Things are hard right now

A framework for navigating uncertain times. And a quiet welcome

May 03, 2026

Three moves, when the ground is shifting

I want to start by saying something I think we are all feeling, even if we are not all saying it.

Things are hard right now.

Not hard in a motivational-poster way. Not hard like the gym is hard, or hard like a new habit is hard. Hard like the ground feels different underfoot. Hard like the news is genuinely alarming and the future feels genuinely unclear. Hard in a way that makes the usual advice—stay positive, trust the process, focus on what you can control—feel a little thin.

I am not going to tell you it is all going to be fine. I do not know that. Neither do you. No one does.

What I want to offer instead is something I have found more useful than reassurance: a way of seeing.

This is the first piece in a series I am calling Reflect, Refract, Resonate. It is a framework for navigating uncertain times—three moves I keep coming back to when the ground starts to shift. Not solutions. Not a system. Just three moves that help.

I will spend the next ten weeks unfolding the framework essay by essay. Some weeks I will be quiet on purpose. Each piece will stand on its own. Together they will tell the whole story.

Welcome.

How I came to this

I am a photographer by training—specifically reportage and documentary work, which taught me early that the most important moments cannot be directed. You wait. You watch. You listen with your eyes. The whole discipline is learning to be present enough that the authentic moment reveals itself, because the moment you try to force it, it disappears.

For more than twenty-three years I have run COOL HUNTING with my husband Evan, looking for what is genuinely new and worth knowing in the world. Same principle. You cannot manufacture the signal. You have to learn to be still enough to receive it.

Alongside that work, I have practiced design—interaction design, user experience, the discipline of making interfaces that fall away so the person can move through them without thinking. And more recently I have stepped formally into energy work. I completed Reiki master training and attunement on the vernal equinox of 2026, after a long arc that started much earlier than the training itself.

It might look like four different careers. To me it’s one practice with different surfaces. What I actually do, across all of it, is bridge the material and the spiritual. The visible and what is underneath it. That is the through-line.

This is where I write about that bridge. The framework you are about to encounter is the first thing I am offering here because it is the most honest summary I have found of how I move through the world when the world stops making sense.

Three moves

Here they are. Reflect. Refract. Resonate.

I will spend the rest of the series unfolding each one in proper depth, but I want to give you the shape of all three now, so you can carry it with you.

Reflect

When things get chaotic, our instinct is to speed up. We consume more information. We make more plans. We stay busier, because busy feels like control. We scroll, not because we expect the news to improve, but because stopping feels dangerous. Like if we go still, the anxiety will catch us.

I understand that impulse completely. I have lived it. I still stumble into it sometimes.

In uncertain times, stillness is not a luxury. It is the first act of navigation.

Reflection is what light does when it hits a surface clear enough to receive it. Done well, reflection lets you see what is actually true for you right now—as opposed to what fear is projecting onto the wall.

This includes the harder material. Real reflection means reflecting everything, not just the parts of yourself that are easy to look at. We do not have shadows without light. The shadow is not the enemy. It is information.

Refract

The second move is the heart of the framework.

Picture a prism. Light enters one side, ordinary and undifferentiated. What comes out the other side is the full spectrum—every color that was always present but invisible, now revealed. The prism does not fight the light. It does not try to send it back the way it came. It does not shatter under it. It simply becomes the medium through which something hidden becomes visible.

That is what difficult seasons actually do, if you let them. The hard things in your life—grief, uncertainty, transition, a career or a relationship or a world that has stopped making the kind of sense it used to—these are mediums. They bend you. The question is not whether they bend you. They will. The question is whether you come out clearer or more opaque.

You do not get to choose whether difficulty changes you. You only get to choose how you meet it.

Resonate

In a noisy world, the pressure is to be louder. Post more. Signal harder. Make sure no one mistakes your silence for indifference. I understand that pressure. I am not arguing for disengagement.

But I want to suggest that the real leverage—the thing that actually moves other people, that actually builds something lasting, that actually helps you make decisions when the information is incomplete and the stakes feel high—is not volume.

It is clarity.

Resonance, in physics, is what happens when a tuning fork meets another fork tuned to the same frequency. The second fork begins to vibrate without being touched. Shared frequency is enough. When you know what you actually value, when you have done the work of reflecting and the work of refracting, you become a clearer instrument. What is meant to find you, can.

That is the arc. Three moves. Each one earns the next.

What this series will and will not do

I will not promise you a cure. I will not tell you that if you do these three things in this order, your problems resolve. The framework is not a system. It is a way of seeing.

What I will do, over the coming essays, is unfold each move in depth, with the personal stories that taught it to me. The Reflect essays will look at stillness as a practice and at the harder work of looking honestly at what we usually refuse to see. The Refract essays will move through the prism metaphor in detail and through the lived experience of being changed by something difficult. The Resonate essay will get practical—what it actually feels like to live from your own frequency rather than performing for someone else’s.

I will close the series with two integration essays: one about the bridge between the material and the spiritual, which is the through-line of everything I write here, and one final piece that tries to leave you with something quiet rather than a call to action.

Some weeks I will publish. Some weeks I will be intentionally silent. The pauses are part of the rhythm. The silences are how the harder material has room to land.

A small request

This lives in your inbox, which means I have access to a kind of attention you do not give lightly. I want to honor that by inviting something genuine in return.

If you reply to one of these emails, it comes straight to me. I read every one. The conversation that grows in the replies is, honestly, the part of this I am most looking forward to.

So I will close with a question—and I will close every essay with one. The questions are not rhetorical. They are an invitation.

For this first one:

What has been hardest for you lately—and what is the advice that has not been landing?

You do not need to answer publicly. You do not need to answer me. But it might be worth taking ten minutes with that question this week. The first move of the framework is reflection, and reflection has to start somewhere.

Thank you for being here. I am glad you came.

—Josh

Next: an essay on stillness as the first act of navigation. Why going slow when everything is speeding up is harder than it sounds, and why it is the foundation everything else rests on.