I arrived in Ojai with a plan—a detailed, color-coded, highly productive plan. I was housesitting for friends for the month of June, caring for their home, their garden, a soulful Frenchie named Gaston and 11 chatty chickens. In my mind, this was also going to be my creative retreat. I had brought my laptop, my project list and my ambitious content calendar. I intended to be a busy, purposeful worker bee—just in a more beautiful location.

The house had other ideas.

Maybe it was the pixie oranges. Maybe it was the way the morning light fell through the kitchen window. Maybe it was the warm eggs I gathered from the nesting boxes each day, still radiating with the hens’ body heat. Whatever it was, within three days my careful plan dissolved like sugar in warm tea.

I started doing something I had not done in years: I slowed down. Not performatively. Not as an item on a self-care checklist. I let the days unfold on their own terms.

Mornings became rituals of small, sensory devotions. Gather eggs. Pick oranges straight from the tree and eat them barefoot in the grass, juice slipping down my wrist. Water the garden. Sit with coffee I actually tasted instead of gulped. Watch Gaston sunbathe, fully committed to the art of doing nothing.

The home—consciously created by my friends John and Jack—taught me something essential: Joy is not something we chase or manufacture. It is something we create the conditions for, and then allow.

Every room held a quiet surprise: a curved wall, a perfectly placed object catching the light, spaces that encouraged lingering and noticing. This was not decorative beauty. It was beauty as hospitality—to the people who lived there, and to life itself.

During the second week I had a realization that felt like both relief and reckoning. I had spent most of my adult life treating joy as a reward I had to earn through productivity. Finish the project, hit the deadline, check off the list—then you get to rest. Then you get to feel alive.

But what if that is backward?

What if joy is not the dessert after the meal of real life? What if joy is real life—and all the striving, producing and proving is the break from it?

I began listening for desire instead of obligation. What did I want to do today? Some days the answer was writing. Other days it was arranging flowers or reading for hours under the wisteria-draped pergola. Sometimes I drove into town for wine and cheese and brought it back to eat on the terrace at sunset while the chickens clucked their way to roost.

My natural rhythm, when left alone, was slower than I realized—more spacious, more attuned to beauty and delight than achievement and output. Shockingly, I became more creative, not less. Ideas arrived like gifts. Insights emerged in the white space between activities, in the pauses I usually rush through.

Midlife keeps trying to teach me this: The second half of life is not about working harder. It is about recognizing—and fiercely protecting—what makes you feel most alive. It is about giving yourself permission to build a life that does not require recovery from.

I thought often about the 11 chickens I cared for. They have one job: be chickens. Scratch in the dirt. Dust-bathe in the afternoon sun. They do not chase productivity goals or optimization strategies. They simply are what they are, fully and without apology. And every morning, the world rewards them with another day of scratching and sunshine.

I thought: This. This is what I want my life to feel like. Not a vacation from real life. Not an escape. But a way of being rooted in beauty, presence and the permission to let desire lead. A life where joy is not the reward for completing the hard parts—it is the texture of the days themselves.

Now that I am home, I am still working and making plans because structure matters, and I like knowing where I’m headed. But last Tuesday I scrapped my afternoon because the light was perfect, and I wanted to sit in it and think. The work still got done. It was better work.

I used to measure my days by what I accomplished. Now I measure them by how alive I felt. That is not less rigorous. It is simply a different rigor.

The chickens are still scratching in Ojai. Gaston is still sunbathing. And I am here, learning to follow joy as though it knows exactly where it is going.