On softer seasons
What I've been thinking about since turning thirty-seven — about rest, about ambition, and the quiet, almost-imperceptible way a life rearranges itself.
I turned thirty-seven in January, and the thing that has surprised me most about it is how little I have wanted to do. Not in a worrying way. Not in a tired or hollow way. Just — less, and more quietly. Less ambition, less noise, less of the busyness I used to mistake for a life. I keep thinking this might be what a softer season feels like.
I wasn't expecting it. All through my twenties and most of my early thirties, I built up momentum the way you build a sandcastle: packed tight, a little defensive, a lot of effort for something the next wave was going to take back anyway. I had a big career. I had goals that came with timelines. I was, I think, a slightly exhausted version of the person I wanted to be, and I didn't notice because I was running.
Something in me slowed down
What happened wasn't dramatic. I didn't burn out, exactly. I didn't have a crisis. One week, in the middle of some otherwise ordinary December, I realized I had been reading the same book for a month — not because I didn't like it, but because I kept falling asleep on page twelve, exhausted by a day I had filled with meetings I hadn't needed to take. I put the book down and thought: I would like to finish it. That is the best way I can describe the beginning.
From there, a lot of small things began shifting. I started saying no to lunches I didn't actually want to have. I stopped volunteering for every committee at the kids' school. I let the laundry pile up on Tuesdays. I stopped replying to emails after 6 p.m. and watched, with some astonishment, the world continue to exist.
I think a softer season is just the part where you stop proving yourself to people who were never asking.
It isn't about doing less
That's the thing I keep trying to explain to my mom, who worries I'm getting lazy. It isn't about doing less. It's about doing fewer things, each of them more fully. I am no less productive, but I am so much less performative. I am still writing. I am still raising my kids. I am still trying to be a good wife and a decent friend and a person in my community. I am just doing those things at a pace my own body recognizes.
A softer season has, for me, looked like longer walks and slower breakfasts and one hobby I am not good at (watercolor) that I am pursuing anyway. It has looked like a tidier house, not because I'm working harder at it, but because I care about fewer things loudly, and the things I do care about I take care of. It has looked like a closed laptop on weekends. It has looked like, for the first time in years, eight hours of sleep most nights.
What I had to let go of
To get here, I had to quietly put down some things I had been carrying for a long time without realizing. The idea, for example, that my worth was somehow measured by my productivity. The idea that rest was something you earned. The idea that a person in her late thirties should be building an empire, or a following, or a brand. The idea — the sneaky one — that if I slowed down, everyone else would pass me.
They have passed me, in some sense. I watch friends take new jobs and accept big promotions and move to bigger houses and I feel, mostly, proud of them. And then I go water my herbs. The life I used to want is not the life I want now, and I have made peace with that slowly, with many false starts, and almost always on the back porch before 7 a.m.
What I'm still learning
I am not, I want to be very clear, some sort of zen person now. I get cranky about the dishwasher. I still lose my temper with Ellie over the tablet. I still, occasionally, check my email on a Sunday because I can't help myself. Softening isn't a destination. It's a practice, and I am terrible at a lot of it.
But I think what I've learned in the past year is that you can rearrange a life without tearing it down. You can change without announcing it. You can be ambitious in small, private ways — for a slow morning, for a paid-off credit card, for a body that feels good, for a marriage that is still tender after fourteen years. Those are also ambitions. They are just ambitions that don't look like anything on a résumé.
If you're in one of these seasons too
I get a lot of notes from readers who describe something similar — a gentle, inward turn that has surprised them, especially if they were the achiever type. If that's you, I hope this essay is a small permission slip. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to name it.
You are allowed to want less. You are allowed to want quiet. You are allowed to live a life that looks, from the outside, a little boring — and to find, from the inside, that it's the most interesting thing that has ever happened to you.
I'll be out on the porch.
