The Practice of Finding Clarity

I have this picture of what the inside of my head would look like.

My thoughts are millions of little bubbles floating around in a vast ocean. The surface of the water is the border between my inner world and the outside world. My mind is the water. My thoughts drift underneath. My words and actions break above the surface. It’s how I show up to the outside world, to people, to the places I exist in.

The busier my life gets, the harder it feels to find clarity in that ocean. The bubbles multiply. They move faster.

So I find myself asking:

• Which bubbles of thought do I pay attention to?

• Which ones should I ignore?

• How do I get better at listening to myself?

What I’m really trying to figure out is simpler, and harder:

• How do I show up with more intentionality in life?

• How do I react less, when things get busier?

• How do I stop feeling like life is just happening to me?

When life gets busy, it feels natural to try to keep up by moving as fast as possible. To answer quickly and to stay on top of things. We have this quiet fear that if we slow down, we’ll fall behind.

But ironically, reacting faster is what blurs our vision.

When you’re so focused on what’s right in front of you, you stop seeing beyond it. You don’t leave any space to notice patterns, to anticipate where things might be heading, and to picture yourself in the future.

Slowing down flips the script. That’s when I can find clarity. When I give myself a little space to breathe, the bubbles in my head start to separate. I can sense which ones deserve my attention. I go from feeling like I’m drowning to knowing how to move with intention.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been experimenting with ways to pause. A set of levers I can pull when I feel lost in the bubbles:

I go for morning walks with my wife and dog and leave my phone at home. Sometimes I go for a long run, other times I lift weights. Moving my body almost always untangles my thoughts.

I write. I keep a daily journal, an ideas notebook, and I use this blog to think in public. Putting words down forces me to slow down enough to hear myself.

I talk to people. A call with a friend or even a conversation with someone new nearly always reflects something back to me I couldn’t see on my own.

I pay careful attention to mornings. Some of my clearest thinking happens early, before the phone, before the noise, before the day floods in. Cortisol levels are low, the mind is rested, and for a brief window the bubbles feel calm and easy to see.

And more recently, I’ve turned to conversations with AI. It’s like talking out loud with a mirror that doesn’t judge. I can throw half-formed ideas at it and see them bounce back sharper. Sometimes that’s enough to cut through the fog.

These are just my levers. Yours might look different. What matters isn’t which ones you use, but that you have some way to slow things down.

It matters because slowing down turns fear into agency. The fear underneath all our reacting is that if we pause, we’ll fall behind. But clarity gives you the opposite: a feeling of empowerment.

It shows up in two ways. First, you can prioritize: you see what deserves your attention now instead of being pulled in every direction. Second, you can anticipate: you imagine how the future might play out and form an intuition about what to do today to move toward it.

Together, those two things give you back a sense of agency. You’re no longer scrambling to keep up. You’re choosing how to move forward.

And yet, even with all these levers, I lose clarity all the time. Over the last couple of months, between moving out of New York, summer travel, and a heavy stretch at work, I slipped back into reaction mode. It felt like life was happening to me at full speed, and I made the mistake of trying to match the pace instead of slowing down.

Writing this post is my way of returning. A reminder to myself that clarity is fleeting because life is dynamic. The ocean never stands still.

My goal isn’t to hold onto clarity forever, but to practice finding it again. To slow down long enough to anticipate, to choose, and to move with intention.

And once I lose clarity, I can come back and do it all over again. That’s the point.