December 31st, 2021 came and went.
We were in Mexico.
The house wasn’t sold. The debt wasn’t fully gone. By the strictest reading of what we’d written down two years earlier, we hadn’t achieved it.
And yet.
We had moved out of the house and rented it, which meant the mortgage was no longer ours to carry month to month. We were sitting in warm winter light somewhere unhurried and slow, in a country that had begun to feel less like a destination and more like a direction. Pascal had mornings that belonged to him. I was writing, cooking, learning the names of plants I’d never grown before.
We were living the feeling.
Not the letter of the goal.
The spirit of it.
I’ve thought about this often in the years since… about what it means to achieve something, and whether the clean version of success is always the most honest one.
The goal we wrote down in those early days was specific and time-bound and measurable, all the things a good goal is supposed to be.
And it served us exactly as it was meant to.
It gave us direction when we needed direction. It gave us a horizon to move toward when staying still had become its own kind of weight.
But life, as it turns out, has its own timing.
October 2022.
The house sold.
I remember the particular feeling of that day — not dramatic, not flooded with the emotion I might have expected after years of working toward it.
More like the feeling of setting something down that you’d been carrying for so long you’d forgotten it had weight.
Truly debt free.
Completely.
10 months later than the date we’d written on paper.
And yet arriving exactly when it was meant to.
By then we had already found the land in Mexico. Already begun learning what it meant to tend something, to build something, to stay somewhere long enough to understand its rhythms.
The house selling wasn’t the beginning of the life we’d imagined.
It was the quiet closing of a chapter that had already ended, the final release of something we’d already let go of in every way that mattered.
There’s something about the in-between.
The years between writing the goal and the house selling weren’t a waiting period.
They weren’t a delay or a detour or evidence that the process hadn’t worked.
They were the becoming.
Every decision made in alignment with those four words… disciplined, vibrant, healthy, energized.
Every morning practice.
Every drawer cleared.
Every meal cooked from scratch.
Every conversation with Pascal about what we actually wanted rather than what we’d simply gotten used to.
Every small action chosen… because it moved us toward the feeling rather than away from it.
That was the work.
And it was also the life.
This is what I couldn’t have understood when we first wrote the goal down, and what I now believe more fully than almost anything else:
The point was never only the destination. The point was who we were becoming on the way there.
The woman who taped four words to a refrigerator in a house she was preparing to leave… she needed the goal to be specific and time-bound and slightly terrifying.
She needed the structure of it.
The clarity of it.
The way it made everything simpler by giving her a direction to move in.
But what she was really doing, in all those quiet daily decisions, was practicing.
Rehearsing.
Becoming, in small and unhurried ways, the person who would one day stand on a piece of land in rural Mexico and feel — not arrival exactly, but recognition.
Oh.
This is what we were moving toward.
Soil to Sanctuary didn’t begin when we found the land.
It began in a living room, with two people and a piece of paper and a dream they’d been carrying long enough that it had started to feel like part of the furniture.
It began with a decision, quiet and undramatic, to stop waiting.
If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, you know the steps we followed.
The desire named.
The goal written.
The list made.
The five actions chosen.
The year mapped out one quarter at a time.
But what I hope you’re also taking away is something harder to put into a framework.
That the life you want isn’t only waiting at the end of the process.
It’s available in the middle of it too.
In the way you choose to spend a Tuesday.
In the four words you tape to your refrigerator.
In the small and honest decision to become, right now, today, the person you’re hoping to be.
That’s where it begins.
That’s where it always begins.
After walking through this story with me, where are you in your own process?
Are you still trying to name what you want?
Do you know the life you want but haven’t yet found the path toward it?
Are you already moving, but need to get clearer about what deserves your energy?
Or have you arrived somewhere you once dreamed about and are discovering, as I have, that there is still a life to keep tending?
And perhaps the simplest question of all:
If you could write one thing on a piece of paper today that would change the direction of your life, what would it be?
You don’t have to know how to make it happen yet.
Just write it down.
I’d genuinely love to hear where you are.
This concludes The Year We Stopped Waiting.
Thank you for reading it with me.
For six chapters, I’ve shared the actual process that took us from a vague longing for something different to a life we could finally recognize as our own.
Not because we followed the plan perfectly.
We didn’t.
Not because the goal happened exactly when we said it would.
It didn’t.
But because the process gave us somewhere to begin.
And perhaps that’s what a good plan is really for.
Not to predict the future.
To give you a place to put your intention.
If something in this series has stirred something in you… if you have a dream that has been waiting longer than it should, or a feeling that there is another way to live that you haven’t yet given yourself permission to name — you don’t need to have the whole path figured out.
You can begin with a piece of paper.
And if you’d like somewhere to take that first step, the Living Planner is the system I created to hold this process.
If this series has made you want to stop waiting and start putting your own life on paper, I made something for you.
The Living Planner is the actual planning system I created during the year we stopped waiting.
It brings together everything we’ve walked through in this series… your desire, your goal, your four words, your five actions, your year, your months, and your days.
If you’re a paid subscriber, the complete printable version is included with your subscription.
And if you prefer something physical… something you can write in, return to, and leave open on your kitchen table… the 288-page Living Planner is also available as a physical book through Amazon.
You don’t need a planner to begin.
You need a piece of paper.
A willingness to be honest.
And the decision to stop waiting.
The planner simply gives that decision somewhere to live.
I began this series by telling you about a dream we hadn’t yet figured out how to say out loud.
Six chapters later, I think the most important part of the story isn’t that we eventually got to Mexico.
It’s that we stopped waiting for our lives to begin.
And I wonder what might begin in yours if you stopped waiting too.
If you could write one thing on a piece of paper today that would change the direction of your life…
what would it be?
You don’t have to know how to make it happen yet.
Just write it down.
—Angie
If you want to keep exploring this way of living with me, subscribe.
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