What Three Days Away Has Taught Me, Before I Even Know How It Ends

My family and I are currently on a trip. I went in thinking we had to hit every ride, that keeping the kids happy meant constant motion, one thing after the next. Classic me, treating a water park like a to-do list. Then I ended up sitting there for 45 minutes straight, watching my son go down the same water slide over and over, having the time of his life.

That's the moment I keep coming back to. Not the whole itinerary, not the rides we hadn't gotten to yet. Just him, genuinely happy, doing the same thing again and again, and me finally understanding that when you find something that makes you actually happy, you don't need to go find something else. You can just stay there.

I'm writing this from the middle of the trip, not the end of it. We still have one more day here. I don't know yet how the last day will go, or what the drive home will feel like. I'm okay not knowing that yet.

Here's what I was afraid of before we left.

I was afraid that work would pile up while I was gone, that I'd come back and Open Day Collective would have lost momentum I couldn't get back. That four days away meant four days I wasn't moving it forward.

But here's what I realized instead.

Work will always be there. Almost none of it was actually an emergency, it just felt like one. And going on this trip is living out the exact thing I'm building Open Day Collective to teach. How can I ask you to step away and mean it if I won't do it myself?

This is a real learning curve for me, if that's not already obvious. I'm much better at helping other people do this than I am at doing it for myself. I built an entire brand teaching people how to step away, and apparently still needed someone to teach me.

Day to day, work was still there, that annoying itch where I'd catch myself half-thinking about a to-do list in line for a ride. But I was able to actually break from it without feeling guilty about it, and just enjoy the trip.

There's one thing, three days in, I already know I want to carry back into a regular Tuesday.

It's okay to put the electronics away and just be fully present. I've noticed I'm always rushing, like I'm trying to get to the end faster, or trying to plan every single second. Here, I don't have to rush. Some things can just happen.

There are times we clearly have a schedule to keep, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But on the days when I'm fortunate enough to have unscheduled time off, I want to stop trying to hurry up and plan that time too, just because planning is what I'm used to doing. Somewhere a version of me is trying to build a spreadsheet for "relax more" and I would like her to sit down.

I'm not going to tell you to book a trip. That's not really what this is about. Most weeks don't have four days to spare, and mine won't either, most of the time. I'll probably have more to say once I'm actually home and the phone goes back in my pocket for good. This is just the middle of it, written honestly, before I know the whole shape of it.

But I think everyone has a version of "away," even if it's an hour, even if it's just leaving the phone in the other room while you make dinner. It's not really about the stepping away itself. It's about being present once you're there, without something else constantly pulling at your attention. The size doesn't matter as much as whether you actually meant it.

What's yours. When's the last time you were fully present, without something else pulling you away, even briefly, and meant it. Tell me in the comments, I read all of them.

every day. on purpose. 🖊️

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