I don’t know if you’ve been here, but if you have, I want you to know I see you.

One morning, I stood in my kitchen and saw the green tubing running from our bedroom into the living room. My husband was still sleeping, and the house was still. The tubing was there so he could move from oxygen in bed to oxygen in his chair when he was ready.

That was the moment it all landed differently.

We’ve been living with health challenges for a long time, so this caregiving journey didn’t begin yesterday. We’ve had diagnoses, adjustments, and new routines before this one. But this was different. This diagnosis, layered on top of several others, brought his mortality into plain view in a way I couldn’t ignore or soften in my mind. I couldn’t make it simply another appointment, medication, or small shift in the day.

Something about that green tubing made the change obvious.

I heard myself say to a friend, “This feels like the beginning of the end.”

Even writing those words now, I feel the weight of them. And maybe that’s part of what makes caregiving so hard to talk about. We don’t always have the right words for what’s happening while we’re in the middle of it. We’re managing equipment, appointments, medications, instructions, phone calls, and decisions. We’re adapting the house, the calendar, and the day’s rhythm. Underneath it all, we’re also carrying the emotional truth of what has changed.

When Love Asks for Something Different

I’ve been my husband’s wife for more than 30 years. I’ve been his partner, his companion, his person. We’ve built a life with all the ordinary and extraordinary things that make a marriage what it is. And laughter has always been part of us. So has honesty, and getting through things we didn’t expect.

Over the years, my role has changed many times. Lover, wife, partner, advocate, caregiver. Some days, those roles blend so completely that I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

That’s the part many people don’t see. Caregiving doesn’t only change what you do. It changes how you listen, how you watch, how you sleep, and how you move through the house. It also changes how quickly your mind goes to the next practical question.

Is he breathing comfortably? Did the new medication help? What does that symptom mean? Will this treatment make things better, harder, or both? How is he really doing with all of this?

And then, somewhere underneath those questions, another one starts to surface: How am I doing with all of this?

That first week after the new diagnosis, I was on high alert — watching for signs that he was struggling with the new routine, and for changes in his breathing. I watched how he moved, how he rested, and how he responded. The future felt uncertain in a way I couldn’t easily name, and the questions kept circling. How would he adapt to this new reality? How would I?

The Conversations That Steadied Us

As the days passed, we began having the conversations that needed to happen. They weren’t grand, but they were real. The ones that come when you’re standing in the middle of something you can’t change and trying to decide how you’ll live with it.

We talked about acceptance and about how we couldn’t change this new situation, only how we would respond to it and build our days around it. We talked about gratitude, too, because even though his body is breaking down in ways we wish it weren’t, his mind is still sharp. That matters. Every. Single. Day.

And we talked about wanting to make the best of our time together, whatever that time turns out to be.

Those conversations didn’t make everything easier, but they did make things more honest. Something about telling the truth together feels very grounding. It doesn’t remove the grief or the fear, or answer every question. But it keeps you from standing alone in the middle of what has changed.

Then, sometime during that first week, his humor came back.

He looked at me with that familiar smirk and said, “At least now I can breathe easy, and I won’t take it for granted.”

There he was. That was my thought. There he is.

I can’t tell you how grateful I was for that moment. He could have chosen anger and turned it toward the situation, the equipment, life, even me. And I would have understood. Instead, my hubby chose to ride this rollercoaster with me the way we’ve ridden so many others, laughing with our hands in the air, sliding into home base with a smile.

That doesn’t mean we’re pretending this isn’t hard. It means we’re still us inside it.

The Ripple Starts Again

I often talk about the Ripple Journey because transitions rarely move in a straight line. Something happens; I call it The Drop, disrupting what had become familiar. Then the waves begin again.

This new diagnosis was another Drop in a long caregiving journey. It changed the room, the routine, and the way the future felt when I looked toward it. The Inner Wave was the pause we both had to take, the honest conversations, the acceptance that life had shifted again, and the tenderness of admitting what we could and couldn’t control.

The Middle Wave came through the people who knew what to do next. Medical experts helped us understand the equipment, explained how it worked, how to navigate with it, and how to integrate it into daily life without letting it take over every corner of our home.

The Outer Wave came through my dearest friends. They listened and acknowledged how hard this was. They gave me room to feel it without rushing me toward a brighter interpretation. They prayed with me and let me cry. And they helped me return to the practical steps I could take, one day at a time.

Sometimes support looks like advice. This time, it looked more like presence.

Slowly, Still Water began to return. It wasn’t that everything was fine, or that the fear disappeared. It returned because we began to settle into the new normal and make the best of it. We learned where the tubing needed to go and how to move around it. We adjusted to what the day required now. And we began to breathe again inside what had changed.

For the Ones Carrying This Quietly

I’m sharing this because I know there are so many of us moving through seasons like this in silence. We bear it, adjust to it, and love through it. We watch as we keep living inside what has changed, even when we don’t always have words for how much it has changed us.

Some are caring for spouses, aging parents, adult children, siblings, friends, or neighbors. Some are sandwiched between generations, tending to growing children on one side and aging loved ones on the other. Many of us do it while still working, leading, showing up, answering emails, keeping commitments, making dinner, paying attention to everyone else’s needs, and wondering when we’re allowed to admit we’re tired.

Caregiving can be full of love, and it can also be lonely. Both can be true at the same time.

And when your role changes, it can shake something deep inside you. You may still be a wife, husband, daughter, son, parent, friend, or partner, but the way you inhabit that role may feel different now. More watchful. More responsible. More tender. More aware of time.

That kind of change deserves a name.

We don’t always know how we’ll respond when The Drop hits. I didn’t. I don’t think most of us do. We find out in real time, often while we’re trying to understand instructions, make decisions, and keep our hearts from running too far ahead.

For me, leaning into my faith is the best thing I can do. I lean in big, deep, and hard because that’s where I find enough steadiness for the next step. For you, it may be faith, too. Or friendship. Or therapy. Or prayer. It might be a walk outside, writing in a notebook, or reaching out to the community that lets you tell the truth — or it could be one trusted person who can hear you say the thing you’ve been holding back.

Whatever steadies you, lean in. You don’t have to carry this season without support or make your courage look polished. And you definitely don’t have to rush yourself past the ache just because other people don’t know what to say.

Still Water isn’t a place where nothing changes. It’s where we learn to breathe again inside what has changed.

That’s where we are right now, my husband and I, living inside a reality we didn’t choose. We laugh when we can, tell the truth when we need to, and make the best of the time we have.

And adapt again, one day at a time.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming your work and life. She is a co-founder of Betweenward™.

I know the fixer reflex because I’ve lived inside it my whole life.

So when my client told me what happened, I recognized the look on her face before she finished the story. One of her team members, usually the most buttoned-up presenter she had, showed up late to a product launch meeting with an important client and stumbled through it. Unprepared. Off his game in a way she’d never seen from him. The client noticed. She could feel the relationship wobbling in real time.

She’d already built the plan by the time she sat down with me. She was going to reach out to the client herself, smooth things over, and quietly start looping in a more seasoned team member for anything client-facing going forward. Efficient. Protective. The kind of move that saved her more than once before.

“What would happen if you let him find his own way through this?”

She looked at me like I’d asked her to do something reckless.

She sat with that question longer than usual. I watched her turn it over, resisting the pull to answer it the way she answered everything: quickly, competently, with a plan already halfway built. For a few seconds, she didn’t fix anything. She just sat in not knowing what the right move actually was, which, for someone who’d built a career on always knowing, was its own kind of hard.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’ve never let someone sit in a mess like this before.”

I wasn’t there to give her the answer either. My job was mostly to keep asking the next honest question, so she had somewhere to put the discomfort besides a fast solution.

That not-knowing was the beginning of something, even though it didn’t feel like progress. It rarely does, in the moment.

What Came Next

Over the following weeks, she didn’t disappear into fixing, and she didn’t leave her team member to flounder either. She asked him what was going on, and learned about the situation at home that had thrown him off. She asked him what he thought he needed, rather than telling him what she’d decided he needed. It was slower than her instinct wanted, and required her to tolerate a version of “in progress” that had no guaranteed ending.

He asked for two things: a little grace on deadlines for a few weeks, and a chance to rebuild the client relationship himself rather than have it quietly taken from him. Neither was a guarantee. She could have overridden both requests in an afternoon and probably felt more in control doing it.

She didn’t. She gave him the grace and stayed close without stepping in, checking in without checking up. Three weeks later, he asked for a second meeting with the client himself, prepared this time, present in a way he hadn’t been the first time around. The client agreed. The account held because she’d let him fix it.

What Staying in the Mess Actually Cost Her

I don’t think people would have called what she did brave if they’d been watching. There was no dramatic conversation or visible risk. From the outside, it probably looked like she simply did less than usual.

But I know what it cost her because I know the feeling from the inside. Every instinct she had was built for speed and certainty, and she spent three weeks doing the opposite: staying slow, staying uncertain, resisting a fix she could have executed in an afternoon. That kind of restraint doesn’t get applause. Nobody sends a note praising the crisis that didn’t happen because you let someone else grow into solving it.

This is where I think the Inner Wave of a transition often hides in plain sight. It happened in a pause like hers: sitting with a discomfort long enough to actually notice it, instead of moving past it toward the fastest available relief.

What I Tell Myself When the Reflex Kicks In

I still feel that fixer pull constantly, in my own life and with clients. It hasn’t gone away. What’s changed is my relationship to it. I’ve learned to notice the reflex arriving, the same fast, competent certainty my client felt, and to ask myself a version of the same question I asked her: is this actually mine to fix?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and I move. Often, especially with the people I love most, the answer is no, and the harder, quieter work is staying with them.

Where in your life is the reflex to fix asking you to move faster than the situation needs?

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María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes about the quiet, unglamorous work of becoming who you’re meant to be next.

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At first, I couldn’t place the sound I heard.

I’d just climbed out of the water at Slide Rock, still catching my breath from the cold, standing on the bank while the July sun dried my shoulders. The creek in front of me looked exactly like it had ten minutes earlier. It was clear and moving at its usual unhurried pace over the red rock. Nothing about it looked capable of what I heard coming.

There was a low rumble at first, somewhere upstream, low enough that I almost mistook it for thunder. Then it got louder, closer, until it wasn’t a sound anymore so much as a presence, something moving toward me with a power the creek didn’t have a minute before.

I stepped back from the bank instinctively. And then, I watched the water change before my eyes. It was the same creek and the same rocks, but they transformed in what felt like seconds into something faster and darker. It carried branches and debris I hadn’t seen anywhere near it before.

I stood safely back and felt two things at once: awe at how fast it happened and a quiet, physical gratitude that I’d gotten out when I did.

What I Recognized in the Water

It’s taken me a while to understand why that moment has stayed with me the way it has many years later. It wasn’t so much about the flash flood, although that was scary. It was about how ordinary everything looked right up until it wasn’t.

I’d been in that water minutes earlier, and nothing about it warned me. There was no shift in color upstream or change in temperature. My senses didn’t catch anything before my ears did. The disruption didn’t announce itself. It just arrived, fully formed, while I happened to be standing close enough to feel its force.

I’ve thought about that morning every time I’ve found myself back in the messy middle of a transition, which, if I’m honest, has been more times than I expected by now. A diagnosis. A loss. A decision that upended a plan I’d built a life around. None of them announced themselves the way I wish they had. They arrived the way the current at Slide Rock did: sudden, loud only once they were already close, and impossible to have fully prepared for no matter how carefully I’d been watching the water.

What the Current Taught Me, Once I Was In It

Here’s what I didn’t expect. Standing on that bank, watching the current change, I was both afraid and amazed. There was something almost holy about it. It was a force moving through that canyon with a power I had no part in and no control over.

That’s stayed with me too, longer than the fear did. Because most of the disruptions I’ve lived through since have carried some version of that same, uncomfortable truth: the force that scared me also made me keenly aware of how fast a life can shift, and how much of what I thought was solid ground was really just calm water — temporarily.

I think this is part of what the Middle Wave of The Ripple Journey™ holds. It’s that strange mix of fear and clarity arriving at once, neither one canceling out the other.

What I Know Now About Standing on the Bank

I wasn’t in the water when the current changed. I’d gotten out minutes before, for no immediately apparent reason. I’ve wondered since whether it was luck, instinct, or divine timing. I suspect the latter. Regardless of the reason, what I did once I heard the sound matters: I stepped back. I didn’t argue with the water or wait to see if it was really as strong as it sounded before I moved.

I wish I could say I’ve always responded to life’s sudden currents that well. I haven’t. Some I’ve stood too close to for too long, certain I could outlast them before they reached me. But I’ve gotten better, slowly, at trusting the sound before I can see the water, and at believing a change is real before it’s fully arrived. And I’ve learned to move accordingly, rather than wait for proof.

The creek at Slide Rock went back to looking calm within an hour, the way these things do. You’d never have known, walking by that evening, what had moved through it that afternoon. I think most of us have experienced a few stretches of water like that. Calm on the surface, with evidence of the flood still there if you know where to look.

