Prompt & Ponder | Center
Special Sneak Peek Edition. On finding a solid place to stand when the world feels like it is spinning. Also… How to get unfrozen in an age of ice.
This is usually part of our weekly paid content. But I wanted to give you a little sneak peek, as well as some encouragement that feels really needed right now.
Many of you read these posts in your email or the Substack app. If this resonates with you, please like and restack it to help it get seen by new people. Thank you so much for being here. 🩵✨
Sometimes the world feels like it is stuck on spin cycle. Everything is moving at warp speed, and nothing is moving at all. Just me?
When I lived in Sudan, every day could have been utterly overwhelming. And some days the only way to stay human was to be overwhelmed, because love demanded witnessing people’s situations I knew I could do nothing to solve.
I had to learn not to let my sense of responsibility shut down my response ability. I couldn’t always fix their circumstances, but I could love people enough to hear and see them in their circumstances.
But if I tried to make the overwhelming tidal wave of need and suffering at a macro level my responsibility, it would short-circuit my ability to respond to the things I could take action on and make a difference in.
Unhealthy responsibility can shut down crucial response-ability.
Those of us in the USA right now are experiencing vastly different realities based on where we live and the color of our skin, as well as the voices that shape our news feeds.
When we witness violence on our screens, it is too easy to either swipe away if we aren’t directly affected or become trapped in the never-ending scroll where that’s all we see.
Neither of these options is helpful.
Which is why I’ve been thinking a lot about the word center. It has everything to do with wonder and the way we move through the world.
Center can mean many things, including:
The point of balance.
The still point around which things revolve.
The place of grounding, orientation, and return
To anchor, steady, focus our attention, or bring back into alignment.
The word center is both a place and a practice. It can give us tools to help find our way home to ourselves when we are stuck in scroll mode or tangled in a trauma freeze response.
To re-center our focus is an act of agency. Because so many things will try to place themselves at the center of our worlds. Urgency, fear, breaking news, productivity, the next video on your FYP.
Here’s the deal. What we center with our focus, we strengthen.
This is in no way to suggest we should just “focus on positive things” and ignore the injustice, cruelty, and violence unfolding around us in the USA at present.
On the contrary. We choose the gravity our lives have by choosing what we center and orbit. Practically, we do this in large part by how we steward our attention.
In 2025, it’s estimated that the average human on planet earth is online 7 hours a day.1 That’s 22.6 YEARS of our lives spent on the internet. Even if it is half that, it’s still staggering.
We are the first generation to know current events around the world in real time as they happen at scale.
Our access to information has grown exponentially in recent decades. While our brains are highly adaptable, the fundamental framework of our nervous system is still basically the same as it was a few hundred years ago.
Sometimes the quickest way back to center is simply to stop negotiating with overwhelm. It's to remove the things temporarily that overstimulate.
Put down the phone for an hour. Walk outside. Sketch something right in front of you. Notice the dancing light beam on your desk. Sit and stare out a window. Sip a hot beverage.
Wonder lives in the present moment we are in. It isn’t about escaping our reality; it is about having the resilience we need to navigate through it.
And so I center myself in hope, not because everything is bright, but because hope keeps a lantern lit for the parts of my being trying to find their way home.
Here are our weekly prompts.
I’m sharing a sample of each of the three kinds of prompts our paid subscribers receive. They get 5 of each every week, as well as a reference image, a printable sheet for the weekly prompts, our paid subscriber dashboard, and complete access to everything in our archives. Plus, supporting me to continue being able to serve you here!
Art-Making Prompt: Use torn paper or fabric scraps to create a “patchwork heart” as a reminder that your center can be made of many things.
Creative Writing Prompt: Write a story where one’s “center” becomes a physical object that must be carried, protected, or passed on.
Reflective Journaling Prompt: Consider the idea of inner gravity. What values act as your internal pull, drawing you back to what matters most?
Our normal prompts for our paid subscribers are below. ⬇️