I know it’s been a while.
I decided to take a summer break.
Not the kind where you close your laptop but continue checking email from your phone. Not a long weekend disguised as rest. I wanted to actually leave. To be somewhere else long enough to stop counting the days until I had to return.
I needed it more than I realized.
Change has been the operative word at work for what feels like years now. New ways of working. Transformations. Layoffs. New faces. New technology. The pace seems to have tripled, and there is rarely a pause long enough to understand one change before another arrives.
For a long time, I absorbed it.
I absorbed it while navigating changes in my own life, too. Most significantly, while helping care for my mother through her cancer treatment. There was always something that needed tending to. Someone who needed something. A meeting beginning. A decision waiting. A life continuing whether I felt ready for it or not.
So this year, I made two decisions.
The first was to take a break.
The second was to be present enough to actually experience it.
Because there is one luxury none of us can accumulate more of later.
Time.
My husband and I decided that much of ours this summer would belong to family.
That sounds simple until you consider what family looks like for so many of us now. Ours is scattered across countries and continents, partly because of opportunities we have pursued and partly because circumstances in Haiti have made gathering at home increasingly difficult.
We have become very good at loving one another from elsewhere.
Phone calls. WhatsApp. Photographs. Birthdays celebrated through screens. Updates delivered across time zones.
But proximity tells you things a phone cannot.
You notice that the children aren’t really children anymore.
Nieces and nephews have become teenagers and young adults, defining themselves in real time. They have opinions now. Plans. A particular optimism about the lives ahead of them that is almost contagious.
And you notice the other direction time is moving, too.
Our parents are getting older. A little slower. You notice it in small ways you might miss over the phone—the extra time it takes to get somewhere, the need to rest, the subtle ways the years have begun to make themselves visible.
I know that noticing better than I want to.
A year of watching for it in my mother taught me what it costs to look away, and what it costs to keep looking. Now I can’t stop seeing it in all of them.
It makes you want to stay a little longer. To have another coffee. Another meal. To sit around the table even when there is nothing left to say.
Because we know now, perhaps more than we ever wanted to, how precious life is. None of us knows where we will all be next summer, or what might change between now and then.
So you stay.
You listen to the story you’ve already heard. You laugh when someone remembers it differently. Someone else begins laughing before the story is even finished because they already know what comes next.
For a few hours, nobody needs anything from the moment except to be inside it.
Those were the moments I kept thinking about.
Not because they were extraordinary.
Because they weren’t.
Breakfast.
Coffee.
Dinner that stretched longer than necessary.
Walking somewhere without rushing.
Sitting around talking about nothing particularly important.
Watching another family’s daily rhythms and briefly becoming part of them.
Travel gives us monuments and restaurants and photographs, but this may be what I love most about it: the chance to observe another way of constructing a life.
And this summer, I began noticing small differences.
What it feels like to move through a place where I felt safe. What it feels like when public life seems orderly enough that you don’t have to remain constantly alert. What happens when meals are given time rather than squeezed between obligations.
Breakfast wasn’t something eaten over a keyboard.
Dinner wasn’t something to finish.
People sat.
They looked at one another.
They stayed.
Even my phone seemed quieter. My social feeds contained fewer advertisements and somehow more of the people I had actually chosen to follow. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I had become to being sold something, warned about something, outraged by something.
Then I came home.
Within hours, the volume returned.
News. Politics. Alerts. Ads. Anger. The endless churn of things demanding attention.
The contrast was almost physical.
I hadn’t realized how much noise I had been sitting in until it stopped.
There has been a surge in Americans traveling abroad, and an increasingly visible culture around it—the photographs, the videos, the social currency of being somewhere beautiful.
Surely some of it is that.
But I wonder if something else is happening, too.
Maybe some of us are traveling because we are looking for evidencenthat life can be organized differently.
That work does not have to occupy the center of everything.
That productivity is not the same thing as purpose.
That having more is not necessarily the same thing as living better.
We spend so much of our lives pursuing the things we have been taught to want: achievement, money, recognition, the next opportunity.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting any of them.
I still do.
But lately I have been wondering about the cost.
Because somewhere between the meals and the stories and watching people I love become new versions of themselves, I understood something embarrassingly simple.
This is the life, too.
Not the part before the important thing happens.
Not the vacation from real life.
The breakfast that lasts too long. The story you’ve heard before. The teenager becoming themselves across the table from you. The parent moving a little more slowly beside you. The afternoon when nobody has anywhere particularly urgent to be.
These aren’t interruptions to the life we’re building.
They are the reason to build one at all.
And perhaps the question isn’t whether we have enough time.
None of us do.
The question is what we are willing to give it to.