surprises us with its power.

The story you believe about yourself and your people quietly decides:

• Which risks are you willing to take

• What outcomes can you even imagine

• How much of your actual self do you feel allowed to bring into the room

The same is true at home. The story you hold about your family shapes:

• Which conversations “aren’t worth starting”

• What gets celebrated and what gets quietly buried

• Whether your children inherit a to-do list and advice, or a sense of rootedness and life-giving values

You can redesign your life plan, org chart, or mission statement every year, but if the underlying story doesn’t change, the same dynamics will keep repeating.

Working directly with your story is one of the simplest, most leveraged moves you can make. Change the story, and the field of possibility changes with it.

4. If you feel stuck, you’re stuck inside a story, not a circumstance.

We say, “I’m stuck.”

Stuck in a role. Stuck in a relationship pattern. Stuck between eras of my life.

From the outside, however, the circumstances are rarely as fixed as they feel. There are options, experiments, and conversations that haven’t been considered yet. There are feelings that haven’t been allowed yet.

What is usually stuck is the story:

“This is just who I am.”
“This is more than this organization can do.”
“This is how this family has always been and will be.”

When you work with a good guide, you begin to see the story itself. You notice where it hardened too early. You notice where someone else’s fear became your script. You notice the places where you were braver than you remember.

You realize, “Oh. I’ve been acting as if this chapter were the whole book. It isn’t, and I have a greater story to tell!”

A recognition like that alone can loosen something in you that’s been seizing for years.

5. Only a story lets you harvest your transformation.

Most of us quietly become different people every 3–5 years.

We go through a crisis, a move, a birth, a loss, a promotion, a diagnosis, a burnout, a new love—something shifts outside our ability to grasp or even be aware of. You look back, and you realize you are not who you were before.

But unless you consciously revisit and re-story your life, you keep operating inside the past narrative.

My favorite poet, David Whyte, sometimes says, “Your inner life is about six years ahead of you.” Fascinating.

This means I might still be making decisions as if I were the younger, more fearful, more ambitious, more wounded, more invincible version of myself—while life is asking something new of me and, with it, offering me what I need to respond.

Telling your story is how you harvest the change life has already grown in you.

You get to say, “I used to be that. Then life happened. Now I am becoming this.” Not as a slogan, but as a hard-won recognition that organizes your choices from now on.

Without that harvest, the fruits of change dissipate. Harvest turns hard work of change into a legacy—for you, and for the people watching you navigate your life.

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6. You can’t see your own life clearly without a witness.

There is a reason you can’t see your own face without a mirror.

In the same way, you know how your life feels from the inside. But you don’t necessarily see the patterns, hear the echoes, perceive your quiet courage, notice the humorous, or experience the beauty of the whole.

That’s where a witness comes in.

A paradoxical truth: You alone are responsible for telling your story, but you cannot tell it alone.

In our work, Your Epic Ordinary Life is not just a project of helping people tell their story. It’s a relationship. It is a series of unhurried conversations where someone like me sits (or walks, or swims, or eats) with you—not to interrogate, research, or fix you, but to be present and curious in a way that draws out your story.

Important side note about AI here. It is the ear of the listener that makes the story alive. If you let AI do the witnessing of your story, your story will sound like AI.

A good listener is someone who can hear the story beneath, above, or within the story. They notice:

• The memory you almost skipped past

• The side remark about “that one person”

• The way your voice shifts

They help you hear your own life in a new key.

This is why trying to do deep story work entirely on your own never works. Left by ourselves, we tend to perform or minimize. With an unhurried and unconditional human witness, you don’t have to advocate, decorate, or defend. You tell the truth, and the real story begins to take shape.

7. Being deeply listened to is itself a turning point.

People often assume the value of a life story lies in the final “product”—the digital record, the audio, the beautiful leather-bound book on the table.

