"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

10 daily ways I'm having a simply stunning summer.

first few days of a simply stunning summer 2024

On Tuesday afternoon, by 2pm, I gave up on the day.

I was angry or annoyed about something, I cannot remember what, specifically.

It was RAGINGLY hot outside. The heat index in the 100s, which is rare for the Hudson Valley.

I changed into very little clothing and my gardening clogs.

And set to weeding the garden, which had — within a matter of weeks — gone from Eden to overgrown.

Some weeds are so satisfying to rip up.

They have almost juicy, bulbous stems and a neat bundle of roots, and they pull right out of the ground like butter.

They also … grow like weeds, so they are literally everywhere.

Some are intractable. Impossible to get out by the root. They snap off somewhere in the middle or don’t budge at all.

I just move on.

Intractable myself, I did all this hot work with bare hands.

“Why didn’t you put the gardening gloves on that you bought?” my husband asks.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

Except I do know — I wanted to FEEL my efforts. That supremely satisfying sensation of getting rid of what doesn’t belong. Pruning, weeding, ripping out by the root. I’m here for it all.

I weeded until my hands grew bloody and blistered — which actually didn’t take long — and I had completely sweat through my shirt — also did not take long.

Dirty, red-faced, relentless. And yet, whatever hot-headedness that prompted me to weed in the heatwave was starting to dissipate.

The weeding was the alchemy.

I was also, of course, weeding to avoid sitting down to write this essay too, because I was feeling pretty blocked by this whole project.

The great thing about writing, though, is that you can write while you weed.

Isn’t that often and always the case?

So many things get solved or resolved when we step away or put it down or take it for a walk or into a meditation or yoga practice or a workout or a conversation with a trusted resource. When we change the perspective, when we widen the lens, the thing starts to work itself out.

So I’m weeding and, as I untangle the roots, I’m also unweaving the threads of this essay and this whole essay project that had become also intractable in my head.

I set out on this Substack journey with utter JOY to be sharing my writing again. And then I gave myself this very serious homework assignment of distilling down all the lessons that I’ve learned over the last 10 years since leaving Big Law into 10 essays.

Oh boy.

What can I say?

I love a threshold moment of reflection and capturing that current understanding in a creative project.

But I made the project so serious and heavy by doing that, that I started to kill the juice that inspired it.

This is not news to me. This is not the first time I’ve sucked the life out of something I love.

Often, when I care about something deeply, I can start to take it VERYSERIOUSLY. And then I grip, grip, grip, white-knuckled & bloodied. I harden, harden, harden, armored up.

My jaw clenches. My shoulders begin to calcify in their stress stance. And my breath becomes clipped and high in my chest, almost held.

(Cue Mary Oliver: “Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”)

I’m working on learning to hold what I love with more ease.

Like my son Louis last weekend and the butterfly he caught in his hands in the garden. And how he brought it over to show me with very lightly, but intentionally cupped palms, fingers loose and relaxed. And then, after showing me, set it free with ease to carry a wish he had made.

So bloodying my own fingers this week — from gripping too tight on the weeds — allowed me to loosen my grip on this essay project.

I laughed to myself as a I worked: Nature is such a reliably, faithfully wise teacher, it could almost be annoying how true & spot on she is, if she wasn’t so patient, nonjudgmental, and consistent in her wisdom.

The very thing I wanted to write about in this essay was getting written as I weeded.

What I wanted to talk about here was this:

That I always knew I left Big Law because of stress.

“To solve my own stress problem,” I said in my corporate-lawyer-turned-meditation-teacher bio. “So I could help others solve theirs too.”

I started with myself: my first, best, and lifelong client. Truly, to heal from real burnout. To reset my nervous system. To get off the hamster wheel of fight and flight and relax into my life instead. To quit abandoning myself for every deadline, ping of an email, or pressure of a billable hour. To come back to myself.

But it took me YEARS (7 to be exact, because I had this next realization just 3 years ago): I didn’t only leave Big Law to solve my own stress problem, I left because I needed to quit completely “Stress Culture.”

Stress Culture, as I’ve come to define it, is created when the collective nervous system of which you are a part (your family unit, your office, an entire industry like Big Law) is so chronically and acutely stressed out, strung out on adrenaline, pumping with cortisol, always hovering on the brink of burnout (or beyond it), the characteristics and behaviors of fight, flight, and freeze calcify into values and norms and even praise songs of that system.

Flight becomes rushing and busyness as a badge of honor.

Fight becomes “sleep-when-you’re-done-not-when-you’re-tired.”

Freeze becomes numbing out at the afterwork happy hour, where the law firm foots the bill!

The thing about Stress Culture is that when you’re doing it RIGHT — when you’re swimming the proper strokes in your designated lane in the pool of Stress Culture — you’re still suffering beneath the surface. You’re drowning.

You can make all the right moves in a Stress Culture setting, check all the right boxes, hit all the right milestones, and STILL, at the end of the day, be burnt out, unhappy, disconnected, disillusioned, and just plain exhausted.

