Introducing Sunday Reverie: a bi-monthly invitation to return to yourself

what higher purpose is this season of your life in service of?

Over the years, I’ve cultivated a weekly Sunday ritual that gives me the space to exhale the past week before inhaling the week ahead. At the start of the year, I added a simple question to the mix: “What did I learn last week that I’m integrating?”

In this process, I’ve found myself returning to 2-3 themes that emerge in different contexts each month, asking to be unraveled.

Living in the epicenter of AI development, it feels like our world (or perhaps just my bubble) is increasingly optimizing for speed and execution more than ever. The trouble is that it’s often in the pauses and subliminal space that our greatest insights surface.

As a small act of defiance, I’m experimenting with a bi-monthly series where I welcome you to pause and return to yourself. Every two weeks, I’ll offer a question that I’m contemplating and invite you to:

1. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea 🫖

2. Cue up some meditative music 🎧

3. Grab your journal and spend 15 minutes reflecting on what that week’s question evokes within you ✍️

The intention is to flip the script on traditional advice columns. Rather than seek advice from someone else, my hope is that this exercise becomes a ritual that inspires you to connect with your inner wisdom, one question at a time.

Onto this week’s question.

What higher purpose is this season of your life in service of?

Over the last six months, the central question that has been swirling in my mind is what higher purpose is everything I’m doing in service of?

Not higher purpose in the spiritual sense, but in the broader arc of the life I’m building.

Answering this question has been an exercise in owning the season I’m in and identifying the trade-offs I’m willing to make in order to prioritize The Thing that is most important to me in this chapter of life.

In a prior season, a younger me would have answered this question with some version of “maximizing my impact,” a relic of a time when work served as my singular source of meaning and external benchmarks of success were how I measured my self-worth.

After spending the last several years of examining who I am without work and learning how to find meaning beyond my day job, I no longer subscribe to work (in the traditional sense) as being my highest purpose.

These days, my conception of higher purpose is more expansive. At the core, it’s about building and living a full and fulfilling life — an amalgamation of starting a family, engaging in meaningful work, being in community with loved ones, and finding avenues to self-express.

2025 was the year that my center of gravity began to shift. In late spring, my husband, Ryan, and I decided that we were finally ready to open the portal to parenthood and began to realign our lives around that decision.

For the two years, orienting toward financial stability had taken a back seat as we each embarked on our respective sabbaticals — me exploring writing full-time then running a local community space and Ryan training to become a freedive instructor and breathwork coach. We both knew that we would soon turn our attention to growing our family, undertaking an irreversible set of responsibilities as Mom and Dad. The higher purpose then was to make the time to find ourselves and connect with the things that made us come alive so that we could arrive at our next chapter fully ourselves.

By mid-2025, we both felt at peace that we had fulfilled that season’s mandate and looked toward turning the page to the next chapter: starting our family.

Despite the fact that I intuitively knew that it was time, with impending change came resistance and fear. Once I arrived at the clarity that our next season was upon us, the hard work began: deciding how to balance the trade-offs we needed to make. Ryan and I agreed that our non-negotiables were staying in San Francisco and abundantly providing for our future child while living in this high-cost city. It was time to reorient back to building financial stability.

While I kicked off a job search in short order, for several months, I lived in doubt that I could find a job that would both provide the financial stability I yearned for and allow me to continue to cultivate my skills as a community builder. I worried that despite all the inner work I had done around untethering my self-worth from work, I’d slip back into old patterns once I returned to a more corporate environment. And that I would struggle to write — not for a lack of desire, but for a lack of time and space.

As I spoke with potential teams and evaluated job opportunities, it became clear that above all, I valued autonomy and the ability to own my schedule. After managing a team in my last role, the obvious next step was to continue to seek out management roles. Without the clarity that this next season called for something different, I would have followed my ego, chasing a title over optimizing for autonomy and stability. In the end, I joined a team based out of New York to oversee and grow our San Francisco Bay Area investor community without the responsibilities of managing a team on the ground.

This season, I’m in service of building a full life — one where I show up to a job I enjoy without losing myself in it, am present at home and in my community, expand my capacity to become a mother, and have the space to freely engage with writing without the pressure to monetize my craft.

And to me, that is enough.

What higher purpose is this season of your life in service of? I’d love to hear your reflections.