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Thursday, 1 October 2026
On this day of your life
I believe God wants you to know ...
... that your agenda for this day has been set in
your soul. The only question now is
whether you will listen to that.
Do you know why you are alive? To give voice and
action and physicality to God. To become the
grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held
about Who You Are.
Everything else is beside the point.
It will involve you, of course. It will grab you and hold
you and make you think it is important today, but it
will all be very much beside the point.
Stay on course. Stay on course.
A Unique Healing Balm (OM)
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Forget about Shared Values: The Real Secret to a Lasting Relationship.
Share on bsky
I write about relationships a lot because I want to know what actually makes them last.
It’s a question I think about constantly: What really makes a relationship work?
We usually hear the same answers. A good relationship needs clear communication, shared values, and a mutual commitment to stay together. These things are incredibly important. They build the initial foundation and show us if two people are a good match.
But I have seen many couples who had all of these things still break up. That’s because even a strong foundation can fall apart if there isn’t a deeper, hidden base underneath it. Think of it like a bunker under a house. We don’t usually look for it when we first fall in love, but it’s the one thing that actually decides if a relationship will survive the hard times.
I’m not saying we should ignore shared values or good communication. But the truth is, there will be times when you and your partner struggle to talk. There will be days when your values clash or when the effort in the relationship is not exactly equal. Life gets stressful and exhausting. In those moments, the standard advice we hear is not enough to keep things together. When the obvious foundation cracks, that hidden bunker is what keeps the relationship standing. That hidden factor is personal growth.
To make a relationship last for decades, both partners need to be committed to growing as individuals. We don’t have to grow at the exact same speed, nor do we have to grow in the exact same way. One person might go to therapy, while the other reads or simply spends time reflecting on their actions. The method doesn’t matter. What matters is that we both share the same core intention: we both want to improve.
The hardest breakups don’t happen because two people stopped loving each other. They happen because one person grew and the other refused to change. You see this when one partner starts healing their past wounds while the other refuses to examine their own destructive behavior—or when one person tries to break bad habits while the other stays completely stuck in them.
When one partner chooses to grow and the other chooses to stay exactly the same, they eventually drift apart.
No amount of shared hobbies or common values can fix that gap. If a relationship is going to survive, both people have to be willing to do the uncomfortable inner work. When both partners commit to working on themselves, the relationship improves. Arguments turn into chances to understand each other. Mistakes become ways to learn instead of reasons to walk away.
To stay committed to personal growth, we first need to realize just how deeply our inner work impacts our relationships. When we ignore our own emotional health, our unhealed wounds end up running the show. We react instead of responding, project our fears onto our partner, and repeat old patterns. Realizing that working on ourselves is the greatest gift we can give to our relationship is what gives us the motivation to start.
Once we understand its importance, we have to treat personal growth like any other vital habit that keeps our relationship thriving. This doesn’t mean changing our entire life overnight.
It means choosing small, consistent habits that fit into our daily routine:
>> Daily reflection: Setting aside just 10 minutes every morning or evening to journal, meditate, or simply sit with our thoughts and check in with how we are feeling.
>> Regular self-education: Reading books, listening to podcasts, or going to therapy to better understand our behavior and learn healthier ways to handle conflict.
>> Weekly honest check-ins: Having an honest, judgment-free conversation with our partner once a week to share what we are both learning about ourselves and where we still feel stuck.
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It takes intentional effort and daily practice, but over time, those small moments of reflection turn into a stronger, far more resilient relationship.
In the end, a lasting relationship is not about finding someone who perfectly matches who we are today. It is about choosing someone who is willing to do the hard work to support and understand us tomorrow.
author: Elyane Youssef
Image: Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels
Sweet Kelsey: it is our Second Anniversary.
It is today our second anniversary: my love, my friend, my teammate, my wife, my sweet and fiery Kelsey.
You chose all these images (see my Insta), and I’ve made no attempt to order them. Memories are like that, anyway.
I met you when I’d lost and given up most hope if not all. And your love was full and bright and shattered everything I knew and pulled me up by the roots.
Love is hard, love is easy. Love started easy for us, but even then it meant meeting as if by fortune through my words and her dear friends and family and her travel and our change and fear and excitement and risk.
But sure yeah then it was all butter, vegan butter. It was licking the butter of heaven off a silver spoon: true love, discovered, waited for, for so long too long just long enough.
