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Six year ago, I have had an increasingly strong desire to stop the bus and simply get off.
But not in a dramatic “sell everything I own and move to an isolated cabin with an open fireplace in the Pyrenées mountains” sort of way.
Although admittedly, after one particularly absurd day recently involving bureaucracy, passwords, a missing document, and technology asking me to “verify I am human” seventeen times, the cabin did seem briefly attractive.
No, what I mean is something subtler than that. Slower. Simpler.
I wanted to stop treating every day like an endurance event.
To stop feeling as though life is one long obstacle course, day after day, after day.
I wanted a different life. I wanted to stop struggling to survive and make time to savour the simple things in life.
I have been thinking about it for a long time, before I took the plunge. Not obsessively, but in the way a quiet longing tends to surface — when I was driving along our often deserted country roads, while I was feeding the feed-us-now-or-we’re-going-to-die horses, when I was standing in my kitchen, brewing a cup of coffee. I had a feeling that there had to be another way to move through a day. That somewhere underneath the rushing and hustling and scrolling and the relentless forward motion, there is a life I actually wanted to live.
Maybe you know this feeling too.
Perhaps this happens to more and more women in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
We have spent decades carrying things.
Families.
Careers.
Worries.
Responsibilities.
Other people’s expectations.
Our own (utterly unrealistic) expectations.
We have held everything (and just about everyone) together with tired graciousness and increasingly expensive skincare.
And somewhere along the way, many of us quietly forgot how to simply “be” in our lives.
Not optimise them.
Not improve them.
Not reinvent them for the fifth time.
Just… live them. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting our lives, intentionally.
Maybe we need to make drastic changes in our lives to be able to do this, maybe not. I did not. I loved living in the French countryside, I loved hosting my Camino de Santiago retreats, and seeing my horses contentedly grazing in their meadows made my heart sing.
But I was so tired.
Mine was a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with how much sleep I’ve had. It was the tiredness of disconnection. I drank my coffee, but I didn’t taste it. I noticed the rampant wild mint, but I didn’t smell it. I saw the sunset, took a picture, but didn’t sit down inside it. The day happened, and then it was over, and it left very little behind.
I found myself craving ordinary things with almost embarrassing intensity.
The aroma of a cup of coffee brewed from scratch, using the best beans I could afford.
A long, unhurried lunch in the garden, laughing with friends, while bees drift lazily from flower to flower.
Slipping between fresh, fragrant sheets, dried in the wind.
Big, juicy fire-engine-red tomatoes, still warm from the sun.
The sound of hoofbeats on gravel.
Soup made with love, bubbling gently on the stove while rain runs down the windows.
Reading in bed while the house settles into silence around me.
Walking slowly enough to notice the endless diversity of wildflowers, instead of merely counting my steps.
I think many of us are yearning for this now.
Not because we have become lazy.
Not because we have “lost direction.”
But because something inside us has changed.
We are no longer impressed by the things that once dazzled us.
The endless striving. The desperate need to collect possessions.
The busyness disguised as productivity.
The strange modern habit of treating exhaustion as a personality trait.
More and more, I think what many of us want is not a bigger life.
It’s a simpler one.
A slower one.
A life with room to breathe inside it.
Days with more texture. Days to share, talking with other women who feel the same pull — toward slowness, toward simplicity, toward a life that is savoured rather than simply survived.
I see this all the time on my Camino retreats.
Women arrive stressed to breaking point from years of holding everything together.
And then, after a few days of walking quietly through the French countryside, something begins to loosen.
Their breathing slows.
Then their faces soften.
Then they begin noticing things again:
Church bells ringing out across the fields.
Golden sunlight falling across an old stone wall.
A shared bottle of wine at dusk.
The profound luxury of not needing to rush anywhere.
And slowly, almost shyly, joy returns.
Not the loud kind sold to us online.
Something softer.
More sustainable.
A new kind of awareness.
Almost as though they are remembering who they were before life became so busy.
I wonder if you feel this too.
If you do — if any of this sounds like something you’ve been carrying around but haven’t quite found the words for — I’d love for you to stay in contact.
I’m building something here. A community for women who are feeling their way toward a different kind of life. Women who are done with always being busy, who are curious about what it might feel like to stop rushing long enough to actually arrive somewhere.
There is a fear, I think, that slowing down means falling behind. That if you stop rushing, you will miss something. But consider what is already being missed in the rushing: the flavour of your breakfast, the colour of the sky on your commute, the sound of your own house in the early morning before anyone else is awake. These are not nothing. These are, arguably, everything.
The simpler, slower, savoured life is not a life of less. It is a life of more — more texture, more awareness, more of the quiet pleasure that has been there all along, waiting only for you to pay attention.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m figuring this out alongside you. But I do believe there is something powerful in finding your people — in being reminded that your longing is not for a fantasy, but for a compass.
Or join one of my retreats.
