Turning the Ship Around
I have been in an intensely work-focused season of life. It started in February 2025, when I finally decided to take on the ambitious task of creating a program designed to help women build and sustain meaningful friendships. I had been sitting on this idea for years, and post-pandemic, it seemed more needed than ever. It didn’t feel like a “project,” rather, an endeavor that would take me away from the elemental things that my life is built on: family, friends, hobbies, and the deep value of slowness. Sleep, too. And despite the sacrifices, what this program could mean for women around the country felt well worth what I would temporarily give up.
The program, called The Invitation, has been a labor of love, as the saying goes, requiring late nights, weekends at my desk, and tension. So much tension between what I would normally have been doing and what I was doing instead, which was working. Even though I was doing something with wide-ranging benefit—changing the lives of women—in the end, work is work. Hours at the computer are just hours on the computer, no matter what is being created. I made a pact with myself and my family to take this chance and build something new and heart-centered, and accept that the workload would put me wildly out of alignment with my values until the program launched.
The intention was to work with intensity for a season and then return to balance. I spoke with my husband and children directly and laid out how I thought this would impact them and me. I shared just how big the ship was, how I would be on my computer at home more than I ever have, and that there would be weekends away to write and create. My family said they understood, and for the most part, they have. That pact was made fifteen months ago, and it is only now that I am slowly coming back into something that looks and feels like the life and rhythms I used to follow.
Before I get to the part of the story where my ship gets lost at sea, and I learn how hard it is to turn a bulky, heavy ship around, I want to tell you a different story about values.
When I was 26, I attended my first therapy session. I was lost in every way one can be in early adulthood. I was working like crazy in corporate America, getting up early to commute on a crowded highway, hoping my pant suit didn’t get wrinkled on the way in. My husband and I, newly married, bought a darling 1960s ranch and spent our weekends fixing it up, which seemed like a good idea. But really, we weren’t living as we had been before we got married. Bike rides and hanging out with friends got replaced with trips to Home Depot and learning how to strip fifty-year-old wallpaper without destroying the drywall. To sum up, I was working in a cutthroat industry and spending my weekends doing a different kind of work, DIY remodeling, all while trying to figure out how to be married. I needed help; I was lost at sea.
After hearing how lost I was, the therapist asked a seemingly innocuous question: What are your values?
I burst into tears.
I didn’t have a ready answer for her. The tears came instantly, because I felt so embarrassed about what it meant about me that I didn’t know the answer to this question. What kind of person doesn’t know what they value? She handed me a sheet with a list of about fifty values and sent me home with an assignment to circle five by the time we had our next session. This was my introduction to defining my values, and twenty-five years later, I don’t need the handout anymore. I am firmly grounded in my personal values, those which underpin my marriage, guide my parenting, and support my friendships.
Fast forward a couple of decades to the season of The Invitation. My ship was big and really good at charging straight ahead, fueled by sheer will, determination, and borrowed energy that would have to be repaid later—with dividends. No matter. Charge on! Just before The Invitation launched, I was near empty in all the ways one can be empty when bringing something meaningful and worthwhile to life. I was exhausted and excited. Hopeful and depleted. I was frantic with an electric, buzzy energy that kept me striving towards my goal.
Launch day was everything I could have hoped for and more. It was a joint effort with my husband and teenage twins, all of us working toward giving The Invitation a memorable introduction. Not only were friends and family gathered around to hear about what I had created, but they were celebrating with me. My ship was still cruising at full speed, headed towards Destination Project Completion. After all the hubbub, I was finally ready to turn her around and head back home to myself. To my family. To my routines and rhythms.
But she couldn’t, wouldn’t turn around as quickly as I needed. My mind was ready to slow down, but my body had no idea what I was talking about. Slow down? Now? Why? My body had gotten used to anxious feelings, jitters, excitement, adrenaline, tension, and around-the-clock busyness and stimulation. It was not aligning with my old values of balance, leisure, slowness, hobbies, and time for impromptu chats with my teens or sleepy pillow talk with my husband. Nope. That was how you lived before, my body said to me. This frantic, excited, always-on energy is the new way, and I am not interested in turning the ship around.
