Bree Stilwell

The reply was in the form of a question, self-directed but shared by the food writer, photographer and nomad, of Let’s Get Lost.

In response to my nudging toward time spent in generous support of our own right to thrive, Rebecca wrote:

“What do I actually need to do for myself to flourish? I do not have a clear answer, but it seems like an important question to consider.”

So many essentials here, in the concise span of twenty-seven beautifully chosen words: need, do, for one’s self, flourish.

Then, poised like bait on a hook: the impression of importance.

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We’ve no shortage of access to good ideas these days, inspiring even, but what often accompanies such bounty is paralysis. Even with the good stuff, the simple reality of too much can feel a lot like the near constant barrage of the bad stuff.

One more thing we have to do something about. And immediately, btw.

I’m interested in supporting the opposite forces—the rebel army. It involves slowing down, huddling up, getting creative and setting strategy together.

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What Do I Actually Need to Flourish?

When I read Rebecca’s comment and question, my curiosity assumed control. I needed more so connected direct.

Rebecca and I chatted over Zoom a few days later—she, angelically backlit against the sheer curtains of a guest bedroom, me, fighting off kamikaze stinkbugs on my back deck.

Within minutes, I forgot I was talking to a total stranger. I imagined Rebecca’s cooking was much like her voice, her vibe—comforting and warm, a little spicy. All hands, no tweezers.

When we eventually veered on-topic after getting to know each other a little better, and after I told her why her question stuck with me, Rebecca described how an insight had started to take shape for her—a realization that while she lives a life very much of her own design, she wasn’t entirely sure if and how she was thriving.

“Yes, my husband and I have always been the type to see something we want to do and just do it,” she explained when I told her how her life appears through her words and work—enviable, particularly in our era of constant performative sharing.

She splits her time between an RV and a sailboat, for Pete’s sake, traveling the country while developing and sharing recipes, having and writing about her adventures.

But there’s a difference between doing and flourishing, between making decisions and taking nourishment from them. We agreed, there’s a mushy middle there, when you’re following your passions while often unaware of what it actually feels like in the moment.

There’s just so much to do, and as Rebecca explained, we’re not always clear on which efforts are pursuant to our thriving, and those that are corrosive to it.

“I’ve been examining what ideas I have about work, business growth, and all these other obligations. I’m asking myself: what would happen if I just didn’t do anything I don’t want to do? Would that be flourishing?”

We obviously can’t protest our way into it, like a child refusing to clean their room because they just don’t want to. But that’s where self-parenting comes in, Rebecca told me, “being the parent of yourself, examining what you’re doing on a minute-by-minute basis, and distinguishing between things you do because of internal motivation versus the external ‘shoulds.’”

“We’d never tell our child or our best friend to go spend two hours on Facebook, so why are we okay doing it ourselves?”

I shared that when my kids argue with me about the value of an instruction I give them (always wear a helmet, don’t drink the science experiment, etc.), I say the exact same words every time: ‘my number one job as your parent is to keep you safe.’

For Rebecca, it’s not that she isn’t flourishing, it’s that she’s not always noticing through the noise of everyday life. And like our children, like many of us, she often doesn’t recognize the generosity and wisdom of her own guidance.

Flourishing is a big hefty word, but Rebecca and I again agreed, it doesn’t have to involve big and hefty actions, accomplishments, a million eyeballs. Thriving can look mundane and feel enriching at the same time, it can even be uncomfortable finding it… getting there.

“Ease can mean hard at the same time – it’s not the easy thing, but we are creating a life of more ease.”

Experiments in Flourishing

1. Ask the hard question: What’s one thing in your life you’d never instruct your best friend, sibling, own kid to do?

2. Be your own parent: After identifying what’s harmful, instruct your way away from it. With love and without judgment, it’s your number one job too.

3. Give yourself options: We struggle when we only go so far as telling ourselves ‘no.’ Dead ends are aptly named, so what’s the alternative route? Flourishing is thataway.

Shiny Baubles

While I don’t claim to share any commonality other than the great fortune of being born, I’ve always cherished sharing my birthday (September 23rd) with several artists I admired long before I was aware of the coincidence.

Celebration is a form of flourishing, creativity even more so. To wit, a few words from two individuals who walked the talk.

John Coltrane

(September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967)

On September 29, 1960, six days after his birthday and the same year Giant Steps was released, ‘Coltrane on Coltrane’ was published in Downbeat Magazine.

Coltrane was already a renowned side-man and session player, and had just made the decision to quit Miles Davis’ band to start and record with his own quartet.

“I want to broaden my outlook in order to come out with a fuller means of expression. I want to be more flexible where rhythm is concerned. I feel I have to study rhythm some more. I haven’t experimented too much with time; most of my experimenting has been in a harmonic form. I put time and rhythms to one side, in the past.

Coltrane would go on to record his most daring, self-investigatory and spiritually driven work in the years following. He wanted to solve the world’s problems with his music—he wanted to cure, to ease, to be a ‘force for good.’

His life ended seven years later. His force, assumed, continued and amplified by his wife, Alice Coltrane, flourishing even beyond death.

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Bruce Springsteen

(September 23, 1949 – forever)

During a very difficult time in my life, immobile in the gaslit prison of a violent relationship, my only escape was through Bruce Springsteen’s The River.

I’d put the vinyl on, drink Cazadores from the bottle and lay on the floor of my mountain cabin, directly in front of the speakers so I could feel something beyond the constant tremors of my own desperation.

It took me a long time before I could listen to any of these songs again, and they still carry a distant ring, a buzz maybe, of a degraded past. But also, each one now also brings a reminder, of a resilience incomprehensible at the time.

I had no way of understanding from there how I’d eventually make it here.

That’s the thing about acute trauma—it’s either physically, emotionally and/or psychologically impossible to see the way out, let alone what it looks like on the other side.

We’re feeling this now as Americans, so too around the world and as a global community. We can’t yet see the alternative to our suffering, let alone the path to flourishing.

Springsteen’s twenty tracks of everyman (and woman) storytelling planted the seeds for me years ago, as do these words now, from his 2016 autobiography Born to Run:

“The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire…

Flourishing, to me, doesn’t feel like happiness. It doesn’t feel like contentment either, like having arrived at an waypoint from which to survey all wants and goals achieved before moving on.

Flourishing is the fire. It’s turning the math on its head and creating something fluid and illogical from what feels like immovable fact.

It’s keeping our own world spinning, our individual efforts bleeding into one another’s, forces compounding and turning the tides.

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And because this is my seven year-old’s super extra favorite thing right now, played daily as his morning hype song on the way to school.

(Viewer’s note: Warner Brothers released this short in 1932, considered one of the worst years of the Great Depression.)