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Some of the best weeks of my life start at 5:20 a.m. on a Monday.

That is when my alarm goes off for a four-mile run along the coast with my friend Becky. We run at sunrise, then jump into the ocean. By the time I drive home soaking wet and tuckered out: something in my week has already shifted.

This week, mid-run, I heard an unfamiliar sound in the distance.

I asked Becky what it was.

“Oh,” she said casually. “That is the lion at the zoo.”

Evidently, our route runs behind the zoo and apparently I’m not great at distinguishing a lion’s voice - go figure!

Hearing a lion roar while looking at the Pacific at sunrise is surreal. Six months ago, I would not have believed this could become part of my Monday routine. Not because it sounds impossible, but because my life felt smaller then.

My days were blending together: wake up, work, scroll, answer messages, think about work, sleep, repeat. I was online and in my head so much that I forgot the world could still surprise me.

That is why the idea of running within earshot of a lion shocked me. It reminded me that life is still strange and alive. That there are things waiting just outside my routine.

I had run that route before and never noticed it. Becky already knew where to listen.

There is a principle from systems theory called the law of requisite variety that I came across from a mentor of mine, Katherine, posting about this week. It is usually phrased as: only variety can absorb variety.

In plain language, when life gets more complex, your responses have to get more flexible. If the demands on your life keep changing but your internal options stay narrow, you get brittle.

Brittleness does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like numbness, irritability, doom-scrolling, or decision fatigue.

A useful way to think about it is through three levers:

Most of us spend all our energy on the first lever: optimize, filter, control. That matters. But it is incomplete.

What these Monday mornings gave me was the second and third.

More range: effort, cold water, laughter, silence, surprise.
Faster adjustment: I notice sooner when I am drifting, and I recover faster.

And I do not do this alone. I do not wake up at 5:20 because I am uniquely disciplined. I wake up because someone else is expecting me to show up.

That is what keeps sitting with me while everyone debates AI companions and the loneliness epidemic. Some of that technology may help. But the moments that brought me back to life were not optimized.

So here is the real question I am sitting with this week:

Do I have enough response variety to match the complexity I am carrying?

The lion was always there. I just needed someone beside me who already knew where to listen.