I want to take a moment here at the midpoint of the year to reflect on and celebrate some of my achievements in the first half of the year gone by.

This long May included my first in-person retreat, Work/Life, international romps with friends through Rome and Vienna, small-group coaching with the guides who lead public tours at the MFABoston, and my 20-year college reunion with another set of dear friends.

So here’s a recap of these goings-on.

Are you feeling burned out?
Questioning how work fits into your life?
Frustrated at feeling defined by your job title?
Do you want your relationship to work to feel different than it does right now, but you’re not sure how to make a change?

This retreat is your dedicated time to thoughtfully, playfully, bravely explore the role you want work to play in your life.

This is the new sign that crowns my bulletin board. It’s pronounced poh’-lay poh’-lay, and it’s the Kiswahili word for “slowly”. It’s come home with me from the fabulously immersive two-week trip to Tanzania I just took with my Mom.

I am tool and substance
I apply force, I rotate
I give way and transform
Offering myself

This performance art piece kept right on resonating in more and more meaningful ways over the past three years, and here’s my tattoo inspired by it.

I’m here for the folks who came to the field out of passion and now know that’s not a healthy basis for a working life and want better for themselves and their colleagues.

I’m for the changemakers more than the places where they make change.

When systems of work and rest and health and politics are cracking everywhere we look, I’m steering into my belief that there are other ways to be in the world. That I can make ways for meaning and value and inspiration that don’t rely on the same faulty pillars that are crumbling all around us.

I’m choosing freedom. I’m choosing to be a pirate.

The next iteration of Interchange (my series of workshops) is happening IN PERSON, and it’s called Adventure | Reflection.

What can we learn about ourselves if we approach an experience as an adventure? In this in-person session, we will explore new and familiar surroundings while we let curiosity and serendipity take the lead.

The epic journey has come to a close. I’m going to offer a few different kinds of reflection and summary posts of this trip.

Here’s one for the statisticians and the summarizers among you.

“You’re allowed to go out and be you rather than something fixed. The world is changing, and we’re all part of remaking it… and we don’t have to follow the paths and patterns that we once had to follow.”