Write a letter to yourself for five years from now. You’ll be shocked what mattered and what didn’t.

Your sense of what matters shifts more than you expect, and the current version cannot be reconstructed from memory later. A letter freezes it: what you were worried about, what you wanted, who mattered most this month. Reading it back shows you both how far you moved and how many of those emergencies turned out to be weather.

Write it this week and be specific rather than wise. Name the people, the fear, the thing you hope will have happened by then. Date it and hide it somewhere you will actually find it.