What sound have you learned to trust before you could see what was coming?

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María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the moments that taught her the most, including the ones she didn’t see coming.

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David was twenty-four, sitting on the floor of the Kingston airport, playing his thumb piano. He had just been expelled from a church work camp in Haiti, with the rest of the summer suddenly open in front of him. So, he did what he always does. He played.

A man stopped to listen and asked about the instrument. The two of them talked, and it turned out the man ran Jamaica’s board of tourism. He had a large house in Kingston, and he offered David a room there, free of charge, for the rest of the summer. David spent the next several weeks traveling the length of the island as his guest.

That is where his curiosity took him. To understand how he got there, you have to go back a few months, to an orientation room in Port-au-Prince.

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The three kinds

When I asked David how he keeps his curiosity alive at 80, he didn’t reach for a memory. He looked it up. He typed the word into his phone, read me the definition out loud, and started sorting himself into the categories.

There are three kinds, he told me. Diversive curiosity, the pull toward anything new. Epistemic curiosity, the drive to know one subject all the way down. And empathetic curiosity, the wish to understand what another person is feeling and thinking. He claimed all three. He owned the first one with a confession: he has been called snoopy, and once asked a woman at a dinner so many questions that she told him she felt interviewed, so he backed off.

The one that stuck out is the third. For David, empathetic curiosity is how he gets close to people, and getting close to people is how he gets close to himself. “By dancing with other people,” he said, “it helps me get in touch with the dance inside of me.”

My own curiosity runs on a different question. Where David reaches for what a person is feeling, I reach for how a thing works, the mechanism under the surface. Same engine, different target.

Careful and diligent

He found something in the etymology that stopped him. The word curiosity comes from the Latin for careful, or diligent. He asked me why care would sit at the root of curiosity. The link is attention. A curious person looks at what most people walk past. We all run on shortcuts, the mental rules that get us through a day without examining everything. Curiosity is the diligence to set the shortcut down and look again, to ask the question the room has agreed not to ask.

The animal test

David is precise about why he guards this. He told me, with no apology, about a visit to his doctor. Everything checked out, and then the doctor said he wanted to run one more test, given David’s age. A test for dementia.

David did not care for the word. He decided, on the spot, that whatever else went in his file, that word would stay out of it. The test was simple: name as many animals as you can in one minute. Go. Zebra, horse, dog, cat, moose, giraffe, lion, rat, on and on. The threshold was sixteen. He got eighteen, barely clearing it. The next year he practiced and got twenty.

Then he delivered the punchline he had been setting up the whole time. The real reason he stays curious, he said, is so nobody finds out he’s demented. He let it land, the way the two women who each lived to 103 told him never to lose the joke. The joke carried the truth underneath it: he keeps his curiosity in shape the way other people keep a muscle in shape, refusing to let it go slack.

Port-au-Prince, 1970

Which brings us back to Haiti.

In 1970, David joined a volunteer work camp building a public health dispensary in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Two groups sponsored it: the Church of Christ and the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization. He had spent three years in Africa studying the instruments connected to religious ceremonies, and he had come to Haiti to do the same with the music of voodoo.

At orientation, they told him the rule. While he was on the island, he would not be permitted to attend voodoo ceremonies. David raised his hand. He said that studying those ceremonies was the entire reason he had come, and that the ban looked to him like religious discrimination. They held the line. Attend a ceremony, they told him, and you are out of the program.

He understood the choice in front of him. He had watched conservative missionary groups across Haiti work to replace what people remembered of their own music, art, and religion. He did the pick-and-shovel labor on the dispensary for a few months. And he went to the ceremonies anyway. They expelled him.

The door in Kingston

The trait that got him thrown out of the program is the trait that got him the summer. He would not stop following the thing he was curious about. Following it cost him his place in the camp. Following it also walked him into the Kingston airport with a thumb piano and out of it with a host, a house, and an island to explore.

This is the pattern worth naming for anyone building a next chapter after 50. Curiosity works like a practice. It can be built, kept in shape, and allowed to go slack. Like any practice, it asks something of you. Sometimes it asks you to be the one person in the room who says the rule is wrong. Sometimes it costs you the safe spot. David has been paying that price and collecting that return for sixty years, and at 80 he is still doing it, phone in hand, sorting himself into categories, naming animals so the word never lands on his chart.

The thumb piano has opened a lot of doors in this series. The one in Kingston may be the clearest. He had lost the program. He sat down and played. The next door opened.

Where we go next

One story has been waiting since the beginning: the woman David met in Tanzania in 1965, a nurse who studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent. We meet again soon. I think it’s time.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He holds a thumb piano, a long memory, and, by his doctor’s count, at least twenty animals’ worth of curiosity. He is, by his own account, an improviser.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

My husband looked at me one morning last month and said, “You seem like yourself again.”

I had to think about that for a second, because I hadn’t noticed the shift until he brought it to my attention. Somewhere over the previous few weeks, the bracing had eased. I was still watching and adapting, still aware of all the things that had changed since his new diagnosis. But I wasn’t white-knuckling my way through the day anymore. The house felt less like a problem I was managing and more like home again.

That’s the closest I can get to describing Still Water from the inside.

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no morning when you wake up and think, I’ve arrived. It’s more like one day someone you trust tells you that you seem like yourself, and you realize they’re right, and you feel something loosen a little at the thought.

What Another Drop Taught Me About This One

There was a morning not long ago when I stood in our kitchen and noticed the green oxygen tubing running from the bedroom into the living room. My husband was still sleeping. The house was quiet. And something about seeing that tubing made the weight of what had changed land differently than it had before.

We’ve been on a caregiving road for a while, he and I. New diagnoses layered on older ones, new equipment, new routines built around a body that keeps asking us to adapt.

I know the Ripple Journey from the inside, not just because I keep living it, but because living it is what gave it a name. This latest Drop set the waves in motion again. There was the internal reckoning, the honest conversations we needed to have, and then the slow reaching out to friends who could sit with me in it without rushing me toward a brighter interpretation.

And then, slowly, the settling.

What I know about transition is that it moves in waves. The Drop hits, the water is disturbed, and what follows isn’t tidy or sequential. And then, eventually, there’s a quieter kind of steadiness on the other side. Urgency softens. The hard thing is still present, but it’s no longer running the whole show.

That settling — not resolution, just the return of breath — is what I’ve been calling Still Water for years. Writing about it as part of a framework is one thing. Living through another Drop and finding my way back to Still Water is another thing entirely.

What I Got Wrong About Still Water When I First Named It

The Ripple Journey didn’t start as a framework. It started as the pattern I kept noticing in my own transitions — and the name came later. When I first described Still Water, I think I imagined it as a destination. The place you get to after all the hard work. And there’s something true in that because it does come after. But calling it a destination implied it would stay, and that’s not quite right.

Still Water is more like a state you return to. Or maybe: a state you practice returning to. Because the waves don’t stop, new ones come. And I’ve had enough Drops by now — professional, relational, health-related, the particular accumulation of things that life hands you after 50 — to understand that what shifts isn’t the disruption. What shifts is the trust that you can find your way back through the waves.

That trust is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through enough transitions to have earned it. That’s not optimism, exactly. It’s closer to evidence. You’ve come through things before, and you know it now in your body, not just in your head.

The Green Tubing Is Still There

I want to be clear about something, because I don’t want this to read as a tidy ending.

The situation hasn’t resolved. My husband’s health is what it is. The equipment is now part of our home, our routine, and the texture of a day. Some mornings are heavier than others. The grief that lives at the edge of a long caregiving relationship doesn’t disappear because you’ve found your footing again.

What changed is something smaller and more real than resolution. I stopped fighting the weight of it. At some point, I just let it be what it is. It’s hard, and it’s ours, and also full of the ordinary things we love about our life together. His humor came back first. That helped more than I can say.

There’s something about letting yourself stop performing okayness that gives actual okayness room to return. I don’t know how to say that without it sounding more prescriptive than I mean it. I just know that when I stopped trying to carry it gracefully and started carrying it honestly, something shifted.

For Wherever You Are In This

If you’re reading this in the middle of your own long transition — a job that ended, a role that changed, a future that looks different from what you expected — I’m not going to tell you that Still Water is waiting on the other side if you just do the right things. That’s not how it works, and you probably already know that.

What I will say is that the water does calm. And sometimes the first sign is someone who knows you well saying, "You seem like yourself again." Or noticing that you laughed at something without it costing you anything. Or realizing that you made a decision this week without rehearsing all the ways it could go wrong.

Small signs. Easy to miss.

Worth paying attention to.

If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone else who might benefit, please share it.

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María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the steady practice of learning to live honestly again amid what has changed.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community.

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David Thiermann has interviewed two people who lived to 103.

Both were women. He spoke with them on separate days, in separate conversations, with no chance for comparison. He asked each the same question: can you give me some advice about whatever?

Both gave him the same answer.

He has been thinking about that for years. Two people who outlasted nearly everyone they knew, who had watched the world change from a distance most of us will never reach, and they both pointed to the same thing. Humor. Specifically: don’t lose it. The phrasing itself is a clue. “Develop a sense of humor” is one kind of advice. “Don’t lose the one you have” is another kind entirely. As if humor is a possession that can slip away while you’re not paying attention.

David pays attention.

Some days he gets too serious. He notices it the way you’d notice a change in weather: gradually, then all at once. The spiral downward, he calls it. Once it starts, it moves fast. The thing that stops it is a joke. A pun. A moment where he can make himself or someone else laugh.

He lives this deliberately.

In our last conversation, he was on camera with me and decided, mid-sentence, that I needed a laugh. He told me he wasn’t sure whether I was an introvert or an extrovert, but that I might be a pervert. He said it with the timing of someone who has practiced this, because he has. The room changed. We moved on lighter than we arrived.

That is a decision.

I recognized it because I do the same thing. A few weeks ago I was leaving Target with my wife, arms full, and the theft alarm went off at the door. The employee told us we were fine. I turned to my wife and yelled, “Run.” It landed. We laughed the whole way to the car. I made a choice to say it in the moment, because I know what happens when I don’t: when I just walk through the door and move on to the next thing on the list.

The good time doesn’t always show up on its own. You build it.

The same week, I had been reading research on intergenerational contact. I had spent a Friday afternoon with Andrew Middleton, who runs a program in the UK called INDY: I’m Not Done Yet. During our meeting, he mentioned a young colleague, somewhere in her early twenties, and described how much he learns from her. It stopped me.

I had been thinking of intergenerational exchange as a gift flowing in one direction: the experienced giving to the inexperienced. The research says otherwise. The World Health Organization has published data showing that positive intergenerational contact produces benefits for everyone across the exchange. The younger person learns from the older. The older person learns from the younger. The direction runs both ways, and the research is consistent on this.

When I shared this with David, he went straight to Tanzania.

He learned a Swahili greeting there in the 1960s that encodes the same principle. In the that culture, when a younger person meets an elder, the standard greeting changes. Instead of the usual exchange, the younger person says: Shikamoo. It means, literally, I hold your feet. I am at your feet. Under you.

The required response from the elder is: marahaba. I accept your respect.

The greeting names the hierarchy of age out loud and confirms it on both sides before anything else happens. The elder does not perform humility. The younger person does not pretend the difference doesn’t exist. They both say what’s true, and then they talk.

In the same week of research, I found that the generation reporting the most intense experience of ageism in Europe is ages 15 to 24. Young people who feel looked down upon, too inexperienced to have an opinion worth hearing, consistently dismissed by the generations above them. No equivalent study has been done in the United States, though I would not expect dramatically different results.

Shikamoo runs in both directions. Respect across age gaps is a discipline both generations practice toward each other, or neither does it well.

David is 80. He races bicycles. He plays thumb piano for people in retirement communities. He asked me in our last session what it would take to become one of our coaches at Betweenward. He is, by his own account, the only student enrolled at Santa Cruz University: the name he gave his life. Every person who sits across from him is a professor.

He is also, unmistakably, curious. I have been watching it across seven months of conversations. He comes in every week having already been somewhere: a thought, a book, a bat fact, a Swahili greeting he wanted me to have. He does not wait for curiosity to arrive. He goes looking for it.

I asked him directly: is this just who you are, or is this something you built?

He said he’d need two weeks to answer properly. That is itself an answer. A man who, when asked how he maintains his appetite for the world, says let me sit with that and come back with something worth saying.

He did offer one early thought. He told me, with full honesty and no apology, that his curiosity has always been linked to the women in his life. The ones who were smart, who told good stories, who made him laugh. The most curious and productive periods of his life lined up, when he looked back, with the presence of someone like that. Then he said: if we ever put women fully in charge of everything, including the politics, the world will be a better place for all of us. Guys had a nice run. It was a nice try.

He was not performing. He meant it.

I keep coming back to the two women.

One hundred and three years each. Separate conversations, no coordination, identical answers. Whatever you do, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.

