A Place to Rest

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Welcome home.

I say that to you this morning, but I also say it to myself.

Finding a place where you can feel at home is something I think we’re all searching for. Whether it’s Prince Harry trying to find his way home, or Gloria Steinem performing the ultimate act of going home this week, I believe we are all seeking a resting place of sorts—a place of meaning, a place of acceptance, and a place of relief where we are known and where performance isn’t required. And so this is how I want to welcome you back to this space after I’ve spent a few weeks away from writing.

When you welcome someone home, you are saying to another human being: I'm so glad to see you. You belong here. You can rest here. You can be yourself here, exactly as you are. No matter where you are on your journey, you are accepted, because this is a place of belonging, listening, learning, growing, care, and honesty.

I hope you feel all of those things and more when you enter this space each Sunday morning. I hope when you open The Sunday Paper, you feel the community that surrounds you and that you’re able to drop your burdens for a moment and rest. I hope you feel welcomed and that you are loved for exactly who you are. Welcome home and I love you for who you are are two of the most powerful phrases one human being can say to another, and so I say both of them to you this morning.

Home has been on my heart and mind all summer. As you may recall, I left a few weeks ago to return home to Massachusetts to see my brothers, to sit with my cousins, and to visit my parents' graves. And during that time, I found myself thinking deeply about my own search for home throughout my life.

When my kids were growing up, I used to read them a children's book called Are You My Mother? But this past month, I found myself thinking I could write one myself called Are You My Home? Because here is the truth: ever since I got separated and eventually divorced, I have been trying to find my way home. But if I am honest—really honest with myself—my journey to find home started long before that. As all great journeys do.

I have looked for home under every rock. In different homes, different states, different countries. I’ve tried to seek it out in relationships, in my work, in my faith, and in my relationship with God. We all do this. We grow up in the home we grew up in, with the parents we chose (and yes, I do believe we choose them), and then we set out to create our own version of home after we move away. We look for home in careers, on sports teams, and in purpose-driven organizations. We look for it in love. We support political candidates who describe the kind of country we want to make our home in. And when our lives crack or fall apart or tumble, we are forced to reimagine home and ask ourselves yet again: Where is my home? And what’s it supposed to feel like, anyway?

This summer I finally realized something I didn’t expect, and that’s that I am actually quite good at creating a sense of home. People tell me all the time that they feel at home in my house. They say that the space I have created makes them feel calm. They tell me they can breathe. I’ve heard this for years, but I have let those words pass through me without letting them land.

This summer, I finally let them land.

Before my summer break, my executive coach told me something that has stayed with me. He said that many of the leaders he works with complain of overload and exhaustion. But, he said, it’s not really the work that is draining you. It's the fact that you don’t let the good stuff land. And when you don’t let the good stuff land, you run on empty. No leader, parent, partner, child, or employee can survive if they don't stop to honor what they are doing well. My coach calls these moments cookies. Needed nourishment.

Research tells us that the more we celebrate the small wins in life, the happier and more self-confident we become, and the more capable we are of meeting the next challenge life throws our way. Celebrating small everyday wins reminds you that you are capable, resilient, and worthy of the bigger dreams you are still pursuing.

So I have been trying to go slow. To enjoy the cookies. And for me, that’s started with enjoying the sense of home I’ve already built for myself.

One quiet day this August, I suddenly realized that I have been creating for others the very feeling I have spent my whole life searching for. The feeling of belonging. The feeling of safety. The sense that you are enough exactly as you are, and you don't have to earn your place to be here. I realized I have been making home for everyone but myself.

That realization made me cry at first. But then it made me want to settle into the feeling, similar to the way a house settles into its foundation. That feeling when something that has been moving and shifting finally finds the ground beneath it and rests.

I have been trying to settle into myself and a new identity—not as someone's wife, daughter, mother, or grandmother, but as a woman in her prime. In her strength. In her vulnerability. In her wisdom. In her being. All of it at once.

And I have been trying to settle into the knowing—the quiet, hard-won, deeply personal knowing—that I do not have anything left to prove to myself or anyone else. I can stop running. For me, and I think perhaps for anyone, that is a huge revelation.

Like you, I have worked hard my entire life. So happy Labor Day to all of us who have worked, be it in the home or out of it. And bravo for all the visible and invisible work you have done over your lifetime and that you are still doing to improve the lives of others. May this holiday help you recognize your work. Your parenting, if that's a path you've chosen. Your caregiving. Your coaching. Your service. No matter what work you are engaged in, honor it. Celebrate it. See it as a win for you and for others. Rest in this win.

And if my words aren't landing, then listen to Dolly Parton, who advised people to make a list of all the things they do well as an exercise of self-love. Or Gloria Steinem, who once wrote, “Once we give up searching for approval, we often find it easier to earn respect.”

I have thought a lot about the role of work in my life, and if I am being honest, my approach to work was, in large part, to get my mother's approval. To be seen as enough in her eyes. To earn something I was afraid I didn't already have.

This summer, as I sat alone at her grave in Hyannisport, I understood something that I have known intellectually for years but had never quite felt in my body until now: I was enough, and I am enough. To her. To me. I always have been.

I didn't have to run away from home to become something. I didn't have to work myself to the bone. Feeling at home in myself, in a place, with a person, in life—it was always within my power to simply stop and see that as so. What a revelation.

