When Doing Less Feels Like More

These days, I keep circling a deceptively simple question:

How should I spend them?

By “them,” I mean my days—these pockets of time I’m still lucky enough to call mine.

I’m living with Stage IV cancer. My doctors don’t speak in decades anymore; they speak in seasons. Time isn’t my friend in the conventional sense—but it has become my most precious companion. Which means how I spend it matters in a way it never did before.

Lately, I’ve been home. I write. I sit poolside. I read, sometimes. Other times I simply… sit. And I love it. There’s an ease in it, a quiet expansion I can feel but can’t quite name.

Still, there’s that whisper: Shouldn’t you be doing something more productive? More ambitious? Something the world would point to and say: “That’s how you make the most of your time”?

The cultural script for limited time is clear: go everywhere, do everything, leave nothing undone. It’s tempting. But it assumes “more” is automatically better. For me, the real question isn’t am I wasting my time?—it’s what do I count as living?

Productivity is easy to measure—miles traveled, projects completed, lists crossed off. But there’s another kind of work: fruitfulness. The work of coming home to yourself, deepening your inner world, tending the quiet garden of awareness. My hours by the pool, my mornings with the page—they’re not empty. They’re full, just not in ways you can measure on a clock or a calendar.

Here’s the paradox: I haven’t given up adventure. Far from it. In 2024, I stood among Antarctica’s blue ice, trekked through Patagonia, rafted the Río Baker, wandered the Atacama Desert, and walked the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia. In 2025, I’ve crossed to Europe and Scotland—and this August, I’ll set out again, toward the polar regions: Iceland, Greenland, the Northwest Passage.

These journeys feed the part of me that still craves scale, distance, the electricity of the unknown. They are my “go big” moments. But the days at home are just as essential. Without the quiet, the big trips would lose their sharpness. Without the big trips, the quiet wouldn’t feel so rich.

When you live with a countdown you can’t see but can feel, expansion changes shape. It’s no longer about collecting experiences like stamps. Sometimes, expansion is learning to rest without guilt. To make peace with your own company. To listen long enough to hear your truest thoughts. And sometimes, it’s choosing not to be swept away by other people’s urgency.

I picture my life now as a pendulum. Outward, toward the far-flung and the awe-inspiring. Inward, toward the intimate and familiar. I keep the slow days, and I scatter in moments of outward adventure: a new café, a short road trip, or yes, a voyage to the ends of the Earth. Not because the quiet is lacking, but because variety is its own medicine.

So, am I wasting my time? No. I’m spending it—deliberately—on expansion that happens in the marrow, not just on the map. When time is short, every choice is a statement of values. Mine says: I will not measure my life only in motion. I will measure it in meaning.

The poolside days aren’t a retreat from life.

They are my life.

And they are the work.

The Reader’s Compass

If you’ve ever wondered whether your quiet days are waste or nourishment, ask yourself these three questions at the end of each week:

• Did my choices make me feel more like myself—or less?

• Am I replenishing my energy, my curiosity, my sense of connection?

• If these were my last months or seasons, would I be content with how I spent them?

  
  

Your answers don’t have to convince anyone else. They only need to be true enough for you.