Hey Reader,

I went to a retreat this weekend. The theme was "shifting."

To go to this, I stepped back from everything: the invoices, the projects, the calendar, all of it stopped for a weekend.

Once I learned the theme, I was thinking about driving stick: clutch down, into neutral, into the next gear. I recognized how this was my life: I've been in one low gear all year, pushing hard, revving past what the engine can hold. Moving for sure, but feeling limited. I've been burning fuel and not covering as much ground as I'm sure the more hybrid style people get in MPG (wow this analogy just keeps on giving).

In the recording booth, "neutral" is the word we all dread hearing from a director. It means flat. It means the audience checked out halfway through the scene. But for this retreat, I used the word differently.

Getting to the next gear means I have to get to neutral first. I spent most of the weekend there, and neutral wasn't numb. I felt everything. The frame around it just changed. Still there, still absorbed, just less sharp at the edges, where I usually get overwhelmed, anxious, worrisome, and do things that feel like action but aren't useful.

Let me bring it back to my reality.

I worked several Audio Description jobs this week. One had more than a thousand cues. I played intention: the music underneath what people said, shaped by what was happening in the story. Most of the cues were fast; the visuals demanded it, and there wasn't room between dialogue. Even so, there was some room. Split a sentence so a sound effect lands where it needs to. Hold a beat just long enough that the visual impact hits at the right second.

On another job, I worked with a director and an engineer I've worked with for years. We read each other now, like a shorthand language built from our professional relationship. A typo, or a bad read, we stop for barely a split second, pick back up, keep moving.

I think about flowing streams - how the water doesn't fight the rock. It finds the way around and keeps going. like that. all bubbly, too.

A newer client this same week; there was a different rhythm where we navigated around how we talked with each other; some circumstances outside both of our control meant we had some real friction, and the communication held anyway. This was a job I'd already agreed to, but I didn't know the details. I showed up and knew inside a minute I wasn't right for it. I'd been so looking forward to it though! But I knew if a blind viewer got me on that job, they'd have been pulled straight out of the story. So I called the coordinator, told the truth, asked if I could bring someone else in. My colleague was available. And lucky enough, she'd already worked with the company in a different capacity, so she was already in their system.

I walked away from a job I wanted, but it wasn't mine to do.

Add that five and a half hour flight delay on top of it to get to a screening at Carnegie Hall, where I landed when it was time to check in to my return flight. But this time, I stayed level through all of it. I trusted it would all work out, with a new kind of confidence that didn't need to push.

The next few weeks are stacked. I'm prepping week 3 of BoothCamp, live after weeks of building it (you've been on this newsletter for the last few weeks, you know!!). Board meetings for a couple of organizations I sit on. Two more productions this week. A panel at Digital Hollywood next week with a few entertainment lawyers on AI and creativity. Three panels at Comic-Con, one of them mine to produce. A handful of conversations outside my comfort zone that matter more than most of what's on the calendar.

I know how that list reads. Like I'm showing off (some of it is that). Most of it is things I've been building toward for a while, all landing at once.

What's different is the gear, this week. The stick shift and the on-ramp are the same idea: the on-ramp is like getting onto a freeway from a dead stop takes real push, and needs those lower gears. But now that I am moving, I'm not needing to spend bad energy, where I'm redlining in the wrong gear, and burning fuel I don't get back in speed. Once I'm in the right gear, the car holds a comfy cruise control 65 MPH without the push.

The cascading water finds the same path around the rock every time. It just doesn't fight the rock to do it.

The shift is more speed, less engine.

Have you felt that? Moving hard in a gear that already maxed out, when what actually gets you more speed is finding neutral first?

If that's you, or someone you know, the Lounge page just got rewritten: roysamuelson.com/lounge. I think it more accurately represents what people get from learning this Audio Description performance work, and how it impacts other areas too. I'd love your thoughts.