Love that’s complementary, with open and full communication and joy and exertion and biking to Niwot and back and biking in the snow and making love and more and more and more and Gather, Gather Family humor and showing one another our favorite treasures in this life we’d lived before we’d found one another. David Whyte put it well.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
But shortly after the proposals of joy (one in green at the Purkhong in Vermont, one beneath the Green Monster in Fenway) and the wedding of families and communities and hearts…
…we discovered more change and loss and health situations and money challenges (it takes money to make all of this possible, and thankfully my life’s work provided not only a healthy though dwindling salary but the time and flexibility to devote myself to serving through the change and loss and change and loss.).
Honestly half of what I long for now is rest, ease, reading on a proverbial beach, time at a hot springs, massage, the chance to melt and cry and let go and cry and celebrate and I’ve missed my friends and aged sangha. But too discovering a new city and living in both is a two-sided delight, or torture, if seen half full or half empty.
Working nights, Willa’ing by day. Sleeping hard from 2 or 3 or earlier or even later, to 7:30 most mornings, once in awhile later thank god. We’re a good team for our Willa, almost always a great team for our Willa.
Change is exhausting, and fun, and hard, and harder than I thought it could ever be. But we’ve stuck with it, and one another, through hard times and change and more change and heaps of change. The only wisdom I have is to hold on, to keep trying, to hang in there as my father-in-law put it. And what do we get out of staying on the path, together?
Not too many smooches, these days, but a few. Not too much cuddling, these days, but 15 minutes interrupted 15 times.
We’ll figure it out. Whatever you want, babes. Home again. Home with you, and your red raw heart and humor and hard times and good meals and teamwork and whatever comes next in my career and writing and trying to be of service to this world of ours, and our children’s futures.
And what do we get out of staying on the path, together?
Among so many other things, now: Willa.
The Next Crisis Facing Humanity is Not what We May Think.
The Intelligence of Care.
For most of human history, leadership has been measured by power. Who can command, conquer, control, extract, and win.
Power has built civilizations. It has also built prisons, empires, colonialism, patriarchy, and ecological collapse. The mythology of the “lone strong man” has shaped nearly every institution we inherited.
And yet, when we look at how life itself survives, it tells a completely different story.
Forests do not thrive because one tree dominates all the others. They thrive because roots and fungi exchange nutrients beneath the soil. Trees communicate, share resources, and support the life surrounding them.
The human body does not survive because one organ rules the rest. It survives because billions of cells cooperate in exquisite relationship, each contributing something specific to the whole.
Healthy families are not held together by authority alone. They are held together by attention, repair, noticing, and tending. They survive because someone recognizes when a person has gone quiet, when something has fractured, or when care is needed.
Life has been trying to teach us something all along.
Right relationship is what makes life thrive.
For centuries, much of the labor required to create and maintain right relationship has been assigned to women. Not because women are biologically destined to nurture, but because patriarchy made relationship our responsibility.
We remembered birthdays and noticed who had gone quiet. We fed people, held babies, sat beside the dying, remembered recipes, and maintained families. We protected community memory, negotiated peace, and carried the emotional weather of entire households.
We learned to see systems through the lens of relationship because relationships were the systems we were allowed to build.
History called this women’s work.
History was wrong.
It was civilization’s most sophisticated leadership training.
The next crisis facing humanity is not a crisis of intelligence. It is a crisis of relationship.
We know how to build extraordinary technologies, but we have forgotten how to build kinship. We know how to extract resources, but we have forgotten how to reciprocate. We know how to optimize systems, but we have forgotten how to belong to them.
The next evolution of leadership will not be led by domination. It will be led by relational intelligence and by people willing to ask a different kind of question.
Not, “How do I gain more power?”
But, “How do I make more life possible?”
That question changes everything.
It changes how we approach business, politics, medicine, education, religion, marriage, ecology, and economics.
Healthy systems are not created through stronger control. They are created through stronger relationships.
This is not an argument against men. It is an invitation beyond patriarchy.
Many men already lead this way. Many women have been forced to lead through domination because domination was the only form of authority their institutions recognized.
This is not fundamentally about sex. It is about maturation.
It is about finally recognizing that the qualities dismissed as feminine were never weak. They were simply invisible to a civilization obsessed with force.
The future belongs to people who understand ecology more than empire, stewardship more than extraction, repair more than punishment, and reciprocity more than conquest.
Forests survive through relationship. Bodies survive through relationship. Communities and families survive through relationship. Love survives through relationship.
Perhaps civilization will too.
For a long time, we have asked who should lead. I think we have been asking the wrong question.
The better question is this:
What kind of leadership makes life thrive?
I believe we already know the answer.
We have simply spent centuries calling it women’s work.
~
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