John R. Miles

I felt this most clearly a few years ago.

I was carrying an old story about what success had to look like, how I had to prove my worth every single day, how rest was something I could only earn after I had exhausted every other option.

I told myself it was ambition.

I told myself it was discipline.

But it was a weight I'd forgotten I could put down.

One day, I noticed I was no longer excited about the things that used to light me up.

And it wasn't because I'd outgrown them.

Instead, it was because I'd run out of room inside myself to fill them fully.

The old story had taken up so much space, that joy.

curiosity, even simple ease had nowhere left to land.

That was the moment I understood carrying what's finished doesn't just cost energy.

It costs possibility.

It costs presence.

It costs the very life we say we want.

So if that's the quiet cost, what becomes possible when we finally choose to pay a different price?

The price?

of letting go.

That's exactly where we're heading next.

Before we go there, I want to pause on something that's been hitting me hard lately.

The stories I just shared, the subtle drag, the shrinking space inside, the way we adapt to a smaller life, they stay with me not because they're dramatic, but because they're so quiet, so ordinary, so easy to ignore until they aren't.