Month: April 2026

Every IT technician has the same first question. Before they look at anything, before they run diagnostics, before they even ask what’s wrong — “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

And it works. Almost embarrassingly often, it works.

We accept this without question for our devices. Overheating laptop? Reboot. Frozen phone? Hold the button, restart. We know that a system running too hot, too long, without a reset — eventually stops functioning the way it should.

So why don’t we apply this to ourselves?

When we’re exhausted, running on fumes, pushing through back-to-back days — we don’t unplug. We caffeinate. We push harder. We schedule a vacation six months out and tell ourselves we’ll rest then. Meanwhile the system is overheating.

The unplug doesn’t have to be a two-week holiday. It can be twenty minutes. A walk. A nap. A genuine laugh with someone you like. Play that has no productive outcome whatsoever. Meditation. Sitting outside without your phone. Whatever “off” looks like for you.

The point is the wait. The actual pause before you re-engage. Not a five-second restart — a real one.

Computers don’t feel guilty about rebooting. They don’t apologize for needing a reset. They just do it, come back cleaner, and work better.

You already know this works. You just need to apply it to the most important system you’re running.

People talk about “finding themselves” as if the self is somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered. A new city, a new career, a new relationship — and maybe that’s where the answer lives.

But I don’t think it works that way.

All of it — meditation, spirituality, sitting quietly with nothing to do and nowhere to be, genuine reflection — what it’s actually doing is removing dust. That’s it. The dust of other people’s expectations. The dust of habits you picked up without choosing them. The dust of noise that’s been accumulating since you were old enough to be told who you should be.

The self underneath isn’t lost. It’s just covered.

When you sit still long enough, when you stop performing and planning and reacting — something becomes clearer. Not a revelation from the outside. Something from the inside that was already there. Your actual perspective on things. What genuinely matters to you, not what you’ve been told should matter. The particular way you see the world that no one else quite sees the same way.

That’s your truth. And it was never missing.

The reason practices like meditation feel profound isn’t because they add anything. It’s because they subtract. Less noise, less reactivity, less borrowed identity — and gradually, you start to see yourself more accurately. Your real strengths. Your actual values. What you bring to the world that’s genuinely yours.

The truth is within. It always has been. It just needs clarity to surface — and clarity doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from pausing long enough to let the dust settle.

For most of my life, when someone said “I need to meditate on that,” I assumed it was just a fancy way of saying they needed more time to think. Same thing, different words.

It’s not the same thing at all.

Thinking is an active process. You weigh options, run scenarios, argue with yourself, look for evidence. It’s useful when there’s a right answer that logic can uncover. But a lot of the decisions we actually struggle with aren’t like that. Whether to leave a job, end a relationship, take a leap on something unproven — these aren’t math problems. They’re gut problems.

And your gut doesn’t respond well to being cross-examined.

That’s where meditation comes in — not as a productivity hack or a stress reliever, but as a way to go inward. To stop the noise long enough for something deeper to surface. The answers to those kinds of decisions are already inside you. They’re just buried under anxiety, second-guessing, and the pressure to be rational about everything.

When you meditate on a decision, you’re not analyzing it. You’re releasing it. You’re creating the quiet that lets the right answer come forward on its own.

There’s a reason people with great instincts — experienced leaders, wise elders, anyone you’d describe as having good judgment — tend not to rush their decisions. They sit with things. They let clarity come to them rather than hunting it down.

So the next time you’re stuck on something that isn’t a factual question — something that comes down to who you are and what you actually want — try not to think about it. Meditate on it instead. Get still, get quiet, and trust that what you need to know is already in there.

It usually is.