My name is Saldon, and this past spring I had the privilege of serving as a Strategic Operations Intern with the Shifting Waters Leadership Institute. When I first stepped into the role, I imagined my days would be filled with logistics, planning, and the kind of behind-the-scenes work that keeps an organization running. And while that was true, what I did not anticipate was how profoundly the work would turn the lens back on me.

As part of my internship, I had the opportunity to assist with and observe SWLI’s Unfinished Series workshops. Each session in the series is designed to awaken something dormant within its participants, to pull leaders out of autopilot and into presence. But it was the second workshop in the series, Living Between the Ticks: Time, Attention & Sacred Urgency, that stopped me entirely in my tracks.

The premise of the workshop is deceptively simple: we do not own time, we are merely entrusted with it. We live as if the years are guaranteed, racing through our days on the assumption that there will always be more time – more time to call home, more time to be present, more time to be the person we keep promising ourselves we will become. What the workshop asks you to do is to sit still long enough to question that assumption.

And so I did. 

I asked myself something I had been too busy to ask before: If I died tomorrow, would I be happy with the life I have led? Would I have any regrets?

I am a student at Cornell University, and for as long as I can remember, my identity has been inseparable from my academic performance. The pressure there is immense, and it is easy, natural, even, to let it become the entire frame through which you view your worth and your days. Grades, internships, recruiting cycles, GPA. The metrics multiply, and slowly, they begin to crowd out everything else.

The Living Between Ticks workshop shook that belief loose. It did not tell me that ambition was wrong or that academic excellence did not matter. What it showed me was that I had, somewhere along the way, confused urgency with importance. I had been so focused on what was pressing that I had lost sight of what was valuable. 

That night, I sat down at the dinner table with my parents and simply asked them about their lives. Not out of obligation, not in passing, but with genuine curiosity. I asked them about their childhoods, what their homes felt like, what they dreamed about, who they were before they were my parents. In that conversation, I discovered people I had somehow forgotten were there, not just as my parents, but as human beings with full, vivid lives of their own.

It was one of the most meaningful evenings I can remember. And it cost nothing except the intention to show up.

That is what SWLI’s mission, developing leaders from the inside out, truly means in practice. It is not a slogan. It is a reorientation. In a world that moves faster and faster as time goes on, SWLI creates spaces where you are invited to slow down long enough to ask the questions that actually matter. Not what can I accomplish? but who am I becoming? Not how do I optimize my time? but what am I giving my time to?

The older we get, the more life fills in around us. Responsibilities accumulate, schedules tighten, and the people and moments that matter most can quietly recede into the background noise of everything we think we are supposed to be doing. I did not realize how far I had drifted from what I valued until the workshop held up a mirror and asked me to look.

I am leaving this internship with sharpened operational skills, yes. But more than that, I am leaving with a renewed commitment to the relationships that anchor me, a deeper appreciation for the ordinary moments I used to rush past, and a question I intend to keep asking myself long after this summer ends: Am I spending my time on what I actually love?

SWLI taught me that the truest form of leadership begins with that question. 

And the courage to answer it honestly.