A Woman in a 40-Year-Old Jacket Changed How I Think About Success

I hate the cold. So why do some of our favorite places on earth sit closer to the Arctic Circle than to anything resembling a beach?

The weather isn’t warm. The infrastructure isn’t convenient. And the place runs on its own rhythm whether you’re visiting or not.

That last part took some getting used to.

We wanted to explore Nolsøy, a small island just a short ferry ride from the capital. But “short ferry ride” doesn’t mean “easy day trip.” If you actually want to hike the island and see what it has to offer, the ferry schedule doesn’t allow it. Not unless you spend the night. The boats aren’t built around your vacation. They’re built around the people who live and work there.

Same story on Kalsoy. We took the ferry over to hike to the Kallur Lighthouse, the one that sits on that dramatic cliff you’ve probably seen in photos. What we didn’t fully account for? The ferry only holds twelve cars. Twelve. If you don’t prebook, you wait. Our bad. So we waited. About an hour and a half on the return, sitting in line, staring at the steering wheel and wondering if we’d miscalculated our whole day.

In the U.S., that would feel like a failure. A logistical screwup. Something to complain about.

Here, it just felt like... part of it.

British soldiers stationed here during World War II called it the Land of Maybe. “Kanska” is the Faroese word for maybe, and apparently it’s the most commonly used word on the islands. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Maybe the weather holds, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you get on the ferry, maybe you wait.

You learn to go with the flow. There’s no other option.

Because the Faroe Islands don’t bend to your schedule. And once you stop expecting them to, something shifts.

As travelers, we can fall into this trap of expecting places to cater to us. But when you’re forced to slow down and accept a place for exactly how it is, how it exists every single day when you’re not there, something opens up. You start to notice all the noise you’ve been carrying around. The speed at which you normally live. And you can’t help but compare it to a place that just... exists. Without the chaos. Without the constant push for more.

Sheep Outnumber People Here. By a Lot.

The name “Faroe” comes from Old Norse. It means “Sheep Islands.”

That’s not poetic branding. It’s just accurate. Around 70,000 sheep live here. The human population? About 50,000. So yes, you will see sheep. Everywhere. Grazing on hillsides, standing in the middle of roads, completely unbothered by your rental car.

They roam freely because there are no natural predators. They’ve never had a reason to fear anything. So they don’t.

There’s something grounding about that. A whole population of animals just... existing. Not performing, not rushing, not optimizing their day. Just eating grass on a cliff above the sea.

A few days into the trip, we wandered into Fuglafjørður.

There’s an old building there from 1887, a former shop that’s been turned into an art gallery and café. The kind of place you could easily drive past without noticing.

Inside, a volunteer greeted us. She told us about the local artists whose work lined the walls, the concerts they host upstairs, the small community that keeps the place alive. Little 5x7 watercolors of puffins hung from string and clothespins. Nothing precious or overproduced. Just art, displayed simply. We looked at each other, smiled, and knew this was the art coming home with us.

We don’t buy trinkets, t-shirts, mugs, or collectible whatnots. We like to let the art find us when we travel. The pieces that have a story or tell one.

We ordered our coffees with almond milk, and the volunteer told us all about the cute pastries on the counter. We picked one out, sat at a quiet table in the back.

I don’t know how long we sat there. Long enough to start dreaming out loud. Mark and I threw ideas back and forth about how we could build something like this at home. A space that isn’t trying to make millions. Just a comfortable place for artists to share their work and maybe make a living doing it. The kind of “job” that doesn’t feel like a job.

That’s the thing about places like this. They make you question what you’re building with your own life.

Before we left, the volunteer asked where we were staying. We told her about our Airbnb a few islands over and mentioned we’d met a woman named Eva who had the most incredible garden stretching up the hillside.

She smiled knowingly. “Oh yes. Eva is pretty infamous around here.”

Eva lived across the street from our Airbnb.

We met her one afternoon while she was bent over her garden, hands in the soil, wind tugging at her hair.

She came over to introduce herself and we ended up talking for a while. Not in an exhausting way. She genuinely loved where she lives and wanted to share her favorite places with us. But mostly, we compared notes on where we’ve traveled around the world. Turns out we’ve been to a lot of the same places.

Her garden stretched across the hillside like a second home. She called it her “fourth child.”

Eva was wearing a jacket she said was forty years old. The kind of jacket that peaked in 1994, teal and purple color-blocking now faded to pastels, velcro that porbably barely grips anymore. She mentioned the jacket casually, but there was pride in it too. Not the kind of pride that needs applause. Just the quiet satisfaction of someone who stopped playing that game a long time ago. "Why not?" she shrugged. "It still works."

She moved like someone with nowhere else to be. No rush, no restlessness, no quiet hunger for more. Just a woman in a forty-year-old jacket, happy with the life she’d built. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little envious. Not in a bitter way. In the way that makes you look at your own life and wonder what you’re overcomplicating.

Eva has traveled to over seventy countries. She’s circled the globe multiple times. But here’s the thing: she doesn’t travel in summer. In summer, her garden needs her. The weather is good. She stays home.

When winter comes and the garden sleeps, she takes off. She sees the world.

Americans have forgotten what stillness feels like.

We fill silence with podcasts. We scroll through our phones while standing in the most beautiful places on earth. We schedule every hour of our vacations and then wonder why we need a vacation from our vacation.

And it’s not just travel. It’s everything. We’re constantly told that whatever we have isn’t enough. That success means more. More followers, more revenue, more square footage. Why have 2x when you could have 10x? Why be comfortable when you could be crushing it?

And the marketing never stops. Sign up to learn the secret to making $10,000 a month. Join this group to be healthier, stronger, richer, faster, better. Every ad, every email, every algorithm assumes you’re not enough as you are. That you need fixing. That you need more.

And underneath all of it is the same threat: keep up or get left behind. Optimize or become obsolete. Rest is laziness. Contentment is complacency. If you’re not constantly leveling up, you’re already falling behind.

It’s exhausting. And it never stops.

Does everyone really feel like they can’t just... be happy without it?

But where’s the top? When is it enough?

No one ever answers that. Because there is no answer. The goalpost just keeps moving.

The Faroese don’t seem to operate that way. They’ve found a pace that works for them and they’re not trying to change it. The ferries run on schedules that serve the people who live there, not the tourists passing through. You can wander almost anywhere without a million restrictions because there haven’t been enough disrespectful visitors yet to ruin it.

The whole place feels untouched in a way that’s becoming harder and harder to find. These are people who value humility over hustle. Who consider themselves ordinary people living in a small country. Who don’t brag, don’t chase trends, and approach most things in life with an easy “if not today, then tomorrow.” They follow the natural rhythm of things. And somehow, that’s become radical.

It made us stop and ask the question we’re always being asked but can never quite answer: What’s the goal? What are we actually working toward?

Eva, I think, figured that out a long time ago. She’s not comparing herself to anyone. She’s not chasing a bigger life. She’s wearing a forty-year-old jacket because it still works, tending a garden she calls her fourth child, and seeing the world on her own terms.

The world won’t stop being loud. But maybe we can.

Since coming home, Mark and I have talked a lot about what this trip stirred up. How to find a better level of happiness and peace in our lives. Not just when we’re traveling, but when we’re not. How to stop measuring ourselves against other people’s timelines and metrics. How to figure out what’s actually enough for us.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have Eva’s level of peace. But I know what it looks like now. And that feels like a start.

What would it look like for you to stop chasing more and just... be content with enough?