I saw a family at the lake the other day with their Blackstone.
And listen, this lake is not particularly impressive. 😂 It is certainly not what I’m used to back home in California. There’s dirt everywhere. It’s a little crusty, but there was water. There were trees. There was a fountain and this family found themselves a good spot, brought the grill out, and created a whole little world for themselves.
Noticing that moment made me realize how deeply I have been craving rhythm with pleasure built into it.
Not a vacation or some elaborate itinerary that requires $4,000 and six months of planning. This rhythm also does not include waiting until life finally calms down enough for everybody to be happy and have the time to put in the effort to go.
I mean creating intentional interruptions to ordinary stress.
Maybe Wednesday was f*cking terrible, or your work was chaotic, the kids were overstimulated after school, everybody is tired and somebody still has homework and there are dishes in the sink and emails you haven’t answered.
Okay.
Let’s go get Subway sandwiches and sit by the fountain.
That’s it.
We aren’t solving the logistics of our lives tonight. We’re eating sandwiches outside at the closest lake or park—where ever you can go to decompress and connect with the outdoors. Saturday morning we load up the grill, grab the chairs. Throw the pop-up tent in the car. Bring some books, snacks, water, a football, whatever. Drive thirty minutes to wherever there’s some grass and water. Set everything up and stay there for six hours.
You can read.
You can nap.
You can talk.
You can be on your phone for a little while.
The kids can run around.
Somebody starts cooking.
There is absolutely nothing to accomplish except being there. The thought of this activity is something profoundly regulating about creating spaces in our lives where nothing is being demanded from us.
We spend so much of adulthood responding.
What time is practice? Did you pay the bill? What’s for dinner? Did you call them back? Who’s picking this up? The car needs an oil change. We need groceries. What are we doing about the thing we argued about Tuesday? Somebody needs something. Something needs fixing. Something needs cleaning. We live on Logistics Highway and then wonder why everybody in the car hates each other or can’t get along. When I think about family I think of the beauty in the hustle and bustle. The beauty in the chaos of school mornings, trying to get the kids or yourself into the car and getting the week started. Closing the day together and navigating the extracurricular events or maybe even some home demands. However, despite the beautify of that life moving forward in motion. It also comes with getting stuck on what has to get done so much so that we forget to remain present while living through it.
Relationships need a Play Highway, too. There has to be somewhere we can get off the road of doing and remember that we actually like being alive together. A difficult week can end with, “Tomorrow morning we’re getting breakfast burritos and going to the river.”
That’s the plan.
Nobody needs to earn it first.
The house doesn’t have to be completely clean before we leave. Every problem doesn’t need to be resolved. Nobody has to be in the perfect mood. We don’t have to wait until we’re financially abundant enough to take some enormous vacation. We can bring the breakfast burritos to the river. What I have noticed in society is that sometimes we confuse numbing with recovery time, or decompressing. Going to the bar every Friday might feel like blowing off steam. Scrolling for four hours might feel like rest. Getting high and disappearing into a couch rot session might feel like decompression. Sometimes maybe that’s exactly what we want or may even need in some seasons.
But I’m becoming interested in another question:
What actually restores me?
What brings me back into my body?
What makes time slow down?
What makes me look around and notice where I am?
What makes the people I love feel like people again instead of additional responsibilities?
I don’t know about y’all, but I grew up with productivity being what calculates your worthiness, but more importantly, it is what grants you permission to do nothing. Only when you get your stuff done and the doing nothing must serve a purpose to something else that is contributing to the logistics highway. Why is it that doing nothing simply contribute to your battery recharging or resting your body, your mind. Why can’t that be good enough. It’s a way to agree on blowing and reducing the pressure that gets accumulated throughout the days.
Sometimes recovery looks like packing the cooler, driving twenty minutes away.
Sometimes it’s music playing while somebody stands over a little grill, or it’s your dog lying underneath your chair while you’re reading.
Sometimes it’s everybody sitting around talking about absolutely nothing important, and maybe that’s part of what I’ve been craving when I say I want to live again.
I want a life built around recovery periods.
