I spent a weekend at a farm called Solitude. Then three days at a hydro afterwards. And somewhere between the silence and the warm water, my body said something I wasn't expecting.
It said: You have your own rhythm. And you haven't been listening to it.
Not a dramatic revelation. More like a quiet correction.
The way a river, when you finally stop walking alongside it, lets you hear that it's been moving at its own pace the whole time.
I've always admired people who seem to move at their own speed.
You know the ones — they don't rush when the room rushes. They don't fill silence with noise. They seem to carry an internal metronome that the world hasn't managed to override.
I am not naturally one of those people.
My mind moves fast. My ideas move faster. For most of my career — twenty-plus years in IT, business, entrepreneurship — speed was the currency. Faster meant smarter. Busier meant more successful.
And my body? My body was the thing I dragged along behind my mind, hoping it would keep up.
It kept up. For a long time. Until it didn't.
Your rhythm is not the same as anyone else's.
That sounds obvious. But think about how many of your days are spent dancing to somebody else's cha-cha.
The pace of your inbox. The urgency that other people carry and hand to you like a baton in a relay you never signed up for. Even wellness spaces prescribe a rhythm — meditate for twenty minutes, journal every morning, follow this five-step routine.
What if your rhythm today is slower than that? What if it changes by the season, the year, the decade?
Rhythm is not static.
Not just because the world changes around you — but because you change. Your body changes. The rhythm that carried you through your thirties may not be the rhythm your body is asking for now.
My body is in a different season. And it's composing a completely different song than the one I learned to dance to.
If I keep insisting on yesterday's rhythm, I miss today's music entirely.
Sometimes it's okay to dance with others — to sync up, to match pace with someone whose energy lifts yours.
But the practice — the real practice — is in knowing when to come back.
To your own walk. Your own pace. Your own breath. Your own footsteps.
Even when those footsteps sound different from what they did last year.
Here was my own body, gently pointing out that I hadn't fully included it in the conversation.
Not the body as a concept in a framework. The actual, physical, breathing body in the hills of the Midlands.
It had things to say.
I have always been here for you — even when you neglected me. You cannot do it without me. Start listening to me. Love me.
Not angry. Not accusatory. Just honest.
The way a friend might say, after years of being overlooked: I'm still here. Whenever you're ready.
There's been a resentment I've been carrying toward my body. Quiet. Unnamed. But real.
The frustration that it slows me down. That it needs things I don't have time for. That it interrupts.
And standing there in the silence, I understood: That resentment was the thing keeping me from the very rhythm I was looking for.
You can't find your rhythm while resenting the instrument.
A word was shared with me during those days that I keep returning to.
Tend.
Not "optimise." Not "fix." Not even "care for" — which still carries a clinical edge.
Tend.
The way you tend a garden.
The way you tend a fire.
Gently. Continuously. Without an agenda.
Feel and hear the body — both are needed. Listen. Really listen.
Taste food. Love food. Bless food — it is there to nourish this body.
Respect it. It is yours to keep and befriend. It does so much to carry you through life.
Rhythm isn't something you create. You don't manufacture it with the right routine or the perfect schedule.
Rhythm is what emerges when you get still enough to hear what's already there.
The work isn't to create rhythm. The work is to stop overriding it.
The quest is not to find the perfect rhythm — there isn't one. But to get curious about the rhythm that's already there. The one your body has been keeping time with, quietly, faithfully, even when you weren't listening.
It's still there. It's been waiting for you.
All you have to do is get still enough to hear it.
And this is my invitation for you, too.
Fall in love with your body. Fall in love with your life.
This moment is all there is.
Still growing. Still becoming. In this together.
Sandra