Moments That Matter

Join me live on Sunday, Feb 2, to put meaning to the moments that have informed your life story

Late last month, I wrote a post called Threshold Moments, inspired by my own experience of feeling out of control. As the year was coming to a close, many of the year-end goals I’d set for myself had yet to come to fruition, and I was facing 2025 with a mix of hope and trepidation, but mostly with a feeling of powerlessness.

The hope part stemmed from changes I’ve been efforting to make in my career and in my work. I’ve been focused on values alignment and cultivating partnerships with people who fuel and inspire me. These changes have been intentional, but they’ve also caused a lot of agitation—because with change, even if it’s positive, comes disruption. The trepidation part is perhaps obvious in that we don’t know what 2025 holds, and the world is chaotic and divided.

My agitation, I came to realize through writing that post, was being triggered by standing between what was and what is about to be, but not being in control of the timing. The etymology of the word threshold—where “thresh,” the physical action of “threshing” (thrashing), meets “holding”—has provided a helpful framework for understanding my agitation, which feels a whole lot like an internal thrashfest. I’m not losing it, I’m just standing here at the doorway, waiting to cross over.

Life is made up of these threshold moments. They are the turning points of our lives. Sometimes threshold moments are things we drive and choose—like a move, a new career, or getting into a new relationship. Sometimes they’re things we don’t, like going through a separation we didn’t initiate, an illness, losing a parent or a child or a partner, or losing a home. What’s behind us signifies the end of a chapter of our lives. What’s ahead of us is unknown, but even in the aftermath of great loss, life, such as it is, holds promise.

One of my friends who lost her home in the Palisades Fire wrote to me after she secured a new place to live and said, “It will be challenging, but it might be the best chapter ahead.”

I told her I was in awe of her optimism, and I’m sure her capacity for positivity fluctuates day-to-day. But human beings are stunning for our fortitude, resilience, and unshakeable spirits. We go through hell and back, and come through the other side to tell our stories.

As it turns out, I’ve been a receiver of other people’s threshold moments—and what they’ve learned from them—for as long as I’ve been working with writers. Threshold moments inform our stories, and coming through the other side changed in some way is what fuels our desire to make sense of and to share what we’ve learned.

When “5 Things I’ve Learned” reached out to invite me to teach a class, I immediately chose this topic of Threshold Moments because I believe they hold everything that makes us who we are. Our threshold moments and what insights we gain from the experience of going through them is what builds our strength and courage and resilience.

A week from today I’ll be holding this class: Five Things I’ve Learned About How Threshold Moments Shape Our Stories. I say “holding” and not “teaching” because this time together is designed to be a sacred space for self-discovery and finding meaning. Less a class and more a time to tend to your own threshold moments and to take the time to see what those moments have taught you, or how they’ve changed the course of your life.

I’ve been facing my current threshold moment, really, since early 2023, when my dad first started to decline. His subsequent illness and death was the first lynchpin in this nearly two-year-long odyssey toward making changes in my life. So, one of the things I’ve learned about threshold moments is that sometimes a moment last months, even years.

I am eager to share more about this and four other things I’ve learned about Threshold Moments, and to invite you to come explore, identify, and give voice to your own moments—small or massive; current or past; personal or universal.

I’d love to spend some time with you next Sunday afternoon/evening.

Click here for more details, and readers of my Substack get $10 off with the discount code SUBSTACK10, so we’ll do all this for $50. Hope to see some of you then and there.

Event details:
LIVE: Sunday, February 2
5:00pm pacific / 8:00pm eastern
120 minutes
Single Ticket Price: $60