Field Notes - February 2026

A thought

Life’s greatest challenge may be endurance. Some times we must endure suffering. Some times, instead of suffering, it is delay. Endurance then looks a lot like patience.

So often we don’t recognize that a moment calls for endurance.

We know the proverb about the frog in the kettle. Dropped into a kettle of hot water, the frog wants to jump out. Put into a lukewarm kettle that is gradually warmed, the frog will stay put.

So often, when things happen - we want to just jump out. Something is hard, it isn’t going our way. We want to get away from it as quickly as possible.

For those of us with high self-agency, we may just attempt to bull doze our way through it and get to the other side.

But sometimes, that is not going to work. There are times where the path forward is the path through. And, we do not know how long it will be, what waits along the way, and what it will require of us.

If you aren’t scared by that, you should be.

These are places where we must be patient. We wait, but we don’t stop and waste away. It is not a place for idleness.

We persist. We encounter the ‘thorns and thistles’ of the ground. The failed harvest, the bad weather. The lost client. We see those as part of it.

We work to learn the lessons being offered.

We also don’t fall for the head fake. Some times there is nothing to learn. Luck can just be bad.

In all - we must guard our self talk - knowing how powerful negative language is.

A quote

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.”

-Ian Wilson quote, former GE executive.

A book I’m reading

Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw

“There’s an old Irish belief that if you aren’t wrapped in a cloak of story you will be unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent at just the moment a culture worth its salt requires you to become a real, grown, human being.”