They named humor. They spoke of the thing that lets you stay light enough to survive the heavy parts. David’s version of this is practiced rather than passive. It is a skill he has been sharpening since he was 19 years old in Tanzania, learning to be a mjanja: the clever one, the improviser who can pull a room into a story. The man who plays a parking meter and hands the cop his attorney’s business card. The man who, when the moment gets too serious, finds the word that cracks it open.

He is 80. He still does this every week.

The two women who lived to 103 would recognize him immediately.

Where we go next

I asked David to spend the next two weeks figuring out how he made curiosity a habit. How he kept choosing it. Through machine guns in Rio. Through the years selling oranges door to door. Through the graduate program he walked out of, the restaurant he burned out of, the metaphysical license that cost him a story.

We meet on May 4th. He will have sat with the question. I will find out what 40 years of career counseling and 80 years of living have taught him about keeping the appetite alive.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is, by his own account, an improviser. He is also, by the account of two women who each lived to 103, doing something right.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

David Thiermann is not a psychic.

He will tell you this himself, though he will also tell you that the Greek root of the word “psychic” is a term meaning sensitivity and that everyone, by that definition, is psychic about something. He has used this information to great effect with the callers who found his name in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants.

“Are you a psychic?” they’d ask.

“Yes,” he’d say. “Everybody’s a psychic. And the reason you’re calling me is probably that you’re looking for a way to market yourself.”

“Wow,” they’d say. “You really are a psychic. How did you know that?”

He kept that listing for years. It never paid for itself. He kept it anyway, for a reason that says something essential about how David operates: he knew it would eventually produce a good story.

He was right. He just didn’t know the story would involve the Santa Cruz Police Department.

The setup, from the beginning

When David started his consulting business in 1987, his marketing strategy was the Yellow Pages, specifically, the index of the AT&T Yellow Pages, which he went through once a year from A to Z, putting a check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun to list himself under. By his count, he ended up under 37 categories. He tracked which ones produced callers and narrowed the list to the ten that were worth keeping.

Spiritual Consultants was not one of the ten. The calls were infrequent and, when they came, tended toward the unusual. There were the psychic callers, whom he handled as described above. And there were the ghost callers.

“Hey, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a ghost in my house.”

“Okay,” David would say. “You have two choices. If you want to get rid of the ghost, we’ve got to call Ghostbusters. If you want to make friends with the ghost, I want you to document every door slamming, every light going on and off, for the next two days. Then call me back and we’ll take it from there.”

He never heard from them again.

Despite the absence of billable hours, David kept the listing. He knew the patience was going somewhere. Then, one afternoon, a voicemail arrived from a sergeant at the Santa Cruz Police Department.

“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve had a complaint that you’re listed under Spiritual Consultants in the Yellow Pages, and we notice you don’t have a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.”

David listened to the message and thought: that’s the call I’ve been waiting for.

The license

He called the sergeant back, apologized for not knowing such a license existed, and asked where he could get one. The sergeant directed him to the police station.

There on the wall, among the various licenses the city of Santa Cruz offered to its residents, at the very bottom of the list: Metaphysical License. $50.

David paid the $50. He filled out the forms. They fingerprinted him, the city kept records on palm readers and card readers and people who listed themselves under Spiritual Consultants, he was told, and forwarded the prints to the FBI.

The sergeant said the review would take about six weeks.

Six months went by.

Then an official letter arrived from the city of Santa Cruz, confirming that David Thiermann had been granted a license to practice metaphysics within city limits. The permit number on the document was 002.

He has thought about that number. Somebody filed complaint 001. Whoever that was, probably a competitor, probably another practitioner who knew the licensing rules, had triggered the whole process. David was the second person in the history of Santa Cruz to hold this license.

He filed it under M for Metaphysics and started telling his friends about it. He also started asking them what metaphysics was, since he still wasn’t entirely sure.

The answer he kept getting: physics deals with things you can touch and see: gravity, tables, chairs. Meta is the Greek word for “above and beyond.” Metaphysics is everything else: the things you can’t touch or see or measure.

“Oh,” David said. “Thanks for telling me.”

He put the license back in the file and waited to find out what to do with it.

The renewal

A year passed. Nothing remarkable happened with the license. David considered letting it expire. Then he decided no, he would renew it. He called the police station.

The secretary answered. He told her he wanted to renew his metaphysical license.

“You don’t need to renew that,” she said. “It’s a lifelong license.”

He pushed back. He told her he suspected they wanted another $50.

“Trust me,” she said. “You never have to renew it. It’s lifelong.”

He hung up.

Four days later, the sergeant called.

“Mr. Thiermann, we’ve revoked your license. You failed to renew it in time.”

David told him about the conversation with the secretary. The sergeant said she didn’t know what she was talking about. And now, if David wanted to reinstate his license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, the process was somewhat more involved than it had been before.

The fee was $1,500.

Additionally, city officials would visit his office and inspect every business within 300 yards to make sure they were all up to code. Additionally, David would need to appear before the Santa Cruz City Planning Commission.

David walked over to the planning commission. An elderly woman came out from behind the counter. She recognized him, his name had appeared in the local papers a few times, human interest stories.

“Are you David Thiermann?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

She explained the process. The $1,500. The inspections. And one more item: he would then need to appear before the full Santa Cruz City Council, where the members would cross-examine him to determine whether he actually qualified as a metaphysician.

David looked at her. He did not have $1,500. He told her he had some appointments and asked if he could get back to her.

He walked out. He never went back.

The story that didn’t happen

This is the part David still thinks about.

If he had had the $1,500, he would have paid it. He knew everyone on the city council. He would have appeared before them and subjected himself to cross-examination on the subject of metaphysics in which he held a license, from the police station, permit number 002. He was certain it would have landed on the front page of every local newspaper in town.

He still has the license. It is still in the file, under M.

He mentioned, in our conversation, that he might go back to the police station now. Just to see. Just to find out if the story is still available.

The sage

Not long after David graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1971, he was back in town and ran into Chancellor Dean McHenry (the man who had built the university) in a local restaurant. McHenry stopped when he saw him. He looked at David for a moment and said: “You have become a sage.”

David felt it land. He didn’t think about it much at the time.

He has been thinking about it lately.

A sage, he’s learned, is a wise soul keen to learn, someone who never mistakes the credential for the education, who treats curiosity as an obligation rather than a personality trait. David’s website is called Santa Cruz University. He describes himself as the only student enrolled there. Every client who sits across from him is a professor.

He has been practicing metaphysics, the things above and beyond what can be touched or measured, for his entire adult life. He did not need the license.

Permit number 002 is still in the file, in case someone ever asks.

Why this matters

David kept the Spiritual Consultants listing for years. He tracked his Yellow Pages categories the way a scientist tracks data — note which ones produce a return, cut the ones that don’t. Spiritual Consultants produced no billable clients and cost money every year.

He kept it anyway. Not because he expected a return. Because he believed, on no particular evidence, that it was building toward something.

That is a specific kind of patience that encore careers require. The thing you maintain for years that doesn’t pay, the connection you hold onto, the skill you keep practicing, the listing you refuse to delete, because you sense it’s going somewhere. Some investments are measured in what they return this year. Others are measured in the story they eventually produce.

David got his story. He just didn’t pay the $1,500.

Where we go next

Two threads are still waiting: the Tanzanian woman David met in 1965 — the nurse who studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent — and the question of what curiosity looks like when it becomes a practice rather than a personality trait.

We’re going in on both.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He holds a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz, permit number 002. The license is in a file. The file is in a storage container. The story is here.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

There was a phone call David Thiermann almost didn’t take.

It was 1972. He was renting a room in Santa Cruz. He had just dropped out of a master’s program at UC Berkeley, walked away after calling out a professor for reading his own textbook aloud to a roomful of sleeping graduate students, and the pride that had gotten him through Tanzania, through Brazil, through a machine gun raid in Rio and a televised thumb piano performance and a year collecting instruments across every country in South America except Venezuela had landed him here: depressed, broke, and convinced he was a failure.

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He had been student body president at UC Santa Cruz. He had run a leprosy hospital at 19. He had won first place on Brazilian television.

None of that helped when the phone rang.

The caller was a man named Tom. Tom had recently made the mistake of building a sauna inside a closet using a wood-burning stove, which was how he burned his rented house down. All he had left was an old Ford pickup truck and a pair of boots. His father, who worked for the fire department in Southern California, had given him enough money to haul two tons of oranges up from the south and try to sell them at the flea market for a small profit.

Tom was losing that bet. The oranges were rotting. He needed help.

David hung up on him.

He was a former student body president. His professors at UC Santa Cruz might see him. He had an image to protect.

He sat there. He thought about it. He picked the phone back up.

“You know what? I just thought: you don’t have a plan. You better start doing something — it doesn’t matter what it is. And who gives a hoot what people think?”

He went to the flea market. They got rid of two tons by the five-pound sack. Then they bought four tons. Then eight. They knocked on every door in Santa Cruz County, one side of the street each, handing out samples, selling by the forty-pound box, buying for ten dollars and selling for twenty.

The former ambassador of Tanzania and Brazil was going door to door, doubling his money on citrus.

He became known in Santa Cruz as the Orange Man.

The $50 garage

When eight tons of oranges require somewhere to live, you find a garage.

They found one on a downtown Santa Cruz street for fifty dollars a month. The previous tenant was a German mechanic who had developed a drinking problem and gone out of business — he’d been repairing Volkswagens in there, and the floor was thick with grease and old transmissions. David and Tom poured muriatic acid over everything, hauled the transmissions to the dump, built sliding doors across the open front, and moved the produce in.

At night, after selling all day, they’d go back to the garage to hang out with friends. There was a blender. Then smoothies. Then a beer and wine license. Then thirty employees. Then an open stage — no auditions, no gatekeeping — running from ten in the morning until midnight, seven days a week.

In four years, the $50 garage became the Good Fruit Company.

David was the MC and the bartender. He never auditioned anyone. The stage held strip tease, belly dancing, juggling, fire eating, sword swallowing, lectures on every subject, every kind of music. If you could perform, you were welcome.

He loved it. He also ran it for four years without a single vacation, working fifteen-hour days every day of the week.

“I got to the point where I just didn’t have any more love to give to people.”

He sold it. The buyers renamed it Tropical Barbecue and started selling barbecued rabbit. Santa Cruz was not ready for that, and they went under.

The nose flute and the identical instruments

When the Good Fruit Company was someone else’s problem, a friend offered David a trip to Tahiti. He went.

He was there for six weeks, studying French Polynesian musical instruments, comparing them against the ones he’d found in the Amazon while working in Brazil. What he discovered surprised him: they were identical. The same instruments, on opposite sides of the world, having arrived there by routes no one could fully trace.

A retired French Polynesian chieftain named Tai Mai Tutu taught him to play the nose flute. It looks like a bamboo flute you’d normally play with your mouth — except you hold it to your nostril and blow air through that instead. You get a tune out of it. David can still play it.

This is consistent with a pattern you can track across his whole life: David tends to find, in places that seem entirely different from each other, the same deep thing. The leprosarium in Tanzania and the flea market in Santa Cruz. The Amazon instruments and the Tahitian ones. The career counselor’s question and the mjanja’s invitation into fiction. He keeps arriving at the same discovery from different directions: the human equipment is the same everywhere. The specific story differs. The underlying need does not.

Door to door, the second time

David came back from Tahiti and needed money. He went back to selling oranges — this time, only to offices.

He worked every office building in Santa Cruz County, from Boulder Creek to Aptos. He’d walk in with a forty-pound box and a question: what are you guys really doing in here? And if you’re successful, why are you successful?

Because he was the Orange Man (familiar, local, useful) people gave him tours. They told him their business secrets. He got to know the internal logic of every enterprise in the county by delivering citrus.

One of his customers, a woman who sold ceramics, noticed he was burning out. She offered him a trade: a session with a career counselor she had scheduled and wasn’t going to use. David thought: why not.

He met the counselor in a coffee shop. For an hour, the man listened while David talked about his life and career. The counselor took notes. He fed them back.

David walked out into the Santa Cruz afternoon and thought: that was kind of fun. Maybe I’ll just do that.

That was 1987. He has not stopped.

$35 an hour and what happened next

He started the same way he started everything: with no credentials and a willingness to figure it out in the room.

He met clients in coffee shops. He listened. He wrote down the story of their whole life and read it back to them. They found this therapeutic. He found it interesting. He charged nothing until his savings ran out at which point he told his next client the rate was $35 an hour, mostly because he couldn’t believe anyone would pay.

They said: sure, where do I send the check?

After about a year, he raised it to $55 because he was booked full. Then a clinical psychologist called who was, by David’s description, something of a bully on the phone. He told her the rate was $110 an hour, hoping she’d say no.

She showed up and paid it.

That became the rate.

What the Orange Man years were actually about

I thought about David’s story this week alongside something I’ve been sitting with from our conversation — the way he described coming back to Santa Cruz in 1972, depressed, renting a room, feeling like a failure for leaving grad school.

