Currents, rhythms – my vane is atmospheric

Weather Systems, Fertility, Grief, Overwhelm, and the Architecture of Work

There are stretches of my life that feel less like chapters and more like weather systems—fronts that move in, linger, break apart, and shift without warning. I don’t always notice the moment the sky changes. One day I’m standing in the fog of something heavy, and the next I’m halfway up a different ridgeline, following a thread of clarity I didn’t realize I’d picked up.

It’s not avoidance. It’s not detachment. It’s simply the way my internal terrain works: fast in some places, slow in others, nonlinear everywhere. I process things deeply and privately, and by the time I surface, I’ve often already crossed into the next season. To others, it can look like I skipped steps. To me, it feels like I’m just moving with the weather.

That’s why some of my transitions—on the page and in life—land like hard cuts. I’ve already metabolized the storm before I ever speak about it. I’ve already walked through the room before I describe the doorway. And unless I consciously slow down, I forget that not everyone is starting from the same ground.

Years ago, a friend told me I used too many ellipses. Too many implied leaps. Too many unspoken bridges. At the time, I didn’t understand the critique. I thought the meaning was obvious. I assumed people could see the same sky I was standing under. That assumption was wrong, and it took me a long time to understand why.

But feedback—even unsolicited—is a gift. And that comment became a kind of early weather vane for me. A small indicator that my internal seasons weren’t always visible to others. I didn’t know it then, but that insight would eventually shape the way I write, the way I communicate, and the way I move through the world.

This post is part of that ongoing shift—a more intentional attempt to name the weather as it changes, to slow down the transitions, and to bring others along the ridgeline with me.

The Quiet Conversations and The Hard Stops

There are conversations that happen in the open, and then there are the quiet ones—the ones that slip into your inbox because someone is trying to navigate something heavy without turning it into a spectacle. A colleague recently posted about navigating fertility benefits. Their pronouns are fluid. Their partner will be the carrier. They’re young, hopeful, and standing at the trailhead of a journey that is equal parts science, longing, and bureaucracy.

I reached out with what I offer now: observation and information, not advice. They were grateful. And afterward, something in me stirred—the same something that stirs whenever grief brushes past like a familiar shadow.

Because fertility, grief, overwhelm, and the long arc of becoming emotionally literate are braided together in ways I didn’t understand until much later.

The Hungry Hunter and the Volatility of Memento Mori

Some days Memento Mori is empowering. Other days it’s fragile and volatile.

News came that the world lost a good one. Bruce. And even though death is part of the whole arrangement, grief still arrives like a hungry hunter—quiet, patient, and uninvited. I found myself wishing peace for a good friend in his loss, hoping that memory would outweigh the sting.

Grief doesn’t always take. Sometimes it leaves gifts.

Bruce was one of those rare reminders that steadiness is a form of wisdom. I didn’t know it then, but the seasons ahead — the hard stops, the fertility years, the overwhelm — would expose every place where I lacked that steadiness in myself.

Bruce: Temperance, Whitman, and the F‑Bomb in Dazed and Confused

One of my favorite memories of Bruce is from post missionary experience and before my return to finishing my college degree. Me, Mike, and Jared watched Dazed and Confused with him. The movie ended. We were stunned at how prolific the F‑word was. Bruce, in his seasoned way, simply said:

“Well… that was interesting.”

And then he went to bed.

Temperance. Demeanor. A man who didn’t need to perform wisdom—he just lived it.

Another memory: he once shared advice saying I should be careful and choose a partner with complementary hobbies and interests. That single piece of wisdom has saved my marriage more times than I can count. Liz and I navigate life as partners, friends, co‑parents, co‑conspirators—and, for a few hours at times, mortal enemies. That anchor has pulled us back to solid ground more than once.

And then there was Whitman. Bruce is where I first learned “Be curious, not judgmental.” Roy Kent wants to burst out of me here, but I’ll restrain myself.

Growing up is still hard. Grief is still a hunter. But sometimes the hunter leaves you with gratitude instead of teeth.

Bruce was one of those gifts — a quiet front that moved through my life and changed the air without announcing itself. His steadiness didn’t feel instructive at the time, but it became a kind of barometer later, when other storms arrived and I realized how unprepared I was for them. Some seasons shift slowly, almost imperceptibly, until you look up and notice you’re standing in different weather entirely.

