You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. Elizabeth Gilbert

The box arrived well past dark on a Friday night, an Amazon order I didn’t place, sent by a long-time client who has become a dear friend.

She and I have walked some hard, painful paths together. I’ve helped her navigate the complex demands of growing an organization, getting burned by people she should have been able to trust and the pain of being denied a seat at the table because she’s full of fire and creativity and has no interest in becoming one of the anointed.

She’s worked to know Jimmy through my stories and writing, even though he died four years before we met. She has my back when something goes sideways and trusts me as deeply as I trust her. Despite our closeness, we move seamlessly between coaching and confiding without losing track of which world we’re operating in. She’s one of my favorite humans and the client I would fight hardest to keep.

Although we spend the bulk of our time together focused on her challenges, a few months ago, I confided that I was struggling. Trying to create my way into a new professional space and feeling the sting of how many people failed to respond to my emails or dismissed my efforts. I can’t recall exactly what she said, but I remember how much better I felt afterwards. Seen. Heard. Lighter.

Two days later, I got a cryptic text from her saying “Heads up: an Amazon package is coming for you by 9:30 pm tonight.” What could she be sending, I wondered?

It was the Five Minute Journal she’d recently started using and had mentioned in passing during our prior coaching session. Not a heavy lift to complete, but a big return, she had said.

Over the years, I’ve tried to keep a journal but have never stuck with it for long. The idea of writing about my day or capturing my thoughts felt awkward and disconnected from whatever I was grappling with. Faced with a blank page, my mind went blank, too. Within a day or two, the task became a chore that I quickly abandoned.

But this little gem of a journal has proved to be different (and no, I don’t get any kickback for recommending it …). In the mornings I write down three things I’m grateful for, three things that will make the day great and a daily affirmation. At night, I capture the three highlights of my day and what I learned.

As I look back on the entries, the lessons learned are really reminders of what I already knew:

• Go outside and take a walk!
• You don’t always know who will be the one to help you.
• Everyone struggles.

I expected the journal to help me get organized, achieve my goals, maybe have a tougher skin. But instead, it did something far more valuable. It revealed how hard I was working on a project that was never going to get lift off which ultimately allowed me to let it go. It illuminated the gap between what I thought I ought to be getting done and the work I was getting done that mattered far more. And it reminded me to notice what and who was there, instead of fixating on what and who wasn’t.

In the early days of using the Five Minute Journal, I’d write down the three highlights of the day, only to realize as I was falling asleep that I had left off something wonderful that had happened. Obscured by my relentless focus on what I wanted to have happen, I hadn’t absorbed or celebrated the beauty of what had.

The journal has allowed me to let the disappointments, the slights, the shadows fade to the background which has let the light back in. It’s pulled me out of the months long hangover of 2024 being the ten-year anniversary of Jimmy’s death. A decade that has both crawled and blazed by. It’s brought me back to what I can control and what I can’t. Most of all, it’s reminded me that other people’s responses (or lack thereof) are not the measure of my worth.

As I turn my gaze on what I’m grateful for (cool mornings, our dog Lucy, my first cup of coffee, a quiet morning in my office), I have stopped noticing what was making me so unhappy and discontented. I realize now how much I had been “worrying myself into a small knot of grim thread,” as Ada Limon said in one of her poems. Thanks to my dear friend, the unspooling has been magical.