With Your Epic Ordinary Life, we do that. Those things matter. These artifacts become touchstones, life’s reminders, and ways of staying in touch with the sacred.

But again and again, I’ve seen that the experience of being listened to in a way most adults almost never are is a threshold of its own.

No rushing. No multitasking. No angling for a soundbite. Just time, attention, a few good questions, and space for being safely lost, for laughter, for grief, and for surprise.

When someone receives that kind of listening, something shifts:

• They stop trying to make their lives sound better than they are.

• They start telling the truth.

• They hear themselves say, out loud, what they’re actually living.

You can feel the room change when that happens. People sit back differently. Their shoulders drop. Their story stops being something that happened to them and starts being something they are in conversation with.

That alone can mark the beginning of a new chapter—before anything is written down.

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8. A simple story can transfer more wisdom than years of advice.

Advice evaporates.

We give our teams speeches about culture, strategy, and accountability.

We offer our children lectures about work, love, money, faith, and risk.

Most of it doesn’t stick. If you ask almost anyone what has actually shaped them, they will tell you about a story they have heard, witnessed, or been a part of. It will be a story behind a scar, a move, a business decision, a divorce, a reconciliation, a sunrise, or a storm.

Your stories travel within people who hear them. They come back to them in the moment they need them the most, long after your presentation or your relationship advice has been forgotten.

When you gather your life into a clear, honest story, you give people something sturdier than instruction, a lived pattern they can adapt in their own way. Instead of pushing a universal map on them, you gift them with your experience of the landscape.

That’s how wisdom actually moves between generations and teams, not through perfectly engineered messages, but through stories we absorb.

9. Your story is time-sensitive.

Memory is fragile.

Details fade. Voices blur. The “I’ll ask her about that someday” moment never arrives. The “I’ll write it all down when life calms down” season never comes.

Story work has quiet urgency.

We are not promised unlimited time to tell our lives. We will likely not be here next week, month, or year to enjoy the telling—to laugh at the ridiculous parts, to grieve what was lost, to praise what has been found, to share our life with the people who most need to hear it.

At the same time, the process itself does not have to be frantic or complicated.

The way we practice Your Epic Ordinary Life is intentionally simple: a handful of spacious conversations, some careful crafting in your own voice, and a tangible form for your story to live in. There’s no performance, no homework, and no need to “get it right.”

Urgent and unhurried at once.

We don’t know how long we have. But we can choose to use some of that time to let our life speak and matter—to ourselves and to the people who matter to us.

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10. You don’t need to be finished.

Some people assume story work is for the end of life—for retirement, or a hospital bed, or a farewell party.

In reality, the most potent storytelling happens in the middle. In transition. In reinvention. In an illness that isn’t terminal but is clarifying. In the messy middle years where you’re too old to pretend you’re just starting and too young to pretend you’re done.

You are not a monument. You are a living, changing human.

Telling your story is a small hinge that opens the large doors so that you can cross the threshold into your next chapter. It lets you say, “Up to now, this is what my life has been about. From here, this is what matters.”

It gives your family, your team, and your own future self a way to understand the moment, and the chance to be astonished by your own life while you are still in it.

Imagine! You get to enjoy the look on someone’s face when they finally hear the story behind your choices. You get to feel your own respect for the younger you who kept going. You get to bless the parts of yourself you once wished away.

You don’t have to be finished to be worth remembering. You just have to be seen.

The simplest work, the deepest impact

In a world that constantly tells us to do more, optimize more, effort more, the story can feel almost too simple.

Sit down. Talk. Listen. Share.

But in practice, telling Your Epic Ordinary Life is one of the most gentle yet radical things you can do—for yourself, for the people you love, and for the communities you influence.

If, as you’ve been reading, you’ve thought, I want this for myself, or I wish this existed for my mother, my father, my mentor, my boss, pay attention to that and make it happen in the way you can.

