Hello Reader,

In October 2020, I published a short piece on Medium called "Be a Goldfish." Two minutes to read, maybe less. The world was inside out that fall, and a new show about an American football coach coaching English football was making a lot of us feel better than we had any right to feel.

There's a scene early on. A player can't shake a mistake he made mid-match. It's written all over him, play after play. Ted jogs over and asks him what the happiest animal on earth is. A goldfish, he tells him. Because it's got a ten-second memory.

What I wrote back then was true: learn from your mistakes, don't dwell on them. Being a goldfish isn't about ignoring the past. It's about not letting the past own the present.

Six years later, I think that reading was true but small.

The 2020 version of me treated the goldfish as a lesson about mistakes. Bounce back. Shake it off. Get on with the next play. Useful advice, and I've given some version of it a hundred times since. But somewhere in the years between that piece and this one, the scene changed for me. The ten-second memory was never really about forgetting failure. It's about where a goldfish is forced to live: right now. The only place any work can actually happen.

The goldfish isn't resilient. It's unburdened.

I couldn't have written that sentence in 2020, because I hadn't done the work yet. You can't see what an idea is holding until you've carried it a while.

Which brings me to why I'm writing this now. On Wednesday, Ted Lasso came back. A show everyone assumed was finished didn't fail or fade. It just stopped. And now it's returned changed — a different job, a different team, the same self underneath.

I'm doing something similar this week: returning to a six-year-old piece of my own. And here's the thing about returns. Neither of us comes back the same. The show didn't, I haven't, and the idea at the centre of that little essay hasn't either. If you've been reading along lately, you'll recognize the thread: stopping isn't falling behind. Sometimes it's just what happens before you come back with more to give.

The Final Flicker

A goldfish forgets in ten seconds. It took me six years to understand what mine had been holding onto — and that letting go of a moment isn't the same as losing what it taught you. Whatever play you're replaying right now: the next one is the only one you can still swim toward.

Talk soon,
Mike

P.S. This Wednesday's Lantern Lyceum is about rules and regulations — why the first kind snaps and the second kind bends, and how to tell which ones are running your days. Live on YouTube, Wednesday, August 12 at 9:00 AM Pacific. Free, as always.

Thanks for reading. Your time is valuable, and I don’t take it for granted. In a world pulling us in all directions, thanks for choosing The Lantern.