I had one of those days last week.
Up early. Morning practice. Coffee with my partner. Into work. Then driving her to her job. Then driving across the island to therapy. Then back across town to the gym. Then it was already time to pick her up. The whole day was a chain: one link locked into the next, no slack anywhere. If one thing ran five minutes late, the whole shape of the day would have collapsed.
I noticed somewhere between the gym and the pickup that my body had gone tight. Head big. Breath short. And underneath it, a feeling I've come to know: caged, suffocated, looking for an exit so extreme my mind goes to the edge of a cliff.
Some days that feeling is louder than others. It scares me that an ordinary calendar can do that to a human nervous system.
I live on an island off the coast of Canada. I moved here from cities. From Los Angeles. The Bay. Even Victoria, where I was before, felt fast compared to this. The whole story I told myself about the move was that island life would do something to me. Slow me down. Loosen the grip. Hand me back to the trees and the tide.
It hasn't.
I still need to schedule friends three weeks out, sometimes a month, on an island you can drive across in under an hour. The grief here is collective. The overwhelm is everyone. Everybody is hustling to keep their life from caving in.
I thought the island would change me. I was wrong about why it couldn't.
The pace isn't the place. The pace is in me.
I brought the colonial-capitalist machine with me when I moved. I'm living on land that was colonized by the Scots and the Brits, and the shape of that machine is still here in how we work, how we measure, how we separate, how we earn the right to rest. But more honestly, the machine is in my body. In my reflexes. In what I expect of myself by 4 p.m. The land didn't slow me down because I never asked it to. I just moved my office to a more scenic location and called it healing.
When I think about an island and the time nature of it, I don't actually picture this. I picture the tropics. I picture Peru. I remember mornings there where I had two, three hours before work to drink tea, sit in silence, be in communion with spirit. After work, I still had four, five hours to tend to my relationship, to my body, to what actually mattered. The day had space built into it like that was the whole point.
I keep asking why. Why does time stretch in those places and shrink here? The closest answer I can find is that there's still a living tether there. To indigenous ancestral ways. To spirit. To a shared agreement that the point isn't the doing. It's the being. People go to the plaza at the end of the day. They drop in. They bask. They sit with each other under a sky. It doesn't matter what you accomplished. It matters that you were there.
That's the medicine I keep flying back for. Not the food. Not the mountains. The time. The cultural permission to matter without earning it.
People come to Canada, the States, Germany to chase what they call the highest human potential. Climb the ladder. Maximize the output. Prove the worth. I want to push back on that. What if the highest human potential is the opposite of what we've been sold? What if it's the ability to live, to be with each other, to breathe, to belong, to feel our own lives happening while they're still happening?
Because the version we're sold turns people into units. Another cog. Another timesheet. Another salary line. Another body feeding a machine that never once says, that's enough.
I don't have a clean fix yet. I'm paying attention. I'm noticing how fast a full day becomes a trapped day. I'm noticing that the real work isn't better scheduling. The real work is changing what I believe time is for.
I'm not running out of time. I'm running out of a relationship to time that lets me be alive inside it.
So I'll leave you with what I'm asking myself this week:
What did you inherit about time that you've never questioned?
If your day collapsed today and only one hour was left, what would you actually do with it?
What part of you have you been negotiating away to keep the schedule intact?
Ish
P.S. If this letter found something in you, the 1:1 work I do with men is about the machine in the body. The reflex that fills the margin. The part of you that can't slow down even when nothing's chasing you. Not therapy. Not coaching. Initiation. Transforming what you've been avoiding into what you're here to give. my 1:1 mentorship.
P.P.S. And when a man is ready to leave the machine for a while, I take him to the place this letter keeps pointing at. Multi-day treks into the Peruvian Andes, where the land itself becomes the initiator and the day still belongs to you. If something here is stirring, that might be the conversation worth having: Men's rites of passage in the Peruvian Andes
