Coming back to now

I am tired in a particular way right now.

Not the tiredness of one hard week. The tiredness of a pattern. Work, eat, a little exercise, some scrolling through the world's ongoing catastrophe, sleep. Then again. And again. And somewhere inside that loop, somewhere between the third cup of coffee and the unopened email, the actual day disappears. It just slips out quietly, like a guest who leaves without saying goodbye.

My work right now is academic - teaching, research, the kind of work I genuinely believe in. But the pattern is not really about the job. The job is almost incidental. This is the forever rhythm of modern life: run, run, run, and somewhere in the running, lose the very thing you were running through. The present moment. The only one you ever actually have. And the news, ohh God, the news! It is the perfect trigger. It feeds the running. It makes the outside world so loud and so urgent that the inside world goes completely quiet. We keep looking out there for something to break the spell. Why do we always do that?

I notice when it has happened to me because I stop being able to find “NOW”. It gets misplaced rather than completely lost. The way you put your keys down for just a second and somehow it is evening and you have no idea where the afternoon went. Connection goes first. Then something else, harder to name. It starts to feel less like living and more like maintenance. A body keeping itself running. A person going through the motions of a life rather than inhabiting one.

What changes it, every time, is absurdly simple. And I resist how simple it is, every time.

I stop. I look at what is actually true right now, not at the next task, not at the news, not at the version of tomorrow I am already anxiously constructing. I play what I have started calling, the appreciation game, a deliberate turning of attention toward what is already here.

My cat touches my hand. That is enough to begin. From there, something loosens. I look at where I am, this particular room, this particular life, assembled from years of choices and chances and surviving things I was not sure I would survive. I look at what I have already navigated to get here. I look at the plain, unremarkable miracle of being alive on this particular planet, in this particular body, on this particular Monday. Not the grand version of my life. The actual one, right now, with the cold coffee and the unread emails and the cat who does not care about any of it.

There are two ways to move through a day. One feels like pushing a heavy door that is already open: all effort, no movement. The other feels like water finding its level: not passive, not effortless in the sense of easy, but natural. Aligned. Like the work is coming from somewhere real rather than from somewhere afraid. The difference is not in the circumstances. It is in the energy you bring to them. Low door-pushing energy is not a character flaw. It is not a personal failing to be ashamed of. It is what happens, reliably, to anyone who runs long enough without coming back to now. Modern life has made the running the default and the returning the exception, something we have to choose, on purpose, against the current. The world is not designed for pausing. It is designed for more.

This is what I sit with clients in. Not to fix the running, most of it is not optional, the work is real, the emails are real, the obligations are real. But to find, together, the place where they can come back to now in the middle of it all. To notice what shifts when they do. To remember, as I keep having to remember myself, that the day is not something that happens to you.

It is something you are inside of, right now, if you can only stop long enough to notice.

Much love,

Charis

The Map and the Territory

For a long time, I studied belonging from the outside.

My doctoral research was built around what I called the intercultural encounter: the moment when two different worlds meet in a classroom, a conversation, or a life and neither remains unchanged. I was fascinated by what happens at that crossing: how people negotiate identity, how they hold on to what they know while slowly making room for what is new, how being genuinely met by another person can shift something that no amount of knowledge ever could. I built pedagogies around that encounter. I wrote about it. I taught it.

And then I moved to the United Kingdom and I became the “Other”.

I was educated and professionally established. But I was also suddenly navigating a “grammar” that was not mine, not just the language, though that too, but the unspoken codes of how things are done here, what is said and what is left unsaid, what counts as warmth and what reads as intrusion. I found myself understanding, intellectually, exactly what was happening to me and still not being able to stop it from happening. The map and the territory, it turned out, are not the same thing. That gap between knowing and living is something I had read about. I had not yet understood it in my body.

What followed was a long, quiet education. I began teaching international postgraduate students - people who had left their countries and their professional identities behind to begin again in a new academic culture. I recognised them. I had stood at a version of the same crossing. I knew what it was to be competent and capable and still feel that the most important question had not yet been asked, to carry a self that did not quite fit anywhere. The questions that began to matter in those rooms were not only academic. They were messier than that, about identity, about how a person shows up when the context keeps shifting, about what happens when the different layers of who someone is do not sit neatly together. It was in the classroom of Inclusive Leadership Practices that I saw what shifts when a person begins to lead from who they actually are, not from who they think the room expects them to be. Something in my attention changed. I was no longer teaching from above the experience. I was inside it.

It was there, with those students, that I recognised something I had been doing for thirty years, with students, with parents, with colleagues, with friends, with family, without ever having a name for it. Sitting with someone in a difficult moment. Asking the question that shifts something. Holding the space until their own answer surfaces. I had been doing it for everyone around me. I was beginning, slowly, to do it for myself.

ALTEA grew from that. The research, then the crossing, then the teaching, then the turning inward, each one the same question, asked from a different depth: what does it take for a person to come home to themselves?

I do not think that is a question that belongs only to people in difficulty. It belongs to anyone who has arrived at a moment when the life they have built, however good, no longer quite fits who they are becoming. That is a threshold. And that is where this work begins.

Much love,

Charis