Here’s what he had already done by then: He had lived inside a leprosy hospital for three years and turned it into a functioning business. He had survived a political raid at gunpoint in Rio. He had won a national television competition in Brazil. He had traveled every country in South America collecting instruments. He had studied Haitian Vodou ceremonies and organized a public health dispensary in Haiti. He had completed a Ministry of Health television series.

He was 26 years old. He felt like a failure because he couldn’t sit through a professor reading from his own textbook.

Most of us carry some version of this. The record of experience we discount because it doesn’t match the credential we expected to hold by now. The life that happened while we were making other plans, and that we’re not sure counts.

The Orange Man years are the chapter where David stopped auditing his own life against someone else’s rubric and started doing the next thing in front of him. The flea market. The garage. The open stage. Tahiti. The office buildings. A coffee shop and a man who listened.

All of it led somewhere. None of it looked, in the moment, like it was supposed to.

Where we go next

Two stories are still waiting.

The first: what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants — and how he ended up with a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.

The second is older and quieter. It goes back to Tanzania, to a woman David met there — a nurse who had studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent. He has been circling that story for weeks.

We’re going in.

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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, run a restaurant, crossed the county selling fruit, studied instruments on four continents, and spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. He is, by his own account, an improviser.

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

“I think I might be overqualified.”

She didn’t say it with confidence. She said it almost apologetically, as if naming it might somehow make things worse.

We were talking about a role she had just been passed over for. On paper, she was more than capable — years of leadership, proven results, the kind of experience most organizations say they want. And yet, she didn’t get the call.

Not because she lacked something, but because, somehow, what she brought didn’t seem to land.

At one point, she paused and said, “I know I have something to offer … so why does it feel like it doesn’t count?”

It’s a question I hear more often than people realize.

When experience stops translating

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that can happen at this stage of a career.

You’ve spent decades building something — skills, judgment, resilience, perspective. You know how to navigate complexity. You’ve led, solved, adapted, delivered. And yet, in certain rooms or conversations, it can feel like none of that is fully seen.

Sometimes it shows up in subtle ways. An interview that ends more quickly than expected. A polite but distant response. A comment about being “overqualified” that doesn’t quite make sense, and hits home hard.

Other times, it’s quieter than that. You start to question how to talk about what you’ve done. You wonder if your experience translates anymore. You catch yourself editing your story, trying to make it sound more current, more relevant … more acceptable.

Underneath all of it is a deeper tension: if everything you’ve built still matters, why doesn’t it feel that way right now?

What’s really happening

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my clients and my own life:

Your experience isn’t the problem. But it may not yet be positioned so it can be fully seen.

Much of what you’ve built wasn’t designed for this moment — not because it’s outdated, but because you developed it in environments where its value was already understood.

Inside an organization. Within a role. Under a title that helped others translate it.

When that structure changes, whether by choice or circumstance, you’re often left holding something incredibly valuable, but without the same context that once made it obvious.

That’s where the disconnect begins.

The shift most people miss

It’s easy, in those moments, to assume something has been lost. That you need to update, repackage, or even downplay parts of your experience just to stay in the conversation.

But what if that’s not the real work?

What if the real work is learning how to see your experience differently — so you can express it differently?

Because experience, at its core, isn’t just a list of roles or accomplishments. It’s pattern recognition, judgment shaped over time, knowing what matters, and what doesn’t, without needing to prove it every time. It’s the ability to walk into complexity and find your footing.

That doesn’t disappear. But it does require a new way of communicating it.

Sometimes the environments you’re pursuing aren’t designed to recognize the depth you bring. Sometimes the language you’re using doesn’t fully capture it. And sometimes — and this is the harder truth — the next chapter you’re meant to step into doesn’t look like the one you’ve been trying to return to.

A better question

That realization doesn’t always come with clarity right away. It can feel like standing in between, no longer wanting to go backward, and not yet seeing exactly what’s ahead.

But this is where something important begins to shift.

Instead of asking, “How do I fit into what already exists?” a different question starts to emerge:

Where does what I bring actually belong now?

That question opens up entirely new possibilities. Not because you’re starting over, but because you’re starting from experience, just in a new direction.

What’s still true

If you’ve been feeling this tension lately — the sense that you have more to offer, but aren’t sure how it’s being seen — you’re not alone.

It’s a real part of transition. And it’s not a sign that your value has diminished.

It may be a sign that it’s ready to be expressed differently.

Because your experience hasn’t lost its value, it may simply be waiting for the right context and the right conversation to come fully into view.

If this resonates, you’re not the only one navigating this question.

These are the kinds of conversations we have inside Betweenward — conversations about what still matters, what’s changing, and what might be possible from here.

So, I’m curious…

Where has your experience felt most valuable, and where has it felt hardest to translate right now?

If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear what this moment is looking like for you.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us in the Betweenward™ community.

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There is a dream David Thiermann has been carrying around since a couple of weeks ago, and he wants to tell you about it.

He was on a white horse, riding bareback up a steep sand dune with his father and his father’s girlfriend. The horse was powerful enough to carry all three of them, and it would lunge forward three or four steps and then slide back two or three in the loose sand, but it kept going, and eventually they made it to the top.

At the summit, an old man — David puts him at 93 — was waiting with a jar of honey. But the honey was black. When David asked about it, the man said: “I figured out how to teach flies to make honey.”

Then David was somehow in New York City, standing next to a parking meter on a busy street. He started playing it with his hands — percussion, like any instrument — and the sound was beautiful enough that all the cars stopped, all the people on the sidewalk stopped, and stood there listening. A police officer finally came over and told him he needed to stop because he was creating too much attention.

David pulled out his attorney’s business card and handed it to the officer.

That was the end of the dream.

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I tell you this not as a detour but because it tells you something essential about the man.

David Thiermann has spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. Over 5,000 clients, by his count — enough files to fill a rented storage container in Santa Cruz, each banker box holding a whole human story: grandparents, early memories, the years that shaped them, and then, at the end of the intake process, a single game he played with every single one of them.

But the dream tells you what the career counseling never quite says out loud: that this man has always believed a parking meter can be an instrument if you’re paying attention. That an obstacle can be a sound. That when someone in authority tells you to stop making beautiful things, the correct response is to produce your attorney’s business card.

He does not give this advice. He lives it.

“I’m an improviser. End of story. That’s it. That’s who I am. Everything I do is improv.”

That’s David this week, arriving at something he says he’s been trying to find the words for. When people ask who he is and what he does, he’s always reached for something clever or descriptive — career counselor, consultant, musician, connector. But the word he’s landing on now is simpler than all of them.

Improviser.

It means, he says, that he can’t memorize a script. He tells this with real glee: a client once asked him to play the dysfunctional alcoholic father in his feature film — a small role, just two lines. David practiced those two lines with his partner Marilyn hundreds of times. When the director and the camera arrived, he forgot both of them entirely and had to read off the page.

He has enormous respect for anyone who can do it differently. He can only work in the present tense, with what the room gives him.

This, it turns out, is not a limitation. It is his entire methodology.

The business license says 1987. Santa Cruz. General consultant.

But that’s not actually when it started.

It started in 1965, when David was 19 years old, newly arrived at a leprosarium in Tanzania with no Swahili, no plan, and roughly a thousand patients who needed something to do. He was, by his own description, a naive idealistic kid trying to figure out how to help. What he noticed was that the patients needed employment — something to make, something to sell, something that returned them their dignity.

He saw a man playing an African thumb piano. He bought it. He asked the man to make another one. Then another. Then twenty different kinds of musical instruments.

He called the operation Ufundi Makete — Swahili for “skills near the leprosarium.” He was 19 years old and he had just started his first career counseling practice, though he wouldn’t have called it that for another 22 years.

When he did take out the business license in 1987, his strategy was pure improvisation.

He got out the AT&T Yellow Pages and went through the index, A through Z, putting a small check mark next to every category that sounded like it might be fun. He ended up listed under 37 different categories. When a client called, he’d ask: “How were you referred to me?” And when they said the Yellow Pages, he’d ask which section. He tracked the responses, year after year, until he’d narrowed 37 categories down to about 10 that were worth keeping.

Career planning and development turned out to be the one that fit best. Not because he planned it that way. Because the room kept giving it to him.

(He also, at some point, listed himself under Spiritual Consultants. What happened when he did this is a story for next time. He promises it will blow your mind.

Here is what David did with every one of those 5,000 clients.

First, he wrote down their entire life story. Not a summary — the whole thing, starting with their grandparents. What the family was like. What the neighborhood was like. Which years shaped them and how. He went forward through every year of their life up to the present.

Then he played a game.

He asked them to pretend they were already dead — looking back over their lives from some point in the future. And from that vantage point, he asked them to tell him, year by year, how they would ideally like their lives to have turned out. If they could have had it exactly their way. If they could have had it all.

“It’s amazing,” he says, “what people come up with when you allow them to visualize, ideally, how year-by-year they would like the rest of their life to turn out.”

He is not describing a therapy exercise or a journaling prompt. He is describing what happens when you remove the pressure of the present tense — all the practical objections, the fears, the voices that say be realistic — and let someone speak from the future they actually want.

That future is usually much bigger than the one they came in with.

You want to know what that game produces?

Meet Dr. Paul Gahlinger.

When Gahlinger first sat across from David in Santa Cruz, he had already been a bush pilot as a teenager in Canada. He’d spent years traveling the world. He’d earned a PhD in medical anthropology and a master’s in public health and epidemiology from UC Berkeley. He was, at the time, a professor of biostatistics at San Jose State.

He was bored.

David ran the surveys and biographical inventories. The results came back pointing toward one category: poultry veterinarian.

“I don’t want to work with chickens,” Gahlinger said.

There was another category in the same column. David looked at it.

Surgeon.

He persuaded Gahlinger to go to medical school at UC Davis. During his third year, Gahlinger was still flying — a Cessna 172 with an extra fuel tank strapped into the backseat. He flew it from UC Davis up to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic. He landed in Ireland with ice on the wings and roughly a gallon of fuel left.

He flew around the pyramids in Cairo during a sandstorm. He sold the plane to someone in Cairo and kept moving.

His first job after medical school was medical director of Johnston Atoll — a remote Pacific outpost where the United States government sends its chemical weapons to be diffused. Gahlinger walked the grounds with four hypodermic needles on his belt, in case something went wrong and he needed to inject himself.

Then he decided to fly his own plane to Peru to study shamanism. On the way back, air traffic control told him he was a thousand feet higher than he actually was. He flew into a mountain in Guatemala. Having been a bush pilot since his teens, he knew what to do: he ran the plane through a line of trees to slow the fuselage, knocked the wings off, and walked away. His girlfriend was with him.

She was, David reports, quite impressed.

Gahlinger eventually wrote the definitive American textbook on illegal drugs — 172 substances, requiring research trips to Africa and around the world. He is currently an occupational medicine physician at a hospital in Fresno, married to a woman from the Philippines whom he is putting through nursing school. David sees their photographs on Facebook.

“Every time I see those photographs,” he says, “of people who are just so happy together, it gives me hope for the human race.”

This is what career counseling looks like when the counselor is an improviser. You don’t plan the destination. You look at what the person can do, where their energy actually lives, and you name the door. Whether they fly through it in a Cessna 172 with a gas tank in the backseat is up to them.

Somewhere in Santa Cruz, in a rented storage container, there are over 5,000 client files in banker boxes.

In each file is a life: grandparents, childhood, every year up to the moment someone sat down across from David Thiermann and played the game. The one where you pretend you’re already dead, and tell the truth about how you wanted it all to go.

David didn’t set out to become a career counselor. He set out to help a thousand leprosy patients in Tanzania have something to do with their hands. He set out to check 37 boxes in the Yellow Pages and see which ones rang. He set out to improvise.

At 80, he would tell you that’s still the method. That every next chapter starts the same way: not with a plan, but with a question.

What would you say, if you were looking back from the end?

What would you want to have done?

Where we go next

Next week: the story of what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants. Maybe?

David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, been an administrator, restaurateur, percussionist, career counselor, and now, reluctantly, a subject.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

We had been promising to hear the thumb piano. Three chapters in. Several conversations deep. An instrument that has opened doors across four continents, charmed Jane Goodall, and won first place on Brazilian television.

And when David finally held it up to his iPhone and played—nothing came through.

The microphone couldn’t pick it up. The frequency was too quiet, or the angle was wrong, or the technology that lets two men talk across 300 miles of California coastline simply wasn’t built for a 60-year-old instrument made by a patient in a Tanzanian hospital.

David tried repositioning the phone. He tried again. Still nothing. Finally he laughed and said he’d make a recording and send it later.

I sat there thinking: this is the most technologically honest thing that’s happened in the series so far. An instrument that has carried one man’s life across decades, and the screen couldn’t hold its sound.

Some things still require presence.