So as I come back to you today, I wonder whether you might be carrying something similar. A feeling that you still aren’t enough. Because we are living in unprecedented times when everyone is comparing their insides to other people's outsides. When everyone is wondering how they stack up against AI. When the pressure to perform, to achieve, to do more and be more is relentless. When the anxiety around inflation and keeping up in our society is high. (And if you’re looking for guidance on how to stay calm in these uncertain financial times, I hope you’ll read our contributor David Booth’s piece below.)

These days, it can feel like the only way to belong—to be enough—is to earn it, over and over, every single day. It's exhausting. And while our society has made real progress in speaking up about mental health and the impossible standards we set for ourselves, particularly for women, our healthcare system still lags far behind. Nowhere is this gap clearer than in postpartum care, where critical access remains out of reach for far too many—a crisis thoughtfully explored in the op-ed below from The Motherhood Center in NYC.

Yet beneath these systemic gaps lies a much quieter, deeper hunger. Most of us are not searching for a tangible thing. We are searching for a feeling of being seen and of belonging somewhere without having to perform for the privilege.

You are enough. You always were.

Desmond Tutu once wrote that many of us are disconnected from our own feelings and experiences. It’s the result of old suffering that caused us to numb ourselves. He said it’s for this reason that we must sometimes relearn to feel. We choose to heal, and we choose to move forward, by being brave and vulnerable enough to feel.

Feeling is both beautiful and scary. But meeting your own feelings head-on and taking agency over them is the path home. Once you acknowledge that so much of what triggers you, enrages you, and drives you is old, you can step away from blaming others and from trying to prove something. You can begin finding your way back home to yourself.

The heroine's journey (I have been thinking about this a great deal as well) ends differently from the hero's. The hero goes out, conquers, and returns triumphant. The heroine goes out, searches, struggles, and comes home to herself. She comes home having integrated everything the journey gave her—the strength and the vulnerability, the wisdom and the innocence, the fire and the tenderness, the masculine and the feminine. She doesn't choose between them. She is powerful enough to weave them together and emerge into her own shining authenticity. When she does this, she is whole. She is triumphant. She rises. She is free. I love that.

That is where I find myself this Labor Day. And here is what I have committed to myself for this fall: No more overwhelm. No more overbooking. No more rushing from one thing to the next. I am pacing myself better, focusing better, and truly trying to be less hard on myself than I used to be.

I am focusing on things I used to think were small but have turned out to be enormous. More one-on-one time with each of my children. More one-on-one time with friends. More memory-making. More fun. I want to lean into fun. I want to slow down enough to really listen. To be better by doing less.

And here is what I know for certain now: The best of times were not in the past, and they’re not in the future. They’re here in the present. I want to work hard, have fun and be fully myself—whole, free, empowered—right now. That is what coming home to yourself feels like.

I have so much I want to explore with you this fall—from the pillars of a meaningful life to midlife as an arrival, from rewriting what aging looks and feels like to staying engaged in the fight for democracy, civility, women’s health, and caregiving. We are all going to end up as caregivers if we need a caregiver, so we need a country and a society that supports that role.

I want to reach the women and men who are in the middle of their lives and feel unseen by a culture obsessed with youth and newness. I want to tell them that this is not the beginning of the end. This is the beginning of the most powerful, authentic, and fully realized chapter of your life. This is the moment to rewrite and redefine aging, not just for those who are aging now, but for future generations to come.

That is what I am here for this fall. That is what The Sunday Paper is here for. This is what my interviews are here for. We are here to be, as St. Francis said, instruments of peace. To shed light into the darkness. To sow love where there is hatred, faith where there is doubt, and hope where there is despair. And I might add: we are here to invite others in. We are here to be a place of rest, a place of honesty, a place of hope. We are here to create home inside ourselves and then offer it to others.

Part of coming home has meant receiving the work I've built with the same grace I'm trying to extend to myself. I am really happy to be here in my digital home with you, The Sunday Paper community. I am honored to be building MOSH into what I believe it can be. I’m proud that it funds research at the Women's Alzheimer's Movement and that WAM has found its home at the Cleveland Clinic, where women from all over the country can now access truly great care at the Women's Health and Research Center. I am excited about the beautiful books coming out of The Open Field, our publishing imprint with Penguin Random House—books that I believe will help you settle into yourself and inspire you to live that meaningful life of yours. And this week, I am honored to be heading to New York to speak about Alzheimer's and women's health for Time.

I am grateful for work that makes me feel like I am making a difference. And I am letting that land. At long last, I am letting so many things land that never used to. That, too, is a kind of homecoming.

So, my friends and fellow architects of change. Welcome home. Come in. Sit down. Rest. And then let's get to busy working together on the beautiful, meaningful, only-we-can-do-it work of moving humanity forward, together.

The fall is here. The best of times are now. And I have never been more grateful to be in them with you.

P.S. This fall at The Sunday Paper, we are going to delve into home in a big way—spiritually, physically, emotionally, financially, and aesthetically. So tell us what home means to you. Where do you find it? What are you still searching for? What would help you on your way home?

P.P.S. I mentioned my executive coach Neal Schore and letting the good things land (or enjoying the cookies in yourself). Well, Neal has distilled everything he has taught me and so many other leaders into a new book that I hope you’ll check out called The 25th Hour. I have found Neal’s wisdom to be genuinely helpful, and I think you will too.

Also in this week’s issue:

• The Lindsay Clancy Case Is About More Than One Mother

• How to “Stay Calm” in Investing—and Life