Why I’m Choosing a Softer Life, Not a Smaller One,

I keep saying that I want a softer life, and I’m never entirely sure what I mean by it. I know what I don't mean. I don't want to disappear into some beautifully lit version of domesticity where I bake bread at two in the afternoon and apparently no longer require money. I like working. I like being ambitious. There are things I want to build, places I want to go and versions of myself I haven't met yet.

I am not trying to make my life smaller.I think I just want to stop believing that everything worth having must be paid for in exhaustion.

For a long time, I treated tiredness as fairly convincing evidence that I was doing enough. If I had several things happening at once, if my calendar looked slightly ridiculous, if I was working late and thinking about work when I wasn't working, then at least I was moving. Rest was what happened when everything else had been dealt with, which is a particularly stupid arrangement because everything is never dealt with.

Lately, I've been wondering what happens if I keep the ambition and remove some of the punishment. I want work that matters to me, but I also want hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with work. I want to take classes simply because being a beginner at something sounds fun. I want to spend money on myself sometimes without immediately producing a small internal business case for why the purchase was justified. I want afternoons that aren't secretly preparation for tomorrow. I want to make our home lovely because we live here, not because it needs to become another completed project.

None of this sounds especially radical when written down. Perhaps that's what I find interesting about it. The things I am describing are remarkably ordinary, yet somewhere along the way, they began to feel indulgent. Pleasure became something I could have once the serious things were finished. I became very good at postponing myself. And I don't particularly want to do that anymore.

There are still difficult things I want to accomplish. I will probably still take on too much occasionally because, apparently, I know myself. But I would like the life surrounding those ambitions to feel good while they are happening. I don't want to spend years building towards some future point at which I finally have enough time, money or permission to enjoy being here. Maybe that is all I mean when I say softer. Not smaller. Not less serious. Not a retreat from ambition.

Just a life in which I am included among the things I am trying so hard to take care of.

For your Saturday

I'm trying to get better at letting Saturdays just be Saturdays. This is what I'm putting on today.