Some part of you already knows that your life is quietly epic, and that bearing the untold story within you is an agony. The invitation here is to unmute yourself, let your life speak, and trade a little time and vulnerability for becoming whole.

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When the holy days of All Saints, All Souls, and Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) roll around, I put fingers of one hand on the wrist of another and my pulsating artery reminds me not only of my mortality but also of my opportunity to live an eternal kind of life. The beat that we feel beneath our skin is the palpitating life of our ancestors, who lived and loved back then, and are now living and loving through us.

This is when I recall my favorite aunt, Ferzata Čengić, who was a mystic if I’ve ever known one. One of the things she taught me about was hunger.

I remember the month of Ramadan when I was 7. I wanted to be like her—strong, kind, and raptured by joy. Most importantly to a boy, I aspired to self-control. Ever since I saw Bruce Lee stand so still and so focused, I knew I needed it. My first test, I imagined, was being able to fast during the month of Ramadan.

Fasting sounded awesome to me, something akin to wielding a sword as a Jedi or meditating as Siddhartha (although I did not know about Jedis and Siddhartha at the time).

“If you want to fast,” she said, “I have a small patch of fabric.”

“What?”

“I can sew this patch to your shirt. It will be as if you are fasting. And even if you have to eat during Ramadan, because you are a child, you are, actually, fasting! Your fasting counts.”

“Nooo? Really?”

Then she added, “Prophet Muhammad said so.”

“Wow,” I thought, “Yeah, Auntie Ferzata, do it!”

“You can eat, but remember,” she said as she worked her needle, “Every day, take one moment and ::feel your hunger:: without rushing.”

Feel my hunger without rushing? Why?

For decades now, I have been a student of fasting. Fasting dramatically increased my free and focused time. It helped me understand my body. It expanded my imagination, helped me develop patience, and, of course, helped me lose weight. Leonard Cohen helped me link fasting to romantic passion. It grounded my sermons about Adam and Eve eating from the tree, or about the Eucharist’s bread and wine, teaching me what it means to live in the body on earth. I can also say that my little obsession with fasting has helped me become a better cook. Twice, I fasted for nine days, indulging in one of those spiritual extreme sports that teenagers need to grow up.

Yet, my aunt’s words, “feel your hunger without rushing,” have been more than just about fasting.

Hunger equips our hearts with empathy and instigates action.

Hunger awakens.

There’s a bigger world out there with other human beings like me, in need of my help, and me in need of theirs. When hungry, we have a bodily experience of the other.

We humans are hungry beings. We cannot survive without life’s welcoming hand. Whoever said “There are no free lunches” has forgotten their uterine experience, mother’s nipples, and (easier to recall) thousands of free lunches ever since, including the one someone harvested, transported, and prepared this morning. Life has taken care of us, and it will continue to do so, and it is inviting us to be a part of its power in the world.

Most of us prefer not to discuss hunger. We mention it sometimes. We don’t want to be with it, let alone dwell on it. We regard it as a nuisance that must be obliterated, a colossal mistake, something to avoid discussing in parenting, politics, and everything in between.

I remember how it felt to walk into Auntie Ferzata’s kitchen, the moist warmth emanating from Trhana, a fermented dough soup. The seductive, pungent scent spreading from a big pan of Popara, and the calming aroma of freshly pulled carrots in the basket on the floor. And, sometimes, coming from playing outside with her boys and my cousins, a tiny spoon with rose jelly paired with a glass of cold water welcoming us in.

And no, Prophet Mohammad never said that thing.

But, if he were to stand next to my auntie, the gentle Prophet would say it right there and then, totally nodding his head and saying yes, yes, yes, you little fasting Jedi! Yes, I said that. Feel your hunger for a moment, and your fasting will be legit!

Before making any decisions about how to spend your time, energy, and money each day, week, or year, allow yourself to feel a sting of hunger. But, this time, don’t rush it. Feel another through your hunger. Let it press you and oppress you.

