Three Things This Week

Music, Mercy, and the Middle Way

The year is ending. I’m glad. I need to unpack all my 2025 trauma in a longer essay, but for now: good riddance.

What’s also almost here is Christmas. Whether you believe in it, celebrate it, loathe it, grieve during it or everything in between, it’s tender. I lost my mother four years ago today. The grieving cycle feels closed, but there’s always some tenderness watching families gather.

This week I’ve been thinking about tenderness differently. As this thing that keeps us human when the world wants us productive. So here are three things: a practice in self-compassion when year-end audits demand cruelty, a learning about refusing the false choice between grinding and giving up, and a piece of music that reminded me what we’re actually here for.

Something to Practice: The Radical Act of Being Okay With Yourself

There’s a specific flavor of violence this time of year. Everyone’s performing year-end audits. Tallying wins, cataloging failures, measuring themselves against some imaginary benchmark that moves further away the closer you get.

I want to offer you something simpler.

What if you just…stopped?

Not in a spiritual bypass kind of way. Not “everything happens for a reason” or “you’re exactly where you need to be.” I mean actually stopping the internal prosecution. The constant cross-examination of your choices, your body, your career trajectory, your relationships.

The wildly difficult practice of self-compassion isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about recognizing that the voice inside your head that sounds like productivity culture, the one insisting you should be more, do more, have more by now, isn’t actually yours. It’s an introjected voice. Something you swallowed whole from a world that profits from your feelings of inadequacy.

Dr Kristin Neff’s research shows self-compassion increases motivation more than self-criticism. But here’s what the studies don’t capture: the freaking sheer relief of it. The way your shoulders drop when you finally say “I’m doing okay” and mean it.

Practice this: When you notice self-judgment arising this week, place your hand on your heart or your belly. Say something simple. “This is hard” or “I’m learning.” Or my favouite: “It’s Okay” That’s it. No wishful declarations or manifestations. Just acknowledgment that being human is difficult and you’re doing it anyway.

Something to Learn: The False Choice Between Lock-In and Checking Out

The internet wants you grinding or gardening. Locked-in or logged off. Building empires or cottagecore fantasies.

I’m here to remind you that both are escapes.

“Lock-in” culture, this performative hustle that’s colonized every corner of my social media, isn’t about actually about achievement. It’s about anesthesia.

My contention is this: If you’re always becoming, you never have to just be.

If you’re optimizing every moment, you never have to feel the ones that hurt.

The alternative isn’t abandoning yourself to Netflix and numbness either.

My favourite teaching from the the Buddha talked about the Middle Way. He spoke about it from experience of both extreme asceticism and his early life of royal over-indulgence. Neither worked to ‘free him’.

The Middle Way is what he found after both extremes failed.

In other words you stay present to what is. Which includes both your ambitions and your exhaustion.

Here’s what I’m learning: slowing down doesn’t mean stopping. It means moving at the pace your nervous system can actually process. When you’re in chronic activation (which most of us are this December), you’re making decisions from fight-or-flight, not from clarity.

The research on Default Mode Network activity shows our brains need downtime to consolidate learning, to make meaning, to integrate. Without it, you’re just accumulating information and stress.

So slow down.

Cook something that takes time. Walk without your phone. Sit and do literally nothing for ten minutes. Your productivity will thank you, but that’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because you’re a human being, not a human doing.

Something to Enjoy: Ólafur Arnalds & Talos, “A Dawning”

Deep listening has become much of a part of my spiritual practice over the last few years. I see sound and music as forms of meditation.

The kind where you’re so present to what is that the boundary between you and the sound dissolves. You’re not listening to music. You’re listening as the music listens to itself. Very metta.

I think contemplative traditions have always known this. Nada yoga. The yoga of sound. Listening so complete it becomes absorption. The Sufis spinning until the self falls away and only the turning remains. Gospel music. Greek Orthodox chanting. The list goes on.

When I sit with a piece of music, really sit with it, the same thing happens as when I sometimes sit on the cushion. The mind settles. The nervous system downregulates. I stop being the one who’s anxious about tomorrow and become the one who’s hearing this note, right now, as it arises and passes.

That’s why A Dawning matters to me. And I think it should to you too. Not just because it’s beautiful, ‘cos it is. Because it was made as an offering. Music returning to what it’s always been: a technology for presence, for gathering, for feeling what we’d rather not feel alone.

The album as made eith Talos (Eoin French) who got sick during recording. Too sick to go home, French ended up staying at Arnalds’ studio in Reykjavik to finish the album. They kept working but French passed before they finished.

In his final days, Arnalds needed vocals. So friends of theirs recorded parts in cupboards during holidays so he could finish it in a hospice chair and play it for French.

After the release, Arnalds and the contributers performed it on TV, physically holding each other up while singing. Arnalds said: “Music at its roots is service to community. Something for ceremonies, funerals, weddings.” I was quite moved by this video.

This is what music does when we let it.

It gathers us. It teaches us things we can’t learn alone.

It holds us when we’re broken and reminds us we’re human, which is both terrible and sacred.