There was a time I was scared shitless to confront the unpalatable parts of my story.
Decisions I wished I could take back, regrets carried around in my body like cement and aggregates hardening into concrete, meant the easier path to take (rather, the well-trodden one) included keeping the stuff in the basement of my inner being hidden, tucked away like forgotten toys into plastic containers and used furniture wedged against the corners of shadowy rooms where spiders cobwebbed them into oblivion. “Some rooms don’t need visited,” I’d think, or, “I’ll deal with that later. Sometime before lying on my deathbed.”
Turns out, the parts of your story that are unresolved may be the most interesting bits you have to offer. But they require you to exercise small acts of courage to carry them from the basement of your inner being into the light of the world around you.
When I started the Porch Sit Revolution three months ago, it was partly done to form a small reading group and leaf through the pages of The Urgency of Slowing, my forthcoming book, and gather feedback. I had no idea who would come or how many. Since January, about twelve people—most of whom I hadn’t met before—have joined me every other Tuesday and with genuine interest. Together, we take our time, practice unhurried conversation, occasionally sit in periods of silence without rushing to fill the space, share unrehearsed stories, and make a practice of giving our attention to self and one another.
But my secret endeavor in forming this group was to make my life visible.
The Urgency of Slowing is a blend of memoir and research, what might be commonly referred to as autoethnography, where a researcher uses their story to analyze and understand cultural and social experiences. What started out as pure fascination on how hurry was affecting individuals, families, organizations, and civilization, quickly turned personal when my life went up in smoke a few years ago. If you’ve ever suffered great loss, gone through a divorce, or mucked up a situation, then you can relate. You know what it feels like when the ground is ripped out from beneath you and you’re looking for answers and the people you used to turn to and the religion of your youth can no longer give you what you need and the only answer is the deafening silence that remains long after the strain of your voice. Through this magical suffering I have learned that if you do not befriend the silence, you will be prone to panic.
The first day of the reading group, I sat with my laptop open on a small desk in my shoebox apartment in New York City where I was living at the time, and shared the prologue of my book with a room of faces I barely knew. My voice cracked in a couple places. I let it. I shared about my divorce, the dark night of the soul, standing at the window with a glass of Woodbridge trying to grasp onto something. About the silence that followed and the strange sensation that crawled over me when I stopped demanding answers.
No one rushed to fill the pause afterward. That was the first gift.
The next was subtler. Someone shared a story of their own. Then another. Each one unrehearsed, a little raw, the kind of thing you’d normally smooth over at a dinner party or bury in a journal entry.
I’ve facilitated groups for years across six continents, with executives and engineers and teenagers and transplant specialists. I know what a room feels like when people are performing. I also know what it feels like when they stop. The air changes. Something loosens in the chest. You can almost hear the masks being set down on the table, gently, like placing a glass you’ve been gripping too long.
That’s what the Porch Sit Revolution, at its best, is. A place where masks rest.
Michael Margolis once asked a question that turned something over in me: “What if your greatest source of power is the part of your story that is unreconciled?” I carried that question for a long time before I understood it in my body. Power is a strange word for it. It doesn’t feel powerful to admit you had built a mask factory so convincing even you forgot which face was yours. It feels like standing half-naked on a mossy rock in Spain with the clouds rolling in and no one around to tell you it’s okay.
But the moment you say the thing you’ve been hiding, it loses a portion of its hold on you. The basement door creaks open. Light finds the corners and the spiders scatter. And what you thought would destroy you turns out to be, somehow, beautiful, and if not beautiful, bearable. Always. Always bearable.
Lao Tzu expressed that in the act of genuine creation, “the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed1.” There is a version of living where you are always managing yourself, curating, positioning, trying to control how others see your story. And there is another version where you forget yourself entirely, where the telling and the living become the same motion, where you are no longer the author standing outside the narrative and have become a character who is surprised by what happens next.
The first version is exhausting.
The second option is terrifying. Yet, I am choosing it, more and more. I keep being terrified, and somehow that combination is producing the most poignant work of my life.
I am watching this happen with others too. A person I coached recently told me she had started writing letters to her estranged father. She hadn’t sent them yet. She wasn’t sure she would. But the act of putting words to what she’d kept in her basement for years made her feel, for the first time in a long time, like the author of her own life rather than a character trapped in someone else’s.
Slowing doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t resolve the tension between who you are and who you wish you were. It is not a practice you undertake to reduce your many masks to one. We will always have masks. But slowing does give you a chair, on a proverbial porch, and asks you to sit, to sit for longer than you want, long enough to hear your own voice say something true, not something new, but the sound you make when no one is listening, which turns out to be the same sound the trees make, the rustling of leaves and creaking of branches, the groan of your being, being yourself.
Wendell Berry once wrote that “the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home2.”
One inch. That’s it.
It takes a lifetime.
Every other Tuesday, a small group of people and I practice moving that inch together. We read and share. We sit. We let silence have the last word. And sometimes, when none of us is the wiser, the doer vanishes into the deed, and what remains is a circle of ordinary humans, being ordinarily human, which may be the most revolutionary act available to us in a world addicted to speed.
Pull up a chair.
If you would like to join the Porch Sit Revolution, you can apply below. No expertise required. Let’s have an unhurried chat first.
All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we're building toward and what we're willing to march for. If you'd like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.
Unhurried Design is a life-centered approach to design created by Jordan Soliday and Johnnie Moore. We prioritize relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste. This blog is now organized into four sections:
Jordan is lost. Often slowing down and getting lost. Stories on the stubborn art of giving attention in a world skimming along the surface.
Johnnie is still walking. Often walking and talking. Reflections from decades of working unhurriedly with humans around the world.
Just the two of us. Conversations, collaborations, and the things we only find when neither of us is leading.
Porch Sit Revolution. A global practice of reading slowly, sitting together, and letting silence have the last word. Pull up a chair.
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Stephen Mitchell, in his translation of the Tao Te Ching, wrote that in genuine creation, “the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed.”
The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge (also found in The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry).