“Monday 5 Things” ….. Five For Two Types …..
January 12th, 2026 by D. Paul Graham
Ever curious and always amused by the quirks of life, join D. Paul Graham each Monday for more M5T pondering.
"Disciplined Formation”, photo by D. Paul Graham. Blue Angels Fly-By, Marine Corp Air Station Beaufort SC, Circa 2019
Over the past year, I’ve made a conscious effort to change the ways in which I pay attention. Not in a disciplined, monk-like way, but in the way that happens when life slows just enough for you to notice what you’ve failed to see.
I started recognizing patterns. Not the loud obvious ones that divide us, but the subtle ones that whisper, showing up in ordinary moments. What and who’s around you. What stays. What fades. How people enter a room. The way conversations either deepen or drift. Choices made. Silence that fills space. Who shows up. What lingers after people leave.
What I’ve come to realize is that the most important differences aren’t announced.
They don’t argue. They don’t trend. They reveal themselves quietly, over time. What keeps showing up is that much of life seems to come in twos. Not opposites in conflict, but options to be aware of. Which, as it turns out, is where choice lives. This morning’s M5T is aware of five for two types.
1. TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE: THOSE WHO ARRIVE, & THOSE WHO ARE PRESENT. Arrival is a physical act. Presence is a moral one. We’ve all been in rooms full of people who technically showed up. Their bodies in chairs, their names on the list, all the while, their attention is hovered elsewhere. Eyes drifting. Phones within reach. Minds already halfway to the next conversation, the next obligation, the next exit.
Arrival checks a box. Presence accepts responsibility. There are those who step fully into the moment. They make eye contact without urgency. They listen without scanning the horizon. They don’t perform attentiveness. They offer it. They don’t just occupy space. They settle into it. Presence can’t be rushed. It resists multitasking. It asks for patience in a world addicted to motion. It requires nerve, because to be present is to be seen without armor or distraction.
Arrival says, “I’m here.” Presence says, “I’m with you.” One simply attends. The other participates in being alive.
2. TWO TYPES OF LISTENERS: THOSE WHO WAIT TO SPEAK, & THOSE WHO STAY. Most of us were taught how to speak. Very few of us were taught how to stay. Waiting to speak is often mistaken for listening. It looks attentive enough. Steady nods and the right facial expressions, but beneath it, the mind is busy rehearsing. Measuring. Preparing a response before the other person has finished their thought. It listens for an opening, not for meaning.
Staying is different. Staying resists the urge to interrupt, fix, or redirect. It allows silence to do some of the work. It gives emotion time to surface before explanation rushes in. Staying understands that not every moment needs commentary. One kind of conversation leaves you informed. The other leaves you understood.
Waiting to speak gathers facts, opinions, and talking points. Staying offers something rarer. Space. Space to finish a thought. Space to say the thing underneath the thing. Space to exhale.
One listener collects information. The other offers refuge. And in a world full of noise, refuge is its own form of generosity.
3. TWO TYPES OF WORK: WORK THAT CONSUMES & WORK THAT REVEALS. Not all exhaustion is the same. Some work drains us because it fractures us. Demanding that we perform, posture, and pretend until the distance between who we are and who we’re required to be becomes unsustainable. It consumes energy not just through effort, but through misalignment. You’re busy. You’re productive. But somehow, you’re disappearing.
Other work costs energy but returns meaning. It demands focus and discipline, sometimes sacrifice, but it doesn’t ask you to abandon yourself in the process. You’re finished and tired but not diminished. You’re spent, but intact.
The world is fluent in measuring productivity. Output. Efficiency. Scale. The soul measures something quieter called alignment. Alignment doesn’t mean ease. It means honesty. Alignment means the work is asking something real of you and giving you something real back in return.
One sort of work uses you up. The other introduces you to yourself. And over time, that difference becomes impossible to ignore.
4. TWO TYPES OF PAIN: PAIN THAT HARDENS, & PAIN THAT SHAPES. Pain arrives in every life, whether invited or not. It ignores timing, preparation, and fairness. What matters most is not that it comes, but what we allow our pain to become.
Hardening is a natural response. It builds walls. Lowers expectations. Sharpens edges. It says, “Never again,” and means it. In the short term, it feels like strength. Like control. But walls protect by closing things out. Including what we need.
Shaping requires a different kind of resolve. It allows pain to carve rather than calcify. It doesn’t deny what hurt but refuses to let the wounds have the final word. Shaping asks quieter, harder questions. “What now? What’s next? Who am I becoming because of this?”
Hardness preserves the heart by sealing it off. Shaping cultivates it by making it deeper. Both responses are understandable. Only one keeps us human.
5. TWO TYPES OF LIVES: CURATED & LIVED. A curated life is carefully edited. It selects what is shown and quietly removes what obscures the picture. Rough edges are softened. Messy chapters are trimmed. Social media posts show only the surface. A curated life is a story arranged and managed to make sense from a facade.
A lived life is less orderly and far more honest. It carries contradictions. It allows for unfinished sentences, wrong turns, failure, and moments that don’t photograph well but matter deeply to the people inside them.
A curated life is fluent in appearance. A lived life is fluent in experience. One asks, “How does this look?” The other asks, “Does this matter?” One is optimized for approval. The other is shaped by meaning. Only one of them feels like it matters. Only one feels like home.
Here’s to a week of recognizing we are rarely just one type. Awareness is the hinge on which everything opens. And once we notice, we can choose which type we want to be.
© 2026 D. Paul Graham, All Rights Reserved
Paul continues to practice intentional awareness and choosing between two types. Results may vary.
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