I want to start adding pleasure into ordinary weeks instead of saved for some imaginary future where everything has finally been “handled.” I want Sunday morning adventures. Walks somewhere beautiful. Dinner outside because the weather feels good. Windows open when it rains, random drives. Apple Hill in the fall. A blanket at the park. A sandwich by the water on a Wednesday when everybody has had enough.
I want to stop treating joy like the dessert we get after finishing life, beucase if we are being honest with ourselves… When are we even finished?
There will always be another bill.
Another deadline.
Another hard conversation.
Another stressful season.
Another thing that needs our attention.
So maybe part of our mission with rewiring out of resentment isn’t creating a life without stress it’s learning how to build a life where stress doesn’t get every room in the house. Stress is a radically accepted part of being human that we include specific rhythms of joy and play or scheduled silence outdoors as a means to manage the stress we have accepted as apart of the life. If we can radically accept stress as part of the every day experience, maybe we can carve a time and space where pleasure has somewhere to live, too. Where the people we love aren’t only the people we solve problems beside, go through conflict, or survive life with.
They’re also the people we sit underneath trees with.
And maybe sometimes healing a tired nervous system really is that ordinary.
A grill.
A tree.
Some water.
Something good to eat.
And nowhere else we need to be.
So as I write this, I ask you, the reader: What is something you will do today to bring a sense of rhythm into your life? The only catch is that the rhythm must have pleasure built into it.
For me, it’s going for evening walks, BUT no podcast or learning videos. Just music, or listening to the sound of the world buzzing around me. It’s deciding I’m going to take my paddle board to the lake. Maybe I’m going to see a movie that evening or meet up for dinner with a friend. Whatever it is, I hope it brings you joy, laughter, and a taste of just how close relief can be when we give ourselves permission to experience it.
I also encourage you during this time to just be. Maybe leave the crime podcasts at home and sit with being in the now. Turn off some of the noise and distractions—the news, the YouTube videos teaching you something, or just the overall constant input that pulls you away from the overarching goal, which is to connect with yourself. When was the last time you sat with just yourself? Had a thought you didn’t need to Google or put into ChatGPT in order to get some sort of response? When was the last time you intentionally sat in silence instead of constantly thinking about what you should be feeding into your mind?
I saw a woman on IG talking about how she was going paddle boarding after work. She gets off at 4 p.m. and basically decided, “I have free will,” so she was going to use it. She was adding fun to her life during the week instead of waiting until the weekend to incorporate it.
This was inspiring for me because I am someone who tends to live with a “school night” mentality. Except now, apparently, it has become a “work night” mentality. It’s this little rule I tell myself about why fun isn’t allowed during the week and somehow belongs only to Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Seeing her say, I have free will, gave me permission to start auditing some of the rules I have given myself as an adult living inside a life I am actively creating.
How effortless is it for us to slip into this default mode where we stop allowing ourselves to play?
Where did we learn to do that?
Where did we learn that being an adult meant we couldn’t make our own rules?
Or that we couldn’t have fun?
When I start my week today, I reflect on the kind of rhythm I’m trying to build into my life now. I also have to be mindful into how my brain tries to define this, because it is not yet another routine I have to perfect or another habit I can eventually turn into a measure of how well I’m doing. I don’t need another bloody checklist. I want rhythm with pleasure built into it. I want there to be things woven into my ordinary days that I genuinely look forward to. Maybe part of becoming an adult is realizing how many rules we inherited without ever agreeing to them. Work first. Fun later. Be productive during the week. Do your chores. Rest when everything is finished. Enjoy yourself once you’ve earned it.
But everything is never finished.
There will always be another email, another load of laundry, another thing I could be learning, fixing, cleaning, planning, or preparing for. I could spend my entire life waiting for the moment when I have finally done enough to deserve an evening that belongs completely to me.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
So maybe this season of my life is less about finding the perfect routine and more about finding my own rhythm. One that has responsibility in it, yes, but also pleasure. Play. Quiet. Movement. Random Tuesday-night plans. Moments where nothing is being optimized and I am not trying to become a better version of myself.
I am simply inside my life.
That sounds like enough reason to enjoy it—don’t you think?
Till next time Data collectors.
