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There is a particular moment that never happens at an airport. The one where you watch a landscape change slowly outside a window — forest giving way to farmland, farmland to coast, the light shifting as you move from one region into another. Where you feel the distance you’ve covered in your body rather than…
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I don’t have children. I want to say that at the start, plainly, because it matters. I’m not writing this from the inside of parenthood. I haven’t been woken at 3am by a small person who needs something only I can give — or had to strip a bed and scrub projectile vomit off the…
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Asking for help is supposed to be the obvious part. And yet, for so many people, it’s the hardest. You’re more irritable than usual and you can’t quite explain why. Your body feels heavy in a way that sleep doesn’t shift. There’s a fuzziness in your head that makes simple decisions harder than they should…
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Rest sounds simple. Until you try it. If you’re here because you’ve tried to rest and found that you don’t actually know how — that stopping just makes you restless or guilty rather than calm — here’s the short version: that’s not a failure on your part. Rest is a skill, not an instinct, and…
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This post isn’t about burnout. Not the full, crashed, can’t-get-out-of-bed kind. Not the kind that sends you to the doctor and keeps you home for weeks. This is about something quieter and more common than that. The gradual filling of a bucket that most of us are walking around with — the one that, when…
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If you’ve ever lain awake at night with a mind that won’t stop running, even though your body is exhausted and everything around you is quiet, here’s the short version of what’s actually happening: your nervous system hasn’t received the signal that it’s safe to rest. Nervous system regulation simply means the process of coming…
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There is a version of slow living that looks very beautiful on the internet. Linen curtains. A sourdough loaf cooling on a wooden board. Someone walking barefoot through a garden with a cup of tea, unhurried, unbothered, with apparently nowhere else to be. And then there is your actual life. The alarm, the commute, the…
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I didn’t choose slow living. Slow living chose me — or rather, burnout chose it for me, and I followed along because there was nothing else left to do. I’ve written before about what burnout looks like when it arrives, and what happens in the aftermath. But I haven’t written much about what it actually…
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There’s a particular kind of morning that only exists in summer. The light is already golden but the air is still cool, the birds are mid-conversation, and the day hasn’t yet become the heavy, slow thing it will be by afternoon. On the hottest days, I’m up by five to catch it — doing tai…
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There’s a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with living somewhere beautiful and taking it entirely for granted. I’ve walked past the Semois river more times than I can count without really stopping. I’ve driven through Ny in summer — past all those overflowing flower boxes, geraniums tumbling out of every window — and thought…
