Hi Reader,

Last week I told you I struggled with creating a purposefully slow summer. The intention was there but the follow through, the guarding of that slow... not there.

This week, I didn't have to. My kids got sick, and slow ... arrived.

One of them is still asleep as I write this. It's 10am. The other is curled up on the couch with a book and a mug of tea. Later, I want to play board games and watch Toy Story — I want to refresh my memory before we see the new one. I may even take a nap with them.

And this afternoon, when they inevitably start bouncing off the walls again, we'll get that pool day. A little quieter, a lot shorter, probably not that many cannonballs and flips, but we'll get it.

I certainly didn't plan this. If you'd asked me yesterday, I would have told you today was supposed to be camp drop-off and a full afternoon sitting at my desk, crossing things off my list.

And even though I won't get as many things crossed off, I am relieved.

Not that they're sick, of course. But the slowness that comes with it. The permission to just stop. I didn't have to earn it, or plan for it, or fight my own calendar for it. It just showed up, a sore throat as its reason.

This is the same thing I keep learning, just from a different angle: the body doesn't wait for your permission. Not ours, not theirs. When it needs to stop, it finds a way to make you stop — one way or another. A few months ago it was my own nervous system, after months of running on empty. Today it's two kids' immune systems, deciding for all of us that this would be a board-games-and-Toy-Story kind of day.

I'd rather learn to choose the slow day on purpose, before my body — or theirs — has to force the issue. But today, I'll take it however it comes.

Yours in taking the slow when it shows up,