First sent to Fieldstone Letter subscribers on 11 June 2026.
Most of the leaders I know have stopped noticing that they’re cut off from two things.
The first is the physical world. Not the world as an idea, but actual terrain: ground with weight and temperature and resistance. The working environment removes it so systematically that, after enough years, most leaders have lost the felt memory of being somewhere real. Tile, carpet, airport terminal, open-plan floor. The body becomes irrelevant to the work. So does the location.
The second is less obvious. It is the experience of being with other people in a genuine way. Not managing them, not networking, not collaborating toward an output. Just being in the same difficult place together, with nothing between them except what they’re carrying and how they respond to what’s in front of them.
You can run on the fumes of both for a long time. Senior leadership selects for people who can. The calibration you lose is harder to measure than performance: the sense of what you actually think, when there’s no agenda to orient around. The trust that builds when you’ve moved through something difficult together and the difficulty was real.
I spent the better part of two decades believing that if I moved faster, the pressure would resolve. It never did. It compounded. The leaders I work with are not short of drive. They have more of it than almost anyone. What they have lost is the ability to stop without feeling that something has gone wrong. The drive that built the career has quietly become the thing that runs it, and it has no off switch.
Robert Sapolsky’s work on chronic stress describes what happens next: a system built to handle short bursts of threat is left switched on for years. The body adapts. The part of the brain that is supposed to be doing the actual leading goes quiet. You keep performing. You stop deciding well.
This is the part no one warns you about. The decline does not feel like decline. It feels like being busy. The calendar is full, the output is real, the results still arrive. And underneath it, the capacity to think clearly about what actually matters is thinning out, one reactive day at a time.
At mile 191 of the Moab 240, I wasn’t managing anything. Desert, cold, three days of continuous movement. Two other people were running alongside me. The terrain didn’t care who we were. Neither did we. What we were was together, in the same dark, holding the same ground.
Somewhere in that dark I stopped. Not because I had a plan. Because there was nothing left to push with. And in that forced stillness I saw, with a clarity I hadn’t had in years, exactly which things in my life I’d been avoiding by staying in motion.
Stillness is not the reward for the work. It is the condition that makes the work possible.
My co-founder, Marsha Prospere, has built her coaching practice on exactly this, and the practice that follows is hers.
So here is the one thing worth trying before the inbox takes you tomorrow. Ten minutes, before the day’s momentum starts, with a single question: what am I currently too busy to look at? Do not solve it. Just let yourself see it. The leaders who last are not the ones who never stop. They are the ones who have built somewhere to stop.
That is the experience Root Astro was built to return.
Ninety minutes from Manhattan, the land changes. The Shawangunk Mountains lift on one side and fall away into wetland on the other, and the property sits at the seam between them.
Up on the ridge run the Long Path and the Shawangunk Ridge Trail, two of the longest footpaths in New York, past rocky overlooks and cold trout streams through the Gobbler’s Knob State Forest. White-tailed deer, bobcat, and black bear move through it. Down in the valley sits the Basha Kill, the largest freshwater marsh in southeastern New York: three thousand acres of open water and reed, more than two hundred bird species, bald eagles and ospreys nesting overhead, river otters and bowfin working the channels beneath a surface that goes to water lilies by late summer. Ridge trail in the morning, a kayak through the marsh in the afternoon.
Device-free, by design. Far enough off the grid that the quiet does the rest.
Read On
What Founder Burnout Actually Feels Like (And Why a Weekend Retreat Won’t Fix It) The version of burnout that doesn’t look like burnout, because you’re still performing.
Hard: Chapter One The book, on the questions we outrun by staying busy. Chapters arrive as they’re written.
The Power of Strategic Rest Marsha Prospere on treating rest as a strategic asset rather than a reward, and the practices that protect it.
The field does not get cleared by working harder. It gets cleared one heavy stone at a time, set down where it can hold weight.
Lee & Marsha