There’s a little sadness in seeing a tidy kitchen and a blank sketchbook.

Chores do have their place.

But occasionally, allow that place to be second.

May you sometimes have a sink full of dishes, a studio full of progress, and a heart full of satisfaction.

All the touch-points matter. The seats, the lighting, the inflight entertainment, how the trays and bins operate.

But well-before those features are installed, the aircraft is a functional flying machine. “Green aircraft” they’re called. Often covered in a protective green coating, these planes are minimally equipped for safe flight, but they’re not yet outfitted with the interior finishes.

In this kind of production, after the aircraft is assembled and tested, it takes a ferry flight to a separate facility where the cabin is completed and the exterior is top-coated.

Why does this matter?

Because it’s really easy to obsess over the cabin. Even before we’ve built the flight-ready structure.

All icing and no cake.

So if you’ve decided you need both, be sure to build a structure that’s worthy of its finishes.

No doubt, generative AI is creating unprecedented change. Some historically laborious tasks are now easy tasks. And some jobs are becoming obsolete. The future is uncertain. (Even more than usual.)

But it’s not the time to panic. It’s the time to double-down on our skills. Skills like empathy, listening, pondering, and curiosity. Openness, wonder, improvisation, and connection.

The landscape is changing — as it always has. As creative humans, we wilt or blossom as we choose. Not because of our environment, but because of how we choose to engage with it.

“I can make one more expensive, but I can’t make one more delicious.”

Sometimes we find an ingredient or a tool that’s just right. It becomes a staple. A workhorse.

And though we can source greater luxury and finer polish, we can’t find what’s better.

There’s tension there. We like improvements. We yearn to climb, even when we’ve reached the summit.

But there can be joy in knowing we’ve already discovered something of great value. That we can turn from the ache of seeking to gratitude for having found.

I picked up some uncomplicated peanut butter — the kind that consists of roasted peanuts, salt, and a jar with a lid.

It was delicious, but impossibly messy. The peanut butter was too liquid, and I couldn’t get it to stay on a knife or to not drip from a spoon.

Food science taught me the fix.

Natural peanut butter is an emulsion — peanut particles and proteins suspended in oil. If you mix in just a little water, it disrupts that oily emulsion as the water interacts with the proteins, causing them to clump together.

And just like that, my liquidy peanut butter became much more workable.

* * *

Add some water to make it more firm? I wouldn’t have guessed it.

When our intuition doesn’t track with the science, the solution will likely seem counter-intuitive.

We enter the studio heavy and we depart light.
We enter the studio empty and we depart full.

Seek these transformative spaces — this kind of work, these human connections — where our burdens are eased and our spirits replenished.

These places are holy.

Listen to the poets.

More than the pundits. More than the analysts. More than all the voices that are jockeying for our attention night and day.

Listen to the poets.

Seek their perspective.

Let them remind you of the wonders of the world.

Let them inspire you to see with your heart.

Let them speak to that inner wisdom that recognizes beauty, that grows through mystery, that embraces the immeasurable, that dances with the unresolved.

Because others will try to convince you that all can be understood, that all can be quantified, that all can be charted and graphed and boxed and readied for shipping.

And with all that noise, we forget the poetry.

Enter the poets. Listen to them.

So much of life is the story of how we navigate unexpected change.

“Take I-95 North. Look for signs for the Lincoln Tunnel.”

There weren’t many more directions on the piece of paper. I was sixteen years old, driving from Baltimore to New York City to visit one of my siblings.

I had to watch the fuel gauge; there weren’t lights or alerts to warn me when the tank was low.

I had to keep track of my speed; I didn’t have cruise control on that vehicle.

I had to watch the road signs and estimate my travel time; no GPS navigation back then.

I had to change the dial every so often to catch a local radio station signal; no satellite radio or podcasts.

Technology has connected us and given us more data than we can ever internalize. But it hasn’t always connected us to experience. In some ways, it allows us to disconnect. To stop watching. To stop paying attention.

But we can still curate moments where we rely on our senses. We can choose to look at signs instead of screens. We can choose to knock on a neighbor’s door. Or to hand-write a letter to a friend. Or to remember with our eyes instead of our cameras.