Let your hungry body guide you to find meaning, joy, justice, and beauty in the life that welcomes you. Think of all the powerful ways you can use your life force to send your love into the future.

Thank you, Auntie Ferzata.

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“We don’t need another hero.” ~ Tina Turner

“Happy is the land that does not need heroes.” ~ Bertolt Brecht

If you are a leader in an organization, you will have heard it said, “You only need to focus on what you can control.”

It is not that simple, though. We cannot wall ourselves into a space where we are in control. And even if we could, that is not where the action is. Or fun. Or people. Or relationships. Or reality.

Learning to let go of control and lead from that space is not antithetical to leadership. Quite the contrary, when we know how to be out of control, we cease to be at war with reality and become better not only at making things happen but also at letting things happen as we participate in dynamics larger than the circle we have drawn around ourselves.

Control does matter, obviously, and we aim to get control of the shared reality by creating models, frameworks, and maps that help us manage what we think is going on.

“All models are wrong,” wrote statistician George E. P. Box back in 1976, “but some are useful.” We move to better ways of making sense when the previous ways become less useful in helping us predict, manage, and work with and through the new complexities we face. When a model does not work anymore, we move to those that work.

Myths that Work

One of the most powerful tools for living with complexity is choosing the myths we live by. Myth is a timeless truth poured into a story, armed with our values, and cemented into our experience.

We humans used to think we were above them. Fortunately, we have been coming to terms with the fact that we have over-reached in our myth-free confidence. We are not living in a merely complicated machine we can learn to control, but in a constantly changing system managing physical, psychological, organizational and other forces that we cannot bring under control. Life and, with it, change, is too wide and too deep to master.

There is always far more happening than what we can fully grasp. So, we have to relate to the unknown, befriend it, even delight in it, get things done in the middle of it, and get others to get things done. That is where the myths come in.

Myths that work hold our worlds together.

They are larger stories that hold smaller stories. Whether true or false, myth is a necessity for any meaning we hope to have as humans. Without the myth, we are all whirling subatomic particles, becoming aware that we are nothing, a realization that is itself a myth.

Now, the most crucial function of myth is to provide us with a perspective, and in today’s world of excess information, perspective is everything, or almost everything, depending on how you look at it. Myths we hold, whether we are aware of them or not, are that perspective.

Good Old Myth

There is a myth we are all quite familiar with.

Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it in substance. It is a pervasive and recognizable story format in the West, particularly in the United States, that has gone global. If you are unaware of it, use this ChatGPT prompt: Tell me about the Hero’s Journey. Then brace yourself.

You might also be familiar with the powerful work of Joseph Campbell, who brought the Hero’s Journey to public awareness. If you are a movie maker, marketer, coach of any sort, organizational psychologist, leadership trainer, management consultant, officer in the military, entrepreneur of any kind, or work in any industry that uses the power of the story, you are probably already overdosed on the Hero’s Journey. It is ubiquitous. So, I promise you, the rest of this article will not be just another Hero’s Journey drill and praise fest. We will go beyond.

First, a quick summary. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you think, ya, ya, ya, I’ve heard this a hundred times already.) The Hero’s Journey is an archetype, an original and recurring motif or symbol behind many ideas and stories that shape our lives today and have also shaped the lives of humans since the dawn of human civilization. Campbell traced the Hero’s Journey through 17 universally traversed steps across culture and time. In its most fundamental form, the journey comprises a three-part cyclical structure: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero leaves the ordinary world responding to a call to adventure (Departure). The hero then enters a liminal space, where they face trials and achieve a climactic victory or revelation (Initiation). Finally, the hero returns to their ordinary world, transformed, and often with knowledge, power, or healing to share with others (Return). This cycle, we are told, represents a universal process of growth and integration that resonates across people and eras.

