This Season

This week has been a lot.

Early in the week, devastating news from a campus where students we care about were in harm's way. As of a couple of days ago, we've confirmed all our scholars at Brown are safe. By midweek, early decision notifications started rolling out, and suddenly our inboxes were filled with updates and videos of students screaming, crying, jumping into their parents' arms. And alongside them, students devastated with news they didn’t want to receive. The highs and lows of this work, compressed into a few days.

That's the reality of this season. It's not one thing. It's all of it at once.

The Break Ahead

The office is closed for two weeks. That doesn't mean work disappears. January 1 application deadlines don't move. Final Winter Scholar Summit preparation continues. There are mail and check pickups, alumni happy hour hosting, and students who still need support. Most of you will still be tapped into work in some way, and that's the reality of what we do.

What changes is the space between. No scheduled meetings. No back-to-back calendars. No pressure to respond to an email. Room to breathe between the things that still need to get done.

I'll be working too. But differently.

Why the Space Matters

I heard something once that stuck with me. Research suggests that our conscious mind can only process about 50 bits of information per second. Our subconscious? Somewhere around 11 million bits per second. The conscious mind is like a flashlight; it can only illuminate a small area at a time. The rest of our brain is taking in everything else.

When we're in the day-to-day (meetings, emails, urgent requests) we're operating almost entirely in that narrow flashlight beam. We're reactive. We're solving what's in front of us. That's necessary, but it's limited.

When we create space – not forcing, not scheduling, not filling every moment – we give the rest of our brain room to work. Researchers call this incubation. It's why ideas often come in the shower, or on a walk, or in the middle of the night. The subconscious has been working on things we didn't even know we were thinking about.

What I'm Doing With It

Over these two weeks, I'm going to do more reflection and big-picture thinking. The kind that's hard to access when I'm in back-to-back meetings or clearing my inbox. I want to step back and see the work differently by giving my brain room to make connections I can't force.

You may find the same thing happens for you. Something about a student, a process, a way we do things - it surfaces differently when you're not in the middle of it. If that happens, don't dismiss it. Write it down. Bring it back with you in January.

And alongside the reflection, I hope you'll make room for actual rest. Not productive rest. Not rest that's secretly self-improvement. The kind of rest that restores you in whatever form that actually looks like for you.

For some people that's sleep. For others it's movement, or time with family, or doing absolutely nothing without guilt. I'm not going to tell you what it should be. But I'd encourage you to know the answer for yourself, and to protect time for it over these two weeks. The reflective, strategic thinking matters. The rest matters just as much.

Before You Go

This season asked a lot of you. The next one will too. The two weeks in between aren't about pretending the work stops. They're about changing the conditions so you can see it differently when you come back.

See you in January.