When Did You Last Not Care What Time It Was?
I mean seriously.
We scrub the to-do list clean.
We optimize the morning routine.
We research the best way to relax. (Even just writing that down sounds exhausting.)
And somewhere in all that effort toward ease, we miss the whole point.
Can anyone relate?
It calls to mind a story I remember about a woman — a worker-bee type — who, while on Sabbatical in Mexico one year, bumped into her cousin on the street. He was with a posse of friends from Mexico City, in town for the weekend. Like a little tornado of joy, they scooped her up and took her to lunch.
Only this lunch lasted five hours. And moved on to dinner — at another restaurant outside of town. Their day together went from 1:30 to 11:30 p.m.
They laughed the entire time.
That woman was me!
And to be honest: it was completely out of character. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t choose it in the deliberate, calendar-blocking sense of the word.
I just… said yes.
And then kept saying yes, for ten hours straight.
When was the last time you sat with a group of people, eating, schmoozing, and not caring what time it was or what was on the agenda?
If you’re thinking prom night, it’s been too long.
There’s something worth noticing in that story — not the spontaneity of it, exactly, but the permission in it. Somewhere between the first restaurant and the second, I stopped waiting for ease to arrive and just…
let it in.
The choice wasn’t dramatic. It was almost accidental.
But what if it didn’t have to be accidental?
What if ease isn’t something we earn or stumble into — but something we can actually choose?
Ahhh 🌊
PS: That day in Mexico lives in me as a kind of proof. Proof that ease is real, that it’s available, and that sometimes all it takes is a little tornado of joy and a yes.
Continue the Journey
There’s more below — including a practice built around three of the most quietly powerful words I know.
This reflection is part of Journey to a Lighter You, inspired by my book A Year to Clear.
If you’re new here, this week is a gentle entry point — no clearing experience required.
If you’ve been on the journey a while, what’s waiting below will give you something to carry into the week — a practice you can return to any time the efforting gets loud.
Something small. Something repeatable. Something that works even when ease feels very far away.
Join us.
Ease Isn’t Something You Earn
This week, our clearing focus is simple: ease is a choice before it’s a feeling.
We tend to treat ease as a reward — something that arrives after the hard work is done, after the inbox is cleared, after life settles down. But ease doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t come to us because we’ve finally handled everything.
It comes because we decide to stop white-knuckling our way toward it.
There’s an old paradigm of clearing that makes us feel bad when we fail — setting us up for disappointment again and again. And then there’s another way. A simpler way. Infinitely more forgiving. One that takes the long view and makes us feel capable and good no matter how small the effort.
Ease lives in that second way.
And here’s the paradox at the center of it all:
we cannot effort our way into ease.
The trying is the obstacle. The doing is what blocks the receiving. For clearing to be lasting — for lightness to actually land —
we have to undo the notion that we need to do.
You cannot will yourself into a state of ease…