If only to remind us what it’s like — or to reconnect to our senses — we can every-so-often rekindle our interest in doing things in a distinctly human way.

A few years ago, I sang the Star-Spangled Banner at an event. It was my first time singing the national anthem, and I was nervous.

Leading up to the event — aside from worrying about the vocal performance itself — I had some things on my mind. What I would wear. How I would look. What I would do with my hands. What my eyes would do.

I was overthinking it.

When the moment came, I stood behind home plate, and with microphone in hand, I began to sing. To my relief (and instant clarity) everyone turned away from me to look at the flag.

Of course.

They were looking the same place I was looking. And for this kind of song, and this kind of venue, it’s exactly what I should have anticipated.

Sure, they were listening, but no one was focused on me. I wasn’t focused on me either.

For all of us, it was something bigger.

Rightly so.

Tracking and logging can seem tedious, but in measured doses, it can teach us a lot about ourselves.

You could choose a day, or a week, or a month … and just keep track.

Maybe you follow every dollar spent.

Or every calorie.

Or every minute.

Or every mile.

And yes, the data will be flawed.

And yes, it’s unhealthy to go overboard with this task.

But might it also be unhealthy to not know?

To pretend that we’re doing one thing when we’re really doing another?

Seeing what we’re actually doing might prompt a pat on the back.

Or it might be the impetus for change.

Either way, we’re better than saying, “I just don’t know where it all went.”

Thinking aloud is not the same as thinking allowed.

Often, we’re practicing one without fully embracing the other.

Helping can sometimes involve sacrifice and labor.

But most often, helping requires more intention than effort.

Because our daily life isn’t a stage for heroics; it’s a series of opportunities to be small expressions of love.

Being truthful doesn’t mean sharing every detail. And it takes skill to know what to share and when.

Consider a surgical drape. In procedures where the patient is awake, a drape is often used so that the surgical site is not visible to the patient.

The drape is a generous abstraction. (We don’t always want to know all the details.)

And outside the operating room, we can think of drapes as a metaphor. A useful way to soften harsh or disturbing realities. Drapes don’t encourage us to live in denial; at times they help us — on both sides — to focus on what’s helpful.

We know this from athletics. We know this from music. We know this from cooking.

Warmups are necessary.

We can begin from a cold start, but it all works much better after we’re warm.

Which is to say — when our creative projects haven’t yet hit their stride, it could be that we’re still warming up. And while some warmups are measured in minutes, others are measured in months and years.

The fable is told a few different ways, but the message is the same.

In a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

The flaw in the parable is that the collaboration always fails. There’s no breakfast because self-sacrifice is not on the table.

We often need collaboration. And we need commitment, too, but not as a casualty.

In healthy collaboration, those who carry the most risk have a say in the decisions that are made.

As for the chicken and the pig, they work together only when they can agree on a new recipe.

One of the doors in my office tends to slam. It’s done this for a long time. Years? Sometimes people catch it to soften the blow. Mostly, it just shuts loudly.

During an in-between moment this week, I decided to see what could be done.

I took the cover off of the door closer, noted the manufacturer’s name, found some documentation on how to adjust the mechanism, and now, the door shuts much more quietly.

Some lessons were learned:

• 20-minutes of attention can fix a two-second annoyance that occurs a hundred times a day.

• Some door closers can sweep quickly and then latch slowly. With adjustments for each. Those are nice features.

• Detailed manufacturer’s information can exist — even for decades-old products.

• Between big projects, sometimes it’s fun to find a small thing to fix.

• Finally: some people tend to notice changes and improvements, and others tend to be generally oblivious.

My son took a test at school — the kind that involves dozens of students sitting at desks in a large auditorium.

As he explained it, the test was briefly interrupted not by a commotion, but by its absence. At one point, the ventilation fans — whose industrial hum had been so constant as to be invisible — the fans suddenly stopped. And there was an unexpected silence. A silence that was disruptive because it suddenly revealed that what previously felt like quiet was not quiet at all.

Absence, as much as presence, prompts us to take inventory.

We cannot make happen what must be invited to happen.

In those spaces, we don’t need the tools of an engineer, but the heart of a sower.

It’s not so much a shame that we have to live with the natural consequences of our actions.

The shame is that in some areas of life, we are stubbornly slow learners.