Candid Conversations Newsletter: A Meditation on Movement, Flow, and Openness

This was my first time in Dallas. Fort Worth, to be exact.

It felt new, a solid place to land after coming off an engagement where expectations and deliverables weren’t entirely clear. Still, I was up for the task. It came with an opportunity to meet leaders I had hoped to encounter, to form a network, an essential component when navigating a large organization.

As is usually the case when I travel for work, my days were for working and my nights were for exploring the city in a quiet quest for food.

My nightly journeys often took me in an aimless pursuit until I found the right place. I’ve found some of the most memorable spots that way.

That became my weekly rhythm, especially on Wednesday nights, the last night before flying home.

Some evenings ran long, filled by the demands of the day.

Other nights were slower, spent digesting notes, forming analysis, and letting a story take shape.

This particular evening started with a Bikram yoga class.

I had done yoga before, but this was my first time experiencing Bikram.

Bikram Yoga is a hot yoga system comprising twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises, performed in a room heated between one hundred and five and one hundred and twenty degrees, with high humidity, for ninety minutes.

In simple terms, it is brutal if it is your first time.

The energy in the room feels competitive.

I was confident. Some might even say overconfident.

I walked in the way I often do in unfamiliar spaces, trying to keep pace, trying not to fall behind.

That night, I learned something valuable.

Move at your own pace.

That lesson did not stay in the room.

Movement Is Paramount 🛣️

Have you ever stood on the shore of a beach and looked out to where the water meets the sky?

Now keep that image in mind.

We grew up calling it the skyline.

Now imagine swimming or sailing toward that line.

With no land in sight, it feels endless, like moving toward infinity.

But if you turn around and look back at the shore, the land behind you also feels far away.

Moving toward a goal is no different.

It often feels distant.

Heavy.

Sometimes dreaded.

There are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns alike.

Yet with each step forward, you have moved farther than before.

The same is true when dealing with sudden misfortune or loss.

Movement is still required.

Through grief.

Through recovery.

Through rehabilitation after illness.

Through rebuilding parts of yourself shaped by things you did not choose.

You keep moving.

That realization led me somewhere else.

Heritage ⌛

How many people before us had to keep moving without knowing where it would lead?

What breadcrumbs were placed along the way in hopes that someone else might find them?

What shade do we now sit under offered by the trees our ancestors planted?

As we enter Black History Month, I’m reminded that more than one thing can be true at the same time.

In previous editions, I’ve written about superposition, paradox, and duality. About holding tension without rushing to resolve it.

Speaking of resolve, I keep a growing book list, but before I pick up something new, I try to return to the ones I’ve already started and haven’t yet finished.

The Plague by Albert Camus is one I still intend to return to.

The novel follows an outbreak in the Algerian city of Oran.

What stays with me is not the disease itself, but how ordinary people respond.

Doctors show up.

People choose decency.

Solidarity emerges not because it guarantees an outcome, but because it is what remains when certainty disappears.

Our Legacy 🌤️

History rarely offers us a single narrative at a time.

The interesting thing about The Plague is that it’s widely interpreted as an allegory for Nazi occupation, but let’s sit with that for a moment.

The political movement that would become the Nazi Party emerged in nineteen nineteen.

That same year, Marcus Garvey, an immigrant from Jamaica, was operating out of Harlem, having founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association five years earlier.

From there, the movement, which grew to nearly two million members, expanded its reach, advocating economic independence and collective self-determination.

Years earlier, the NAACP had already been established, another pillar in the long struggle for Black advancement at home and abroad, alongside the intellectual work of W. E. B. Du Bois.

Oppression and liberation.

Destruction and construction.

Unfolding side by side.

I hope the duality is clear, and how these narratives converge.

The value lies in the parallel, and in the space in between.

The strength lives in the corners of history.

“None but ourselves can free our minds.”

Sometimes being free begins with choosing a different lens.

Growth 📈

That night in Fort Worth, I struggled through the Bikram class, but afterward my body felt open.

Energetic.

Awake.

The heat and breath had done their work, not through force, but through attention.

Movement improved my posture, my circulation, and something quieter, my awareness.

Which brings me back to now.

We are living in a time plagued by distraction.

Speed is rewarded.

Attention is fragmented.

Yet the story still matters.

Meaning still forms when we slow down long enough to connect the pieces.

Never before have so many forces pulled at us from so many directions.

And never before have we had access to this much information, technology, and knowledge, right at our fingertips.

That access is both a gift and a danger.

So the question remains.

What will our legacy be?

One shaped by domination and erasure,

or one aligned with discipline, care, and collective responsibility?

It is a good time to be alive.

But only if we move forward with intention.

Growth looks like something.

Sometimes it feels like heat, breath, and learning when to slow down.

And it begins, as it always has, with movement.

As we move through this Black History Month, let me leave you with one word.

Ubuntu!

“I am, because you are.”