The Hard Stops

There are places in my story where I simply stop. I carried that steadiness with me longer than I realized, even if I didn’t yet know how to name it. Not because the emotion isn’t there, but because I’ve already metabolized it privately. Or because I don’t know the rules of engagement for sharing it. Or because the topic feels like a room I’ve already walked through and closed behind me.

The shift from grief to fertility was one of those hard stops. I didn’t know how to narrate that transition in real time. I was overwhelmed, unsure how to plug in, and quietly accepting the idea that more kids might not be part of my future. I didn’t have the language for it then. I barely had the footing.

And the truth is, the transition itself wasn’t clean. It wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t even conscious. It was more like walking through a doorway I didn’t realize I’d opened — one moment standing in the fog of loss, the next standing in a clinic hallway under fluorescent lights, trying to make sense of a future I wasn’t sure I was built for.

I didn’t recognize the overwhelm for what it was. It felt like static. Like shrinking my hopes before anyone else had the chance to. Meanwhile, Liz was living the experience in her body — every cycle, every appointment, every quiet disappointment. She was carrying the emotional load, the logistical load, and the biological load while I was still trying to figure out which direction the weather was moving inside me.

Looking back, I can see how much I had already pre‑grieved the possibility of more children. Not out of pessimism, but out of self‑protection – my unknown version of premeditation malorum. It felt easier to lower the horizon than to risk watching it collapse. I didn’t say that out loud — I didn’t even know how to — but it shaped the way I showed up, or didn’t.

And yet — gratefully — I was wrong. Liz had the patience to sit with me in the mud long enough for me to find my footing. She didn’t demand clarity I didn’t have. She didn’t punish the gaps. She just stayed. And that steadiness became the bridge between the season I thought we were in and the one we were actually entering.

Maybe this draft is me finally circling back to name that weather for what it was.

2005: Straight Lines and Naïve Certainty

Our first child arrived in 2005. Back then, I believed life moved in straight lines. You decide, you try, you succeed. A tidy sequence.

Then came the years that weren’t tidy.

My wife lived the reality of secondary infertility in real time—every appointment, every cycle, every quiet disappointment. I drifted. Not out of disinterest, but out of under‑skill. Out of the coping patterns I had built long before I understood what coping patterns even were.

My resilience strategy was simple: disconnect, compartmentalize, keep moving. It worked for me. It did not work for us.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth I didn’t understand then: overwhelm isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a physiological shutdown mislabeled as a moral failure.

I wasn’t unmotivated. I was overloaded. And I didn’t have the language—or the courage—to admit it.

The Moment the Air Left the Room

There’s a moment I still replay. We were at the fertility center in Sandy, Utah, nearing the final ramp toward a low‑stim IVF cycle with ICSI. The physician—well‑meaning, but careless—looked at my wife and said:

“With what I see from your partner and you, this is textbook. You shouldn’t have to use this.”

I felt the air leave the room. I felt something collapse inside her. Another weight on a pile she had been carrying alone.

And I was still too wrapped in my own inconvenience—managing our son, managing my schedule—to see the full picture.

That moment became a seed. A slow‑germinating one. But a seed nonetheless.

2015: Science, Insurance, and Grace Intersect

In July 2015, our second child arrived—IVF‑assisted, low‑stim protocol, made possible by a $20,000 lifetime fertility benefit. Without that support, our family would look very different. And yet there are people who want to legislate that support away, claiming divine authority while wielding political power.

My second child wouldn’t be here without science. My last three children wouldn’t be here without that door opening. And someone wants to close that door for others.

That tension sits with me.

Stoicism, Emotional Literacy, and the Painted Porch

People often assume Stoicism is emotionless. They’re wrong.

Stoicism gave me emotional literacy—my own dialect of it. The four virtues—courage, temperance, wisdom, justice—became anchors, not armor. They didn’t shut emotions down; they gave them structure. They gave me a way to encounter, acknowledge, accept, and metabolize them.

My emotional current isn’t shallow. It’s just… efficient. Not rushed. Not repressed. Just mine.

It’s why Memento Mori can steady me one day and destabilize me the next. Death remembered is a compass, until it becomes a storm.

Around the time of our IVF journey, I picked up Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way and later Ego Is the Enemy. And I realized I had become the kind of person I used to critique—someone fluent in theory but inert in practice.

