Arriving Empty-Handed

On Grace, Attention, and Belonging

 

I spent most of 2025 writing about leaving abstraction behind and moving closer to the body, closer to people, closer to whatever happens when you stop trying to get to the point too quickly. I wrote about not overriding discomfort, about choosing usefulness over visibility, about letting things unfold at the pace they actually require.

And then, near the end of the year, I counted.

7,496 writing sessions across 155 days. 700 hours, not lost to my phone. 154 workouts. 162 hours moving my body. Weight dropped 7.3 kilograms whilst muscle mass increased.

The numbers are precise, almost confrontational in their clarity. They sit uneasily beside everything I’d been arguing for. Still, they’re hard to dismiss because they show repetition, commitment, and a year spent returning to the same practices again and again.

What they don’t answer is the question that began to bother me as soon as I saw them laid out and the questions I’m closing the year with:

Was I practising something, or was I documenting my right to be there?

Was measuring helping me deepen the work, or was it a way of earning a belonging I didn’t yet trust was already mine?

As I looked back, three words kept surfacing not, so much as goals I’d named in advance or values I’d tried to live up to, just what the year itself seemed to insist on returning me to. Each of them left traces in the numbers but also exposed a place where I was still working harder than I wanted to admit.

● Grace ● Attention ● Belonging ●

Ella

The piece that stayed with people most this year wasn’t about systems or practice but about loss. In February, I wrote about the days after we helped our dog, Ella, leave. I didn’t plan it, I wasn’t thinking about audience or resonance, only that the grief needed somewhere to go, and writing was the only place it would settle.

Everyone who opened that piece read it through.

I noticed that when I stopped trying to sound capable and wrote from the place where love and loss collapse into each other, people didn’t respond to the writing itself but to the honesty. Not admiration as much as recognition.

That’s the texture of belonging I keep coming back to now; being met without having to demonstrate usefulness, being seen because you let something real land rather than because you shaped it carefully enough.

The question that followed me for the rest of the year was quiet but persistent: could I arrive everywhere else the way I arrived there? At the page, at the gym, in relationships and without armour, without proof, and trusting that being human might already be enough.

Grace

If you look at my training data, the story appears simple. I started from almost nothing and climbed steadily through the year.

What the data doesn’t show are the negotiations on the mornings I wanted to push when my body was asking for restraint, the days recovery felt suspiciously like laziness because my plan said intensity. Progress happened, but only because I kept interrupting my own urge to override the signals that mattered.

Grace, for me, turned out to live in that interruption as space enough to notice what was happening before I acted on it.

Daniel Chambliss writes about Olympic swimmers, and how improvement hides in details most people don’t bother with. A slightly longer streamline or a breath taken half a beat later. Nothing dramatic, just attention sustained long enough to notice what’s off.

This was the first year I trained not to chase a result, but to try to understand how effort, nervous system, and capacity speak to one another. It felt less like sport and more like sādhanā in that the practice changes the person doing it.

Showing up 154 times does that but it also revealed something uncomfortable. I extend grace easily when I’m holding others but with myself, I’m less certain and will still reach for consistency as evidence, as though being here needs to be justified through repetition.

Attention

My writing numbers are harder to explain away. On the days I wrote, I averaged close to fifty sessions of scraps, half-ideas, arguments with myself on the page. Almost none of it was meant to be seen because it was thinking by staying.

The hours I didn’t spend scrolling belong in the same category of noticing the reflex to disappear, choosing not to, putting a little friction between impulse and action, and sitting with whatever showed up in the gap.

I published eighteen pieces this year but my real work happened elsewhere. Early on, the writing leaned analytical, still trying to stand outside the systems I was describing. By summer, that stance had softened and my pieces began c,loser to sensation, closer to story once I stayed long enough for it to change on its own.

Attention, though, has its own edge because the same discipline that helps you stay with uncertainty can quietly harden into control.

Shohei Ohtani’s high-school training grid made this visible for me. Alongside speed and control, he tracked things like picking up trash and treating umpires well. You can’t perform those actions for effect – either they shape who you are, or they expose the fact that you’re acting.

That’s where my own attention sometimes tipped from a practice that helped me listen more closely to becoming a way of managing what I didn’t want to feel and watching myself carefully instead of letting myself be seen.

Belonging

For the longest time, I earned my place by being useful. I built things. held rooms and created structures where other people could arrive safely. It took me years to notice that I was building externally what I didn’t yet trust internally.

This year sharpened the difference between longing and belonging. Longing reaches outward and wants reassurance, acknowledgement, some signal that you’re doing it right. Belonging feels quieter as if the body settles and you stop rehearsing.

I’m good at making space for others and know how to offer patience, attention and care. Receiving those same things, without contribution attached, still feels uncertain. Sitting down without having brought something with me still feels like a risk.

The numbers can’t help with that because they don’t show whether I let myself rest inside what was already there. The data tells a true story of practice, staying and repeating small choices often enough for them to matter.

What it can’t tell me is whether I let myself be changed by what I was practising, whether grace moved inward as easily as it moved outward, whether attention stayed porous, whether belonging was allowed to arrive without terms.

Grace creates room, attention keeps you honest and belonging asks whether honesty can land without explanation.

I got better at the first two this year, and I can feel that shift in my body and my work but the third remains unsettled.

As 2026 begins, the question I’m carrying isn’t how to practise more carefully or more consistently. It’s whether I can trust that I’m already here, and let that be enough.

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Originally published on Substack on 31 December 2025. Read on Substack →