We've had a few nights out there this week. Beanbags dragged out into the backyard, the girls between us, all of us staring up counting satellites as they cross the sky. No plan. No reason it started beyond someone suggesting it and nobody having anywhere better to be. Some nights it's twenty minutes. One night it was hours.

Nothing happens out there. But that's the whole point.

We met at 18. Fell pregnant at 19. Had our first daughter at 20. Married at 22. There were years in there that were hard — not just on us individually, but on the two of us as a unit, at a time when we were both still working out who we were. That's life. Nobody gets the version where it's smooth the whole way through, and if they say they did, I don't believe them.

Ten years married yesterday, and to write this newsletter I went looking for some historical example of a partnership like this — the great thinker and the person who quietly kept them standing — and then I stopped, because I didn't need one. I've got my own. Elise, my wife, has been the single most consistent source of support I've had, through every version of me I've been over the last decade, including some versions I'm not particularly proud of.

Here's the part I keep sitting with though. At 20, I would never have lasted twenty minutes in a beanbag doing nothing. Everything needed to move. If something was taking too long, I wasn't interested — onto the next thing, faster, more, now. Patience wasn't a skill I had any use for, and stillness felt like wasted time, like something you did when you'd run out of better options.

This week, lying out there counting satellites, nothing to check, nothing to fix, nothing needing my attention — I wasn't bored. I wasn't waiting for it to end so I could get back to something useful. There was nowhere I'd rather have been, and I can honestly say I couldn't have asked for a more perfect moment. Ten years ago I don't think I had the capacity to feel that.

I think that's what stillness actually is. Not the absence of things happening — plenty was still happening around us, the girls arguing over who saw a satellite first, the usual noise of a house that's rarely quiet for long. Stillness is being fully in the moment you're already in, instead of half in it while some part of you is already reaching for the next thing. It's not about doing nothing. It's about not needing anything else to be happening.

Most nights it's not even the stargazing. It's an hour on the couch before bed, not doing anything in particular. No plan, no conversation that needs having, sometimes barely any talking at all. Just being in the same space, at the end of the same day, with nowhere else either of us needs to be. Just with the person we love. And that's most of what life actually looks like. It's not milestone after milestone. It's the small moments. The everyday moments. The couch moments.

And I think that's the actual measure if you want to know whether something's working — a marriage, a partnership, a life — It's not the big days — there aren't many of those, and they don't come around often enough to build a life on. It's whether you can sit in the small, forgettable, in-between moments with someone and not once feel like you'd rather be doing something else.

Ten years ago I married Elise not knowing what any of this would look like — the business we'd lose, the daughters we'd raise, the versions of me she'd have to put up with along the way. I'm grateful for the big things. The wedding, the kids, the ten years itself. But mostly I'm grateful for the couch. The beanbags. The satellites nobody's really counting properly. The little moments that don't photograph well and wouldn't make an anniversary post, which are somehow the whole point of the thing.

Ten years in, and it genuinely feels like we're just getting started. I'm looking forward to the many more moments we have to share.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson