I was putting the finishing touches on a piece about creating in 2022. But then I got a chance to connect with an old friend making a big change in his life.

I’m grateful for that connection and for all the friendships from over the years, both inside and outside of work.

And now, rather that rush to finish the article, I’m going to give it some extra space to see what emerges.

I’ll be off with family next week and wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving from beautiful Carbondale, Colorado.

I had two experiences this week with a sudden, deeper knowing.

The first was with a person who is in the process of becoming a client of mine.

He just had an exit and is trying to figure out what to do next. We were talking about some of the possibilities, and about seeing that he really didn’t need to do anything, that he was already whole and complete, as a prerequisite to seeing what would show up next.

He had already had a significant opportunity. He was being recruited to be CEO of a startup that was starting to scale and he was excitedly telling me about the opportunity, the underlying opportunity, what it could mean financially.

And then he stopped and looked at me.

“Wait a minute. I don’t want to do that.”

He just knew. There was nothing logical, nothing “on paper,” to explain how he knew. The opportunity looked great. But he sensed that there was nothing new for him there.

He had worked his ass off and made a lot of money. He knew that path. And he now knew that the next thing would be something else. He didn’t know what it was—not yet—but he knew it was not this.

The second experience came to me just this morning.

I have been posting every Friday morning for the last few weeks, but I was going into an online retreat for four days and it started at 8. I would need to come up with something fast and post it before going online.

And when I woke up this morning, I just knew—

“I don’t want to do that.”

I didn’t know when I would post, or what I would write. But I knew “not this, not right now.”

As it turned out, I did write a post—you are reading it now.

It came to be in about 5 minutes. At a break.

Because I trusted it would come. Because the “no” that happened then made room for the “yes” that happened just now.

What do you say no to?

What could it make room for if you did?

My client, a CEO who has just sold his company, set aside two days to come to Aspen and do a mini retreat with me. We were going to take this past Tuesday and Wednesday to look at the work we had done over the last couple of years to get to this point, and also to set him up for whatever was next.

I was excited to have this extended time together, and also a bit nervous. While I had some ideas about how to use our time, how to point to the space where things happen, how to look upstream at the source of our creativity, I’m not exactly sure I trusted that things would unfold exactly as they needed to.

Turned out they did. Without me.

My client, who I will call Matt, texted me Monday afternoon. His flight to Denver had been delayed, so he missed the connection to Aspen. He was now going to stay over in Denver and fly to Aspen Tuesday afternoon (instead of Monday evening).

His new flight left on time and I drove to the Aspen airport to pick him up. But the website showed that his flight was more and more delayed. And it had been raining in Aspen all day.

Matt was supposed to land at 2:30. At 3:15 he texted me. He was back in Denver. The cloud cover had been too low to land and they went back to refuel and try again.

At 4:00, they canceled the flight. And Matt decided that rather than come to Aspen for what would now be a day at most (his flight was first thing Thursday), he would return home.

We talked today. And I asked him about his trip.

“What amazed me was all of the suffering going on around me as the situation kept changing. A woman burst into tears. A man was livid and started yelling at the gate agent. But the kids were all doing great—they were playing in the airport, acting like there was nothing wrong. Because there really wasn’t.

“What I saw was that I was perfectly ok. That life was happening differently than I thought, but that it wasn’t really a problem. And that I could just sit and enjoy the time away rather than struggling to change something I had no control over.”

It is entirely possible that my client saw more by going through that experience than he would have had he come to Aspen for two days.

And I saw that when you look in the direction of insight, insights tend to happen. Even if they don’t happen the way you think they might.

When we look toward what is always true, we see that the world is just happening. Our struggles come from the fact the we want it to be different, or that somehow we think we deserve a different experience. When we really see that, we find there’s a lot less to do.

Turns out I didn’t even need to show up for my client to have a massive insight!

What’s possible for you when you let go of what you don’t control?

And how much do you actually control, anyway?