We moved to LA for the aliveness.
That’s the honest answer. Not the weather, not the career, not the proximity to anything practical. It was the energy—that particular vibration under a sun that refuses to clock out. You can feel it in the air here. It makes flow easier. It makes grounding easier, too, because the ocean is right there, asking you to come watch the waves roll in.
For a month now, I’ve been watching my old habits slip back through the door I thought I’d closed in Portland.
I know my triggers. One of the big ones that turns my bad habits into a high-speed slip and slide is juggling too much at once—so much that there’s no room left for me to actually exist inside my own life. Forget flow. Forget aliveness. When every dial on my internal system is shouting SOS, the whole organism narrows to one question: how do I get through this crush?
Lately, there have been too many big things stacked on top of each other. And when that happens, I lose my ability to sort. I can’t tell what’s genuinely urgent from what just feels urgent because my nervous system is already running hot. Everything gets flagged at the same priority level, which is to say: now, now, now.
Some of the big things are done. The move is managed. The boxes are mostly unpacked. The donation pile has been sorted and hauled away. I made it through the part I thought was the hard part.
And now I’m noticing that the thing I came here for—the aliveness—has been waiting for me this whole time while I was busy not existing.
So I’m making myself one promise: a morning walk to the ocean, every day.
This was part of my original vision for what life in Venice could feel like. And it’s one of the first things that fell off the list. There wasn’t time. There was too much to do. I got swept into a tsunami of doing and left the ocean behind, which is almost funny if you squint at it.
But the walk is the most physical, undeniable reminder that I’m in a new place. It’s the most grounding ritual I have access to. Starting the day by putting my feet on sand, watching something move that isn’t a to-do list—that sets the tone for the whole day. It tells my system: we’re not in the crush anymore. We live here now.
A reminder to flow like the ocean.
I’m done with grinding until there’s nothing left of me but a pile of dust. I’ve done enough of that already to know where it leads, and it’s not a place that produces anything good—not for my work, not for my clients, not for the people I love.
The aliveness is the whole point. If I let the doing swallow the reason I came here, I’ve traded something I can’t get back for something that was never going to satisfy me anyway.
So: the ocean. Every morning.
My line in the sand.
