Back on the Rails

On disruption, control, and finding my way back to the work

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written.

Life had other plans.

Three weeks ago, my wife Tammy was hospitalized. What followed was a stretch of days and nights that shifted my attention entirely—first to the hospital, then to home care, and now to the steady rhythm of follow-up treatments and routines. Alongside that, we’ve recently received the details for Coach Rodgers’ memorial service, which has brought its own wave of logistics, reflection, and emotion.

In short, the system changed.

And when the system changes, everything connected to it adjusts—whether we intend it to or not.

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The Writing Stopped.
The Thinking Didn’t.

While I haven’t been publishing, I haven’t been idle.

If anything, the past few weeks have been full—just not in ways that produce visible output. The writing paused, but the thinking did not. It rarely does.

That’s something I’ve come to accept about this process. Writing, at least for me, isn’t confined to the moments when I’m at the keyboard. It’s happening in hospital rooms, in quiet conversations, in moments of uncertainty, and even in the logistical shuffle of booking flights and hotels.

The work continues—just beneath the surface.

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The Illusion of Control

Before all of this, I had a rhythm.

A system.

Days structured around reading, thinking, writing, and publishing. It felt productive. It felt intentional. And, if I’m being honest, it felt like control.

But the past few weeks have reminded me of something I’ve likely always known but occasionally forget:

What I thought was control was really just stability—until it wasn’t.

We influence them. We participate in them. But control? That’s more fragile than it appears.

Life introduces variables we don’t anticipate—health scares, emotional obligations, sudden shifts in priorities—and the system responds. Not in a linear, predictable way, but in a series of adjustments that ripple outward.

What I thought was a stable routine turned out to be highly sensitive to change.

And that’s not system flaw. That’s reality.

A Systems Perspective
(Without the Theory…Yet)

Over the past few weeks, I finished reading Thinking in Systems.

I’m not going to unpack the book here—that will come in my next post—but I will say this: experiencing disruption while reading about systems is a different kind of learning.

You begin to see it everywhere.

You see how inputs change outputs.
How pressure shifts behavior.
How quickly a well-functioning routine can reorganize itself under new conditions.

And perhaps most importantly, you begin to understand that systems don’t break—they adapt.

Sometimes in ways we like. Sometimes in ways we don’t.

Back on the Rails
(But Not the Same Track)

So here I am—back on the rails.

But not exactly where I left off.

The past few weeks have changed my perspective, sharpened some thoughts, and, in a strange way, reinforced why I write in the first place. Not to document perfection or consistency, but to make sense of change, uncertainty, and the patterns that shape our lives.

This post isn’t a grand return. It’s a reconnection.

A way of picking up the thread.

In the coming days, I’ll return to Thinking in Systems and share some reflections that have been forming—both from the book itself and from how its ideas have played out in real life.

For now, it’s enough to say this:

The system shifted.
The work paused.
But the thinking continued.

And from that, the writing begins again.

Final Thought

Sometimes stepping away from the page isn’t a break from the work—it’s part of it. Thank you for being here as I find my way back into the rhythm.