The smell of lavender and sawdust float on the subtle breeze, dancing and intermingling. They pull each other around the yard like two kids eager to share their tiny little treasures hidden in a blade of grass or buried in the dirt or in the branches of the tree. The clouds are thick, but that doesn’t stop the sun. She permeates the gray with a gentle warmth, brightening everything just enough that everything feels like quiet joy vs. shrouded sadness. I will forever love summers in the Pacific Northwest.

With 40 has come a different understanding of time than I’ve ever experienced before. I crave the slowness of a day–watching the afternoon sun shift its course through my windows as the minutes move by. It might take a month to notice the difference, but each day where the light touches changes just a little and exposes a bit of something it hadn’t the day before.

120° has been haunting me the past almost 3 months. Thankfully, not the temperature. That would be awful. It’s been my main goal in flipping a world turned upside down right side up.

There are a lot of things I want to tell you.

Here’s the current status: swollen knee, strained meniscus, gash in my heel, mildly sprained wrist, pinky slice from a Japanese chef’s knife, slightly twisted ankle, out of place ribs, and an okay attitude. 

Not all of these are related to each other, but most of them are. Except the okay attitude. That came on its own at the beginning of the week as an unexpected Monday gift.

Okay, so I bought this leather jacket at Goodwill a couple of months ago for $14.99. I was so stoked on the find—100% leather, simple front zip with a few fun details like a lapel that has a couple of flat silver studs and it was black, naturally—my favorite color. The Goodwill tag said it was a size bigger than what the jacket tag said which were both smaller than what I typically wear, but with -30 seconds left until closing, I quickly tried it on and deemed it the perfect fit.

Just when I thought I would be in the shade for the rest of the evening, a perfect sliver of sunshine found its way through the buildings behind right before sunset. I was lying on my back, eyes closed, at the end of a free evening yoga class on the bluff overlooking the ocean. I could feel the gentle kiss of the sunlight on my skin and without prompting, I subtly smiled.

Two people I work with told me they were proud of me this week, and about something completely unrelated to work. It was unexpected, yet very welcome. As we go about our lives, it can be easy to forget how the little things we do are actually big things. Things that matter. Things that can make a huge difference in the trajectory of our lives. Things that both check and challenge us. Things that can even be, magical.