For months after the project launched, I still felt tension, like gears grinding, sparks flying as metal ground on metal. I felt at odds with how my body had gotten used to stress and constant work, while my mind was ready to realign with my core values. This is where knowing my values was key. How else would I know what I wanted to get back to? The problem was, when an empty evening presented itself, I’d think, ”Oh, lovely, how do I want to spend my time?" and a consideration of several options would follow: read and chat in the sunroom with my husband, hang out with one of my kids, start a new embroidery project? Then an upside-down feeling would come over me as I considered these options, because none of them involved work.
That upside-down feeling was a mix of panic and discomfort. Yuck.
An inner voice would whisper hypnotically, Isn’t there something you ought to be doing? Something actually productive? I had rarely felt this tug between the cognitive clarity of my chosen lifestyle and my body's near craving for tension and busyness.
What the hell was happening? Why was it so hard to turn this ship around?
Wayne Muller, whose work has influenced my beliefs and values about living a contented, meaningful life, wrote in his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, the following regarding the dilemma of rest and slowing down: “Our ability to rest depends on what we find there.” Mueller states this truth so simply: If we find anxiety, panic, or guilt when we want to slow down, we won’t rest. How many of us experience a primal, tension-filled response to rest and slowness? A lot of us. Knowing that, I have worked diligently throughout my adult life to adaptively cope with how I experience leisure, pleasure, and slowness. How could all that work have faded? And what of the beliefs I have built my retreats, women’s circles, and writing on? Was it all slipping through my fingers after one season of overworking? Could I still call my beloved newsletter and blog The Slow Weekender, for goodness’ sake?
After several weeks of living with two parts of me duking it out, of sailing in choppy waters with wave after wave of resistance and friction, my ship finally started to veer back towards the familiar. I had to repeatedly choose myself and my values to get her to change course and head home. I slowly started journaling more, cracking open books that had been collecting dust, and spending more time humming in my kitchen while cooking weeknight dinners. Little by little, my body stopped quivering when I wasn’t working and became acclimated, once again, to calm and peacefulness.
I was clear from the start of this season of overwork that it would be just that, a season. A time with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I never expected to find such a challenge in returning to a slower lifestyle. I am well aware that the scope of this project was small in comparison to what some people try to create. No matter the scale of the endeavor, this is what no one tells you in all the celebrated stories of entrepreneurs who take chances and build beautiful things: after all the pushing and sacrificing, when and if they try to come back to themselves, it is incredibly difficult.
The transition from fast to slow is not neat and tidy.
Like turning a thousand-foot ship around—long enough that the bow has no idea what the stern is doing—this has been an arduous, choppy return to life beyond work. The hardest part of this truth is that even when we are clear about our values and know where home is, we still have to choose, and choose again, and choose yet again to head there. Knowing your values means you have a beacon lighting a path forward; even so, you still have to decide to head that direction. In some ways, the easy part is defining your values; the hard part is living in accordance with them.
The world is happy to give you accolades for working hard, being busy and productive, and living fast and furiously. When you crash, thundering and shattering into land, breaking both you and everything around you, people will comment about how brave you were and continue to give you accolades as you smoke and smolder in the wreckage of your own life. Our success-obsessed culture measures achievement in dollar signs, likes, and followers. The wrong thing is being calculated; the socially influenced values we chase are nothing but a blurry mirage of happiness.
To slow down is counter culture, and the cultural tides are made of swift currents. Choosing a slower life is the first step; tolerating the grinding, uncomfortable transition between overwork and a moderate work-life is the second. When we burn out in the process of chasing a dream, there are no awards for what we gave up, only for what we achieved. The fact is, no one but you cares about what you have sacrificed to achieve your goals, and no one will tell you when it's time to stop. Only you can listen for the storm brewing in your body and spirit and decide when the sole accolade you crave is the intrinsic one from choosing yourself.
Enjoy the slow- Heather