I’m not going to lie: this has not been the easiest year, to say the least.
I know we say that about many years. And, if I’m honest, I’ve always waited for the year to be over before saying it out loud. This time, I’m saying it while I’m still in it.
There has been a lot of personal stuff. Coming to terms with the fact that we’re all getting older, and that with that comes a little more to deal with physically. Having my moral compass tested to a degree I never imagined would be necessary. I’m happy to say we stood firm. But the cost of standing up is something we don’t talk about nearly enough.
The personal things stayed mostly unspoken, as I suppose they do for most of us. And I found myself returning, more and more, to familiar things. The things that ground me. The things that make life feel manageable when everything else feels a little too much.So we got into the car and went to the West Coast.
It’s a complex part of South Africa in every possible way. The weather is unpredictable, even more so than Cape Town’s. The landscape is strange and beautiful: part Karoo, part beach. Here, lamb and seafood somehow both make perfect sense.
But the best part of the trip was the thunder and lightning. Lying there, listening to the rain hammer against the roof, it felt almost as if the heavens were screaming. Letting out everything that 2026 has come to mean for me. What was missing, though, was petrichor. That unmistakable smell of rain on dry earth. The smell that tells you relief is coming, or perhaps that it has already arrived. Maybe it’s missing because I’m writing this while I’m still in the middle of it. Or maybe it’s just the West Coast.
Because life isn’t neat.
It is difficult, and beautiful, and hard, and happy. It is loss and laughter. It is standing your ground and then needing somewhere quiet to recover from having done so. It is the storm and the stillness afterwards. Perhaps that’s why the West Coast feels so familiar. Maybe the West Coast is what life is. And business, I think, is much the same. We spend an awful lot of time talking about resilience in entrepreneurship. About pushing through. Staying the course. Getting back up. Finding the opportunity in the difficulty.
All of which is true. But I think there is another part of resilience that we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes you don’t push through. Sometimes you stop. You get in the car. You go somewhere that reminds you who you are when you aren’t being a founder, a leader, a wife, a parent, an attorney, or the person everyone is expecting something from. You listen to the rain. You let the thunder say the things you haven’t had the words for.
And then, eventually, you go home.
Not necessarily with everything figured out. Not necessarily with the answers. Just a little more able to carry what comes next. Perhaps that’s the real lesson of entrepreneurship too. We don’t have to be unbreakable. We just have to remember that the storm is not the whole story.
Sometimes, there is still rain to come before the petrichor. And sometimes, that’s okay.