Pace

Pierre Bonnard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This Sunday, I woke up at 5:30 a.m., not because I was disciplined or inspired, but because I had gone to bed before nine the night before, utterly depleted. I spent last week co-leading an in-person event, something I hadn’t done in a while. I loved it — physically being in rooms with people and guiding conversations, watching ideas spark. I’m good at it, I feel alive in it. And it drains me in a way that feels embarrassing to admit.

By Friday, my nervous system was fried. The commute back and forth to Madrid. The stimulation of being “on.” The particular exhaustion of constant presence. Writing this feels uncomfortable, like I am confessing to a limitation that the version of me I prefer to present would never have. She doesn’t need to collapse into bed at 8:47 p.m. on a Saturday night and sleep for ten hours and still wake up feeling like she hasn’t quite recovered.

I drifted back into a strange half-sleep filled with vivid dreams, then finally got up around seven, an hour before my family. On a normal Sunday, I would go straight into my home office with a piping hot cup of coffee, and read a dozen or so pages of a book, or make my way through my many open tabs. Some writing, perhaps. Production. Because even me time has a metric attached.

But this particular morning, I felt heavy. Not tired exactly, but off balance.

So I put my phone in my office, shut the door, and decided on a phone-free morning. I know myself well enough to understand that if the phone is within reach, I will reach for it. And when I reach for it, even briefly, I disappear. Not dramatically. Just that instant, familiar disappearance into other people’s thoughts and lives that fires my own brain in dozens of directions and leaves me feeling hollow by noon.

I emptied the dishwasher. I folded laundry and made breakfast. When the children woke, we ate together, played a card game, and then headed out to the park. I left my phone in my office and played Spider-Man with Sofia and dragons with Alex. I was not toggling between play and inbox. I was not half listening. I was fully there.

This is not revolutionary. Everybody talks about presence. But I lived it that morning in a way I rarely choose, and I saw the results immediately. The quality of time was different. My nervous system felt slower — not drowsy, but regulated, like it was finally getting the rest that ten hours of sleep hadn’t delivered.

By early afternoon, I hadn’t written this essay as planned. I hadn’t read a single page of my book, and I hadn’t been productive by any metric I normally use. And yet the day felt long in the best possible way. Mostly in the way it let me be with my kids without mentally being somewhere else.

I keep thinking about that. The same hours, yet a completely different experience of pace.

For most of my life, I’ve equated pace with speed. Fast meant capable, serious, productive, worthy. Slow carried an undertone of laziness, or at the very least, irrelevance. Even when I knew intellectually that this was a trap, my actions showed otherwise. Speed was a currency, and I was always spending.

When I moved to Madrid at twenty-five and began building what would become my company, I lived in a state of constant motion. I spent entire days trying different things, launching small experiments, watching numbers change. And when something worked, the feedback loop was intoxicating. You try an action. You see immediate results. You adjust. The results compound. You try again. It was addictive, there’s no other word for it. The pace of entrepreneurship is electric, and I wanted more of it constantly.

There were real periods of flow in those years — hours, even days, that passed unnoticed while I was building or writing or strategizing, when the rest of the world dropped away entirely. But there was also a frenetic quality to this time. My energy shot outward in every direction. Evenings felt like mornings. My husband and I would sometimes go out for an evening glass of wine and tapas when we had truly hit a wall, and those moments felt like relief, like surfacing for air. If we met for lunch instead, we were anxious to get back to our computers. Connection felt indulgent. Work felt urgent.

There was no rest. No mental rest, no physical rest. Years of this.

I told myself this was ambition. I told myself this was what building required. I was praised for it. I was proud of the accomplishments. I was completely unconscious of the cost. Over time, my nervous system began to revolt. Chronic pain. Anxiety. A body that felt brittle. My marriage strained under a rhythm that left no room for us.

—

Then I became pregnant with twins. After a miscarriage, it felt like grace. And for a brief stretch, I experienced a different pace entirely. I took long walks in the mornings. I cooked nourishing food. I allowed the business to run without my constant intervention. I took care of myself and felt better than I had in years.

At twenty-nine weeks, I went into labor out of nowhere and was rushed to the hospital and put on strict bed rest, hooked up to IVs around the clock. One day I was walking. The next, I was not allowed to sit up. I used a bedpan. There was no adjustment period, no gradual winding down. Just a hard stop that my nervous system had absolutely no idea how to handle.

Until the babies came at thirty-two weeks, I stayed in that hospital room. And I did what I knew how to do — I made productivity lists, dictated into my phone. Woke up — check. Brushed teeth — check. Had breakfast — check. Sponge bath from nurse — check. Each item on that list was proof that I had done something, that I was still a person who accomplished things, that I had not dissolved. That is how deeply pace had fused with productivity in my sense of self. Even lying in a hospital bed, unable to stand, I needed tangible evidence of output to feel like I existed.

Early motherhood bled into the pandemic and was a long fog of monotony. Pumping for hours on end, feeding — 10ml here, another 20ml there — don’t forget to record it in the app, change after change, soothing that didn’t soothe, over and over, day after day. The physical pain of the caesarean. The rare shower, only to see my hair falling out in clumps. The torture of never sleeping.

