I had a lovely conversation recently with Parker Palmer, who is someone I suspect a lot of you know. He is a famous advocate and writer, author of beloved books such as Let Your Life Speak and A Hidden Wholeness, and he has spent decades helping readers reflect on vocation, courage, and what it means to live with integrity.
So when he says, I’ve struggled in my life. I wouldn’t have known it from the outside. (Don’t we all look so shiny on the outside? Or at least we try to?)
I was moved by his candor about his descents into clinical depression. Not just “feeling lost in the dark,” he told me — but becoming the dark. That distinction has stayed with me. “When you’re lost in the dark, you can negotiate the darkness,” he told me. “Maybe there’s a door here. Maybe there’s a window shade over here. Maybe there’s a light switch somewhere. I can find some way to kind of deal with the situation I’m in and keep a little hope alive…But you’ve become the dark, there is no negotiating it. You’re it. It’s you. That’s all she wrote.”
Depression, at its worst, is not just an emotion or mood. It can feel like the only way of being.
Parker, of course, has spent a lifetime writing about vocation, community, and courage. But what moved me most wasn’t just his body of work, but a tool he used to get through those dark days.
He kept a journal of tiny, tiny, tiny achievements. Which don’t feel tiny when you’re in the muck.
✓ Getting out of bed.
✓ Turning on a light.
✓ Riding a bike for ten minutes.
In a culture that measures worth by productivity and reinvention, it helps to reconsider what counts—especially in those seasons where agency is incredibly limited. Eventually, those tiny achievements start to add up.
And this wisdom isn’t only for those living with clinical depression. It’s for anyone staring at an impossible to-do list. For the late-night doomscrollers. For the person quietly overwhelmed by caregiving, or uncertainty, or by the heartbreaking noise of the world.
And if you are struggling deeply, please reach out for help — in the U.S., you can call or text 988. You don’t have to manage this alone.
May the smallest faithfulness sustain you.
May quiet persistence carry you.
May mercy meet you in your appropriate smallness.
And may enough be enough for today.
For today, what might make your tiny list of achievements?
P.S. You can listen to my full conversation with Parker Palmer on Apple, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
I put both the coffee and the water in the coffee pot and I remembered to turn it on.
Sharing the cancer journey with you through, appropriately, this Lenten season has been a privilege, a terrible honour.
Yesterday I sat down for a few minutes to take drink, and when I made to rise to continue work upon the aeroplane (it took three tries) I could see that walking across half of the room would take everything I had, and it did. I was battered on the storm-rocks of pain, but each step (once such a thoughtless act!) was sweetly redolent of salvation,
a self-deliverance from the prison of despair.
It was almost fun, and to paraphrase Keith Richards, "when you're going to kick cancer in the teeth, you may as well use both feet."
Almost fun?
It WAS fun.
***
It has been bad, today was worse,
each moment quailed the one before.
Cancer's coin has no obverse,
no silver lining, that's for sure
but for the one that I put there,
limning the hot black cloud of pain
with knowing that I still do care,
that I am here and I remain.
I stood, and standing I did see
that the step which must come next
would be far past agony,
but it would leave hell sore perplexed
that I could, weeping, yet pass through
the very worst that it could do.