The Hero’s Journey has obvious advantages. It provides a framework for personal growth, fosters empathy for the experiences of others, and offers a roadmap to navigate life and leadership challenges, among other benefits. Its explanatory power has been felt by many of us. Do you remember the rush when, in the middle of a troubling life challenge, you first thought, “Is it possible I’ve been on a Hero’s Journey all this time? Is it possible I am on one right now?”

Living In a Monomyth

While Hero’s Journey is part of the truth, it is also less than the truth. It has its limitations, which, as we move into a world where our stories are colliding with one another, are becoming quite obvious and grave.

Our imagination has been taught to look for it, and now we see it everywhere. Often, it is the only thing we see. It is what we are told we want and what we learn to want.

When I engage with leaders who question this myth, the majority become defensive from the start, forcing every alternative idea into the existing perspective. They have experienced the monomyth’s power and now use it to construct the same explanations for new experiences.

However, life and leadership bring new experiences, and these are arguably the only forces capable of loosening the grip of our knowing and opening up possibilities for new explanations.

As poet David Whyte would put it in his corporate leadership training, we tend to name our experiences too early. We leaders, he argues, can find our way forward by first stopping the conversation we are having. By conversation, he means the tired and tiring ways of naming and reassuring ourselves, telling the same old story over and over again.

Stories, like humans, are alive. One model or myth gives way to another. That is how we change. As all living beings, our stories exist in ecosystems. In every complex system, whether biological, cultural, or organizational, a monoculture eventually, and always, spells devastation.

Historically, we humans are all exposed to the tyranny of one story. Like the former head Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sachs, argues in his book The Dignity of Difference, the more perfect we become as humans and the better we become as a global society, the more varied we will be in the way we see, understand, and experience the world.

Let that land. The more perfect we all are, the more different from each other we will be.

The drive to find the best way to finally get control over complexity, uncertainty, and volatility will sooner or later end in violence, he argues. Universality breeds death.

We have been driving the Hero’s Journey for so long, and so far, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth.

Let's examine three constrictions of the Hero's Journey so that we can open ourselves to new experiences, explanations, and stories that might help us liberate ourselves from the monomyth's grip on our leadership.

Constriction 1: Hero's Perspective Only

The Hero's Journey requires tricking our perspective. It is the story told through the eyes of the hero and limited to the way the hero sees the world. It suffers from solipsism, a self-centered lack of awareness, and a single perspective to the exclusion of other perspectives.

Humans tend to suffer from the main character syndrome. We believe the main story is about us. We see our story, the story in which we are the protagonist, as the story. We have all met leaders who suck up the majority of the oxygen in the room and expect all participants to contribute to the story they have already written for themselves in their heads.

I am not being judgmental here. I am still in recovery from it myself.

In reality, where we actually live, there are other stories at play. If I see myself as being on a Hero’s Journey, however, I need others to play the roles I need them to play.

You know what happens next, right?

In a world where a hero monomyth shapes our imagination, everyone expects to be at the centre of the story. Even when there is every reason to agree, use opposing views to find a solution, or play only a supportive role to create a better world, we do not choose to do so. We are conditioned to feel like we are somebody only if we focus on our opinions.

We are drowning in opinions.

Not clarity, not inspiration, not shared values, but nauseating contrarianisms. It is a pyramid scheme of heroes. Heroes are taking over the heroes, who are taking over the heroes, where we eventually all lose—a contrarian hell.

But, deep inside, we know: other stories don’t exist to serve ours. To love and lead, we let others have their own stories in which they see us differently. Perhaps we are a villain in their story. Or a victim. Or, even better, we both live in a story that is different or larger than heroes colliding with villains, in which the same villains see themselves on Hero’s Journeys of their own.

As a human, I have the capacity to realize that my perspective is not the only perspective. My story is not the only story. Who I am is not only about me. It is also largely about how I am seen and experienced by others. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it, "An eye is an eye not because you see it; an eye is an eye because it sees you."

