Stay

If nothing changed in 2026 except your pace, what version of you would finally create the life you desire?

After what feels like a few reincarnations vagabonding with Tom into The Great Unknown these last couple of years, we found a house with a lemon tree and bougainvillea spilling like silk over our terrace, a few blocks from the sea.

Home, ‘til elsewhere calls, as we always say.

But first: one last shedding.

Life rolled its dice again and, overnight, February decided it would be lived in a sun-drunk attic in Paris. And so we followed.

If you’ve been here long enough, you know Paris is not a city for me but an initiation. My hunger for freedom made flesh.

Here I am again, vis-à-vis with younger versions of Self piecing together an imaginary map. Treasure-hunting memories à la recherche du temps perdu.

Time feels like something I carelessly crumpled in a hurry on my way to somewhere that I no longer remember, and forgot in the pocket of an old coat.

“I’ll come back to you later”

So I guess about now its a great season to reach back into that back pocket and open the ever-present weight of time again.

Our writers headquarters this month, in Belleville Paris. Btw, Tom finished his second book 🤍

January’s slowness: gone.

The gentle trial period of the year: over.

Year of the snake: shed.

Now we stand in that familiar acceleration:

oh wow, another year has passed indeed.

And suddenly the air is thick with a destination.

With that manic panic of needing to get somewhere.

And in a world where everyone is rushing somewhere,

I find myself with more reasons than ever to simply:

stay.

The question that keeps rising from beneath my resistance to urgency is this:

If nothing changed in 2026 except my pace, what version of me would finally create the life I desire?

Not a completely new identity. We’ve done that before.

Just a different tempo. Dancing to a different beat.

Because I know with certainty now that the life I want isn’t waiting at the end of speed, but at the depth of slowness.

Stay

I’ve spent the last weeks walking the streets of this ashtray of love until my feet ache in the most satisfying way. Reading Fitzgerald for the first time and it almost feels like I saved him for a season that I could go slow enough to savor every line. Eating breakfasts with absolutely no nutritional value and infinite emotional density. With the man I get to spend the rest of my life with.

This time, I am not intoxicated with the possibility of what’s next.

This time, I get to stay.

In the romance of it all. In the real meaning of the word. Romance, simply meaning: going slow.

Of course Paris has its romantic mythology, but this time I can actually feel it.

It is not the city, but the constant refusal to rush through beauty. The staying at the table long after the coffee is cold. It is reading that one paragraph twice.

I wonder if time has loosened its final grip on me.

Perhaps it was never time slipping away but me, outrunning it.

An outrageous Breakfast For Three Hours™️ and running around Paris to find the Wuthering Heights book

Like many of you, I spent most of my twenties running.

Racing toward an invisible finish line, convinced that arrival would hand me something. What exactly? I’m not sure. But I kept running. And running.

I wonder where I learned to run and never look back. I have my theories, but looking back always felt more dangerous than stopping.

Next week I turn thirty-one.

And I keep thinking: What’s the rush?

Because I know this now with a certainty I didn’t have before:

If I start running again, I will reach the end of that imaginary line only to realize I missed the texture of living.

The smell of lemons on my terrace. The absolute miracle that waking up to a man with beautiful hands and sun-steeped deep brown eyes is.

And choosing to stay.

Like hitting snooze and realizing those last five minutes of sleep were the most decadent eternity.

So I promise my younger self

I will never rush the moments I once prayed for.

And I will never, ever apologize taking my sweet time savoring every bite.

And now a question for you:

What’s the rush?

Truly.

Instead of wishing you could live certain moments twice, what if you simply

halved

your

pace

and

doubled

your

presence

in this strange, delicious interlude we call living?

●○

P.S. If slowness feels impossible right now, don’t force it.

Begin here instead:

Here’s (free) Self Reckoning practice for you.

A way of looking, actually looking, at who you’ve been being.

I know it will support you in slowing life down.

Written with so much love from a sunny attic in Paris.