EASY RED KIDNEY BEAN TOMATO STEW – HEARTY & VEGAN RECIPE
I kept a notebook for years where I wrote down who I would become.
Not goals exactly, but qualities. The person who woke up early without resentment. Who returned emails promptly. Who had strong opinions about wellness and could remember people’s names at parties. Who felt at home in their own skin.
I carried this notebook from apartment to apartment, city to city, relationship to relationship. The pages yellowed but the dream remained: somewhere ahead of me was a more complete version of myself, and if I could just figure out the right combination of habits and insights, I could step into them like putting on better clothes.
The notebook is still in a drawer somewhere. I stopped writing in it not because I gave up, but because one day I forgot to check if I was becoming the person I meant to be. I started to know that I already am.
The Space Between
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes from living your life like a dress rehearsal.
You hold back a little in conversations, saving your best self for when you feel more worthy of being heard. You choose apartments that are “good enough for now.” You love carefully, conditionally, with one foot always positioned toward the door.
Everything becomes temporary. Not just the circumstances—the projects, places, the morning routine—but you. You become temporary to yourself.
I used to think this was wisdom. That I was being honest about my limitations, realistic about how much growth I needed before I could claim the life I wanted.
But waiting for yourself to arrive is just another way of leaving.
What i have come to learn is to be in constant arrival of the new. This moment, and the next truly unique from each other. Always majestic and full of awe even though it is been the same dishes day in and day out or the cat running out of the house and being lost for days.
If one can breathe, one is truly ok. You breathe, knowing that your inner world is your outer world reflected, and no matter how much chaos there may seem to be, there is an inherent force of good connected from your spine to the cosmos.
What Actually Happened
The change wasn’t dramatic. No revelation in the grocery store or moment of clarity in traffic. I just noticed one morning that I’d stopped checking.
I was making coffee with the same chipped mug, looking out the same window at the same nothing-in-particular view. But the voice that usually narrated these moments—this is temporary, you’re working on something better, this doesn’t count yet—had gone quiet.
What remained wasn’t better or worse than what I’d imagined. It was just here.
The coffee tasted like coffee. The morning felt like morning. My life felt, for the first time in years, like my life. It just felt right.
My friends are such creatives, this up cycled purse shouts out patriotism 💯
The Kindness We Don’t Recognize
We think we’re being patient with ourselves when we say “I’m still figuring it out.” Kind when we defer our own needs until we become someone more deserving. Humble when we treat our current selves like rough drafts of who we’re meant to be.
But there’s a cruelty in this kindness. It keeps us always in the waiting room of our own existence, always preparing for a life we never quite arrive at.
The person you are while figuring it out is not practice. The love you feel while not being ready is still love. The life you live while getting your act together is your actual life.
We are always building the plane as we fly it. So try not to think about it too much and just be it.
The End of Almost
I know people who’ve been almost ready for decades. Almost ready to commit, to start the business, to have the conversation, to live where they want to live.
Almost is a comfortable place to stand—close enough to possibility to feel hopeful, far enough from commitment to stay safe.
But almost is not a place you can build a home.
The waiting doesn’t end because you become who you thought you needed to be. It ends when you stop needing to become someone else to deserve what you already have.
In your morning stillness practice, try to observe the minds wanderings, the egos’s requirements and preferences and just breathe.
When you think you are almost there, shift to the feeling that you have always been here. We try to always get to the next thing, if only this and that, but when you get tired, and your nervous system will tell you, the greatest gift you can give yourself is to allow yourself to know that you are already here. Complete, correct and ever flourishing.
Simple Truth
Your life is not a rehearsal for your real life. This is it. The dishes, the doubts, the way light falls through your particular windows at this particular hour.
The person you’ve been waiting to become—they were never coming. There’s only you, here, now, enough exactly as you are.
Some days this feels like everything. Some days it feels like nothing at all.
Both are true. Both are enough.
What have you been waiting for permission to claim?
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“Your life is not a rehearsal for your real life. This is it. The dishes, the doubts, the way light falls through your particular windows at this particular hour.” Thank you for the reminder that this is it.
A luminous meditation on presence, self-acceptance, and the quiet power of now. Paolo Peralta’s reflection dismantles the myth of “almost”, that liminal space where we postpone joy, purpose, and belonging until we feel more deserving. His writing is tender yet incisive, gently urging us to stop rehearsing and start inhabiting our lives as they are.
The notion that “waiting for yourself to arrive is just another way of leaving” is especially poignant. It reframes growth not as a destination, but as a continuous unfolding one that doesn’t require perfection, only presence. A beautiful reminder that the chipped mug, the ordinary morning, the breath itself, are not preludes to life but life in full bloom. Thoughtful, expansive, and quietly transformative.