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Where the thumb piano came from—really

In Chapters 1 and 2, the thumb piano appeared as a kind of magic key: the thing David carried into rooms to signal trust. But I hadn’t yet asked the harder question—not what it does, but why it stuck.

This time, David answered plainly.

He arrived in Tanzania in 1965. He was 19 years old. He had taken Swahili courses at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and at a teachers’ training college in Dar es Salaam, but he wasn’t fluent. He certainly didn’t know the local Kinyakyusa language.

And he was alone.

No other Americans nearby. No other “white people” around. He was cooking his own food on a one-burner kerosene stove on the floor. He was carrying water from the river and boiling it to avoid amoebic dysentery. He was washing his clothes by hand on a rack.

“I was feeling pretty insecure,” he said. “So I was looking for a way to create some more security for me, and music was the way to do that.”

He had brought a Gibson guitar from the States. He played an autoharp with a harmonica strapped to a holder so he could play both at once. But the instrument that changed everything was the one he didn’t bring, rather, it was the one he found.

He saw a man at the leprosarium playing an African thumb piano. David asked if he could buy it, and whether the man would be willing to make another. That transaction became the seed of a workshop that eventually produced over twenty different kinds of instruments, run by the patients themselves.

The thumb piano was less a souvenir, than it was a survival strategy born from loneliness and turned into connection. David learned to play it so the people he lived with could hear him trying. And it worked because the effort was legible.

They called him Bwana Marimba—the marimba man. The instrument itself, in the local language, was called the tongo mali. And when David walked through the area playing it, keeping his thumbs in rhythm with his feet, people followed. He compared himself, grinning, to the Pied Piper of Hamelin—”not that I’m trying to get rid of rats or children, but it feels good if somebody’s willing to follow me around while I’m playing it because they like the music.”

The tradition behind the thumb piano carried its own logic: if you can keep a rhythm going with your thumbs and your thumbs don’t get tired, neither will your legs. You can walk long distances as long as you can keep your thumbs moving. Music as engine. Music as endurance.

The night in Dar es Salaam

Not every story about the thumb piano ends with applause.

David was 19, still new to Tanzania, still learning the rhythms of the place. One evening he went out to hear Congolese jazz in Dar es Salaam. He made friends with a bouncer named Simba—lion, in Swahili—and met a Tanzanian woman who asked him to walk her home after the show.

David agreed. He had no intention beyond courtesy. He was playing his thumb piano as they walked through the dark streets.

Then a taxi began circling the block. It circled again. Then it stopped in front of them, and four or five men got out.

They grabbed the woman. They ripped her clothes. They tore the jewelry from her neck. And they took David’s thumb piano—one of his first—and threw it on the ground, where it shattered.

David’s reaction surprised even him. He grabbed one of the men, lifted him into the air, and threw him into the street. He still doesn’t know how he did it. The men jumped back into the taxi and disappeared.

The story could end there—young man, dangerous city, adrenaline—but what David remembered most vividly, decades later, was the rage he felt when they destroyed his instrument. Not the fear for his own body. Not the shock of the confrontation. The instrument.

“Sometimes in your life you’re so emotionally connected to something,” he said, “that if you lose it, you have super strength in terms of how you react.”

I told him I understood. When I was young, my father had lupus and was having a serious reaction. The ambulance was on the way, but our car was blocking the driveway and we couldn’t find the keys. It was one of those old 4x4 wagons with the wood panel siding—heavy as a promise. I pushed it out of the way by myself. I still don’t know how I did it either.

Some emergencies bypass the body’s normal rules. The question is what triggers that bypass: fear, love, or the feeling that something irreplaceable is about to be gone.

The names on the wall

David has a habit of dropping famous names the way other people mention neighbors—casually, mid-sentence, as if proximity to greatness were just geography.

This chapter gave us three.

Bonnie Raitt. David grew up going to the same camps she did. They knew each other as kids. Now, when she comes to Santa Cruz for a concert, David goes to the afterparty and hugs her like a cousin. He says everyone stares: How do you know her? He shrugs.

Ry Cooder. David’s first guitar teacher. They went to the same high school in Santa Monica. Cooder went on to become a legendary musician and filmmaker—his documentary work with Cuban musicians became one of the most celebrated music films of its era. David talks about him the way you’d talk about a lab partner who turned out to be a genius: with warmth, no envy, and a little wonder.

Bob Dylan. This one deserves its own frame.

The cyclist and the rock wall

It was 1972. David had just left a master’s program in public health at UC Berkeley—because he couldn’t handle the boredom.

He told me a story about that departure that says everything about his temperament. A professor named Jim Cunningham was teaching a communications course by reading aloud from his own textbook. David looked around and saw every student in the room falling asleep. So he interrupted: “Hey Jim, I understand you’re an expert on communications theory, but if you just look around the room, you can see everybody’s fallen asleep.”

The professor turned red and left the room. The students woke up and told David to keep his mouth shut—they were just trying to get their credentials. David followed Cunningham to his office and apologized. Cunningham told him he was right, that he should have left the university twenty years ago. He took David to dinner and tried to convince him to stay.

David took a leave of absence and never went back.

He moved in with his mother in Santa Monica and picked up his old exercise habit: racing a Masi Italian bicycle from Santa Monica to Malibu and back, about 35 miles round trip. Crash helmet, special shoes, jersey, pumping hard along the coast.

One day, pedaling through Malibu, he passed a man sitting on a rock wall near a flower shop. Hunched over. Alone.

David rode past. Then he thought: That looked like Bob Dylan.

He kept going. He told himself not to bother the man, it was probably the first five minutes of peace he’d had in years. Then he turned around.

He got off the bike. You could hear the cleats clicking across Highway One. He walked right up and did what David always does: pretended they’d known each other forever.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?”

Dylan didn’t look up.

David kept talking. He told Dylan he appreciated his music. He mentioned his instrument collection. He said he was staying at a mansion in Beverly Hills—his brother was caretaking the place, next door to Dean Martin’s house—and invited Dylan to come see his instruments.

Finally, Dylan looked up. David knew then it was really him.

Dylan said four words: “But why me?”

David told him he seemed like a cool guy. He talked about his African thumb piano. Dylan said he knew some guys in Chicago who played thumb pianos. Then he asked: “Have you got a business card?”

David was in a cycling outfit. He did not have a business card.

They parted. David got back on his bike. That was the whole interaction.

He told me he felt sorry for Dylan at the time—his hands were swollen, his health looked rough, he seemed worn down. David thinks it was shortly after Dylan’s motorcycle accident.

When I asked if Dylan might have taken him up on the offer, David said what he always says when a door doesn’t open: “You never know. You never know, right?”

Smoke, feelings, and the trick that worked

Between the big stories, David and I wandered into a conversation about nicotine—how addictive it is, how it hooks you through secondary smoke, how David got hooked as a child because his stepmother smoked a pack a day inside the house.

He smoked unfiltered Camels. He wanted to quit. He went to a psychologist, and she gave him advice that changed the pattern.

She told him: before you light up, notice that you’re probably feeling something—anger, hurt, sadness, fear, love. The nicotine will temporarily numb those feelings. You’ll still have to deal with them later. But if you sit quietly for ten minutes and let yourself feel what you’re feeling, see if you still want to light up after that.

It worked.

That’s a story about the distance between a feeling and a habit—and the ten-minute gap where a different choice lives.

I shared my own version: Marlboro Reds under a Marine cover, not a cowboy hat. Smoking and chewing tobacco on deployments, then stopping cold when I came home to family. David laughed when he asked if I was wearing a cowboy hat. I told him it was a Marine hat. We moved on the way men do when they’ve traded enough vulnerability for one afternoon.

Why this matters

This chapter is about origins—the real ones, not the polished ones.

David didn’t fall in love with the thumb piano because it was exotic or beautiful. He fell in love with it because he was 19, alone, scared, and unable to speak the language of the people around him. The instrument was a bridge he built out of necessity, and he’s been walking across it for sixty years.

That’s the part of reinvention nobody puts on the brochure. Before the confidence comes the insecurity. Before the connection comes the loneliness. Before the story you tell at parties comes the night in Dar es Salaam when someone broke the thing you loved and you found out what you were made of.

If you’re 50 or 60 or 70 and standing at the edge of something unfamiliar—a new city, a new identity, a new room full of strangers—David’s life suggests that the way in is not through credentials or confidence. It’s through something small you can carry, something you’re willing to offer before anyone asks, and the nerve to keep showing up even when the technology can’t capture your sound.

Chapter objects

If Chapter 1 gave us the stage and Chapter 2 gave us the game, Chapter 3 gives us the source:

A one-burner kerosene stove on a floor in Tanzania—the loneliness that made the music necessary.

A shattered thumb piano in Dar es Salaam—the night David learned what he’d fight for.

Cleats clicking across Highway One—the sound of a man deciding to turn around and say hello to Bob Dylan.

A Tupperware container—where David keeps his most valuable instrument, sealed against moisture, stored like something sacred inside something ordinary.

A recording that arrived days later—proof that some sounds don’t travel well through screens, and that the best things in life still ask you to come closer.

And then the sound arrived

A few days after our call, my phone buzzed. David had sent the recording.

I pressed play and heard something I wasn’t prepared for: quiet. The thumb piano doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t fill a room the way a guitar or a horn does. The notes are soft and metallic, almost liquid—like someone tapping out a message on tiny bells submerged just below the surface of water. Each pluck hangs in the air for a half-second longer than you expect, and the spaces between the notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves.

It’s the kind of sound you lean into. You have to come closer to hear it. And maybe that’s the whole point—maybe that’s why it works as a trust-building instrument. It doesn’t overpower a room. It invites the room to come to it.

I played the recording three times. The third time, I stopped thinking about the series and just listened. The sound is gentle, almost private, and completely at odds with the enormous life it has helped build. Fifteen thousand people at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Brazilian television. Jane Goodall’s smile. Bob Dylan’s “But why me?” All of it started with a sound this soft.

Where we go next

Next week, I want to go deeper into Tanzania. Three years is a long time to live inside someone else’s world. I want to know what David carried home that he couldn’t put in a suitcase—and what he left behind that he still reaches for.

Because now I’ve heard the instrument. And the longer we talk, the more I realize this series is about one man’s extraordinary life and about the ordinary materials extraordinary lives are made from: loneliness, nerve, a broken instrument, a psychologist’s advice about sitting with your feelings, the willingness to pedal past Bob Dylan and then turn around—and a sound so soft you have to come closer to hear it.

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About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

There comes a moment after discernment when something else must happen.

You begin to see what drains you and recognize what you’ve been tolerating. You feel the bend in your own life — the subtle curve of strain that has gone unnoticed for too long.

And then you’re faced with a quieter question: If this no longer fits, what will you protect instead?

For many of us, the first shift is awareness. The second is restraint. But the third is more difficult. It requires a decision. It asks us to act on what we now know.

Not dramatically or impulsively. But deliberately.

The Myth of Infinite Capacity

For much of our lives, capacity has been a point of pride. We were praised for our endurance, admired for our availability, and trusted because we could handle what others could not.

Being capable became part of our identity. Being dependable felt virtuous. Being responsive signaled value.

Over time, this subtle equation forms: the more we can carry, the more we matter.

Emotional labor slips easily into this identity. We become the steady one, the listener, the one who absorbs tension so others don’t have to. We say yes because we can, stay available because we’re able, and step in because it feels generous.

But generosity without discernment eventually becomes diluted. Our energy spreads thin as our time fragments. And the very qualities that once felt like strength begin to feel costly.

As we move further into this chapter of life, our relationship with time shifts. We begin to feel more clearly that it is finite, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, undeniable one. Research on adult development suggests that when time feels more bounded, we naturally become more selective. Meaning rises above maintenance, and depth begins to matter more than momentum.

This isn’t urgency. It’s clarity. And clarity, if honored, becomes stewardship.

When Protection Feels Selfish

Stewardship sounds noble in theory. But in practice, it often feels uncomfortable.

When I began limiting the open times on my calendar for client sessions, I felt hesitation. When I guarded my weekends more carefully, I worried about disappointing people. And when I made space for my husband and the small, unremarkable moments we share, guilt surfaced more than once.

I have spent decades being available. Shifting that pattern felt, at first, like withdrawing something valuable.

But underneath the guilt was something stronger. I knew that if I didn’t begin protecting my time sooner rather than later, the cost of waiting could be emotionally catastrophic.

Not because something dramatic would happen overnight. But because regret accumulates quietly. It forms in the spaces we didn’t claim, in the evenings we surrendered too easily, and in the conversations we postponed. It gathers in the ordinary moments we assumed would always be there.

What I feared most was the possibility of losing something I could never reclaim.

That realization changed the equation.

Stewardship Is Not Withdrawal

Stewardship is the careful tending of what is finite.

It’s the recognition that energy, attention, and presence are not infinite resources. And it’s the understanding that what we protect shapes what we experience.

To steward something is not to hoard it, but to honor it.

