Welcome to Sunday Stillness, a few minutes each week to meditate on one idea that will bring us closer to who we want to become.

I'm going to read to you a paragraph from our Eric Thomas's new book,

Congratulations, The Best is Over.

And it's from a chapter called Maybe Going Back Again, and it's about his high school reunion.

And maybe you heard Eric and I laughing about this part of the book when we talked about books on our recent episode,

episode 2 18. And I revisited this paragraph and wanted to read one part to you that really stood out and

sort of encapsulates why I loved this section of the book because it really spoke to me.

Here's what he writes. I was having a wonderful time and David was having a wonderful time and I wasn't really sure what my objective was beyond that. I don't think I had anything to prove or disprove, not to them at least.

I'd spent the last two decades mulling over every weird embarrassing thing I did in high school

just like everyone does. But I'd also spent two decades

building a self who wasn't ashamed of being weird or embarrassing or not fully

knowing who he was. I felt like myself at the reunion in both the old way and the new way.

Those words again are from

Congratulations the best is over by our Eric Thomas, which is a book of essays from this amazing writer.

But I've been thinking about that concept of feeling like yourself, both your old self and your new self, and when those

things align, when you don't feel uncomfortable with your past self and when it feels like it makes sense with your current

self instead of in contrast to or like an earlier version is a primitive version like in a

negative way instead of it all being you and maybe when we're alone we feel some versions of that but what he's

describing at a high school reunion how often do we get to feel that alignment and

feel that we're occupying both selves in one body and one

moment in front of other people. And that feels rarer to me as I get older.

You know, my life in particular is divided in a,

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