If we haven't met before...

A nice-to-meet-you post & tell me about you too!

me, tapping out this essay at my Hudson Valley yoga studio moments before teaching my favorite class “the gentle practice” in a skirt! Cause I forgot to bring stretchy pants to work yesterday. This could be me in a nutshell.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome. (I say this all the time and my husband cannot stop poking fun at my obsession with saying things thrice. But there’s a rhythm to it, a cadence. I like it, and it feels like ME!).

If we haven’t met before (or it’s been some time), I’m Catherine Zack. And this little corner of Substack is called “Let’s Sit Together.” (I’ll tell you more about that name in a moment).

I had a whole essay planned about the Topic of Success for this week.

But it felt kind of weighty and serious, and I wanted to do that essay justice. And it’s HIGH summer and I’m feeling flirty and fun and very relaxed. And not like I can handle the Topic of Success Essay right now. (But maybe I’m actually writing it right now ;)).

The world is heavy and scary. And it shows no signs of stopping. So I’m all for a little silly, light, daily joy practice for me, for you, for all of us if / when we can muster it.

Levity always helps.

Some of you are new-ish here. Others of us have been having conversations like this in little communities for a decade.

But what I’m finding as I edge closer to my 39th birthday next week and live this 10-year-anniversary-since-quitting-big-law year that WOW I am still & always changing. Imagine that.

So here are 10 7 things about me — I have no idea what I’m about to say.

Just going to let it stream-of-consciousness pour out, and I 100% invite you to share something about yourself below in the comments.

This is a conversation and a community. You are so welcome (welcome, welcome) here!

1. I love writing. And I write everyday. I have kept a journal since I was little, and have done my Morning Pages everyday for the last 8 years and it is oxygen to me. Essential life blood. Daily bread & butter. And since I am of the elder millennial vintage that has spent their adolescence into deep-adulthood-almost-middle-age sharing their life on the internet, it makes good sense that I ended up here on Substack.

I am also (predictably) a Joan Didion fan, and I resonate with her whole “I write to know what I think” line so much. I’m not a fabulous writer. My voice is no less or more important than anyone else’s. This is just so clearly one of my main ways of experiencing this “one wild and precious,” and part of the work I came here to do.

I also realize I have a LOT to say. But I bet you do too. And you might have a different medium — painting, making, crafting, growing, tending, sculpting, accounting — I don’t know! Only you know! And I hope this little slice of the internet feels like an invitation to just own whatever it is for you. Call it your own. Name it, claim it. Practice it daily because it will keep you human. And vital and alive and growing. And well, that’s good work if you can get it.

2. Part of why I’m here on Substack is this: I REALLY WANT TO WRITE AND PUBLISH BOOKS … in my 40s. I have wanted this for 10 years, but I was busy changing careers, falling in love, getting married (building a marriage and a life with a partner), having 2 babies (even though it feels like I spent my entire 30s having these 2 babies, if you’d really like to know). SAYING OUT LOUD THAT I WANT TO WRITE AND PUBLISH BOOKS IS VERY SCARY TO ME, which is why I am saying it out loud. And I will keep saying it, until I actually do these things. Here are some subtler thoughts around this topic … (subtle, but still terrifying).

I am scared to write and publish books.

I can lay off the caps lock now, because wow, as I keep writing that sentence over and over and over again in public, it gets a little less scary!

(Ok - open invitation: say something in the comments that feels too scary to say, too audacious, too big, too “I can’t claim that for myself” and I will cheer you on forever!).

I have recently realized that my procrastination on this book writing is Both / And : It is true that I have not yet been ready — my creativity has gone to making literal humans and also has not been dormant. I’ve been writing privately and publicly this whole time, just on a very small scale.

I can also see that this procrastination is a block — it feels “confronting” and “triggering” (I’m putting these terms in quotes because they feel very therapy-speak and that is a wonderful language for some, but it is not my native tongue or even a second language that I usually use!).

The block is something like this: “What if it fails?! What if it sucks?! What if I can’t lift off on something I really want to do?!”

And also, the perhaps more terrifying block is “Holy sh!t, what if it works??!?! What if I do it and it’s good and it has an impact?!”

I know I will be veryannoyedwithmyself a year from now, if I still have not made moves on this book writing / publishing thing.

