Happy Friday Everyone,
The excited mingling of color as we rush towards to silent bare months comes with a reminder that rears its head too soon for my liking. The nights and early morning bring a cold chill, pervasive enough to seep into my bones as I sleep, making rising to another day difficult, yet nonetheless worthwhile.
I hope the week has gone well for you, no matter who and where you are in the world. It’s been an interesting one for me, filled with excellent conversations and further understanding of the self in relation to others.
After yesterday’s livestream with Nicole Eisdorfer (recording will go out to my subscribers on Monday, 10.27.2025), I was fortunate enough to strengthen connection with friends and explore some of the threads of agency and self awareness further.
Then, in doing my morning reading session, context from around the world made those threads a bit clearer, and that’s what I’m sharing with you today. I thank you for your patience in advance, today’s newsletter is a bit of a ramble.
Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed. At first he thought he had slept late, after a long unpleasant dream that still hovered on the edge of memory. Or perhaps he had been ill? But the ceiling looked strange; it was flat, and it had dark beams richly carved. He lay a little while longer looking at patches of sunlight on the wall, and listening to the sound of a waterfall.
‘Where am I, and what is the time?’ he said aloud to the ceiling?
‘In the house of Elrond, and it is ten o’clock in the morning,’ said a voice. ‘It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know.”
‘Gandalf!’ cried Frodo, sitting up. There was the old wizard, sitting in a chair by the open window.
‘Yes’ he said, ‘I am here. And you are lucky to be here too, after all the absurd things you have done since you left home.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring. Book 2, Chapter 1.
I used to re-read the Lord of the Rings every year, and I would do so around fall time, a sort of grounding or re-centering ritual, however I’ve skipped that tradition in the years since my father passed. I may need to pick it back up, and see what new insights it might give.
Tolkien’s setting of Middle-earth has special meaning for me as The Hobbit was the first serious chapter book I read as a kid, around 7 or 8 years old, and my father originally read it to me. Without him and Tolkien I may not have become the avid reader I am today.
The context around the quote above, [spoilers] is that Frodo has been injured with a wound that he will never fully heal from. It is part of his burden now, yet he can choose what do with it. His wound is emblematic of the weight of having agency to shape your life despite the circumstances forced upon you.
The choices he makes, as one of the smallest sentient creatures of Middle-earth, will have the biggest consequences, whether he knows it or not.
Frodo, like all of us, may never know the true extent of his impact, he only knows what meaning he makes for himself and whether that meaning is worth the effort of moving forward; this will all depend on how self-aware he becomes, not just of his own context but that of his role in the world.
When he wakes from his sleep, he tries to grasp for certainty in unfamiliarity, to contextualize where he finds himself.
The difference between Frodo and many people I engage with today, is that before asking or taking action, he observes. He doesn’t immediately react to the strange surroundings, either in rejection or acceptance.
He grounds himself by looking at the details that immediately surround him in environment around him, and uses other senses to listens to the waterfall he can’t see.
Only then does he speak aloud, after trying to figure it out himself, and Gandalf promptly tells him that after the foolish decisions he made since he left home, he is lucky to be here.
In Middle-earth, the place Frodo wakes up is known as Rivendell, “The Last Homely House.” When do we know when we are home, or when we have left it? What governs our actions, when we aren’t home? An internal compass or external pressures? When do we find a new home? I’d say it’s when we feel a connection that links us to those around us, to the places and rituals that energize us rather than drain us.
It’s the places and times that foster the co-creation of meaning and purpose.
Home is often the first place we find meaning, and sometimes the first place we lose it. Meaning changes over time, and perhaps what gave us meaning in the home pushes us to find it elsewhere.
Regarding Rivendell, some of the definitions of homely mean simple, unadorned, plain, and comforting.
Comfort, I believe, is where we find the feeling of home, but more accurately, the feeling of being connected.
We can find connection anywhere, so long as we aren’t expecting to find certainty preceding comfort in the same place. Connecting with new places, people, ideas, always is uncertain. But we can become comfortable with that necessary process if we allow it’s simplicity.
I know that when I’ve lost meaning and tried to find it externally, I’ve done some pretty absurd things, difficult or otherwise. But those actions were taken because I wanted to be certain before I felt comfortable. Before I could belong, I wanted to know I belonged, and unfortunately that isn’t how meaning is found, and makes the process much more complicated.
If you’ve had the chance to keep up with my newsletters of late, I’m reading Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta, and this morning’s reading session tied off some of the conversational threads from yesterday.
“I’m on a hair-trigger as I continue looking for the one perfect thinking tool that will help me avoid the shouting matches, manipulative bullshit, rapturous escapism and cultish ideologies of this era. I can’t find it, not in my culture or anyone else’s. I guess my community has an aversion to one-size-fits-all solutions, so there’s never been one tool to rule them all, or one message, or one guru.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story, p.150
It’s a very familiar narrative to me. Part of my search for meaning as a young man, came from the pursuit of perfection. I have yet to find it. That pursuit drove me forward until it pushed me over the edge, and I realized that what I was searching for was in fact comfort. I thought at the time comfort could be found in belonging, through acceptance by others, of not needing to be perfect yet still being enough.
