> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.withlovesm.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Growing up without growing out of it - URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/growing-up-without-growing-out-of-it/ - Published: 2026-09-21T23:39:58.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T14:55:03.000Z - Description: September 21, 2026 - Author: sasha mekker - Tags: blog Last week I took a trip home and left realizing I barely made time for the things that make going home feel like going home in the first place. I didn’t go for a walk at the canal. I didn’t go to Pete’s Polar Parlor for ice cream before it closed for the season. I didn't give my cat his daily treat. I didn’t spend nearly enough time just sitting around with my family. I didn’t make certain conversations a priority. I didn’t even do some of the smallest things I'd wanted to do, things that would have taken ten minutes and probably meant more to me than most of what I did instead. It made me think about how important priorities become as you get older. I’m incredibly thankful that I got to grow up in a safe, loving home surrounded by amazing people. My childhood gave me the kind of freedom to just be a kid, and there really wasn’t that much competing for my attention. If I got interested in something, I could follow that curiosity for however long I wanted. I could create entire fake businesses and pour everything into making sure they succeeded, design and write my own newsletters, or spend hours reading the Farmer’s Almanac and Guinness Book of World Records. I’d build mini golf courses in the backyard and attempt Rube Goldberg machines, make my brother play school with me, practice piano and then put on a concert, or venture into the backyard like Lewis and Clark and come back having created an entire village. I had so much time to follow an idea simply because it interested me. There wasn’t a constant running list in the back of my head reminding me of everything else I could or should be doing. Obviously, that’s not realistic anymore. And that’s not as sad as it sounds. A lot of the things competing for my attention now are there because my life has gotten bigger, and I’m also really grateful for that. There are more people I care about, more things I want for myself, more responsibilities, more decisions, and more maintenance required just to be a functioning human. I care about my family and my friends and my relationship. I care about my health. I care about my career and my future. I want to write and design and ski and learn things and travel and make things and meet people and also occasionally sit and do absolutely nothing. All of those things are real priorities that have to fit inside the same 24 hours. I’ve been having a hard time accepting that because I learned to associate caring about something with giving myself completely to it. If I’m interested in something and I have more energy, why wouldn’t I keep going? If I have another hour, why wouldn’t I use it? If I could do more, stopping feels lazy. Dedicating thirty minutes to something doesn’t feel like enough when I know what I’d be capable of doing in three hours. I know I can’t live every part of my life like that anymore. If I give three hours to every single thing I care about, there aren’t enough hours. And if I wait until I have three hours before I let myself do something, I end up not even doing it. I don't want to become less driven because of that. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking I need to relax more, care less, stop putting so much pressure on everything, and just chill the hell out. There's definitely truth in that, but I also love how much I care! It's so me. I like wanting things. I like getting excited. I like having an idea and immediately wanting to know everything about it. I like being the person who asks a ton of questions. The solution to feeling overwhelmed by life cannot be becoming indifferent to it. It scares me how easily "I need to care less" could turn into "I don’t care." What do you want to do? I don’t care. Where do you want to go? Whatever. What do you want your life to look like? I don’t know. If you answer enough questions with "whatever," eventually you’re not really making many choices at all. Then you're just experiencing the default version of your life. The questions I'm asking now: how do I care deeply without letting every single thing I care about consume me? How do I have patience while still taking action? How do I keep wanting more without constantly feeling like what I did today wasn’t enough? Thirty minutes still counts. Thirty minutes spent writing counts even if I don't finish the article. Reading five pages still counts even if there are 300 pages left. A short walk counts. Calling a friend counts. Learning one completely random fact counts. The fact that I technically could keep going doesn’t mean I have to. The key is getting better at stopping while you still want more. That feels backwards to me because personally when I get into something, I want to ride that feeling until there’s nothing left. But I’ve done that enough times to know what happens. I go until I’m exhausted, another part of my life gets ignored, and the thing I was excited about starts feeling like another obligation. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing there is something nice about leaving with a little fuel still in the tank. I can come back tomorrow and actually be excited to come back tomorrow. I think learning might be a good place for me to practice this. I recently did a values exercise at work where I had to rank what mattered most to me, and my number one value was learning. The second I saw it there, it felt obvious. I've always been happiest when I’m learning. I love when some random thing catches my attention and then I’m reading about it at midnight even though it has absolutely nothing to do with my life. I love being able to actually see myself getting better at something, remembering an idea from a book weeks later, or realizing I know enough about something to have a conversation with someone about it. It's satisfying to notice that I know or can do something today that I couldn’t a month ago. Learning is also what I tend to think I need a ton of time for. I want to read and underline the whole book. I want to understand the whole thing. I want to keep going while I’m interested. So what would happen if I let thirty minutes be enough? Or ten? Or five? Instead of waiting for enough time to fully disappear into something, what if I just intentionally gave myself a little bit of time to be curious every day? Starting today, I'm gonna pick one thing to learn about each month. It can be anything. Something educational, hyper-specific, a physical skill, a time in history, a recipe I want to know by heart, a person, place, literally whatever. This past weekend, I went to an airshow and loved the way this one plane looked. Mainly just the colors and the vibe. I knew nothing about it, but now my one thing is this F7F Tigercat, a WWII Navy plane. There is no practical reason I need to know about the F7F Tigercat and that’s exactly what I like about it. The only real rule I want to give myself is that every day, I interact with that month’s thing somehow. I could have two hours and read a book about it. I could have five minutes and Google one question. I could go to the library. I could watch a YouTube video. I could find someone locally who knows about it and ask if I can buy them coffee. I could try something with my hands. I could write about what I’ve learned. It doesn’t really matter. And at the end of the month, I have to pick something new. That doesn’t mean I have to stop exploring last month's thing. If I fall in love with it, great, let it become part of my life. I just don’t want every interest to become another endless project I have to complete (bc there is no completion). I don’t need to become an expert. I can learn a bunch of stuff, leave with unanswered questions, and go be curious about something else. I like the idea of looking back after a year and having twelve completely different subjects woven into my life. Not even saying I mastered twelve things, more so that I spent a year deliberately interacting with things I didn’t know before. Maybe I met someone because of one of them or one changes what I believe or becomes a lifelong hobby. Maybe I learn about something for thirty days and never think about it again and that’s fine too. Zooming out, I'm trying to relearn how to let small things be enough. Growing up means I can’t give every wonder an entire day anymore. There are other things and people that deserve pieces of me too. I refuse to let the curious part of me disappear. She might only get thirty minutes today instead of five hours and that's okay she's still with me. I refuse to let the ambitious part of me disappear. I can always acknowledge I have fuel left in the tank and that's okay I just need to get comfortable leaving some of that fuel there. There are things I want to come home with energy for. There are people I want to be present with and conversations I don’t want to miss because something else felt more urgent. There are walks I want to take, questions I want to ask, places I want to go, things I want to learn, and plenty of nights where I want to do absolutely nothing. I have to leave room for all of it. *with love, sm*