Room for One More

Dear reader, I want to tell you where I'm writing this from.

It's evening, and the light is doing that thing it does here in Texas before it finally lets go — going gold, then amber, then quiet. The balcony faces an incredible set of trees, and if you sit still long enough, you stop noticing the traffic somewhere nearby and start noticing the birds instead, settling in for the night the way birds do, a little noisily, like they're arguing about who gets the best branch.

There are two chairs occupied out here now instead of one. Maria is usually in the other, and we talk about nothing in particular for longer than either of us planned to. I mention this not because it's news, but because it's the truest thing I can tell you about why this place exists at all.

For a long time, I measured my life mostly in outcomes. Deals closed. Boards served. Businesses built, some of them well, a few of them not. There is nothing wrong with any of that — I still love the work, and I don't think loving it was ever the problem. But somewhere in the last year or so, quietly and without much ceremony, the center of gravity shifted. I noticed I was more interested in the conversation on the way to the meeting than the meeting itself. I noticed I'd rather sit with someone's hard question than hand them a fast answer. I noticed that the moments I kept coming back to, when I was honest with myself, weren't the ones where I'd impressed anyone. They were the ones where I'd simply been present.

I don't think that shift was mine to take credit for. If I've learned anything worth passing on, it's that the meaningful things — a relationship, a character, a faith worth keeping — are almost never built in a single decisive moment. They're built the way a porch is built: one board at a time, mostly unnoticed, until one day it can hold the weight of an actual conversation.

That's what I mean when I say every meaningful life is built one faithful step at a time. Not one grand step. One faithful one. Then, if you're willing, another.

So this is not going to be a place where I tell you what I've accomplished. Honestly, I hope you forget most of that fairly quickly. What I'd rather do — in this letter and the ones after it — is think out loud with you about the things that seem to matter most as I get older: how to lead without losing yourself, how to build something that outlasts you, how to stay tender in a world that rewards hardness, and how faith quietly proves itself when life becomes more demanding than we expected.

I'll get things wrong; I’ve been getting things wrong for decades! I'll probably say something in six months I'd word differently today. That's fine. This isn't a broadcast. It's a conversation, and conversations are allowed to keep going.

If you've found your way here carrying something heavy — a business that isn't working, a title that doesn't fit anymore, a season that looks nothing like you expected — you're not behind. You're just further back on the porch than some of us, and there's a chair for that too.

Take a seat. There's no rush.

There's room for one more.

— Kyan

*P.S. — If any of this stirred something loose in you, hit reply. I read these. That's rather the point.