Pruning.
Plus the menu for the week of February 23-27th
I heard a word recently that brought something familiar back to life for me: pruning.
Over on my other Substack project, Sober Sisters in St. Louis, we’re hosting a book club written by psychologist and coach Amy Johnson, PhD. I’ve done several self-study and coach training programs under Amy’s guidance over the years, and her work has deeply informed my own curiosity about how I look at life.
In a recent podcast, she mentioned a way she’s been living, something she simply referred to as pruning.
It’s funny how a new-ish word or metaphor can wake up something we already know. Pruning could easily overlap with things like boundaries, living intentionally, not overscheduling, or saying yes only when you really mean yes. But somehow, hearing it framed this way gave it new life for me.
One of my favorite books on “productivity,” 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, is really about this exact idea. Not how to do more, but how to decide what actually deserves your time and attention, and what might need to fall away.
Still, this idea of pruning stuck with me.
Recently, I spent time with a good friend and told her about our new family member: a gecko my 10-year-old now owns. I explained (without irony) that when mealworms are refrigerated, they need five to ten minutes to “wake up” before feeding, otherwise you might think they’re dead. She paused and said, “You really have to keep a lot of things alive.”
Totally.
Three kids. Two cats. One dog. Now a gecko. Work. Relationships. Responsibilities. I know I am not alone. :)
