An Ode for the Over Givers

The Street With No Manholes Doesn't Exist

(Just when you thought you’d heard the last from me - a little hard-earned wisdom for your morning inbox.)

There’s a poem I’ve always loved — Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson.
You know the one.
I walk down the street. There’s an open manhole in the sidewalk. I fall in.
It isn’t my fault.
I climb out.
And on it goes — until, finally, I walk down another street.

For years, I thought that last line was the goal.
Find the street with no holes.
The safe one. The healed one.
I treated every wrong turn as proof that I hadn’t yet learned the lesson.
Why can’t I find that “other street?!”

It’s an exhausting way to live — walking with your eyes glued to the pavement,
scanning every crack, every shadow, every possible fall.
When you’ve spent your whole life on a healing journey,
it’s easy to mistake vigilance for wisdom.
You start thinking that being “awake” means never making the same mistake twice.
And when you do — when you find yourself in another manhole —
the first thing you reach for isn’t compassion.
It’s blame.

How did I not see that coming?
Haven’t I done this work already?

That’s the weight of hypervigilance:
believing every stumble means you’ve failed the course.
Believing that if you were truly evolved, you’d have chosen differently.
You’d have seen the danger, sidestepped the lesson,
and finally graduated to a life without pain.

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Lately, I’ve been standing at another crossroads —
deciding whether to buy a business that will, inevitably,
need more from me than I probably want to give.

And I know this hole.
I’ve fallen into it before.

For me, it isn’t about financial risk or long hours.
It’s the shape of an old pattern —
the one where belonging is earned through caretaking.

The kind of caretaking that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
The kind that quietly costs your evenings, your peace, and occasionally your sanity.
Sometimes I want to ask the broker,
“So… where on the P&L is the line item for the owner’s soul?”

Because that’s been the hidden line item all along —
the emotional labor of keeping everything and everyone afloat.

And when that’s been the price of belonging,
the only way the psyche knows how to protect itself
is to swing hard in the opposite direction —
toward freedom purchased through aloneness.

It feels safe for a while — peaceful even —
until it isn’t.
Until you realize that self-protection can also be a kind of exile.

The pendulum always swings too far.

---

But something feels different this time.
Maybe because I can see it.
Maybe because I’m tired of living as if healing means finding a street with no manholes.

Maybe the lesson isn’t to stop walking down familiar streets,
but to walk them differently.

It turns out there are no streets without manholes.
There never were.

And if you wait to find one,
you’ll spend weeks or months or years avoiding life for fear of falling.
You’ll confuse caution with wisdom, and safety with stillness.

So maybe the work of this season —
in business, in love, in life —
isn’t to find the road that’s safe,
but to keep walking the ones that call to you but differently.

Because that pull, that spark, that quickening in the chest —
that’s not danger. That’s aliveness.

And instead of the last chapter inviting us to walk down a different street,
maybe healing invites us to walk the same streets —
the cracked, uneven, potholed ones —
but this time carrying a bridge.

A bridge that lets us belong without overgiving,
lead without disappearing,
care without caretaking.

To keep walking, eyes open, bridge in hand,
ready to cross again and again
without abandoning ourselves.

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(Maybe that’s what healing really is — not the end of falling,
but the end of believing that falling means you’ve failed.)