When I make room on my calendar now, I’m not stepping away from contribution. I’m choosing where my contribution is most wholehearted. When I limit availability, I’m not becoming less generous, but more intentional about where my generosity flows.

There’s relief in that. Peace. Gratitude.

Relief because I’m no longer overextending by default.
Peace because my choices reflect my priorities.
Gratitude because I can feel the difference when I’m fully present instead of partially available.

Those emotions aren’t indulgent. They’re instructive. And they signal alignment.

Choosing Without Regret

Discernment narrows what we’re willing to tolerate. Stewardship determines what we’re willing to protect.

You don’t have to overhaul your life to practice it. You may only need to protect one evening, one conversation, or one stretch of time that belongs fully to you and those you love.

For some, stewardship may look like fewer meetings. For others, it may mean declining roles that once felt obligatory. It might mean saying, “Let me think about that,” instead of an automatic yes.

The form will differ. The principle remains the same.

What you protect today shapes what you’ll remember tomorrow.

I don’t want to look back and realize I was present everywhere except where it mattered most. I don’t want the habit of availability to cost me irreplaceable time.

So, I’m learning to make room. Not out of fear, but out of devotion.

Stewardship, in this season of life, isn’t selfish. It’s wise.

And wisdom, when acted upon gently and consistently, leaves fewer regrets in its wake.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

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David opened our second conversation the same way he opens a lot of doors: with a compliment and a grin.

“That color looks pretty darn good on you,” he said, looking at my shirt on camera. Then he followed it with a jab that landed like a friendly elbow: “When you wear those kinds of shirts, people think you play golf, right?”

It was an ordinary start. Two men on a Monday afternoon. Santa Cruz on his side. Southern California on mine. Coffee in the background. Life rolling forward.

And then, as usual with David, a small moment turned into a lesson about how the world works.

Chapter 1 was about the stage—Pete Seeger, 15,000 people, and an African thumb piano. This chapter is about something quieter and more powerful: the rules of the game.

Because David has spent a lifetime switching between worlds (countries, professions, languages, social circles), he learned early that the difference between connection and conflict often comes down to one thing: whether people know what game you’re playing.

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The thumb piano as a key

When I asked David what drove him to help one of his career counseling clients meet Jane Goodall, he started with an honest motive: he wanted an excuse to go, and he wanted to give his client a moment she’d never forget.

Her name was Deborah. She had lived several lives herself, professional model, image consultant, jewelry business, and designer. In one session, David asked her a simple question: “Is there a woman on the planet whom you respect a lot and would love to meet someday?”

Deborah said quickly: Jane Goodall.

David checked the calendar and discovered Goodall was giving a lecture at the Flint Center at De Anza College the following week. “Would you like to go with me?” he asked.

Deborah’s body started shaking just imagining being in the same room with her. Mainly because some forms of public recognition turn human beings into untouchable objects in our minds.

They went. They sat in the balcony, far enough away that Goodall looked “about an inch high,” David said. When the lecture ended, David turned to Deborah and said, “We’re going to go meet her now.”

He hadn’t met Goodall before either, he told me. That detail didn’t slow him down.

They walked toward the stage. Security formed the usual perimeter. And somehow David and Deborah got through.

David had brought the same tool he carried into so many unfamiliar rooms: his African thumb piano.

He walked right up to Jane Goodall like they were old friends. “Hey Jane,” he said. “It’s really great to see you. I wanted to play you a little tune on my African thumb piano.”

Goodall knew the instrument. She had worked in Tanzania. David played. Introductions happened. Hugs happened. Deborah shook like a leaf while holding the kind of moment people think they’ll never be allowed to have.

Then David asked for a photograph. Goodall said yes. They took the picture.

To David, the whole scene made perfect sense: “She’s just another human being.”

And then he said the line that should be printed on the back of every glossy magazine cover: publicity can make someone feel untouchable, even when they never chased that status in the first place. I thought to myself, indeed.

Gravity doesn’t care who you are

David has a way of pulling the conversation back to the body. In the middle of our talk about fame and access, he shrugged and reminded me, “Regardless of our notoriety, we’re all dealing with gravity—and it never gives up.”

I told him about my own small encounter with gravity that week: a breakfast burrito, a cup of water, too much in my hands, and an unthinking moment where I dropped the cup and spilled water everywhere in a coffee shop. The kind of mess that makes you blush for a second, until you remember everyone has been there.

David riffed immediately: “They say don’t cry over spilled milk. What do you say when you spill water?”

I told him, “Let it evaporate.”

This is part of the point. Humor is a social technology. It lowers threat. It reopens attention. It gives people room to breathe together.

The pollinator of Santa Cruz

David called himself, through a friend’s nickname, “the pollinator of Santa Cruz.” He connects people the way bees connect fields: not because he needs the credit, but because he can’t help noticing what might happen if two lives touched.

He told me why he does it. If he introduces two people he respects, he gets to sit back and listen to how they draw each other out. He learns things he would never learn in a one-on-one conversation, because people reveal different parts of themselves when a third mind enters the room.

He gave me an example from his life right now: a monthly coffee conversation with a friend named Bruce, someone who once helped start the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, later became a marriage and family therapist, and now travels the world sourcing specialty acoustic wood for major guitar makers. David recently met another man, a psychiatrist with more than five decades of practice. He invited both of them to coffee—not to perform, but to listen.

That’s what a connector does. He shares stories, and he creates conditions for more stories to happen.

Back to Tanzania: the two words that changed everything

At a certain point, I asked David the question that matters for this whole project: where did you pick that up? Where did this instinct to connect, to improvise, to read a room come from?

He answered in plain language.

David spent three years in Tanzania (1965–1968). When he arrived, he had to learn Swahili. Then he learned greetings in the local language of the people he lived with, the Nyakyusa.

In that culture, he said, storytelling was entertainment and a social skill. It was a way to earn respect, make friends, and prove you could move with the group instead of against it.

David told me he realized he needed to become an “mjanja” rather than an “mjinga.”

He spelled them out:

Mjanja (M-J-A-N-J-A): the clever one, the improviser, the storyteller who can make something up on the spot and pull a crowd into it.

Mjinga (M-J-I-N-G-A): the fool—the person who can’t read the fiction, can’t play along, can’t create the story.

David wanted to be the insider who could participate. He wanted to be respected. So he practiced. He learned how to make up stories. He learned how to invite people into play.

And it worked. He made friends quickly. He got embedded. He became fluent in the social rhythm of the place.

But then he came home.

The LA Times walkout

Here’s the problem with learning a powerful cultural skill: you can forget it has context.

David told me that when he returned to the United States, he was still in “mjanja mode.” He was still making up stories—sometimes for fun, sometimes because improvisation had become natural.

His father was proud of him for doing meaningful work in a hospital for three years. He invited groups of people to dinner. David showed slides from Africa and told stories.

Then his father invited another group the next week, and David told a completely different set of stories.

His father misinterpreted it as lying. He got worried. He thought something might be wrong with his son.

Then the organization that had sent David to Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, asked him to sit down for an interview with two Los Angeles Times reporters in Pasadena.

David walked into that office and made a mistake that still feels vivid decades later: he didn’t explain the game.

He didn’t tell them, “I’m about to show you how storytelling works in the culture I lived in.” He didn’t say, “For the next few minutes, we’re going to talk in fiction.”

He just started making things up on the spot.

The reporters were disturbed. They walked out.

It’s one of those moments you can feel in your gut even through someone else’s memory: a door that was open, closing mid-step.

David’s takeaway became clarity.

If you’re talking in nonfiction, and you want to shift into fiction, you have to name it. You have to tell the other person what rules you’re using. Otherwise, they will experience you as dishonest—even if you’re trying to invite them into something deeper.

“If I can get you to agree,” David said, “for the next five minutes to talk in fiction where we just make stuff up as we go along, we can have a lot of fun… and sometimes we’ll say things that are even more truthful than if we were talking in nonfiction.”

This is the heart of the chapter. The lesson is “improvise.” And the lesson is “set the context.”

Comedy, improv, and the truth hiding in embarrassment

David connected this idea to something he learned over decades of career counseling, including work with professional comedians.

Comedians, he told me, all said some version of the same thing: when you get on stage, announce who you are. Tell the audience you’re a comedian. If you don’t, they’ll feel insulted by what you say.

Then you do the second move: you tell the truth about embarrassing subject matter. People laugh because they recognize themselves in it. The body reacts before the mind can defend itself.

I told David my spilled-water story again and admitted the truth: yes, most of the time when I make people laugh, I’m laughing at myself first.

David’s point landed clean: humor is often truth wearing a safer shirt.

Why this matters

This is where David’s story stops being a fascinating personal history and turns into a field manual for the rest of us.

If you’re building a new chapter of life after 50, you’re going to step into rooms where you don’t know the rules: new industries, new communities, new identities, new rhythms. You’ll be tempted to perform. You’ll be tempted to hide. You’ll be tempted to apologize for being new.

David shows a different path: declare the game you’re playing and invite people into it.

That’s what the thumb piano has been for him. It’s an instrument, yes. It’s also a signal. A way to say, “I’m safe. I’m curious. I’m here to connect,” before the words arrive.

It’s also what I try to do in my work on “What Time Binds”: help people rebuild shared meaning when our tools and our emotions push us into misreadings. We get into trouble when we assume the other person is playing the same game we are. We get out of trouble when we clarify the rules together.

David’s LA Times walkout is a small story with a big warning label: don’t make people guess your intent.

Chapter objects

If Chapter 1 gave us the stage and the crowd, Chapter 2 gives us a new set of “chapter objects”—anchors that can hold the memory in place:

• Two Swahili words: “mjanja” and “mjinga.”

• An office in Pasadena where an interview ended early.

• A simple rule: name the game before you play it.

• A thumb piano that keeps opening doors.

Where we go next

Next week, I’m going to ask David to bring the thumb piano and play it on camera. I want to hear it—not as a symbol, but as sound. Then I’m going to do what I do: describe what I heard, and ask what that sound has carried for him across decades.

Because the longer we talk, the clearer the pattern gets: David doesn’t use music to escape life. He uses music to enter it—one room, one handshake, one story at a time.

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About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

He drove up in a ’63 Bug with a small instrument in his hands and a slightly reckless idea in his head: “Let me on the stage.”

The producer brushed him off. So, David scanned the crowd, spotted Pete Seeger talking with friends, and walked right up as if they’d shared coffee a hundred times. He leaned in, introduced himself using the name he carried in Africa—“ Daudi Mohammed”—and played a short tune into Seeger’s ear on an African thumb piano.

Later, Seeger called him up. David remembers sitting there, smoking a whole pack, convinced he’d been forgotten—until the signal came and the crowd did what crowds do when something new hits their ears at once: it leaned forward and clapped like it meant it.

“I was so scared… I had never played in front of 15,000 people before.”

That’s the kind of story that tells you what this series is going to be about.

A small instrument. A big life. The nerve to ask. The grace to listen. And the strange way one thread—music, in David’s case—can stitch together decades that might otherwise look like separate lives lived by different people.

The “African thumb piano” David talks about is commonly known as the mbira or kalimba—a lamellophone with metal tines you pluck with your thumbs, rooted in Southern African traditions and heard across the diaspora.

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Who is David Thiermann?

David is 80 years old, and in our first conversation, he moved from origin story to world story without ever losing the human scale.

He says he was conceived in New Jersey, born in Philadelphia, and raised in Santa Monica—ocean nearby, salt air baked into the memory. He left at 17 for University of California, Berkeley in 1963, transferred to University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965, then took a turn that feels almost impossible in today’s credential-obsessed culture: he went to Tanzania and worked in a leprosarium for three years.

There, he says, he was responsible for helping provide work and occupational therapy for about a thousand patients, and he did it by starting a business that made traditional African musical instruments, learning directly from the people around him, including members of the Nyakyusa tribe.

When he came back, University of California, Santa Cruz gave him retroactive academic credit for that fieldwork—an institutional nod to something older and wiser: lived experience counts when you can show the work.

He also describes studying musical instruments connected to Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, organizing a public health dispensary project there, and later organizing a TV series in Brazil for that country’s Ministry of Health in 1971.

And if you’re thinking, That sounds like three separate lifetimes, good. That’s exactly why it’s worth recording.

The series premise: the instrument is the through-line

Early in our talk, David said something that reads like a table of contents:

“I’m going to be telling you a lot of stories about serious trouble that I got into because of music and serious trouble that I got out of because of music.”

That’s the hook for this entire project: music as passport, music as risk, music as survival tool, music as joy.

David doesn’t describe himself as a traditional musician; he says he can “get noise out of anything,” and most of what he plays is improvisation, made on the spot.

He’s also been collecting instruments since childhood, and he traveled widely—he even says he visited every country in South America except Venezuela, chasing festivals, museums, and whatever sound might teach him something new.

When David landed somewhere and didn’t yet know the language, he carried instruments over his shoulder—thumb pianos, small flutes, harmonicas—because music could break the ice and build trust faster than vocabulary drills.

