Some weekends give you beauty.
Others give you something to work through.
This weekend gave me both.
Mama and I took a walk through a beautiful park and spent time admiring a garden filled with flowers and vegetables. There was something about being surrounded by things growing that settled me.
Life was everywhere.
Then I had a conversation about race that triggered me.
Not intellectually.
Personally.
The kind of conversation that can shift your internal temperature. The kind that makes you realize there are still places in you that need attention, even when you have done a lot of work.
I had to let myself be unsettled without allowing the experience to define me.
And then today, the weather seemed to offer its own metaphor.
The day started cloudy and gray.
Then the storm came.
For a while, the sky looked turbulent and heavy.
But by evening, everything changed.
The clouds gave way to one of the most beautiful sunsets.
I stood there thinking about how often we mistake the weather we are experiencing for the story of our lives.
A gray sky can feel like the whole sky when you are standing underneath it.
A difficult conversation can feel like it has undone all the progress you've made.
A triggering moment can make you question whether you have really healed, really grown, really changed.
But maybe the goal was never to become someone who is never affected.
Maybe growth is learning what to do when you are affected.
To pause.
To notice.
To tell yourself the truth.
To tend to what has been stirred.
And then to keep living.
Because the storm is not the whole story.
Neither is the trigger.
Neither is the hard day.
There is still a garden.
There is still a walk with Mama.
There is still life growing.
And sometimes, after the clouds have done what clouds do, there is a sunset waiting on the other side.
Not because the storm didn't matter.
Because it wasn't the end.
That feels like a leadership lesson too.
We spend so much time teaching people how to perform through difficult conditions that we forget to teach them how to return to themselves afterward.
How to recover.
How to process what happened.
How to recognize what belongs to the present and what has been stirred from the past.
How to let beauty interrupt the heaviness.
How to keep moving without pretending nothing happened.
Tonight, I am grateful for the reminder.
The sky was gray.
The storm was real.
And the sunset was still coming.
Maybe yours is too.