How Not to Get Cut

Some Days Come With Rough Edges

Some days don’t knock before entering. They walk into the room with a slammed door, a sharp word, a cold message that sits in the chest longer than it should. We don’t ask for these moments, yet they find their way to our table anyway.

We may not choose what arrives, but, quietly, we still choose how we pick it up.

Every small hurt, every misunderstanding, is a bit like a heavy pot with two sides to hold. One edge is all corners and metal and noise. It’s the side that makes us think, “They never understand. This always happens. Why is it always me?” It feels satisfying for a moment, like scratching an itch that only grows redder. The other side is less obvious. It doesn’t shine. It asks for a pause. It sounds more like, “They look tired today. I know they’ve carried their own worries. We’ve had kinder days between us. I’ve spoken sharply too, once upon a time.” It doesn’t excuse what hurt, but it softens the way we carry it.

Think of the last time a loved one’s tone stung more than their words, or an email left your heart racing for no good reason. The event itself was one thing. What grew around it, the story, the replaying, the long inner argument that was something we kept adding, thought by thought. Often without noticing, we keep holding the side that cuts us.

This isn’t about pretending the pain is smaller than it is, or smiling when something needs to be spoken about. It’s about a small act of quiet courage: refusing to let a hard moment decide the kind of person we will be for the rest of the day. It is the choice to remember shared warmth in the middle of a cold exchange. To say, “I will not let this turn my heart into stone.”

Today, when plans shift without warning, when someone forgets to reply, when a familiar disappointment returns, see if you can catch that tiny moment right after it happens. That little space where you’re reaching out, ready to grip. Ask yourself, almost like a whisper, “How do I want to hold this?” Not “How do I fix everything?” Just, “How will I meet this one small thing?”

Often, the world in front of us does not need to change at once. Sometimes, it is enough to hold the same old trouble from a gentler side and walk on with a heart that is bruised, but not closed.

A Great Quote

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
— C.S. Lewis

Book Review: “The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

Grief doesn’t always send you inward. Sometimes it pushes you out—into wind, work, and wide, bare land. It makes you move your body because your heart doesn’t know what to do with itself.

That’s where this book begins. Not in insight, but in weather.

After the death of someone she loves, Gretel Ehrlich goes to Wyoming. There is no “lesson” waiting for her there. Just distance. Cold. Sky that never seems to end. The Solace of Open Spaces isn’t a confession and it isn’t quite a memoir. It feels more like a season of a life—watched closely, worked through, written as it is being lived.

These essays are not written from a safe room with a view. They come from long days outside: riding out storms on horseback, waiting through blizzards, helping with cattle, standing in mud and dust and silence. You start to feel that the land is not the backdrop to her grief—it is her company in it.

The land in this book is not turned into a symbol. It is not dressed up as “healing nature” or some gentle metaphor. Wyoming is rough, empty, changeable, and at times unkind. Ehrlich lets it stay that way. In that honesty, something quiet happens: the land begins to work on her, and on us, without being asked to.

Work is the way feelings move. She does not sit and explain her sorrow. She gets up at dawn, mends fences, brands calves, rides out with ranchers. The hard, ordinary work becomes the language of what she cannot say aloud. There is a kind of honour in that refusal to over-explain. She shows us a life instead of an argument.

The writing itself feels weathered. Many lines arrive plain and unpolished, as if they have been carried in a coat pocket for a long time. Then, suddenly, a sentence will open up the page and you realise how much she has been holding back, and how much she has seen fall apart and slowly be stitched together again.

What may not work for everyone
You can’t rush this book. There is no strong plot pulling you by the hand. You move through it the way you would cross an open pasture: step by step, with no clear marker of “now you have arrived.” If you like stories that build to a neat end, this might feel like wandering.

One line I won’t forget:
“True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.”

It doesn’t come as a solution. It lands more like a simple, hard truth: there may be no final comfort, and yet, somehow, life keeps offering small, steady ones wherever you stand.

P.S.: If this newsletter brought you calm, pass it on to someone who’d enjoy the silence too.

About : Every two weeks, I sit down to write a quiet note: something like a pause in the middle of a restless day. Inside, you’ll find small reflections on change and growth, a line or two that lingers in the heart, and a book that has left me seeing the world a little differently.

Think of it less as a publication and more as a letter with the kind of words that steady us when the world moves too fast.