I was standing on my painted porch, admiring the philosophy I claimed to embody, but not repainting the porch to reflect who I was becoming.

Infertility cracked that façade. Grief carved the rest.

Overwhelm, Motivation, and the Architecture of Workv

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started noticing a pattern—not just in myself, but in the systems we build around work.

We confuse overwhelm with laziness. We confuse shutdown with apathy. We confuse bandwidth with character.

Most workplaces still treat overwhelm as a personal defect instead of a systems‑level signal. They rely on urgency, reactivity, and the myth that competent people have infinite capacity. And when the scaffolding of autonomy collapses—when micromanagement rises, when AI accelerates expectations instead of easing them—motivation doesn’t increase. It fractures.

I’ve learned that my motivation shows up cleanest in environments built on clarity, purpose, and steady cadence. Give me coherent goals and space to move, and I don’t need pressure to activate—I just move.

But when the environment leans on adrenaline as a strategy, motivation collapses into survival mode.

Interest, autonomy, and conviction are renewable fuels. Panic is not.

This realization didn’t arrive in a workshop or a leadership book. It arrived in the quiet wreckage of infertility. In the slow recognition that I had been designing my life—and my work—around the wrong energy sources.

Observe. Inform. Instruct. (Only With Consent.)

One of the biggest shifts in me came from realizing how often I had given unsolicited advice. Today, my framework is simple:

Observe — see what is actually happening.
Inform — share context without prescribing action.
Instruct — only with explicit consent.

This is how I responded to my colleague. This is how I respond to anyone navigating fertility. This is how I respond to grief. This is how I respond to overwhelm—mine and others’.

The Shift in March

People might assume there was some dramatic event that triggered the change in my writing this spring. There wasn’t. It was more like a slow internal pressure building until something finally clicked. A spark, not an explosion.

Professional feedback played a role—not as the driver, but as the nudge. Enough friction to make me look at my own patterns. Enough tension to make me reorganize the categories and tags on my blog. Enough noise to make me want clarity.

And once I started reorganizing the structure, the writing followed. I found myself leaning into themes of agency, discernment, systems, and the quieter internal movements I’d been ignoring. The cadence changed. The voice sharpened. The ellipses became intentional instead of accidental.

This post is part of that shift—a more mindful, grounded version of how I move through my own story.

The Long Arc Back to Presence

If I’m honest, the IVF chapter wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was realizing how absent I had been. How much of my “strength” was avoidance. How much of my “resilience” was emotional distance.

That reckoning became a hinge point in my life.

It’s part of why I do endurance sports now. Why I lean into friction instead of running from it. Why I’ve spent years doing the slow work of becoming a better husband, father, and human.

And somewhere along the way, two more children arrived naturally. No procedures. No clinics. Just life surprising us after we had stopped expecting surprises.

Where I Am Now

I’m learning that clarity isn’t always about having the perfect transition. Sometimes it’s about naming the gap. Naming the blind spot. Naming the place where the story jumps because that’s how I lived it.

I’m not trying to sand down every edge. I’m trying to make the edges honest.

And if the writing feels different now, it’s because I’m different now. Not in a dramatic way—just in the way a person changes when they finally stop assuming everyone else is starting from the same ground.

Why I’m Writing This Now

Because someone out there is where we were. Because someone is quietly Googling coverage options at midnight. Because someone is carrying the emotional load alone while their partner doesn’t realize they’re drifting. Because someone is mistaking overwhelm for failure. Because someone is trying to stay motivated in a system designed for burnout. Because someone needs to hear that fertility journeys aren’t just medical—they’re relational, emotional, and deeply human.

And because grief is a hunter, and remembering death—Memento Mori—is both a compass and a storm.

What This Offers

Not advice. Not prescriptions. Just presence. Just observation. Just the story of a man learning to repaint his porch, metabolize his grief, redesign his work, and show up with courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice.

The sky feels different now. Not lighter, not resolved — just named. And maybe that’s the work now: noticing the weather as it turns, and letting myself stand in it long enough to understand what season I’m actually in.

And now, as I sit with Bruce’s memory, I’ll put on DMB’s “Granny” and let the hunter rest for a moment.

Rest easy, Bruce. Rest easy.

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