Stop. Breathe it in.

“Stop. Breathe it in!” I kept saying on a recent trip. So I quit my job and jetted to Europe for a month (another story) and as I escaped and landed in Europe I just stopped doing and let myself breathe. Usually, people leave jobs and already have a job lined up. This time around I forced myself to just stop, not take the next thing that pops up and is easy, and just let myself take a step back and figure out what I REALLY want to do with my life. (sidenote: saving is important!)

I live in NYC and this city is busy. Busy is an understatement. And for the most part I absolutely love it. There are always people around, you can eat whatever you want at any hour of the day/night, there are dozens of free events every day, art and music everywhere, etc. It’s basically a city where you are never bored and a place where I have to force myself to just relax and maybe say no and actually put DO NOT MAKE PLANS as an event on my calendar. It’s hard to stop and look around when I’m running around and doing all the things. So I land in Lisbon, Portugal, have a few hours until my friends showed up, and I started exploring. My only requirement and the only thing I had to “do” was explore and be a tourist and look at pretty things. It allowed me to truly stop and look around, to get lost, to breathe it in. My friend and I drove the Atlantic coast and ended up at this beautiful beach called Porto Covo. It was breathtaking. Life is weird. Tragic things happen. We have no clue how long we’ll be here. We are in a constant state of doing rather than just being. But it’s these moments where I see something so beautiful, and I can stop and breathe it in, and feel true gratitude.