Life is short.
It’s true, tomorrow is never promised. But, if we're lucky, life is actually long. The average life expectancy is 84 years. That's roughly 28,800 days, 692,000 hours, and more minutes than any of us could ever count one by one.
It's a fascinating paradox: life is short and long, all at once. But I think what people really mean is that time is precious. Not because there's so little of it, but because it's so easy to spend without noticing.
I always return to author Annie Dillard’s words: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” When we're constantly striving for the next best thing—the next milestone, the next upgrade, the next version of ourselves—time can slip through our fingers, uncounted. We remember the big days. But we rarely notice the ordinary ones, even though they're the ones we're actually living in.
Your first task: Choose a familiar place. It could be your favorite sunlit chair, the crooked tree on your street, or the corner table at a café you love. Over the coming weeks or months, return to it again and again. Photograph it in different seasons, at different times of day, in changing weather, or after moments of celebration and upheaval. Let it become a record of time passing.
As you document, consider:
- What light, weather, or season feels most like itself here?
- What details do I notice now that I would have overlooked before?
- How is this place changing? How am I changing in relation to it?
- If someone looked through these photos years from now, what story would they tell?
Clearly, June’s theme is Time—how we spend it, lose track of it, try to hold onto it, and sometimes, finally, make peace with it. Keep reading to make the most of it.
Recreate this Mood Board for yourself:
- Look forward to the second cycle
- Linger at the table and start a new conversation
- Take the plunge on pursuing your dreams now
- Transform your house into a vacation home
- Preserve the moment with turmeric sun prints
- Explore breathtaking libraries and cinemas frozen in time
- Bake your way back to childhood with homemade Pop-Tarts
- Tune into pre-iPhone summer nostalgia
- Let someone admire you as you age like art
Life, unplugged
💗 Honor your physical archive
Our bodies are personal archives. They’re vessels that tell stories of attention, care, grief, joy, stress, resilience, survival. Honor the passage of time by loosely filling in these prompts:
- I'm thankful for ___ because it tells the story of ____.
- My body is carrying evidence that I have ___.
A few to get you started:
- “I'm thankful for my calloused hands because they tell the story of work I'm proud of.”
- “I'm thankful for the lines around my eyes because they remind me I've spent years looking closely at people I love.”
- “I'm thankful for my stretch marks because they tell the story of a body that made room for someone else.”
- “My body is carrying evidence that I have danced in kitchens and laughed until it hurt.”
- “My body is carrying evidence that I have grieved and kept going anyway.”
- “My body is carrying evidence that I have changed my mind about who I wanted to be—more than once.”
Familiar comforts
🍰 Host a “sobremesa” dinner party
The best part of a dinner party often ends up being the third act when the plates are stacked, everyone's lingering at the table, and the conversation is flowing. There's a word for that tradition in Spanish: sobremesa.
This dinner party format is built entirely around it. Stay awhile, forget the clock, and lose track of time.
The idea: Brainstorm deep-dive conversation prompts to accompany dessert and coffee. Write the prompts on slips of paper and let everyone take a turn pulling a topic from a bowl. Dig into whatever comes up—a memory, an opinion, a hypothetical. Start with these topics:
- What's a summer you'd go back to?
- What's your hot take?
- What's the best meal you've ever had, and where were you?
- What did you want to be when you were 10?
- What's something you changed your mind about recently?
- What's something you want to learn before you turn 100?
- Where would you travel right now if you had unlimited time and money?
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Help desk
🩹 How to get over almost anything
Does time heal all wounds? That's up for debate. Time has a way of softening embarrassment, rejection, heartbreak, career setbacks, awkward memories, and old crushes, but some feelings linger no matter how much distance you put between you and the moment. Here are a few ways to speed up the process, using time as your guide:
📝 Put it on paper. Write for 15 minutes without editing or rereading. Just braindump. Then, think back to where you were one year ago and write down three concrete ways you've changed or grown since then—got a new job, started a new hobby, made a new friend, etc.
📱 Put your phone down. Mute the group chat, unfollow the account, or archive the photos. You don't have to delete anything forever, but you can get it out of your daily view. If you're drafting a message you're not sure about, write it, then wait 24 hours before you send it.
🗓️ Put one thing on the calendar. Book a plan for next week (dinner with a friend, a workout class, tickets to a comedy show) so you have a fixed point to look forward to.
👟 Put your body in motion. Take a 30-minute walk or jog around the block and get lost in your favorite playlist. Visit a nearby park, café, or bookstore and stay for at least 20 minutes.
Reader insights
🎨 Make more time for personal hobbies
Most of our readers are interested in learning new things—a language, an instrument, a craft—but according to their honest answers, “occasionally” is about as often as it actually happens. This month, make it your mission to up that frequency.
Begin with a fun mental exercise: Imagine you had an entire month all to yourself in a perfect world—no work, no responsibilities, infinite free time. How would you fill your time? Would you learn to make ice cream from scratch? Would you rank every episode of Desperate Housewives? Would you make a travel scrapbook?
To make more time for these personal hobbies in your current life with responsibilities, consider two mindset shifts:
1. Stop waiting for a big block of time. You don't actually need a whole free month to justify starting an activity, you just need 30 minutes at the end of a day. Pick one night this week and schedule your hobby on the calendar like a meeting with yourself.
2. Lower the bar. “Start a garden” is overwhelming, while “plant one packet of tomato seeds” is doable. Before you talk yourself out of something, ask: what's the smallest possible version of this I could do this weekend? Start there.
Before you know it, the perfect month you imagined will be happening—30 minutes at a time.
