For a while now there has been a grey over my thinking. Not a problem I could point to - more a dimming. A flatness where possibility used to be. I am a man who works with distinctions for a living, so my first instinct was to hunt for the avoidance underneath it, the thing I was dodging while telling myself a noble story about why.
But it would not resolve as avoidance. The harder I looked, the more it kept slipping the frame. And eventually I let myself consider a different possibility - that this was not something to see through. It was something to grieve.
Grief and avoidance have completely different shapes. Avoidance is a maneuver. You catch it, you own it, you choose again. Grief is the fitting response to a real loss, and it does not dissolve when you see through it, because there is nothing false in it to see through. You do not out-think grief. You move through it.
So I asked myself what I was mourning. And the answer came quickly: a future I had been certain of and could feel myself losing. I had assumed, for years, that coaching would become the vehicle - that it would scale into something large, or climb into something premium, and that either road would carry me into the freedom I have wanted my whole adult life. The freedom to live near water in a beautiful part of the world. To write. To be an artist with my days. I had built two roads to that one place and I was watching both of them narrow at once.
That is a real loss, and I let it be one. But then I did something simple, and it changed everything.
I let the dream be fully alive before I let it go. Not the strategy version. The felt one. I asked myself what the best morning actually looks like.
Here is what I saw.
I wake with the sun. Early. A shower, a stretch, Tai Chi, a walk that turns into a short run. Good coffee with condensed milk, or tea with my protein shake. I am dressed simply - light, easy, tasteful, nothing flashy. I walk to the cafe luxuriously slowly, taking my time with the water, the forest, the morning. I wave to the people I know and trade a few words in the local language or in English. I sit, I greet familiar faces with a joke or a kindness, I laugh, I connect. I open my notebook and write a little - a poem, the seed of an article. Then I walk back, a touch quicker now, eager to work. I write through the morning. The people I love wake later and join me. A cook makes us a beautiful lunch, served with love, and we eat and laugh and share. I work a while longer, and at three in the afternoon I stop. The evening is for the people I love, in the village, by someone’s table, out in the world.
I sat with that picture for a long moment. And then I noticed something I had somehow never seen in all the years I spent building toward it.
The empire is not in the picture.
Look at it again. There is no crowd that knows my name. No premium roster. No scale. None of the things I had decided I needed to build are anywhere in the life they were supposed to buy. What is there instead is small, particular, and warm. A cafe. A handful of faces. The people dearest to me. A cook. Water nearby. And hours to write.
Which means the empire was never the dream. It was the toll booth. Somewhere along the way I decided this was the price I had to pay to be let through to the cafe by the water - and I have spent years, and no small part of my sense of my own worth, saving up for that toll.
When I set the empire down beside the morning and saw that the morning did not contain it, I waited to feel the grief land harder.
What I felt instead was relief.
I have learned to trust that. Relief is the body’s verdict, and it is usually more honest than the mind’s. When setting something down brings relief rather than loss, it is the clearest sign that it was weight you were never meant to carry. The grey over my thinking was not a block at all. It was the strain of holding up a structure my actual life never asked for. Set the toll down, and the lights come back up on their own - not because anything outside has changed, but because the demand did.
I wrote this poem months ago, before any of this had words. I thought I was describing a mood - the still, grey, brooding stretch when the waves stop coming, nothing moves, and there are no answers, only more questions. I understand now that I was describing a cycle. The tide going out is not a failure or an ending. It is the part of the rhythm where the wiser ones know what is quietly growing underground, out of sight, while everything on the surface looks dead and done. The grey over my thinking that I described at the start of this piece was my own tide going out. The poem already knew what I would have to live my way into believing - that there is no sense making drama out of a rolling tide.
When the Tide Goes Out
When the revelry is over. When the waves stop coming. Leaving a sandy liquified slop... With a different world of creatures.
When the tide goes out, Life seems so still, Nothing moves, You feel the call of night, The time for dark sleep.
Brooding weather. Brooding and no answers. More questions lackluster, Feeling the brown and down.
You walk along the water’s edge, and You feel the sun go down. The wiser ones know of what’s growing underground. The preparations for the feast The fattening of the beast.
Good always follows bad - the cycle makes it all meaningless. Why do drama with a rolling tide?
There is one thing worth guarding, and I will name it because it will come for you too. The old story does not leave quietly. It comes back and calls this “settling.” It whispers that the real win was the empire and the cafe by the water is a consolation prize. It is the reverse. The cafe was always the dream. The empire was the detour. When that voice returns, you can recognize it for what it is and let it pass.
If any of this is landing in you, here is the practice, and it costs nothing. Picture your own best morning in full sensory detail - the light, the place, the first thing you drink, who is there, what you make. Make it vivid and a little extravagant, because the truth lives in the particulars and never in the concept. Then look for your empire inside it. The promotion, the exit, the number, the recognition you have organized your years around. See whether it is even in the room.
You may find, as I did, that the life you actually want is smaller and nearer and more human than the one you have been building toward. That the thing you thought you had to become was only ever the long way around to a quiet table by some water, a notebook, and the people you love arriving for lunch.
The empire was the detour. The cafe was always the dream.
If this landed somewhere in you, come walk the rest of the way with me.
READ MORE FROM AND OF ME: I write most weeks - quiet field notes from thirty years of helping leaders see the thing they have been avoiding, and find the thing they actually want. It is free to read. Paid subscribers get one deeper piece each month: a single distinction, fully unfolded, the version I would normally only share in a long private conversation.
SEND THIS TO A LOVED ONE: And if someone came to mind while you were reading - a friend who may be carrying a toll they do not actually owe - send this to them. That is the kindest thing you can do with it.
THE FREE THING: One more invitation, if you are curious. Most of us have a quiet disguise running our leadership - a noble-looking story that keeps us building empires we never needed. You can find yours in a few minutes here: the free Noble Disguises assessment.
With love, Sunil
About Sunil
Sunil Bhaskaran is a transformational leadership coach and writer. An engineer by training - dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Irvine - he has spent thirty years building a body of work that brings the precision of systems thinking to the inner life of leaders, drawing on Zen, Heidegger, and Western existentialism. He is the author of More Money, More Time, Less Stress, writes The Whisper Newsletter on Linkedin, and lives in California, near the water he keeps writing about.
“Hey the cafe is right here!”
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