And that veryannoyed feeling — especially when it follows a period of curiosity and quiet contemplation is usually my intuition saying loud and clear: “OK, go do this thing. You can’t not do it. It is time.”

3. I want to write a LOT of books! The first one, I think, is the book form of my daily practice / meditation program that I created in 2019 called “40 Early Mornings.” A practice is a solo, sacred, single-tasking time that you set aside for yourself to come back to yourself everyday. There’s lots of ways to practice. The tools of the 40 Early Mornings practice are meditation, journaling & reflective writing, stillness & silence, rest, and movement you might call yoga. I love this program, and it’s named after a Rumi poem that I also love.

This is not the first time I’ve used Rumi in this way.

One time, about 13 years ago, I had just had a TERRIBLE breakup. I was wrecked by it. I spent my afternoons locked in my law firm office trying to avoid my ex and scribbling lines from Rumi onto my “Catherine Zack, Esq.” official law firm stationary.

It’s a funny image to me now but I didn’t see it then: This very serious law firm stationary just covered in ecstatic poetry. (I should have known then that I wasn’t going to last much longer in Big Law).

There’s the one Rumi poem about the field:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.”

Well, that felt like the field for me and that pretty much anyone else I wanted to meet was also hanging out there.

So I’m just sad and carrying around these Rumi scribbles in my bag, and I meet my little sister after work for happy hour at this Chinese food place in Northern Virginia.

The food was good. The beers cold and cheap. And the bar the right amount of dark.

It was pretty empty when we arrived at 5:30pm or so (I definitely tip toed out of the office early a lot in those sad days).

And the only other guy at the bar seemed like he had been there for SEVERAL hours.

He talked to us and shared a bit of his story, and I figured this guy needed the field poem as much as I did.

So I passed along my Rumi, as one does, forgetting it was on my office stationary.

Until about a year later, right before I quit Big Law, I got an email from an unknown sender.

And it was the guy from the bar.

That night, he told me, was his last night drinking. He was coming up on one year sober. He said thanks for the field poem. I feel like that was the first time I really believed that the world didn’t need me to be another corporate litigator.

4. So these other books I want to write: I want to write a book about stress at work. I want to write a kids meditation book (and that *really* surprises me because I actually don’t really sit around practicing yoga with my kids and teaching them meditation. They would rather eat Doritos and build Ninjago Lego sets and watch TV! I’m trying to play the long game there. Meditation by osmosis, something like this.)

I also want to write a novel, which seems INCREDIBLY hard to do and almost impossible to do well — I respect the hell out of my favorite writers who do novels in a brilliant way.

I recently devoured Miranda July’s All Fours and just picked my special-ordered copy up of Catherine Newman’s Sandwich and — while doing so — accidentally overshared with the friendly local bookstore guy about the time I had a panic attack on the morning of my last day of a weeklong girls trip to Portugal where we literal drank gallons of wine and stayed up entirely too late and I missed my kids so badly so I bought her book We All Want Impossible Things in the Portugal airport, sobbed the entire time I read it in the airport and on the flight home (it was finished by the time we landed) and yes, well now I’m oversharing with you. But her work is so damn moving, I can’t help it!).

Where was I?

Oh yes, the novel thing is intriguing because there are some topics I don’t feel safe exploring in nonfiction but really want to explore (middle-age, perimenopausal desire and longterm marriage and finally emerging from the shroud of giving over my body to my babies for a decade) AND spill the tea on some salacious Big Law details in a juiced up, fictionalized way.

5. I’m turning 39 this month and that feels exactly right and also like HOW? I still feel about as old as I did when I was 19 in many ways. And this is because I feel buoyed by a strong sense of possibility. A lot of good things have happened so far, but I don’t think the best is behind me. A lot is yet to come. I feel ready for things I couldn’t possibly be ready to explore until this moment. I am mostly still learning things. But I also feel a little … wise? And it’s nice. I define wisdom as information integrated through real life experience. So you’re probably really wise too! Isn’t that great? That just by living we have the chance to grow and change and all of it.

These are all my thoughts on this topic. 😂

6. It feels a little scary to “begin a career as a writer” in my 40s. But I am not worried! I feel POSSIBLE.

I am also much more interested in vocation rather than career or titles.