That detail matters for anyone 50+ standing at the edge of reinvention. We tend to treat “starting over” like a résumé problem. David treats it like a human-contact problem: How do you build trust in a new place? How do you show you’re safe to talk to?

Rio: when the story turns hard

Some lives have a single “big dramatic moment.” David’s life seems to have several, and one of the sharpest edges in our first conversation came from Rio de Janeiro.

He tells a story about opening his apartment door to a hallway of men with machine guns, being pushed to the floor, having his money and passport taken, and realizing—fast—that survival sometimes depends on how quickly you can read a room and keep your head from spiraling into panic.

Later, he learned the raid had connections to political turmoil and someone his roommate had sheltered. David was, in his words, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He thought about going home.

Then the thumb piano showed up again.

A person in Rio encouraged him to audition for a popular Brazilian TV program hosted by Flávio Cavalcanti.

David tried out, played the thumb piano, and says he won first place—becoming, overnight, recognizable as “the thumb piano guy,” and using the prize money to help complete his Ministry of Health TV work.

“It was quite a turnaround.”

That phrase—turnaround—is the heartbeat of Betweenward. Reinvention isn’t always a clean pivot with a neat LinkedIn headline. Sometimes it’s a crooked path where one skill becomes the rope you grab in a bad moment.

Santa Cruz: joy as a practice, not a mood

If you want to know what someone values at 80, watch what they do for people who can’t offer them status.

David told me about visiting a retirement community—Dominican Oaks—to entertain residents in their 80s.

A friend played mandolin. David decided to “play the fish”—a battery-powered singing fish he’d picked up at a flea market. He turned it on, let it flop and sing, and said some of the residents laughed so hard they nearly fell out of their chairs.

And then he said it plainly:

“I love entertaining people… it gives me a lot of joy if I can bring some joy to other people.”

That’s the line I want to carry into this series. Because the real question for encore years is less about “How do I stay busy?” than it is about “What do I do that reliably makes life better for someone else?”

A life you can map by objects

This first conversation gave us a handful of “chapter objects”—the kinds of things that can anchor memory and make a life readable:

1. The thumb piano that helped him build trust across languages and borders.

2. The guitar he bought as a teenager in Paracho, a place widely known for guitar-making and lutherie.
   He still plays that guitar today, improvising along with music through headphones as if he’s been invited into the band.

3. The hand-to-hand greeting he learned with the Nyakyusa —slow, connective, physical—touching person after person until you feel stitched back into the world by the end of the day.

I keep thinking about that greeting. It’s the opposite of how most of us move through life now: fast, untouching, half-listening. David’s stories have motion, but they also have contact.

Where this series goes next

This weekly series will work like an oral history with a beat.

Each week, I’ll ask David to pick one scene (one “frame” from his life), and we’ll build around it:

1. The moment (what happened, where, who was there).

2. The meaning (what he learned, what he believes now at 80 that he didn’t know at 20).

3. The takeaway (a practical reflection for Betweenward readers building their own “what’s next”).

Over time, the pieces will naturally organize into a book-shaped arc—childhood, leaving home, fieldwork and risk, work and identity, love and loss, humor as survival, aging and generosity. David and I aren’t shooting for a perfect legacy, rather, we are capturing a real one with the storyteller correcting us, challenge us, and laugh at our first drafts.

And if you want the honest “series thesis” in one sentence, it’s this:

A well-lived life stays playful, stays useful, and keeps one small instrument ready for the next door that might open.

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About the Author

Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring what I call the Ripple Journey — the natural movement that unfolds when something meaningful ends and something new begins to take shape.

We started with the Drop — that disorienting moment when the water is first disturbed, and nothing feels steady.

We moved through the Inner Wave, where small habits helped us regain our footing.

Then, we stepped into the Middle Wave, where connection reminded us we don’t walk alone.

And we reached the Outer Wave, where experience began to serve and make a difference.

Still Water is what comes after movement.
Not as an ending, but as integration.

It’s the place where what you’ve lived through settles.
Where insight becomes embodied.
Where urgency softens into trust.

What Still Water really is

Still Water is often misunderstood because things seem to calm a bit.

It isn’t stagnation, or withdrawal, and it certainly isn’t giving up.

Still Water is clarity without force.
It’s the nervous system at rest.
It’s knowing without needing to act on it immediately.

It’s the moment when you stop asking, “What should I do?” and begin noticing, “What feels true now?”

What has quietly shifted

If you pause long enough, you may notice that something in you has already changed.

Perhaps there’s less panic when things feel uncertain. You might feel less pressure to explain or justify yourself. Or less need to have answers before you’re ready.

In its place, there may be:

• A steadier breath.

• A deeper trust in your own timing.

• A growing sense that you’re not lost. You’re just between currents.

These are the quiet markers of integration.

Still Water doesn’t announce itself loudly. It reveals itself gently.

Recognizing the signal

What no longer feels urgent to me is the panic itself.

When I was younger, major changes in my life would trigger a familiar cycle. First, a rush of worry would hit before my calm essence had a chance to catch up. I didn’t trust the pause, and I wanted a resolution quickly.

Having lived through the Drop more than once, I now recognize the flow of the ripple. I know what it feels like when the water is first disturbed.

And I also know that it settles.

These days, I notice the signal sooner. It often begins as a burning sensation between my shoulder blades. It’s my body’s quiet way of asking me to step back. When that happens, I pause, breathe, and remind myself to trust that clarity comes in its own time.

I give myself grace sooner now.

And I surround myself with the people who help me return to center.

Still Water, for me, isn’t about avoiding disruption. It’s about trusting what I’ve learned and letting calm lead rather than urgency.

What doesn’t need to be rushed anymore

One of the gifts of Still Water is discernment.

You begin to sense what no longer needs your energy:

• the pressure to reinvent quickly

• the belief that clarity must be immediate

• the habit of pushing through uncertainty

Instead, you allow space.

You let insight ripen, listen more closely — to your body, your values, and your rhythms. And you trust that when action is required, it will feel clear and grounded, not frantic.

Reflection

Take a moment to sit with these questions:

• What feels more settled in me now than it did before?

• Where have I learned to trust myself more deeply?

• What no longer feels urgent, even if it once did?

• What feels quietly ready, without needing a name yet?

There’s no need to answer them all.
Notice which one lingers.

What’s next?

The ripple doesn’t end with Still Water.

It pauses here long enough for you to recognize who you’ve become through it.

Still Water doesn’t ask you to move. It asks you to notice.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community

Subscribe now

There’s a path near my home that I’ve walked for years.

It wasn’t designed or planned, and it didn’t appear overnight.

It formed because people kept choosing it — step by step, season after season. Over time, the grass gave way. The ground softened. And what began as a faint trace became a clear way forward.

That’s how we create meaningful impact.

Not through a bold declaration or a sudden reinvention, but through presence. Through repetition. Through choosing, again and again, to show up in small, human ways.

This is the Outer Wave — the stage where inner growth and connection begin to express themselves outwardly, shaping something that lasts.

When impact found me

I didn’t go looking for my Outer Wave.

It began with a simple LinkedIn message. I don’t remember the exact words that caught my attention — only that they sparked curiosity. At the time, it was still an emerging idea, and my initial response wasn’t certainty; it was intrigue.

As this person shared more about his vision for serving professionals in the encore stage, my readiness grew alongside the concept itself. What drew me in first was the mission — a genuine commitment to honoring people’s experience and helping them shape what comes next with dignity and intention.

What ultimately solidified my yes, though, was something more profound.

In my conversations with the co-founders, I saw integrity and servant leadership. I saw people building something to serve others.

When I decided to join in, they didn’t ask me to reinvent myself. They invited me to bring what I already carried — my years of coaching experience and my three decades of leadership in corporate marketing. That combination allowed me to contribute not only as a coach but as a thought partner in rebranding, marketing strategy, and coach engagement.

That’s how the Outer Wave often works.

Impact doesn’t always come from creating something new. Sometimes it comes from being recognized for who you already are, and choosing to offer that experience where it can do the most good.

A small act, a wider reach

One of my clients told me she felt pressure to “do something meaningful” after leaving her corporate role, as if purpose required a title or a significant initiative.

After exploring the idea further, she decided to start small.

She agreed to meet a former colleague for coffee, to just listen. She shared one story about a hard-earned lesson she’d learned years earlier.

Her colleague later revealed, “That conversation changed how I see my own situation.”

What surprised my client most wasn’t the impact on the other person; it was how the exchange reawakened something in her. She felt useful again. Relevant. Connected.

That’s the Outer Wave in motion.

Sharing experience vs. mentoring

This distinction matters.

Sharing experience sounds like:

• “Here’s what I learned.”

• “This is what surprised me.”

• “If it helps, this is how it unfolded for me.”

It invites reflection, not compliance.

Mentoring or advising, on the other hand, carries more responsibility:

• offering guidance

• suggesting direction

• helping someone navigate decisions

Both have a place in the Outer Wave, but they require different levels of energy, commitment, and consent.

I’ve learned that many people rediscover impact simply by sharing experience, without taking on the weight of being “the expert.”

That, too, makes a difference.

What the Outer Wave asks of you

The Outer Wave isn’t about doing more.
It’s about expressing what’s already been integrated.

Here are a few gentle ways to let your experience serve:

• Notice where people already come to you. That’s often a clue to your natural impact.
  

• Offer presence before advice. Listening is a form of contribution.
  

• Test contribution in low-stakes ways. A conversation. A story. A question.
  

• Choose resonance over obligation. Say yes where energy flows.
  

• Let impact be cumulative. Paths form through repetition, not urgency.

A quiet truth about making a difference

Impact doesn’t require a platform.
It requires presence.

It doesn’t demand certainty.
It grows through honesty.

And it rarely announces itself in the moment.
You often see it only when you look back and realize:
A path has formed here.

Reflection

1. Where am I already making a difference, even in small ways?

2. How might I share my experience without feeling responsible for outcomes?

3. What kind of contribution feels life-giving in this season?
   
   

The Outer Wave doesn’t ask you to do more or be louder. It simply invites you to walk the path already forming beneath your feet — offering your experience where it’s welcomed, and trusting that even the smallest acts of presence can shape something lasting.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community

Where stories, insights, and honest conversations ripple outward.

Subscribe now

There’s a moment just before dawn when the world is still dark, but the light is already beginning — quietly, invisibly, inside the flame of a single lantern.

One lantern by itself can’t brighten a whole path.
But when another lantern comes just close enough — the flame extends itself.
It lights the other without dimming.
It doubles the illumination.
It creates something that didn’t exist before: shared light.

This is how the Middle Wave begins.

Not as a forceful push outward, but as a soft ignition between people — a moment when your light connects with someone else’s, and suddenly the world feels a little less dark.

The Middle Wave is the movement that happens between us.
And it’s often the moment that brings the first real lift in your next chapter.

A moment that lit the way forward

Years ago, when I was unexpectedly laid off from IBM, the Drop hit me hard.
Sudden, disorienting, overwhelming.

Everything I had counted on — my role, my routine, my financial stability — vanished overnight. And layered on top of that, my life had shifted into full-time caregiving, leaving me exhausted, terrified, and unsure how to begin again.

I remember rattling off a litany of fears to a friend on the phone:

• Who would hire me at my age?

• How would I replace my income?

• What would happen to my healthcare?

• How could I possibly reinvent myself now?

I was spiraling down a rabbit hole — fast.

And then my friend interrupted me gently and said something I’ll never forget:

“Maria… what if this was your idea?
What would you do then?”

It was like someone lit a candle inside a very dark room.

Those words didn’t magically solve everything.
But they illuminated a possibility I couldn’t see before.
For a moment, I wasn’t alone with my fear.
I was connected to someone who believed something more was possible.

It reminded me of something a mentor once told me:

“Worrying is like praying for what you don’t want.”

That connection — that warm glow — helped me stop spiraling and start imagining.

It was the first lantern.
And from there, others appeared.

A lantern passed at the right moment

One of my clients described her transition as “a long hallway with too many doors.”

She spent months walking that hallway alone — trying to think her way into her next chapter. Her journals were full, her thoughts were loud, and her clarity was nonexistent.

Everything shifted when a colleague sent her a message:

“There’s someone I think you should meet.”

Just one name. One connection.

My client hesitated because she didn’t want to look needy, uncertain, or “behind.” But she reached out anyway.

The conversation that followed didn’t deliver a breakthrough strategy, a job offer, or a roadmap.

But it lit something in her — a sense of possibility, a reminder that she wasn’t alone, a spark of renewed energy. I resonated with her response.

That one conversation led to another, and then another.

It was her Middle Wave. Connection building momentum.

Where we are in the Ripple Journey

If you’ve been following our Ripple Series, you know we’re moving through a progression together:

The Drop

The sudden dissolving of what once defined you.

The Inner Wave

The small, steady micro-shifts that begin internal movement.

