Begin Again

AKA: Why I Vanished for Two Weeks

So… yeah. I disappeared for two weeks.

No dramatic crisis. No spiritual retreat. No enlightenment on a mountaintop.
Just good old-fashioned writer’s block of the kind where you open your laptop, stare at the blinking cursor, and think, “Ah yes, today I shall write… absolutely nothing.”

And here’s the embarrassing part: the guy who writes about mindfulness also fell off that wagon. My meditation cushion sat untouched, silently judging me like a disappointed golden retriever.

Turns out, not writing and not meditating feel suspiciously alike: a kind of brain fog where you forget what you were trying to do, why you were trying to do it, or whether you should just take a nap. (Highly recommend that last one. Surprisingly refreshing.)

But then something saved me — the same thing that saves every half-ass meditator eventually: the practice of beginning again.

If you’ve ever meditated (or tried, or pretended), you know this drill. You sit down, breathe once, and immediately your brain says, “Hey, remember that email you didn’t send in 2014?” The mind wanders. You notice. And then, as every teacher repeats like a gentle, loving broken record: just begin again.

No penalty. No foul. No “you’ve failed the meditation exam.”

Just start over. That’s the job.

And honestly? Writing is the same damn thing.

I kept waiting for inspiration to strike like the voice of God, but inspiration is lazy as hell. It shows up when you show up — not before. And when you don’t show up for a while, you don’t need punishment, shame, or the dramatic internal monologue of a Victorian poet.

You just… start again.

Begin again is one of the most forgiving teachings I’ve ever come across — in meditation, in creativity, in crisis comms, in life.

Crisis teams blow it all the time. Public figures make awful decisions. We torch relationships, screw up opportunities, lose the plot, wander off. But as long as the fallout isn’t nuclear, there’s usually a version of “okay, take a breath, let’s try that again.” That’s mindfulness. That’s also communications.

That’s also… being a human with a brain.

So here I am, beginning again — with writing, with meditation, with showing up for the thing I said I cared about.

If you’ve fallen off your cushion, your routine, your creativity, your sanity — congratulations. You are extremely normal. Come sit by me in the beginner’s section. It’s where the action is.

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