To be here. To be whole

A lot of us are not busy because we are living.
We are busy because we are reacting.

You’re standing in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and your head is already running a second life somewhere else. Emails. Bills. A task you forgot. A task you remember too well. Something you promised. Something you didn’t promise but somehow got assigned to you anyway. You’re not even tired from doing hard things. You’re tired from being “on” all the time.

We don’t really work more than generations before us. We just never fully stop. Even when the room is quiet, our minds keep running. We’ve built our lives like open-plan offices with no doors, no privacy, no signal that the day is done. We move from one thing to the next, not because we’re curious, but because we’re compelled. Most of our time is spent in a kind of low-grade reaction. We keep checking, replying, tidying, preparing. We don’t choose, we respond.

And over time, the hours start feeling like they belong to someone else. We’ve become tenants in our own calendars. And the rent is not paid in money, but in little pieces of our attention. Each day, we sign away another morning, another lunch break, another evening we could have spent fully present but didn’t. What’s worse, even when we do get time for ourselves, it rarely feels ours. It’s borrowed. And it comes with strings.

You sit down to rest, but your mind taps on your shoulder. Shouldn’t you be doing something? Shouldn’t you check in? Shouldn’t you fix that thing you forgot? You finally get the quiet you craved, but guilt follows you in. And then you realise the trap was never the full schedule. The trap is the feeling that you need to earn the right to stop.

We are not just renting time. We’re also subletting it to guilt. The guilt of not being productive enough. The guilt of saying no. The guilt of choosing rest over speed. Joy becomes something we schedule. Stillness becomes something we apologise for. We postpone the act of living until we feel we’ve done enough to deserve it.

And then, eventually, the body decides for us. You finally go on holiday and fall sick by day two. Your body, clever and long-suffering, waits until it knows you're somewhere quiet before it lets go. As if it’s been holding its breath alongside you. As if it’s finally safe to break down. We call it bad timing. But it isn’t. It’s just the first time in months or even years you’ve stopped running from yourself long enough for the tension to surface. It’s not the holiday’s fault. It’s that this is the first time your body was allowed to feel anything at all.

But what if we don’t need to earn it?
What if time is not a reward but a medium we live through?

Maybe the goal isn’t to squeeze more hours from the day, but to make the ones we already have feel more like home. Not by fixing everything. Not by changing careers or deleting all our apps. But by stepping back into our hours like they are rooms we can re-enter.

Instead of reacting, we arrive. Instead of squeezing, we shape. One small moment at a time.

We can start by watching the kettle without checking our phones. Letting the moment be quiet. Letting it be useless in the best possible way. Giving the day even five minutes of time that belongs to no one else.

You don’t need to make it sacred. You don’t need to write it down. Just notice it.

Because the antidote to rented time is not more control.
It is permission.
To be here. To be whole.
To stop measuring your life in output, and begin measuring it in presence.

Time doesn’t have to feel like a hallway you rush through.
It can feel like a room with your name on the door.
And you can come back to it.
Even now.
Even in the middle of the kettle boiling.

And in that spirit, let me show you something.

Not a masterpiece, just one of those thing I make in my own time.
A painting I can call:  Between Text and Silence
Just to remind both you and me, this is what it can look like, to return to yourself. Ha ha...