Choosing the Harder Thing

As summer edges into September, I return from a long summer in Europe with my in-laws, trying to hold onto days that unfold slower and more deliberately. The daily walk isn't exercise squeezed between obligations — it's the main event that sets the day's essential rhythm.

There's a Japanese concept called ikigai— translated as "reason for being"—that encompasses this beautifully. I think ikigai lives less in some grand pursuit than in small, daily acts of stewardship: caring for something that, in turn, gives shape and purpose to the day.

For us this summer, that ritual was the walk to the orchard with my in-laws. Every week, they tend their olive, fruit, and nut trees — pruning shears in hand, devoted no matter the weather. They go out early, before the Spanish sun turns brutal. There's something in the act of caring itself that seems to keep them strong, limber and focused well into their eighties. Or maybe it's the reverse: maybe the land keeps them around so they'll keep caring for it.

I've been noticing the same instinct in myself since coming home and specifically, all the small places I've chosen the harder path over the easier one. Our house here has air conditioning, and most days I use it without a second thought. But the 16th-century house we stayed in abroad has none. Its thick stone walls hold the temperature instead, if you help them: open the windows first thing for a cross breeze, shut them before the hottest hours hit, reopen them once the mosquitoes have finished their evening feast. It's considerably more work than flipping a switch. But in that daily choreography, I found real respect for a house that's kept its guests comfortable for five hundred years without ever asking for electricity.

We're told constantly to choose convenience above all else — the cooler house, the shorter walk, the easier version of nearly everything. But watching my in-laws return to their trees each week, and catching myself opening and closing windows all day just to keep a very old house happy, I don't think convenience was ever really the point. Now that the season is turning and routines are resetting, that's the shift I want to carry into fall: not doing less, but choosing, on purpose, the effort that gives something back. The things we care for have a way of caring for us in return.

- Andrea