A fall practice for releasing what isn't yours

During Friday's Q&A at the Ivory Tower Inner Fire Summit, the host Marie asked me a question that I've been sitting with: What's one rule you've rewritten?

I laughed because, as a recovering academic, there are quite a few! But the one I shared was about how we care with boundaries, something we've been exploring in our conversations about care without carrying.

Because the amount of suffering we absorb is not evidence of how much we care, how good we are at caring, or proof of our worthiness.

This is one of the institutional rules I've had to unlearn, and it's connected to something else I've been thinking about lately: the relationship between grief, responsibility, and our sense of purpose.

Learning to have a regular relationship with both career grief and climate grief has taught me some critical lessons. Through that grief, I began to recognize just how much responsibility I'd taken on for saving the institution, the program, and even humanity.

But no one person, or even group of people, can carry that kind of responsibility. And there's another question worth asking: What are we trying to save, and to what end?

Grief helped me see what mattered to me without assuming I had to carry the entire burden of protecting or saving it. I could still care deeply, show up, and take meaningful action, while also recognizing my own capacity and finding joy in how I contribute.

This matters whether you're staying in academia, leaving it, trying to change the system you're in, or doing meaningful work in a world full of problems.

Not everything that lands in your lap belongs to you.

And when we stop trying to save everything, we create some spaciousness to discern what actually is ours.

Which brings me to a seasonal practice I've shared before, but one I've been revisiting through the lens of deinstitutionalizing work.

The Fall Release / 4D Inventory

Start by taking inventory of everything currently occupying your time, calendar, mental and emotional energy, work, commitments, attention, creative endeavors, and social connections.

Then run those things through four questions:

• DELETE — This shouldn't exist. It doesn't fit within what matters.

• DELEGATE — I don't need to be the one to do this. Someone or something else can carry this if they want to (not necessarily if they will).

• DELAY — This doesn't need to happen now. There's so much faux urgency in organizations.

• DO — This is genuinely mine. Sometimes that also means deciding to do something now so I can get it off my plate.

If you've been with me for a while, you're probably familiar with this practice. But I want to invite you to think about it as more than a productivity tool (although it can certainly help with that).

When we approach release as a practice of deinstitutionalizing work, we add another layer of reflection:

• What am I grieving as I let this go?

• What am I making room for by releasing this?

• What becomes possible when I stop carrying what isn't mine?

Because the deinstitutionalizing part isn't just deciding what stays and what goes. It's understanding why letting something go can feel like betrayal, failure, laziness, abandonment, or even a loss of purpose.

We've been taught to attach our worth, commitment, and identities to how much we're willing to carry. So releasing something can bring up grief, even when we know that release is necessary.

But it can also create room for the things that matter most. For joy, connection, creativity, and the kind of meaningful contribution that doesn't require us to sacrifice ourselves in the process.

That's the work of reclamation. Not learning to carry everything more efficiently, but discerning what is ours to carry and what we are ready to release.