I’m becoming less and less interested in chasing things.

I don’t mean I’ve lost my curiosity. Or my ambition. Or my desire to make things and go places and experience the world.

It’s something else.

I’m less interested in chasing the invitation, the connection, the opportunity, the version of myself that might exist if I could just get into the right room with the right people and have the right experience.

I’m less concerned with being understood.

That one feels significant.

I have spent a lot of my life explaining myself. Telling stories. Pulling evidence from the annals of my past and arranging it neatly on the table: This happened to me. This is what I learned. This is why I am the way I am. Here is the connective tissue. Here is the origin story.

Maybe we all do some version of this.

We want people to know us, and so we narrate ourselves to them.

But lately I don’t feel much desire to narrate.

I am home more.

I make sourdough, and then I give it away.

I make candles, and then I give some of those away too.

I’ve started writing something that might become a children’s book, though I’m not sure it’s really a children’s book, and strangely enough, it isn’t about me.

Even in my classroom, I notice the change.

My students don’t hear nearly as many stories about my life as students once did. Whatever wisdom I have gathered over the years has become more covert.

It hides in the things I ask them to read.

It slips into the directions for an assignment.

Reflect on who you are.

Tell the truth.

Be authentic.

Pay attention to your patterns.

Change the ones that no longer serve you.

Protect the things that matter.

I suppose I am still telling them everything I know.

I’m just not always telling them how I learned it.

There was a younger version of me who would have imagined this life as lonely.

She would have been suspicious of all this quiet. She would have wondered why we weren’t out there doing something. Meeting someone. Going somewhere. Making ourselves visible.

Sometimes she still shows up.

She knocks on the window.

Hey. Aren’t we supposed to go chase that thing?

What about that event?

What about those people?

What if everyone else is out there living some more interesting life?

And there is another part of me now—older, quieter, considerably less impressed by all of that—who barely looks up from what she is doing.

What are you trying to prove, sis?

And the funny thing is, the younger part knows.

She knows exactly what we were trying to prove.

That we mattered.

That we belonged.

That we were interesting.

That we were loved.

That we were not missing out.

For a long time, chasing felt like living.

Now I wonder how much of it was trying to fill an emptiness I didn’t yet know how to sit beside.

Because my life has gotten quieter, but it doesn’t feel empty.

It feels incredibly full.

There is bread rising on the counter.

There is wax cooling in jars.

There are pages beginning to collect into something I don’t fully understand yet.

There are students encountering questions that might follow them long after they have forgotten my name.

There are people lighting things I made in their homes.

There are people breaking open bread made by my hands.

There are ideas moving outward without requiring my biography to accompany them.

Maybe this is another kind of ambition.

Not the ambition to be known, but the ambition to be useful.

To make something good and send it out into the world.

To leave a little warmth somewhere without needing everyone to know where the flame came from.

There is still a negotiation happening inside me.

The people-pleasing part occasionally looks around nervously and asks why we aren’t doing what we used to do.

Why aren’t we reaching out?

Why aren’t we adjusting our schedule to make all of it possible?

Why aren’t we making sure everybody likes us?

Why aren’t we explaining?

The wiser part doesn’t really argue.

She just keeps kneading the dough.

Keeps pouring the wax.

Keeps writing.

Keeps teaching.

She seems to understand something the rest of me is only beginning to learn:

This life is for you.

You do not have to turn it into evidence.

You do not have to make a case for who you are.

You do not have to chase every open door simply because it is open.

And perhaps the strangest part is that living more for myself has somehow made my life feel less self-centered.

Because when I was chasing, so much of what I was doing was trying to satisfy something inside me.

Now I am mostly tending things.

Making things.

Giving things away.

Planting little ideas in places where I may never get to see what becomes of them.

Maybe that is what this season is.

Not disappearing or withdrawing.

Not becoming smaller.

Just becoming less interested in being the subject of the story.

And more interested in what I can quietly leave behind.