There is nothing wrong with telling a story from the hero's point of view. A lot is cut out, though. Too much. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe says, 'Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.' Everything, literally everything (including our planet), but the hero and his beloved story is expendable.

Constriction 2: Villains Wanted

Another limitation of the Hero's Journey is the way it creates tension in the story. Every story that commands our attention and draws our hearts needs a conflict or, at the very least, a contrast. Without a conflict, there would be no story. The issue here is how Hero’s Journey creates the story's conflict.

When leadership work becomes difficult or overwhelming, we have a favourite starting point: a villain. Someone, somewhere, is doing this to us. To regain control, we need to identify and vanquish the villain. We believe our world would be better without it.

Notice how in the Hero's Journey, the villain is expendable. There is neither redemption nor a future for the villain. There is an evil, a mistake, or a problem. It is the other. We do not have to understand, live with, or certainly not learn from the villain. God forbid we find the villain in ourselves.

And in the world where everyone wants to be a hero, everyone needs a villain of one kind or another. Stories in which the roles of heroes, villains, and victims are the only roles available push us apart and antagonize us. While everyone loves a hero, who wants to be the villain?

Or the victim? In these kinds of stories, victims are story extras or, to name them more directly, passives. Think of employees, consumers, the public, or the planet. They have to be conquered, saved, served, or entertained. The story offers them no agency.

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald. The monomyth has left us in a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sometimes, it seems as if we live in a Groundhog Day scenario. The villain and the hero play a zero-sum game to the bitter end, setting the stage for the next cycle in the spiral of destruction. The result is an exhausting and increasingly tedious repetition of establishing the next king of the hill, cage-fight champion, or a winner who takes all. In many ways, modern history is a story that repeats itself over and over again, with heroes' departure, initiation, and return becoming three stages of not changing.

What if the world beyond the walls of the village is not villainous? What if that world just is? Like our world. What if the dark underworld is troubling but also kind and cooperative? What if the wild we fear is not evil or ungodly, and what if it does not need our hero to tame it or save it? What if the unknown is not only a source of danger but also a source of new and better questions and solutions we have been looking for all along? What if the unknown is reaching out to us in friendship?

Constriction 3: Superpowers Distraction

Over time, Hero’s Journey has become too predictable, a shortcut, really. One of the earliest and most notorious problems with ChatGPT has been how quickly it will make you into a hero. A hero has now become a tourist, with a curated journey into a liminal space. And that tourist now wants, nay, expects, a superpower.

In the Hero’s Journey, heroes used to be regular people who, among other things, discover their unique power. They stumble on it, or a mentor gives it to them, or they win it.

In the monomyth world, that is far from enough. We are all now talking about superpowers. Superpowers break the laws of ordinary life. They pull out an extraordinary sword and other feats that break the physical and every other aspect of our ordinary lives, but the ordinary life is where we all actually live. Superpower shrinks our larger, complex, and natural human abilities into a fetish. In other words, our pining for a superpower distracts us from what I would call commonpowers.

Commonpowers are powers that come from having an aware, curious, and courageous human experience. Coping, connecting, creating, relating, and contributing, to name a few. They are skills of human maturity. In other words, our ordinary lives can teach what no specialized book or training (even those on the topic of leadership) can. Developing our common powers is the most direct way to increase our leadership range, repertoire, and results.

We believe that superpowers will solve our problems “once and for all” and give us a sense of control. If we can wield fire at will, we can just incinerate those bastards attacking our walls. If we can make people laugh, we can bypass feeling uncomfortable by simply cracking a joke. You get the drift. Superpowers are a distraction.

Power is much more common. You have what you need, and others have what they need for us to do what we need to do. Hiding in plain sight, these powers are potent and available. If only we could let go of our paralyzing fascination with what we don’t have, and recognize what we already do.

I know, something is deflating about this.

You have probably walked away from a superhero movie exhilarated to face your own situation, only to realize there is no superpower in sight. Realizing that you are a common person, led by common people, who in turn lead other common people, can be a downer.

