Reading · Decks and Diapers

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A French Canadian colleague told me she was taking a month off this summer … not to go anywhere specific, just to dériver.

I didn’t know the word. She explained it: intentional drifting. Moving with some direction, but without a fixed destination. Letting the current take you somewhere interesting rather than forcing yourself toward a predetermined point.

Every year I choose a word to live by .. something to imbibe. Dériver is mine for 2026. (It also makes me sound very sophisticated, which I’m not mad about.)

I’m currently on maternity leave. Baby number two arrived late last year. I know exactly how fast it goes. There’s a part of me that genuinely wants to be here … fully, unhurriedly here. With my infant, soaking it all in unrushed.

And then there’s the other part.

My work-self. The part watching AI reshape entire industries in real time. The part quietly auditing herself every few days … should I be learning to code, should I be building tools, should I be spending naptime keeping up?

Earlier this week I found a note in my phone … written with a few business school classmates, mapping where we each needed to be by 2028. A decade after graduating. I remember how certain it felt.

Reading it now, I laughed.

Not unkindly. But the person who wrote that note had made a specific kind of error …not a professional one, but a personal one. She had not anticipated, could not have anticipated, what becoming a mother once and then twice would actually demand from a person.

It was an unknown unknown.

A complete blind spot. She thought the self who made the plan would be the same self who executed it. She thought sheer force … hard work, determination, the willingness to bulldoze through … would be enough. She hadn’t yet learned that sometimes the ground moves. That sometimes you move. And that neither is a problem to be solved.

Her professional vision stayed frozen: titles, scope, trajectory. Locked in place as though the person pursuing them would remain unchanged.

I am not unchanged.

And now I’m on maternity leave with my second, watching AI move at a speed that makes stillness feel like a strategic error.

I see the LinkedIn posts … the new certifications, the apps people are building on weekends, the courses people are taking, the quiet reshuffling happening inside corporations. The rational part of me knows that six to ten months don’t change a career.

But the AI-rational part knows that six to ten months right now might be a decade of change compressed into a single season. And I’m watching it from the sidelines.

That’s the specific texture of this anxiety. It’s not that I’ve lost my ambition … I haven’t. I am still driven. I still want to do interesting things in the world.

It's that I've always been someone who wants to be in the arena, playing the game. Right now I'm not. And the arena is being rebuilt while I'm out.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m still the person who checks LinkedIn during nap time, still carrying a low hum of urgency that doesn’t fully switch off. But I’m slowly learning that the anxiety isn’t wrong exactly … it’s just pointed at the wrong thing.

Being married to a plan written for a past version of yourself isn’t ambition. It’s just anxiety with a spreadsheet.

Dériver isn’t about giving up the drive. It means loosening your grip on a map drawn by someone you no longer are.

I’m not there yet. But I’m trying. And right now, in this season, that may be enough.

The world isn’t going to slow down and wait. But maybe the move isn’t to run faster … it’s to get better at navigating moving water.

If you’re holding a plan written by a past version of yourself … maybe it’s okay to put it down for a while.

🎙️ This week’s Running Note is a short one … but it might stay with you.

Running Notes #2: What Toronto Taught Me About Being Many Things at Once — I’ve been thinking about how this city holds four completely different versions of itself across the seasons. And how maybe we’re allowed to do the same.

Under 5 minutes. One reflection question at the end. Perfect for a walk or your commute.

The Coffee Chats and Open Tabs will be back in the next edition.

If you find yourself with a little extra time, maybe you use it to go through the archives and rediscover an old conversation I had shared.

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

Dériver

And then there’s the other part.

Reading it now, I laughed.

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