Last month, I kept returning to one question: what happens to the things we don’t say, and how they accumulate in relationships over time.
It made me more aware of silence as a pattern, not just an absence. In others, and in myself. I’m generally expressive, but expression isn’t the same as clarity. Sometimes what I intend doesn’t land the way I mean it to.
This month, the focus has been to be intentional about the gap between what I feel, what I say, and how it’s received.
There are two parts to it: having the wisdom to know what matters, and learning how to articulate it in a way that holds.
Through conversations and observing people around me, I’ve been reminded how much gets lost when things are left unsaid for too long. By practicing this within my family as a return to the starting point. Starting small, in close relationships. The shifts have been subtle, but slowly noticeable when I take the time to reflect.
When Breath Becomes Air was a book I read and it stayed with me the most, and I really enjoyed this passage.
Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.
Less as insight, more as a reminder of how limited and temporary everything is.
How life is impermanent.
I’ve also been thinking about emotions vs feelings: the immediate experience, versus the meaning we build after.I found myself coming back to Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. I’ve always enjoyed studying it and how much of what shapes us sits beneath what’s visible. Perhaps more on it in my next piece of writing.
This then triggered another thought about how this fits within my practice of design and how design thinking extends beyond work. Not as a method, but as a way of interpreting situations. How we make decisions, how we respond to people, how we try to make sense of ourselves.
Perhaps March was about reducing the gap between intention and expression.
Not perfectly. But more consistently.