I’ve said it more than once, and I’ll say it again: WE ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN OUR LIVES ON PAPER (or LINKED IN!). (To be honest, I don’t think that if I read my own LinkedIn profile page right now I would recognize that person as myself!).

I feel like I’m just nurturing all these little seeds that were planted in me when I arrived on earth and I’ll spend the rest of my life tending this garden. When I was a little girl I was very much sitting in my room writing and thinking about Big Things. And that’s basically what I do now.

If I spent my 20s becoming a lawyer and practicing law and then quitting the law.

And I spent my 30s becoming a mother, a meditation and yoga teacher, writing some, small business-owning, and opening a studio.

And my 40s feel like they will be my Writer Era.

And it’s all just seeds, here’s what I think is coming. God willing life is LONG:

• 50s: open a retreat house in the Hudson Valley modeled on the French Alps place I wrote about here in this essay.

• 60s: becoming an interior designed and decorator because I love to do that and I kind of feel like I’m already an interior designer, literally, like for people’s interiors. The inner landscape.

• 70s: I think I’ll go back to one of my alma maters and teach a course as a professors called Mindfulness for Lawyers. It is so needed and to teach the human side to all this Big Important Work Stuff and it’s just not happening. If I had that class in law school.

• 80s: I have no idea, but the seed is there.

• 90s: I hope I’m still teaching meditation and putting around and pondering these Big Things.

• 100s: An amateur flower farmer.

And that’s about as far as I can get right now ;)

7. My oldest kid’s birthday is this week, and he turns SEVEN. I was 5 days away from turning 32 when I had him and I joke / not joke that I was a “young mom,” and I actually feel like that’s true. I look at my own sweet round baby face from that time and see how YOUNG I was. I will probably look at my own sweet not-so-round-or-baby face from THIS moment one day and think, “wow I looked so young.” (In the same way I watch Love Island and think “I really should have worn more thongs in my 20s!”).

I can safely say that my two kids are the best and also that they have sucked the literal life out of me over the last 7 years! It’s amazing that what parenting and marriage are ACTUALLY like is not something that I really understood till I was here. And maybe it’s just like that. But also I don’t think I heard many people talking about the reality of these things before I did that. I am pretty sure I was raised on a straight diet of “fairy tale.” And while this is the best work I do — building a life with someone, creating and raising literal humans — it is also the most challenging.

I am metabolizing a lot of “old work” on this Substack, revisiting topics I’ve been writing about and teaching about for years like STRESS and meditation and daily practice and leaving corporate life for creative life, but I also am curious about exploring topics that feel surprising and newly interesting to me like… desire in almost-mid-life. So some of these things might crop up here too.

I named this Substack “Let’s Sit Together” because when I teach meditation, I do a little “opening act” of talking about a topic to kind of orient the experience. Something like the topics of any one of these Substack essays and then as to bridge fthe conversation toward the actual meditation experience, I have said for years something like “Ok, let’s sit together.”

So I actually say this phrase several times a week in my real life work!

I wanted to title a podcast with this a few years ago (I ended up calling it Beyond Balance, and you can listen to it here!). But I thought it was “not serious enough.” And this would have been 2021 when I forgot that I didn’t enjoy corporate culture and decided I should be a corporate wellbeing consultant because this was high pandemic times and for 5 minutes even Big Law cared about employees’ wellbeing! (I was literally recruited for the “Director of Wellbeing” job at a Top 10 Law Firm that year!).

Anyways, I’ve pretty much integrated that era of pandemic-self-understanding amnesia, but I’ll probably write some more about it here, because I think a lot of us experienced a seismic shift in how we understand ourselves, our work, our relationship to our work, how we move through this world during those early 2020s years. So we’ll see.

OK! I have to go prep dough for the 100 homemade pizzas we will make for a party tonight because I am a crazy person who always loves to give herself a lot of work to do ;)

If anything resonated above — leave me a comment! That way I can tug the thread on that topic in a later piece of writing.

AND BONUS if you introduce yourself in the comments, I will send you a personal thank you because I am seriously amazed that you are here reading this!

thank you SO much for simply being here,
Cath

Seriously — say hello! Tell me if anythign clicked or sparked something for you. That way we can keep going there together.

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