Enough Fixing. Let Summer Find You.

I caught myself trying to optimize my exhale this morning.

I was sitting on my front porch with no agenda, which had been the entire point. Just to sit. To be present. To let summer find me the way I keep promising my soul it can.

About ninety seconds in, I noticed I was already doing it. Checking. Was I exhaling deeply enough? Was my body softening? Was this what relief was supposed to feel like? Should I move my shoulders? Was I doing the porch thing right?

I was not.

I sat there a while longer and a truth surfaced, almost mischievous in its timing. Striving doesn’t stop just because you sat down. It whispers from the corner. It puts on summer clothes and calls itself self-improvement.

Here’s what I haven’t quite said out loud until now.

I’ve been trying to “fix” my life around the clock. Morning. Noon. Night. The middle of the night, when I should be asleep but I’m lying there sorting through the latest list of what’s wrong, what needs healing, what I should change about my finances, my body, my work, the next decision, the next correction.

And I’ve been doing this for months, longer really. I’ve been writing around this all year, in one form or another. The scripts. The contracts. The cost of being “fine.” The old dreams we set down so gently. The fury underneath all that practiced gratitude.

Just last week, I made the biggest declaration of all. I wrote that survival was no longer allowed to run my whole house. That it could have a chair. It could ride in the passenger seat. But, it didn’t get the steering wheel anymore.

Yet, here I am. Only a week later. Ninety seconds into a porch morning, with survival back in the driver’s seat, asking my shoulders if they’re softening fast enough.

Many of you have been in it with me. I see it in your replies. You’re doing the same thing in your own way, in your own life, at your own kitchen table. We have all been working very hard on ourselves.

And somewhere in all that working, I lost track of the part where you’re also supposed to live the life you’re trying to heal.

Apparently you can heal yourself right out of being alive.

So my soul handed me a permission slip. And for once, I’m not going to talk her out of it.

It says: “Not everything needs fixing. Some things just need you.”

So this season I’m putting down the fixing. The figuring out. Healing as a project. The releasing I keep conjugating like a verb. The 3am inventory of what’s not working.

This season I’m choosing my front porch. The library. The half-tank drive with no destination. The farmers market on a Saturday morning where I’m not there to meet anyone, just to be around other humans for an hour. The kind of afternoon where nothing gets solved. The book that doesn’t ask anything of me except to turn the page. The unmastered art of being in my own life without trying to renovate it.

Honestly, I’ve never really done this before. I’ve spent most of my summers plowing through them the same way I plow through every other season. In my head. At home. With a to-do list.

I have rarely let a season be a season.

So this is a small revolution for me. And it might be one for you, too.

If you don’t typically allow yourself to exhale or let a season have its own shape, if you’ve been working on yourself in the background of your life for so long you’ve started confusing the work for the life, this is the invitation.

Maybe we don’t have to keep digging. Maybe we’re allowed to come up for air.

The exhale is still uncomfortably unfamiliar. My shoulders are still tight. There will be mornings I sit on the porch and catch myself checking again, asking my body if it’s softening fast enough.

But the air feels a little different now. Lighter. Fresh on the shoulders that have been holding a lot. A summer that doesn’t need me to optimize it.

And a permission slip in my pocket, just in case.

With you on the front porch,

Katherine
Soul Letters

Soul Inquiry

If your soul handed you a permission slip this summer, what would yours say? What might exhaling actually look like, or feel like, in your real life?

I’d love to hear it. Hit reply or leave it in the comments below.

P.S. In the spirit of letting summer be summer, I am also accepting recommendations for novels that do not require me to become a better person by the final chapter. If you’ve read something delicious, absorbing, funny, tender, or impossible to put down, send it my way.