Seventy Years of Living Next to Twenty Years of Becoming
I just finished a 3-day kindergarten camp as a facilitator. The kids were great. But honestly? That's not the part I keep thinking about.
It was the conversations with the other facilitators. Ages from 20s to 70s. Different backgrounds, different life chapters, zero reason to be in the same room together — except we were.
And somewhere between camp sessions, people just... talked.
Career pivots. Family decisions. Seventy years of living next to twenty years of becoming. No agenda. No audience. Just honest exchanges between people who had no reason to perform for each other.
It reminded me how much I've been underweighting this.
I spend a lot of time building in the digital space. Shipping things. Writing things. Optimising things. That work matters and I'm not stopping.
But there's a kind of knowledge that doesn't live in a dataset or a feed. It lives in people. And you only access it by showing up somewhere inconvenient and actually listening.
The richest conversations I've had recently haven't happened online. I want more of that. More situations where I'm not the builder or the expert — just a person sitting with other people, genuinely curious about their lives.
We really don't know what someone has been through until we ask.
When was the last time you had a conversation that genuinely surprised you?