The Middle Wave (this piece)

Where illumination begins to spread outward and connection becomes the bridge between inner readiness and outer momentum.

The Middle Wave is where the self meets the world again … gently.

Why connection matters now: the biological truth

In a recent article, my colleague and co-founder, Dr. Jerry Washington, wrote about the sequence our nervous system follows during transition:

Regulation → Connection → Motivation → Action

This is not philosophy — it’s biology.

After the Drop, your nervous system is often still bracing for impact, even if you’re mentally ready for change. Before you can reconnect with purpose, you need connection with people.

Because:

• Connection signals safety.

• Safety creates Slack (mental bandwidth).

• Slack supports Context (belonging, possibility).

• Context restores Drive (autonomy, mastery, purpose).

Connection is not optional at this stage. It’s foundational. It’s the lantern that relights your internal flame.

Practical ways to begin the Middle Wave (connection in practice)

Here are gentle, doable ways to start rebuilding your relational ecosystem — without overwhelm, performance pressure, or awkwardness.

1. The “Warm Reach-Out” Message (Two Sentences Only)

Send a message to one person this week:

“You came to mind today, and I realized how much I appreciate your presence in my life. I’d love to reconnect when the time feels right.”

No agenda.
No pitch.
Just warmth.

This alone can begin the Middle Wave.

2. The Lantern List

Write a short list of three people who:

• help you feel more like yourself

• listen without trying to fix

• leave you lighter, not heavier

These are your lanterns.
Begin with them.

3. The Low-Stakes Conversation

Choose a chat that requires nothing from you except presence.

Not networking.
Not strategizing.
Not “selling yourself.”

Just talking with someone who feels safe.

This regulates the nervous system more than you might imagine.

4. The Level 2 Connection Question

In one conversation, ask:

“What’s something you’re exploring or learning right now?”

It opens doors.
It creates shared ground.
It shifts the conversation from roles to people.

5. Let someone else light your lantern

You don’t have to power your way through this stage.

Let someone else’s belief, presence, or insight illuminate something in you.

It’s allowed.
It’s necessary.
It’s human.

The Middle Wave is where light is shared

Ripples expand outward, not through force, but through connection.

Your next chapter does not begin in isolation.
It begins in illumination — shared, extended, multiplied.

You don’t need a master plan for the Middle Wave.
You just need one lantern in sight.
One voice of encouragement.
One moment of shared humanity that lights the next small part of your path.

Because sometimes, what’s next becomes visible only when someone else’s light meets your own.

A time for reflection

1. Who are the lanterns in my life — the people who help me feel more grounded, more capable, more seen?

2. What have I been trying to navigate alone that might be easier to carry if I share it?

3. What is one small relational action I can take this week to spark my Middle Wave?

The Middle Wave begins with one shared light — a reminder that you don’t have to walk alone. When you let even one connection brighten your path, the way forward becomes clearer than you imagined.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation.

Join the Betweenward™ Community on Substack

Where stories, insights, and honest conversations ripple outward.

Subscribe now

A wave doesn’t begin with force.
It begins with the slightest disturbance — a nudge, a breath, a shift in the unseen currents beneath the surface.

You rarely witness the beginning of a wave with your eyes.
You feel it.

Before motion, there is intention.
Before intention, there is awareness.
Before awareness, there is a quiet truth rising from deep within.

This is the Inner Wave.

It’s not the dramatic splash.
Or the outward ripple others can see.
It’s the first, almost invisible movement that tells you:

Something in me is ready to change.

The Drop and the silence that follows

Most transitions begin with what I call The Drop — that moment when your long-held identity shifts, the noise stops, and life suddenly becomes a space you don’t quite recognize.

In my earlier Insight, The Drop: When You Know Something Has to Change, I wrote about the internal awakening that begins this process. And in last week’s essay, The Silence No One Talks About, we explored the unexpected quiet that follows — the pause that feels both disorienting and revealing.

The Drop is the tremor.
The silence is the settling.
The Inner Wave is the movement that follows.

It begins quietly, not with reinvention …
but with readiness.

A personal experience of the first wave

There have been times in my life when that first movement caught me off guard.

As someone who spent decades in corporate environments, I was accustomed to moving fast, solving problems, and being needed. I didn’t always give myself space to notice when something inside me was shifting.

But looking back, I see the pattern: before every significant reinvention, there was always a small change I made before I even realized what I was preparing myself for.

A different question I asked myself.

A new habit that softened my approach.

A pause before saying yes.

These weren’t strategic.
They weren’t ambitious.
They were gentle — almost inconsequential.

Yet each one became the first ripple of a larger shift.

My Inner Wave always arrived quietly.

A tiny step toward a wider life

A woman I coached years ago described it this way:

“I didn’t start by changing my career,” she said.
“I started by changing my mornings.”

After leaving her executive role, she felt the familiar Drop — the jolt of going from constantly needed to suddenly quiet. Like many leaders, her instinct was to fill the space with plans and productivity.

But what she actually needed was a micro-shift.

So she began taking a ten-minute walk every morning.
Not to reach a step goal, or to design her future, or to accomplish anything.

Just to move.

That small habit did something important:
It regulated her nervous system, restored mental bandwidth, and created emotional safety.

It became her Inner Wave.

“Everything that came next,” she told me, “started with that one walk.”

The science behind why small shifts matter

My colleague, Dr. Jerry Washington, recently shared an excellent insight, Beyond the Drop: The Science of the Ripple, outlining the biological and sociological forces shaping this stage of life.

Three parts of his framework matter deeply here:

1. Safety

Before we can make meaningful change, our nervous system must feel regulated enough to stop scanning for threat.

Tiny habits restore safety.
Small steps quiet the alarm.

2. Slack

After years of high-demand roles, your mind is often overloaded. Micro-shifts create cognitive space — enough to think clearly again.

A simple walk.
A mindful pause.
A consistent morning ritual.

Each creates slack.

3. Context

Our behavior changes more easily when we surround ourselves with cues — and people — that reinforce what’s possible.

Small habits are context cues.
They signal to the brain:
“We are moving. We are ready.”

This is the Inner Wave taking shape — the combination of internal readiness and gentle external action.

The Inner Wave in practice: Micro-shifts that create real change

Here are a few small habits that help leaders move from Drop to momentum, from stillness to shaping what comes next.

1. The One-Line Journal

Write just one line each morning:

• What you’re noticing

• What you’re feeling

• What you’re curious about

• One small truth rising

It’s not about insight.
It’s about presence.

Why it works: It builds identity-awareness — the anchor for every ripple that follows.

2. The Ten-Minute Walk

Walk without a goal.
Let your body lead your mind, not the other way around.

Why it works: Movement regulates the nervous system and creates cognitive space (safety + slack).

3. The “One Small Reach-Out” Practice

Choose one person each week to send a two-sentence message:

“I’ve been thinking of you.”
“I’d love to reconnect when it feels right.”

No agenda.
Just connection.

Why it works: It begins building Level 2 relationships long before you need them.

4. The Permission Pause

Before saying yes, ask:

“Does this align with who I’m becoming?”

Just once a day.
One pause.

Why it works: It shifts decision-making from autopilot to intention — from past identity to emerging identity.

5. The Evening Gratitude Scan

Not a gratitude list.
Just one thing you appreciated about yourself today.

Why it works: It builds emotional safety from the inside out — something many leaders aren’t used to offering themselves.

The Inner Wave is the quiet beginning of reinvention

Real change rarely starts with bold plans.
It starts with tiny movements that whisper:

“I’m ready.”
“I’m becoming.”
“I’m open to what’s next.”

Small habits don’t look dramatic.
But they’re how identity reshapes itself.
They’re how courage accumulates.
They’re how clarity forms.
They’re how momentum builds gently, sustainably, and honestly.

Every ripple begins with a slight shift.
Every transition season moves with an Inner Wave.

A Moment of Reflection

1. What’s one small habit that feels doable — and meaningful — right now?

2. What micro-shift might help me inhabit the person I’m becoming?

3. Where do I notice the first movement of my own Inner Wave?

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us at Betweenward.

Where encore stories, insights, and honest conversations ripple outward.

Subscribe now

There is often a moment before a significant life shift when nothing looks different on the outside — yet everything feels different on the inside.

It’s quiet.
Barely noticeable.
Easy to dismiss.

But it’s there.

A single drop.

It might happen on an ordinary Tuesday morning as you close your laptop. Or while sitting in a meeting, you suddenly realize your enthusiasm has slipped out the side door. It might come when your children are grown, when caregiving ends or begins, when you read one sentence in a book that lands differently, or when your reflection in the window looks strangely honest.

The moment is simple.
But its message is not.

Something has shifted.
Something no longer fits.
Something inside you is asking for more truth than the life you’ve been living.

If you’re in your 40s, 50s, 60s, or beyond, you know this moment. You may even be standing in it right now.

This is the drop.
And for many of us, it is the beginning of the ripple.

The drop often arrives quietly — but it speaks an unmistakable truth

People imagine reinvention as dramatic: a sudden epiphany, a bold announcement, a lightning strike of clarity.

But more often, it begins with a whisper.

A sigh you didn’t notice.
A pause that lingers.
A sentence you can’t bring yourself to finish.

And in the encore chapter — after decades of achievement, responsibility, and resilience — these small inner shifts are not signs of instability. They signal awareness, a powerful developmental milestone in later adulthood.

Stanford’s Center on Longevity notes that our second half of life often brings greater emotional regulation, deeper self-knowledge, and a heightened desire for meaning and contribution. In other words, the drop is not a breakdown — it’s a breakthrough announcing itself early.

It’s your inner wisdom saying:
I’m ready for what’s next, even if I don’t know what it is yet.

Why the drop matters so much

In our earlier years, we often push through discomfort. We stay on autopilot. We fulfill the expectations of work, family, and society.

But later, something shifts. We begin asking different questions because we’re finally free enough to ask them.

Questions like:

• Is this still the life I want?

• Have I outgrown this role, this identity, this routine?

• What am I no longer willing to settle for?

• What feels true now?

This inner inquiry is not indulgent. Research from AARP shows that more than 53% of adults over 50 pursue new career paths specifically to align their work with meaning, purpose, or personal growth — not simply because they need a job.

The drop is the doorway to that alignment.
It’s the moment the old identity begins dissolving so a new one can form.

And that’s why it matters.
Because your encore chapter will not be built on momentum alone. It will be built on awareness.

The drop is not a crisis — it’s a recalibration

You may feel unsettled at first. That’s normal.

Many people describe this moment as:

• “A quiet dissatisfaction I can’t explain.”

• “A restlessness, like something inside me is stretching.”

• “A feeling that I’ve completed the old chapter but haven’t started the next one.”

• “A grief for what I’m leaving, mixed with excitement for what I can’t yet see.”

There is nothing wrong with you if you feel this way.
In fact, there may be something deeply right.

Psychologists call this identity elasticity — the natural expansion that occurs when your inner life grows faster than your outer life can keep pace.

The drop is simply the first signal that your life is trying to realign with who you’ve become.

How to recognize your own drop

For many in their encore years, the drop shows up in one of five ways:

1. A subtle loss of energy

Tasks that once felt meaningful now feel heavy or obligatory.

2. A shift in values

You notice you care about things you didn’t before — and no longer care about things that once defined you.

3. A desire for ease and authenticity

You can feel the difference between performing and being.

4. A new hunger for contribution

Not productivity — contribution.
You want what you do to matter.

5. A pull toward something you can’t yet articulate

You can’t explain it, but you feel it.

If you’ve experienced even one of these, the drop has arrived.

So what do you do with the drop?

Here’s the most important truth:

You don’t rush it. You honor it.

Awakenings don’t need urgency. They need space.

Here are three gentle ways to begin:

1. Name the truth without solving it

Try completing this sentence:

“What I’m noticing lately is…”

Let it be simple.
Let it be incomplete.

Naming truth is the first ripple.

2. Create a moment of stillness each day

Not a meditation practice you’ll judge yourself for.
Just one intentional pause where you ask:

What feels off? What feels true?

Calm attention is clarity’s best friend.

3. Make one micro-shift

Encore reinvention rarely begins with a leap.
It begins with a single, deliberate, values-aligned adjustment:

• Taking a different route on your morning walk

• Saying no to something small

• Reading something that challenges you

• Reaching out to someone who inspires possibility

Momentum begins microscopically.

What the drop is inviting you toward

If you’re feeling the early tremor of change, hear this clearly:

You are not late.
You are not behind.
You are not starting over.
You are starting differently — which is often better.

The drop is not about discarding your past.
It’s about integrating your wisdom into a future that fits.

Your encore chapter is not a reinvention of identity —
It is a realignment of identity.

And the drop is the first sign you’re ready.

A gentle reflection to close

If you feel something stirring — even faintly — try asking yourself:

Who am I now, after everything I’ve lived, learned, carried, overcome, and released?

I don’t mean who you were, or who others expect, or who the world rewards.

But now.
The true you emerging.

Your ripple begins here.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

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