I was constantly accompanied and profoundly alone. My husband, my babies, my mother or my mother-in-law rotated through. And yet I have never in my life felt so isolated. I grieved the version of motherhood I had imagined and felt relentless guilt for not being content with the one I got.

The pace was slow, but it was not nourishing. It was tedious and suffocating, every day indistinguishable from the last, and I endured it the way you endure things that have no visible end.

For a long time, I thought these were the options. Fast and scattered, where you burn through everything, including yourself. Or slow and monotonous, where the days blur, and you disappear inside them. I assumed pace was just speed with different emotional consequences.

It has taken years to realize that pace is not a binary between fast and slow. It is an experience shaped by attention and energy. There is fast and scattered, which drains. There is fast and flow, which expands. There is slow and tedious, which suffocates. And there is slow and present, which nourishes.

The difference between these experiences is not how fast or slow the clock moves. It’s something closer to the quality of energy you’re inhabiting while it moves. Whether the hours are feeding you or depleting you. Whether you are choosing your pace or defaulting to it.

—

Fast and flow has been mostly absent from my life since I sold the business in the middle of that foggy season. I didn’t miss it at first — I was too tired. But eventually I felt the ache of it. A deep craving to be consumed by something creative and alive, to feel that weightless quality of hours disappearing while something inside me builds and shifts. I missed the version of myself who existed in that state. She felt empowered. Embodied. Brave.

Writing has brought pieces of it back. Not the writing I did for the past decade — recipe content, marketing copy, strategy documents — but writing that is closer to thinking out loud. Writing for myself, which I realized I hadn’t done in years. And when it’s working — when I sit down and the words start to move — my body feels like it’s floating. I don’t get hungry. I don’t get thirsty. Hours melt. When I stop, I feel physically spent in the way you feel after a long hike — exhausted but deeply hungry, deeply alive. Something has shifted. Something has been built. It feels like alignment in the truest sense, like that was a moment that was supposed to happen.

There is no guilt in that state. And yet, tension remains.

On a Saturday when I feel the pull of flow — when an idea is forming, and I can feel the momentum building — I sometimes park the kids in front of a screen and go to my office. I hear Sofia call out, “Mommy, why are you working? It’s play day!” And I try to explain that I like my work, that sometimes I choose to work on weekends. I tell myself I am modeling something important, that I am refusing martyrdom, that I want my children to see a woman who chooses herself when the moment asks for it. I have seen martyrdom up close, and I know how it hollows people out. I refuse to choose it for myself.

But still, there is guilt. I hold onto the hope that one day they’ll see it as agency and not absence. That they’ll understand choosing yourself is not the same as not choosing them.

Then there’s a Tuesday morning when the kids are at school, and I’ve carved out time for flow, and it doesn’t arrive. I feel restless, impatient, stifled — the loss is sharp. It sucks. There’s no more elegant way to say it. I had a slot, the slot was supposed to be sacred, and yet nothing happened.

You can’t schedule flow. But you can protect the space for it. And when that space goes unfilled, it’s hard not to feel cheated.

—

I’m nearing forty. There’s a strange quality to this age — the awareness that half your years may be behind you, which carries a thin layer of grief I don’t always look at directly. But also the recognition that much of the first half was lived without real intentionality. It was reactive, proving, surviving, running on programming I hadn’t examined. And the thought that keeps surfacing is not that time is running out, but that for the first time, I might actually be conscious enough to inhabit it well.

If my daughter grows up and says, “Mom, I learned from you that pace equals productivity,” I will have failed her in a subtle but significant way. If she believes pace equals speed, that faster is inherently better, that slower is inherently suspect, then I will have replicated the same trap I spent years trying to escape.

What I want her to understand is that you can move fast and feel frantic or move fast and feel alive, and those are not the same experience. That you can be still and feel nourished or be still and feel suffocated, and those aren’t the same either. That the question isn’t how quickly you’re going but whether the going is giving you something or taking it away.

I want her to learn that pace is a choice. That it’s one of the most important choices available to her. And that the ability to notice what she needs and then choose it — even imperfectly, even laced with guilt, even on days when the choice doesn’t cooperate — is a kind of freedom most people never realize they have.

I don’t aspire to a slow life. I love building. I love the electricity of ideas compounding, the forward pull of momentum, the feeling of being consumed by work that matters. And I don’t aspire to return to the version of fast that almost broke me.

That Sunday morning was not about slowing down. It was about choosing to inhabit the hours I had rather than letting them run on autopilot. And the older I get, the more I understand that the real luxury is not more time, but the agency to decide how those hours feel.

Most mornings, I will still reach for the phone. Most days, I’ll still default to whatever pace feels familiar instead of whatever pace I actually need.

But every now and then I’ll switch things up. Leave the phone behind. Let the hours be what they are instead of what I think they should produce.

And I’ll notice, again, that the day doesn’t feel wasted. It feels longer. It feels like mine.