Hello, rise together listeners. Dave here coming to you from the old back patio of peace here at my place in lovely dripping spring's Texas. Come on by if you're around.

I've just finished a long run and I wanted to share a little bit of how I am one to work through a season where there are more questions than there are answers.

And how this process of my long runs and the way that I keep my notes open on my phone and dictate thoughts as I do a long run might give you a resource of sorts if you find yourself also in a world where there might be more questions than answers.

But also if in any way any of the things that I am processing in real time resonate for you maybe there's something in this that makes you think about something you're working through in a different way or if nothing else makes you feel normal for going through the kind of stuff that I think most of us as humans end up going through.

What would the world look like if we all pushed ourselves to have candid conversations with people who didn't look like us, think like us or live like us. I'm Dave Hollis and I'm on a mission to learn more about this world by meeting more of the people who live here.

You may not always agree with everything you hear but I guarantee you'll come away more informed on topics you might never have thought to seek out before.

This isn't just a podcast, it's a community and when we raise each other up we all rise together.

This last few months this entire year has really been marked for me by a full scale pullback, a wholesale inventory of everything more or less in my life.

It's a strange thing. I had the experience of 2020 where the unexpected nature of the end of my marriage, the transition of what I did in working in a business with my ex-wife to having to figure out what is next look like now.

There was an opportunity to build, do, be, whatever. And there I've talked about it plenty of times. Something exciting and terrifying about that prospect and 18 months in.

Man, I felt so proud of so much of what was the work to turn terrifying into exciting. And I found myself on top of what felt like having done a lot of things, built a lot of things, created a lot of things.

I felt myself standing on top of something that was built on a foundation that itself had not been examined for structural damage before any of the new building was done.

And for me what that ended up meaning is that when I found myself under pressure, when I found myself the victim of the critic inside, when I found myself insecure or filled with imposter syndrome or facing just the stuff that ends up coming up in grief long after you think you're done processing that part of it.

But the unsteady foundation, she did give way on me somewhat at the end of last year. And the results of that was pain, but also like an invitation to rebuild in a better way.

And so this journey for me in the last three months has really been one of asking a lot of questions, a lot of self discovery and a lot of time, a lot of time frankly with myself and normalizing.

And the ability that we have as people to confront the things we don't like to have to necessarily confront and sit for prolonged period of times and that discomfort so that the answers that inevitably actually will present themselves are given the time to do so.

And it left me with just an abundance of hope and such insight into so much of who I am and why I am and why I do the things I do or why I don't do the things I don't do.

And again, been this invitation to start a journey of building on top of what now is hopefully a more properly tended to foundation. So I feel hopeful about that. What's weird is that I also find myself as I said at the top in a world right now where I have more questions than I do answers about some of the specifics of how I'll do all the things that I'll do.

And so I have any time I've run into a time when I feel like, oh man, I don't understand what's happening here or this desire that I have for certainty or control.

These are things that have tended to usually spin me out or create anxiety or make me want to drink or a whole host of things that to be honest just haven't been necessarily productive.

And this time, I think in part because of having taken as much time away from the world, having stepped away altogether from social media, sitting in so much therapy.

I find myself without as many answers, but still connected to hope. And that's an awesome place to be.

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