Here’s one example of what Stress Culture felt like in Big Law.

Days felt like they were meant to “get through,” rather than live.

There was always a deadline (usually many, often competing) that we were limping toward on any given day.

The pace, the fury, the pressure felt like it was always “finals period” but the actual test never came. The end-in-sight-finishline kept getting nudged out, farther and farther away, and we continued to cram and pull all nighters.

It was a lot of “when / then” thinking in Big Law’s Stress Culture.

“When this case settles, then I’ll take a vacation.”

“When I make partner, then I won’t work nights and weekends.”

“When I pay off these loans, then I’ll move to a more life-style-friendly law job.”

It was a lot of delayed living.

Merely solving my own stress problem and then diving back into the pool would have felt like half-way weeding, snapping off the invasive plant somewhere in the middle, but not the root.

To fully heal, I needed to get to the root of Stress Culture.

And like facing a whole overgrown garden of weeds, you have to start one by one.

So I took that “when / then” value and inquired whether it was one I actually wanted to align my life with?

Whether I wanted to spend all of my foreseeable days in delayed pleasure, relief at the end of a deadline instead of fulfillment and connection to meaningful work, always hustling yet always exhausted.

Or actually have the capacity to be present and attentive to each day as it unfolds? To be intentional with my days. To have the bandwidth to choose how I shape my days and what I place in my schedule, my list of to dos, my priorities.

It’s what Annie Dillard states so simply and stunningly in her book The Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

The least sexy and also the most extraordinary, ordinary reason I quit Big Law: I did not want to spend my days cooped up in an office, with forced air conditioning and windows that didn’t open, billing another hour to another billion-dollar client. I wanted to be barefoot and in the garden, weeding and writing. Owning my own time again. Setting my own pace. I wanted to fling the windows wide open and eat my meals outside. I wanted to take my time. And hop on my yoga mat at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Be there to pick up my kid from the bus stop and pick sun-ripened strawberries right off the vine and pop them into my mouth, still warm and dripping with sweet juice.

It’s been two days since I weeded. The garden is once again overgrown after a night of almost-summer thunderstorms. My blisters are healing (aren’t these vital bodies amazing like that?)

I am still and always learning the lessons I teach. I promise you that. The roots of Stress Culture run deep and grow fast, and I still often get snagged by it all.

Today is the Summer Solstice — a threshold moment, as good as any, to pause and consider — to check in with the quality of our days and how we spend each of them.

I realize I’ve been clamping down too much lately, holding my breath, going too fast, pushing the river, taking on too much, being busier than I’d like.

And yet, I actually want this summer to be filled with joyful, present, and pleasurable days and intelligent fire, heat, and growth — not burnout.

So here are 10 ways I’m committing to a simply stunning summer, one day at a time:

1. To holding my own butterflies with a looser grip: to let these essays come through me without attachment to the outcome or some “10 Lessons / 10 Years / 10 Essays” format. To be easy and loving with this work (and YOU!), all at once.

2. To making time for my own solo yoga practice again, at least one “idle & blessed” afternoon a week.

3. To spending more time in my garden. Watching it. Tending to it. Cultivating it. And allowing it do what it will do, with my care and its’ own full potential. If we get one tomato this first year, I will rejoice! I will cut flowers, pretty weeds, and grasses daily. And arrange them in my artfully amateur way because I could melt at the beauty of it all.

4. To eating as many meals as possible outside.

5. To springing for the babysitter and having a hot date down in Hudson on a Wednesday night ;)

6. To doing the “bare minimum” with the admin bits of my work. (Btw, I say “bare minimum” with zero ounce of self-flagellation, instead embodying the reframe I give to my coaching clients: “bare minimum” = “I have excellent discernment and delegation powers. I can distill my life and work down to what is absolutely essential. And let that be enough.” You are so welcome to use that reframe too ;)).

7. To chilling out on my own self-imposed deadlines (and perhaps weeding out a couple of them altogether, at the root!).

8. To embarking on my own 40 Early Mornings journey today, the Summer Solstice — a dedicated 6-week container of coming back to myself. The next round of 40 Early Mornings begins on the Autumnal Equinox. This program is a complete nervous system & soul reset. I would love to have you join me. The waitlist is here. 🫶

9. To softening my gaze: Fewer screens, more skies.

10. To working with folks this summer in a simple yet wildly potent way — which is why I just launched the Burnout Breakthrough. The concept is simple: you fill out a form — and it’s like your friend with the calmest nervous system and gentlest way to help you widen the lens on your perspective sends you a voice memo that gives you an instant exhale, a true sigh of relief, and a PLAN for resetting your nervous system. An almost-instant shift for you, no scheduling or commitment require ;) This might be my favorite offering yet.

OK now you go — if how you spend your days is how you spend your life, how are you living this summer?

to today & everyday,
Cath xo

FOR MY PAID SUBSCRIBERS — you DEAR ones — the audio version of this essay + mini meditation is below!