What You Don't Think You're Saying, But I Hear Anyway
“I was burned out,” the former elected official tells me. I remove my glasses to better listen.
It’s late afternoon. We’re meeting for coffee. I was the one who introduced myself to him and asked to meet, hungry for someone senior to me on this political journey to give me advice on how to get the big things done when it comes to supporting unhoused people.
With the temperature dropping and the sky threatening rain, I’d arrived early to snag an indoor table. Now I wait and watch the cafe door. I bounce my knee. Check my phone.
He arrives, orders, sits, and sips his hot drink. He tells me about how he was raised and where the call to serve came from. I praise his storied career and recent retirement. He shakes his head like You don’t know. Then he says, “All those years took a toll. I was burned out. I had to just leave for awhile. I went down to Peru, and for thirty days I just walked village to village to village in the Sacred Valley. I couldn’t even explain what I was doing." His voice trails off. He looks down at his mug.
My mind does that thing of searching for a pattern to make it all make sense.
“Meeting new people over and over again village by village, engaging those strangers, connecting as a person plain and simple, to convey “you matter,” and to also feel seen by them as you journeyed, but without your career-long responsibility for fixing things, and instead to be able to just BE. It sounds like exactly what you needed to begin to recover.”
His look says Are you for real? Then he says, “I’ve never thought about it like that.”
I realize what I’ve said may be taken as an overstep.
But then a huge grin starts to spread across his cheeks. “You’re totally right,” he tells me, as he takes up his mug and looks around and starts telling me more stories.
_____
Reader: Many of us yearn to be better understood and perhaps to better understand ourselves. If you and I found ourselves on a rainy day in a warm cafe, and I took off my glasses and leaned in, what would you want me to learn about your story? Comment below.
_____
My conversation with the former elected official goes past the allotted time. He thinks my thoughts on how to support unhoused people are neither politically feasible nor economically pragmatic. But then he grabs hold of the vision and starts throwing out concrete ideas to help me.
I’ll take it.
Take time to listen, and you never know what you’ll see.
xo
🤗 Here’s a hug for all the empaths, for whom this is both such WORK yet is also the only way we know to be.
1️⃣ + 1️⃣ = 💞 Please help me grow Julie’s Pod by sharing this piece with ONE friend.
© 2025 Love Over Time LLC All Rights Reserved
When you lean in I will tell you that I have learned to say yes to people and opportunities and experience things for the joy and not for the outcome. I am at the point in my life where I remain active and curious, engaged and eager - and that is enough. It is satisfying to travel, to stretch in new ways and take time for old hobbies and activities to reemerge. It comes with the price of no parents and one (almost two) launched children and I accept that price and I grow and continue to make friends who notice when I am gone for awhile. I rise every day in gratitude for what I have and what I have in front of me. Thank you for listening...