January 05, 2026
Some advice sounds obvious until you realize how long you have been ignoring it.
If you can’t swim, keep walking along the river until you find the bridge.
It sounds like something a calm person says to someone panicking. Someone dry. Someone already on the other side. But the longer I sit with it, the more I realize how often I have done the opposite. I jumped in anyway. I flailed. I called it perseverance. I called it grit. I called it character.
Most of the time, it was just stubbornness dressed up as virtue.
We tell ourselves that staying in the water builds strength. That if we just keep moving our arms, we will eventually figure it out. And sometimes that is true. Sometimes you do learn by doing. Sometimes the struggle teaches you what no instruction ever could.
But sometimes the struggle is optional.
Sometimes the wiser move is to stop proving something and start choosing something.
Walking along the river is not quitting. It is paying attention. It is admitting that effort alone is not the same thing as progress.
Thought of the Day
If you can’t swim, keep walking along the river until you find the bridge.
There is a humility baked into this thought that I find uncomfortable in the best way.
It assumes you do not have to master every environment you enter. It assumes you are allowed to change tactics. It assumes that survival does not require heroics.
We grow up learning stories where the answer is always to push harder. Dig deeper. Try again. Those stories have their place. They have probably kept many of us going when we were close to stopping altogether.
But there is another story we do not tell as often. The one where the win comes from stepping sideways instead of forward.
A bridge is not a shortcut. Someone had to design it. Someone had to build it. Someone had to decide the river was worth crossing but not worth drowning in.
When I look back at periods of my life that felt like constant treading water, I can see now that there were bridges nearby. Conversations I avoided. Decisions I delayed. Endings I refused to name.
I stayed in the river because leaving it would have forced me to admit that something needed to change. And change, even good change, can feel like failure if you frame your life as a test of endurance.
There is nothing noble about exhaustion for its own sake.
There is something quietly brave about choosing a different way across.
Question of the Day
What bridge do you need to burn in 2026?
For me, I need to stop paying so much attention to where I have been and pay closer attention to where I am going.
That might sound neat and tidy, but it is not. It is messy. It means letting go of familiar reference points. It means not constantly checking the rearview mirror to reassure myself that my past still validates me.
Burning a bridge does not always mean ending something dramatic. Sometimes it means ending a pattern. Ending a story you keep telling about yourself. Ending the habit of returning to places that no longer require you.
We usually think of bridges as things we cross, not things we destroy. But there are times when keeping a bridge intact becomes the very thing that keeps us stuck. An old job you keep measuring yourself against. An identity that once fit but now chafes. A version of you that did its job and deserves a quiet retirement.
If you always leave the bridge standing, you might keep wandering back to it out of comfort or fear. Burning it is not about anger. It is about clarity.
It is saying, this got me here, but it will not get me there.
If this question resonates, you might also want to sit with a past reflection like Change, or revisit how others have wrestled with similar turning points in Question of the Day: What bridge do you need to burn?.
Neither offers a map. Both offer company.
Before you jump into another river this year, pause. Look up and down the bank. Notice what has already been built. Notice what you are allowed to leave behind.
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Sometimes the most important movement you make is not forward, but out of the water.
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