Jennisms

Fragments of self-knowledge.

The throughline

I save these the way other people save recipes: a line that lands, a thing I noticed, a fragment of self-knowledge. For a long time that is all they were, a pile. Then I read the pile and found one argument running through every single one.

It is the move from anxious control to secure presence. From gripping and testing and bracing and trying to decode the outcome, to showing up, feeling all of it, and keeping what wakes me up. I tried to control my life and my love, and both of them taught me to be present instead.

The primitives

Show up, don't control.

Presence over outcome. My job is to be here, not to manage how it ends.

Nothing is wasted.

Every chapter has value. If they leave, thank them for it.

Feelings are data or fear.

Learn which is which before you act on either.

Lessons repeat until you learn them.

What you won't deal with comes back, uglier.

Boundaries from having had none.

The most boundaried people used to have none at all.

Keep what woke you.

You keep the parts of yourself a person revealed, even after they go.

Notice life together.

The purest love is wanting someone to notice life with you.

Accept the irreducible.

Love the distance you cannot bridge instead of fighting it.

Agape for everything.

The love is bigger than romance. The same open hand, pointed at the work, the team, the stranger, the day.

I have watched How I Met Your Mother more times than I will admit, and the lesson that stuck is the one holding this whole page together: the scars of what happened to you do not have to stay scars. You can paint over them in the loudest colors you have, your imagination, your stubbornness, your will to love your life exactly as it was, and as it is. The fragments here are the scars. Studying them is how I paint.

The love face of the same argument lives on On Love. The threads across a whole saved folder, each one checked against the research, live on The Saved Folder.

The drawer · the lines I save, studied

Lines I’ve kept about how to live, each one held up to the light: what it’s really saying, and whether it survives the check.

“The meaning of life is just finding things you like doing and people you like spending time with, and spending as much of your life as possible on those two things.”

a saved line

The study

Reads like a fridge magnet, and then the longest study of human life we have agrees with it. Harvard has followed the same people for 85 years, and the single best predictor of a happy, healthy life is not money or achievement, it is the quality of your relationships; strong ties move your odds of being alive at the end about as much as quitting smoking does. So the line is not naive — it is the finding with the citations stripped off. Find the things and the people, and spend your life there.

Sources Harvard Study of Adult Development (relationships and a good life) · Yerkes-Dodson law (pressure and performance) · Piff & Keltner, 2015 (awe and the small self) · Epictetus, the Enchiridion (non-attachment) · Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things.

Wisdom, served

The fragments above are mine. These are the older books they keep rhyming with: the Stoics, the Gita, Rumi, Rilke. Press for one off the top of the deck.

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion · c. 125 AD

Rhymes with · Feelings are data or fear.

The whole anxious-control loop, named two thousand years before I lived it. The thing rarely hurts me. My read of the thing does.

In my own words

The thoughts I recognized myself inside.

Some began as observations about another person or a problem in front of me. I kept them because there was enough of me inside them to be useful.

Recognition

Sometimes I find myself inside the thing I am saying about someone else.

I said this while talking about interns: if you tell someone to go, they may run as fast as they can until they falter. Someone has to help with the pace, and someone has to bring water before mile twenty-four. The metaphor was about support, but there was enough of me in it that I kept it.
The runner was not literally me. The recognition was.

I struggle with the idea of having capacity for all the good things life brings. Not that I can't hold it — that I don't trust myself to hold it without something breaking.

Care

Care becomes craft.

Life and work are all the same thing. The care I put into something for a person is how I tell them they matter. The substrate changes. The commitment doesn't.

I built this place alongside the best people in my life.

Failing someone because I didn’t consider.

Honesty

Correction is a form of belief.

Seeing where you do it wrong is the most helpful thing, honestly. It means someone thinks you can actually fix it.

I’m not gonna pretend like I had it together. I didn’t.

Being unkind.Or becoming someone who uses honesty as a weapon instead of a gift.

Attention

I want to be known for how I notice.

Compliments I like: you’re smart. You’re funny. I like how you speak.
WAY MORE than “you’re pretty.” Duh.

It’s so expressed — theatre. You give yourself over to feeling it all, to becoming someone else. Those empathy skills translate to everything.

I have a degree in expressing feelings.

Margin notes

Disappointment.Both directions. Being disappointed and being disappointing.

Forgetting where I come from.

Bad with uncertainty. Not the risk part — the part where you don't know the shape of what's coming and you can't prepare for it.

My vice is tardiness.

I do not believe in absolutes. “All X are this.”

← Back to journal