“The flower is made of non-flower elements.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Outside, the first real blizzard in a few years is settling over southeastern Massachusetts. The wind has been howling since dawn. The lights are flickering. The yard’s buried beneath drifting snow. I’m not going anywhere.

I’ve been thinking about harmony today — about what happens not just within things, but between them — as my old house stands solid against the wind, while I stand in the kitchen, granola in the oven, trying to get a recipe right.

This especially harsh winter has forced me to slow things down to what’s essential — and I’ve found, not for the first time, that there’s something good in that. For me, it’s meant puttering around the house, picking up old hobbies, writing more, and spending time in the kitchen.

Lately I’ve been tinkering with these bars. Granola, almond butter, miso, dark chocolate, a few other things. The recipe isn’t finished yet. Too sweet. Not enough depth. Something missing. Balance a little off. The miso was the surprise. On its own, it has no business being anywhere near a granola bar. But add it to the right combination of things, and something lifts. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. I keep coming back to that word — combination — and what it actually asks of us. Not just the quality of the parts, but the harmony between them.

We’re good at evaluating ingredients. Resumes. Rankings. Stats. We’ve built entire systems to assess the parts. What we’re less practiced at is sensing what happens between them — the relationship, the fit, the way one element somehow transforms all the others. A great ingredient and a great combination are not the same thing, and we constantly confuse them.

I notice this especially when people talk about sports teams. The conversation almost always turns to talent — who’s on the roster, who the star is — the best recruiting class. Fans and analysts understand talent. What they don’t always see is combination. The coaches understand it. They have to. Because they know that assembling the right mix of people — complementary skills, temperaments, roles — is a different art than simply collecting the best available players. Sometimes the team with less talent wins, and it isn’t luck.

There’s an alchemy that happens when the right combination comes together. In sports. In music. In a kitchen. In a room full of people who somehow, improbably, bring out the best in each other. You can’t always predict or engineer it — but you can feel it when it’s there. Both Olympic hockey teams felt it this week, and so did everyone watching.

I coached lacrosse for many years. One season, I had a talented first offensive unit — three attackmen and three midfielders — that felt almost complete. Almost. Something about the movement wasn’t right, though. We had shooters and feeders. We had dodgers. Players who wanted the ball in their hands and thrived when the game ran through them. What we didn’t have was someone comfortable in the spaces where the ball wasn’t.

In lacrosse, off-ball movement is largely invisible. It doesn’t show up in the highlight reels. But the player who reads the defense, drifts into an opening, stays patient without the ball — and then, in one quiet moment, finds a seam, catches a pass, and finishes — can change everything. Most players don’t want or know how to do this. It asks you to be peripheral for long stretches and to trust that your moment will come.

I started looking. I ran drills designed to surface that quality. I watched practice differently — not just where the ball was going, but what was happening away from it. It was detective work more than anything else.

Then I found Matt.

Matt was quiet. Humble, almost shy — and his personality was actually the first clue. The players who thrive off-ball tend to be the ones who notice what others miss, because they’re not busy announcing themselves. He fit. Not just tactically. He fit — the way the miso fits — by making everything around him better, by completing something the group didn’t know it was missing. That season, Matt led the team in goals. We won the league title.

The missing piece isn’t always the most obviously talented one. It’s the one that creates the alchemy. We hear this in music — the band that’s more than its players, the song that shouldn’t work on paper and yet does. We taste it in food. We feel it in teams, in friendships, in families. The right combination does something the individual parts simply can’t do alone. The question isn’t only how good are the parts? The question is what happens between them?

What I’ve come to understand — through coaching, through a long cooped-up winter of tinkering with granola bars — is that harmony isn’t manufactured. You can’t force it into existence by adding more or trying harder. It requires a different kind of attention. Slower. More receptive. You have to feel for it. Adjust. Stay curious without grasping. The recipe isn’t finished until something in you says, “There it is.” The lineup isn’t right until the movement on the field has a quality you can sense but not quite name. That’s a presence practice.

And it doesn’t only live in kitchens or on athletic fields. It lives anywhere you’re willing to ask not just what’s missing — but whether you might be the ingredient that completes it.

The snow’s going to fall for a while. Maybe I’ll make another batch.

— Pete

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If this resonated, you’re welcome to share it with someone who might appreciate it. And if you feel like it, you can always reply — I read every note.

Author’s note: This reflection draws on themes explored more fully in my book, The Why of Sports, where presence — not pressure — is the doorway to performance, growth, and connection.

Thanks for Reading.