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Photographs paired with short reflections on presence, transition, and the ordinary work of coming home to yourself.
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A few frames from the everyday
Updated as new photographs are shared. Select any image to open it on Instagram.
On Saturday I returned to the same harvest celebration in Napa that I attended a year ago.
Going back gave me another way to notice what had changed during the year between visits. Some changes arrive with a date attached. Others become easier to see only when something familiar gives us a point of comparison.
This week`s essay is about travel, celebration, returning, and the ways we sometimes recognize change by coming back to a place we already know.
What place or ritual helps you notice how your own life has changed?
https://buff.ly/0sYFzgY
#LettersFromTheInterior #NapaValley #LifeTransitions #Belonging #PersonalGrowth
Working on the second book in the trilogy sent me back to the first and to a question I have been carrying: Where does a journey actually begin?
Sometimes the first sign of change is not a dramatic event. Life can still look workable while some part of us has begun to recognize that the life we built no longer quite fits who we are becoming.
This month`s Letter from the Interior is about that quieter beginning, and why A Life Aligned is still the place I would begin the larger journey. What has started asking for your attention?
https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/letter-where-the-journey-begins
#LettersFromTheInterior #ALifeAligned #LifeTransitions #PersonalGrowth #Querétaro
A woman I often see in a waiting room began talking to me in Spanish this week.
I understood enough to stay with her and not enough to feel fluent. She filled some of the gaps with gestures, I answered with what I had, and the conversation continued.
What I noticed afterward was not better grammar. I was more willing to be seen learning.
This week’s Letters from the Interior is about that small shift, and about the kinds of progress that are easy to miss because nobody is keeping score.
https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/she-offered-me-the-other-chair
#LettersFromTheInterior #LearningSpanish #LivingInMéxico #Querétaro #PersonalGrowth
This week, I found myself caring less about whether everything I do fits beneath a single professional label.
Coaching, writing, teaching, scholarship, and the book increasingly feel like expressions of the same person. Jobs and titles will change over time. I am becoming more interested in whether the work I choose reflects who I am.
Returning to a mastermind group after almost a decade has helped me notice that shift. Having a regular place for unfinished thinking has brought greater order to the week, and it has also made certain choices harder to avoid.
This week`s Letters from the Interior follows that question further:
https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/when-things-begin-to-move-again
#LettersFromTheInterior #ParadiseRediscovered #PersonalGrowth #MeaningfulWork #Querétaro
On Saturday, I adopted two kittens, sisters, hermanas. Their names are Frida and Georgia, for Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe, one name from México and one from New Mexico.
They have been here for only a short time, and I am already seeing the house differently. A desk is something to investigate. Sitting down may mean acquiring a kitten. The rooms are the same, and my attention inside them has changed.
That became part of this month’s Letter from the Interior, which is about what happens when something new enters a life and begins changing the meaning of what was already there.
The full Letter: https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/letter-two-kittens-moved-in-yesterday
What has entered your life recently and changed the way you see something familiar?
#LettersFromTheInterior #ParadiseRediscovered #Belonging #LifeTransitions #México
On Friday afternoon, I took a photograph of my dining table before people arrived for dinner. Looking at it later, I realized that I have lived in this house for almost a year, and this was one of the first times I had filled that table with guests.
It reminded me of something I have seen repeatedly in professional life. We can give someone a new title and responsibilities on Monday, while becoming comfortable in that role may take considerably longer. William Bridges`s distinction between change and transition has always helped me understand why.
The same has been true in my own move to México. I can tell you when I moved and when I began living in this house. I cannot identify a single day when unfamiliar routines became ordinary or when I stopped feeling that I was still learning how to live here.
Friday`s dinner gave me one small indication of how far that transition had progressed. It also reminded me that when people are adjusting to new roles at work, the effective date may tell us very little about where they are in the transition.
What might change in the way we support people at work if we remembered that distinction?
I wrote more about the experience in this week`s Letters from the Interior:
https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/it-took-me-a-year-to-set-the-table
#Leadership #OrganizationalChange #LifeTransitions
On Friday afternoon, before everyone arrived for dinner, I took a photograph of the table.
I have lived in this house for almost a year and in México for almost two years. Somehow, this was still one of the first times I had invited a group of people here for dinner.
That stayed with me after the evening was over.
We can know exactly when we moved, changed jobs, began again somewhere else, or made another decision that altered our lives. Living into what follows can happen much more gradually.
Sometimes the evidence is surprisingly ordinary. A street no longer requires directions. A language requires a little less thought. A house has been home for a long time, and one evening you look around the table and notice another way in which you have begun to inhabit the life you chose.
I wrote about my own version of that this week in Letters from the Interior.
https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/it-took-me-a-year-to-set-the-table
#lettersfromtheinterior #lifetransitions #belonging #livinginmexico #Querétaro
Years ago, gatherings like the one I attended in San Antonio this week required more effort from me. Some part of me would remain just outside the experience, monitoring where I should stand, whom I should talk to, and whether I was doing any of it correctly.
This week, surrounded by colleagues I usually encounter through a screen, I noticed something had changed. I was simply there.
I don`t think I became better at working a room. I think I became less dependent on the room to tell me whether I belonged in it. I could enjoy being welcomed without needing the welcome to establish my place there.
I wrote about that quiet change this week in Letters from the Interior, and about what happens when people we usually know through screens suddenly occupy the same physical space.
When the screen becomes a room
Read it: https://drmarkarcuri.substack.com/p/when-the-screen-becomes-a-room
What places have become easier for you to enter than they once were?
#LettersFromTheInterior #Belonging #PersonalGrowth #LifeTransitions #Querétaro