Between Empty and What the Hell

It’s early.

Too early, maybe.

That gray hour before the light decides whether it’s worth showing up.

The alarm buzzes, and I’m not even pretending to feel motivated. The air feels heavy, the kind that muffles sound. The room still smells faintly of yesterday’s coffee, a small domestic reminder that I’ve done this before.

Lately, the needle’s been stuck between empty and what the hell.

As in: what the hell do I do now?

That space between purpose and paralysis is familiar. You start to wonder if you’ve finally run out of fuel or just lost the map. I stare at the ceiling, negotiate with the morning. Five more minutes, a better start tomorrow, maybe coffee will fix it. The body bargains. The mind shrugs. Neither side really cares who wins.

Eventually, I do what I’ve trained myself to do: move first, think later.

Shoes on. Door open. Cold air.

Motion Before Motivation

The first few steps are mechanical, the kind of movement that feels like a parody of discipline. Each one a little argument with gravity.

But there’s something almost comforting about it, this small, stubborn act of motion. Discipline gets a bad reputation, as if it’s punishment. I’ve learned it’s really self-respect in motion. You move because you said you would. Because you remember that the body, unlike the mind, doesn’t lie about what’s possible.

Somewhere between steps and breath, the noise starts to clear. The day doesn’t get easier; it just gets quieter.

I’ve learned that motivation isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s friction. The act of moving creates the spark. You don’t wait for it. You make it by showing up when your head hasn’t caught up yet.

That’s what Perform on Purpose was always about. Not heroics, just presence. You show up, and somewhere along the way, meaning meets you halfway.

The Stillness Between Movements

Even while running, I notice a kind of quiet under the effort, a pocket of stillness that doesn’t ask for anything. It’s strange how often stillness feels like failure, as though if you’re not pushing, you’re falling behind.

But the more I pay attention, the more I realize the body knows what the mind resists. The pause isn’t the opposite of performance. It’s part of it. That calm between strides, that breath you almost forget to notice, it’s the space where rhythm lives.

Momentum doesn’t mean constant motion. It means the right motion, in the right sequence, at the right tempo. Every runner knows the danger of going out too fast. Every leader should, too.

Teams, like bodies, need rhythm: push, pause, integrate. The best ones don’t just drive, they pace. They know when to accelerate and when to breathe. They understand that readiness isn’t something you manufacture on demand. It’s something you protect by building in recovery.

That’s what I’ve been missing. Not drive. Not purpose. Just rhythm.

Compression Before Ignition

Somewhere around the halfway mark, I realized I hadn’t stalled. I’d condensed. The stillness I’d been dragging behind me wasn’t a void; it was density.

Weeks of half-formed thoughts, unstarted sentences, and unfinished workouts had been quietly settling, layering on top of each other like sediment finding its own weight.

I’d mistaken dormancy for depletion. What was really happening was fusion, small fragments of effort and rest collapsing inward until they became something solid enough to hold a spark. All that waiting, all that not-knowing, wasn’t wasted time. It was the compression phase, pressure building just beneath the calm.

I felt it in my stride, that subtle click when inertia gives way to momentum. Maybe I hadn’t lost my edge. Maybe I’d just been stockpiling readiness, letting it coalesce until it had nowhere left to hide. Maybe the pause had been doing the work I was too impatient to see.

When the spark finally came, it didn’t explode. It expanded. Slow, deliberate, clean.

Phase change.

The moment potential energy becomes motion again.

Stillness wasn’t silence. It was the quiet half of momentum.

Between Empty and What the Hell

By the time I got home, the light had shifted, not bright, but awake. I wasn’t fixed, but I was different.

The run hadn’t solved anything; it just reminded me that motion still lives somewhere under the static. Maybe I’d been hibernating, not hiding. Maybe what looked like burnout was just readiness condensing, waiting for the right conditions to ignite.

Inside, the coffee maker hummed its small act of faith. Steam fogged the window. The world outside was the same, but I wasn’t watching it through glass anymore.

I’m learning that momentum has a pulse, inhale and exhale, push and pause. You can’t rush either half without losing the rhythm.

So I’ll keep showing up for both: the run and the rest, the noise and the quiet. Because maybe that’s the real definition of performing on purpose, learning to hear your own rhythm again after the noise fades.

Somewhere between empty and what the hell, the next spark always seems to find me.

Next time, I’ll tell you what happened when I finally stopped trying to regenerate on the run—and started trusting the process that does the work when you let go.