My Sundays with Rumi Part 2
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop”
For years, this line from Rumi has been in my email signature.
Not just because it’s beautiful — but because it’s true.
And because it reminds me of something I still have to re-learn, over and over again:
our lives are not random.
The family you were born into.
The patterns you inherited.
The struggles and contradictions you keep bumping up against.
The quiet longings and the stubborn wounds.
None of it is here by accident.
None of it is here to punish you.
And none of it is meaningless.
Our lives as fractals of the whole
In nature, a fractal is a pattern that repeats at every scale. No matter how far you zoom in or out, the same shape reveals itself.
Our lives are like that too.
Each of us carries the pattern of the whole in our own story — a kind of assignment to remember, heal, and embody differently through us.
What we inherit — from family, culture, even the land we’re from — can feel like a burden.
It’s often messy, unfair, and painful.
It’s tempting to try to escape it.
But what if, instead of seeing our inheritance as a trap, we saw it as curriculum?
Not to fix the whole world.
Not to solve everything at once.
But to show up differently — one choice, one conversation, one presence at a time.
This is what I’ve come to call fractal leadership.
From performance to pattern
We’re taught to see leadership as a kind of performance: image, control, scale.
But that model is cracking.
What’s rising in its place is more subtle, more relational, more real.
Leadership rooted in coherence — the ability to live in alignment with what we know to be true.
The work is no longer about playing roles (victim, rescuer, persecutor) or managing appearances. Those roles may have helped us survive once, but they fragment us.
Instead, the work is about embodiment.
About living the pattern differently.
About letting our lives — and the truth of who we already are — ripple out into the world.
Rumi’s words remind me: you don’t have to fix everything.
You don’t have to carry it all.
You don’t even have to have all the answers.
But you do have to remember that the ocean is already in you.
From drama to dharma
When we lead from the roles we learned to play — victim, rescuer, persecutor — we stay reactive, righteous, and stuck in cycles.
But when we shift into the dharma of leadership — creator, coach, challenger — we step into something more mature.
We take responsibility for what is ours.
We challenge and support others from a place of wholeness.
We stop shrinking, overreaching, or blaming.
It’s not comfortable.
But discomfort isn’t danger — it’s just the feeling of growth.
Honesty isn’t harm — it’s what healing sounds like.
Start here. Start now.
I don’t believe we are here to play small roles in someone else’s script.
We are here to embody a pattern that wants to be restored through us.
We are here to interrupt the old story — and offer a new one through our choices.
That’s what sovereignty really means:
Not independence at all costs, but responsibility for what is truly yours to hold.
So today, I invite you to sit with this question:
🌿 What pattern are you here to embody, interrupt, or restore?
You are not just a drop.
You are the ocean — remembering itself through you.
Start here. Start now
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💬 I’d love to hear what this Rumi line awakens in you.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email.