But if you stay with that difficult feeling long enough, the weather inside of you will change. You begin to feel the strength of something real arriving. Your ordinariness becomes a door into everything. To embrace yourself as ordinary is the way (perhaps the only way) to discover and live out one’s singularly unique calling in the world.

That deflating feeling is the experience of moving from fantasy (someone else’s journey) to a dream (of what is actually yours to do). Superpowers are for stories of control. Commonpowers are for stories of something greater: reality. And reality is better.

Done Pretending

As I came of age, I had three posters on the wall above my bed. The most idolized guru of my youth was David Bowie. Now, forty-five years later, I find his epic song “Heroes” prophetic. That anthem took me over the threshold of allowing myself to be different from other people and live a life I can call my own.

I remember singing it back then with my freshly colored turquoise hair, fantastical purple pants, and newfound freedom to be myself. His soaring voice declared, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Notice his qualifier, however, “Just for one day.”

That is it. Have your turn to be a hero, for a day.

That is plenty. More than that, would that really be sustainable for you? For others?

Okay, take a year, or, if necessary, ten years. But then go on with the task of finding stories other than the hero’s story you have inhabited for so long, no matter how awesome that story might have seemed when you first encountered it. There are different ways to see, experience, and act in the world.

What if you are not on the Hero’s Journey? What journey are you on? What else is out there?

The invitations to the good old myth will keep coming to each one of us from all directions: “Become the hero of your own story!” I hope that now you know, and cannot un-know, that for that to work, you need to pretend that your story is the only one that matters to you.

But we are done pretending. When we stop and think about it, we cannot, and we don’t want to, control the world, even the corner of the world that we lead. We want to discover, be turned around, and right side up. Leadership, at its best, is not a matter of control but of surprise, including the surprise of finding ourselves in a story we have never imagined before.

Don't Lose Heart

These are the times of myth-famine. Both religious and scientific myths have been steadily deteriorating, losing their potency to inspire and ground human thriving. Communism is dead. Its longer-living twin brother, capitalism, is on the deathbed, pretending to be the greatest hero ever. You might have a global myth that you see to add to this list.

The truths behind many of these myths no longer ring true. There is no timelessness and boundlessness to them. They are not useful anymore, too small to inspire and ground us.

Yet, in my daughter’s generation and among people from around the world, I notice that people come alive when someone tells a story that interrupts the tired patterns of symbiosis, ecology, revolution, friendship, pilgrimage, and magic, even in the stark worlds of business, economy, and politics.

When I immigrated to the United States, the most popular American phrases I encountered were startlingly violent. “You killed it.” “You are dead in the water.” Then there were also empowering (and less boring) ones, such as “You got this.” It assumes that you already have what it takes and witnesses to you that you are not alone.

So, let’s not lose heart.

We got this. While the loud and powerful are falling asleep at the wheel of imagination, in the clandestine places invisible to unsuspecting people like many of us, new and better myths are being born, like new stars. These myths in the making are so new, tender, and powerful that we cannot even recognize them yet. As our disoriented hearts are taking the necessary time to grieve the myths that are dying, away from our sight, new ways of being kind, strong, and wise are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good and resilient humans in every corner of the world.

(originally published in Developing Leaders Quarterly, August 2025)

💎 LEADERSHIP TOOL 💎

Are you stuck in hero mode?

This is a 2-minute self-check—a mirror, not a metric. Ten quick prompts help you spot “hero-mode” reflexes, then pick one tiny 48-hour experiment to try.

Use it solo: notice your patterns, reduce control-anxiety, and make one purposeful shift.

Use it with your team: create shared language, defuse hero-vs-villain loops, and align on one small experiment everyone tries.

NOTE: It’s available to read below for paid subscribers of The New Glossary. A printable PDF that includes both the tool and this article is attached.

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