On Saturday, I remarked to some friends of mine that I’ve spent nearly a year querying literary agents for my romantic comedy, and no one wants to represent me. One of my friends chimed in, “yet. No one wants to represent you yet.”That word snagged my attention because there’s so much hope and faith wrapped up in three letters.

In the process of coaching me through transformation, my chiropractor said there is a space between who I am and who I’d like to become. And in that space, I need to breathe in trust and creativity. I don’t need to know how to get where I’d like to go, I just need to trust I’ll get there and remember to be creative. More in this week's post.

I’ve been writing about transformation so much lately because that’s the phase of life that I’m in, but the shadow side is I keep bracing for the worst-case scenario. It’s perfectly reasonable, sensical, even, but that also means my hope for things working out or going the way I’d like is at a nadir. Hope is so tricky.

I keep thinking about a song I first heard more than 20 yearsago called “Eg Ser.” Unfortunately, there’s no publicly available version I can share, but you can purchase the albumit came from. And YouTube offers numerous options, just not the one I’m thinking of. Anyway, “Eg Ser” is a Norwegian song, and the English translation I like best is:

 I can see that you are tired, but I cannot walk all thesteps for you

They are yours to walk, but I can walk them with you

And I will walk them with you

I can see that you’re in pain, but I cannot cry any tearsfor you

They are yours to cry, but I can cry them with you

And I will cry them with you

The song is what I imagine God, the Divine Beloved, Higher Power, whatever word you want to use, would say to us.

You may already know this, but AI safety researcher Mrinank Sharma resigned recently. That’s not really news in and of itself – people leave their positions all the time. No, the newsworthy part is that he left Anthropic, best known for its chatbot Claude, to study, drumroll please: poetry. Yes, poetry.The context is what makes the whole thing fascinating.

You know how people say most of the things they’re afraid of never happen? The opposite is true for me – most of the things I’ve feared have happened. Not the fleeting, “I’m scared I’ll miss my flight” things, but the “I’m scared I’ll be broken into” things. The recurring fears, the ones that cause my stomach to roil and my chest to constrict. But I've learned something as a result.