But I could never be certain, and so I was never comfortable. And over time I learned, but didn’t quite internalize, that comfort is found not just in feeling the connection to our communities and the world around us, but in feeling connected to ourselves.
Comfort is found despite uncertainty, through understanding that we can more often impact the world through not just carrying our little burdens with responsibility, but welcoming and taking ownership of them.
I believe that’s whats has governed my search for meaning as I’ve gotten a bit older. Comfort in self. The comfort to stand in my values, to find meaning without resolution. Reconnecting with myself, so that I can better exercise agency to help others reconnect with ourselves, globally.
On the livestream yesterday Nicole helped structure our conversation by taking my proposal (treating Agency as a living creature to be nurtured) and pushing it further, asking: “how would you treat Agency if it was a guest in your house?”
agency: Agency is the capacity of individuals to act on their own will and shape their lives, influenced but not wholly determined by social structures, resources, and personal beliefs.
Sometimes we don’t recognize Agency, or even if we do, we don’t know what to do with it. Too afraid to take it’s hand, because maybe we feel we don’t deserve it, wouldn’t handle it. Maybe we are afraid it will judge us.
Sometimes we abuse it, take it for granted. Narcissists are particularly good at that, and keep their agency alive by killing the the agency of others.
One thing Nicole struggled with wrapping her head around, was the point I had brought up to her that we don’t own Agency. It is a commons that simply exists, it isn’t something we do or don’t have, but by our nurturing of it becomes stronger and more supportive of us, more easily exercised through individuals and collectives.
Here in Appalachia, if you have a guest in your house, you want them to feel comfortable. You put out food and drink, offer a cup of coffee at the least, more than likely invite them to stay for dinner with the family. You might ask them about where they are from, tell them stories about your life or family. You connect, and make meaning together. You provide comfort, despite the uncertainty of this person in your home, because we all know it’s like to feel disconnected. We have to be able to connect with our Agency in order to fully realize it.
“I look forward to walking country again without carrying a box. One day. Realistically, I probably won’t return to the land until I’m in a box myself, and in that way I’m the same as you. I bet you long for some place, even if you’ve never seen it. I miss my place. But at least I can earn a good living by talking to an Irish woman on the other side of the planet about it, and in that way I’m more fortunate than most of the people in the world.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story, p. 156
If you remember from Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about the fall leaves being a “carpet of vibrant death” that seemed to echo “the myriad signals and noise [I’m] seeing stack up in the digital landscape of social media and 24-hours news cycles.” In this passage I read this morning, I find comfort and connection that I’m not alone, that a few years ago two other people had a conversation about the same issues.
“She is frustrated by the manufactured noise that has been inserted into the interface between modern humans and nature. We’re supposed to be part of it, but the stories we lay over top of this relationship often become twisted, particularly with bees. The same goes with finance.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story, page 159
I’ve talked many times before about the myths we tell ourselves, that organizations tell themselves about their culture or successes, and Nicole has talked about the same thing from the neuroscience perspective with cognitive dissonance.
Regardless of how you frame it or at what scale, the quest for certainty so often conflated with comfort prevents us from understanding, from self-awareness, and our agency becomes limited as a result.
It’s an extractive, toxic void absent meaning and perspective. How many times have you pushed yourself beyond what you should have because you were certain that you would be judged by the end result rather than your effort (systemic realism of that issue aside?).
Voids don’t last for long, particularly when enclosured inside a human brain or organizational structure. They fill up with whatever will flow in quickly if you don’t plant intention into it. The ‘manufactured noise,” the ‘carpet of vibrant death’ that is social media inspired individualism is nothing more than performative attempts at making meaning and connection, same thing for KPIs and culture that exists only on shareholder briefings.
“It all falls into proper proportions if you’re connected to a place or creature; you can see all the layers in between these two extremes in context, because you know what’s in between. But there are some many settings now where we don’t have that context. We don’t have that connection, so we only have these two poles to orient ourselves and neither one is satisfying or even accurate in isolation. Reconnecting is at the root of everything.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story, p. 160-161.
Meaning is measured in self awareness. Self-awareness comes though recognizing connection. Connection is comfort. Connection is found through intention. Intention is agency.
That’s the nature of the relationship between agency and self-awareness Nicole and I missed, or at least glossed over, yesterday.
Intention
Yes, there is a myriad amount of chaos and death and uncertainty in the world right now. But there always is, just in the modern world many of us have been privileged enough to not be exposed to it, which by and large seems to have made it harder for us to find meaning.
Sometimes the leaves need to fall for you to be aware of what you need to reconnect to. And once reconnected, you can choose how to carry your meaning forward.
Until next time,
- Chris
Seed Catalog:
I’ve given you more than enough literary snippets this week. Here’s something short form I came across that I think is quite pertinent to forming meaning as leaders of the future.
Hi there! I’m Chris, a leadership guide, father, partner, veteran, writer, the list goes on.
Raised in Appalachia, I use an animistic lens to explore the the liminal relationships between individual leaders, their organizations, systems; and I love examining literary and cinematic storytelling as a way to bring the lessons I learn to you.
Contour Lines is my anecdotal newsletter segment that weaves whats going on in my life with my thoughts on leadership as well as personal and organizational development.
If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.
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