Earlier this week (before the snow and the storms), I took a birthday visit to the lake yesterday to celebrate and do some reflecting about the transition into a new decade.

One of the things I thought about was how, in my twenties, I felt a lot of pressure to be good and feel good – to manage and maximize my life through positivity, productivity, and perfectionism.

But I began to see somewhere along the way that this focus was off – and that it was a better investment to pour my time and energy into the project of becoming a person big enough to hold the hard stuff – the complexity, imperfection, failures, hard emotions, and bad days – rather than pushing them away.

Ultimately, the focus on goodness, positivity, and perfection made me smaller because, in my efforts to maintain them, I often shrunk away from the real and hard stuff that was asking something of me.

And now, in all my 30 year-old wisdom, I feel pretty confident saying that living a good and deep life is far more than a collection of good feelings, positive thoughts, and productive days strung together.

It’s about our capacity to be with their opposites; it’s about becoming a person who can do a hard thing and feel a painful emotion rather than let them stop us.

Which is probably why being in the presence of the lake was so comforting - a perfect metaphor for becoming a vast container to carry whatever flows within it.

Here’s to a decade of bigness, flow, and power.