What Keeps You Whole

—

やさしさは
ささいなことに
にじんでいる
kindness lives quietly
in small things we overlook
until we need them

—

We often think of self-care as something curated—an afternoon off with candles, a journal, a walk in the woods wearing linen. But I’ve come to realize that real self-care is less about aesthetic and more about rhythm. Less about what it looks like from the outside and more about what it keeps whole on the inside.

And wholeness, I’ve learned, doesn’t come all at once. It comes in moments. In habits. In the slow return to yourself after the world has peeled away some part of you.

—

In my early twenties, I thought taking care of myself meant pushing through. I ran until I broke. I studied until I forgot why I cared. I stayed up too late, drank too much, said yes too often. It was only after my body began to protest—headaches like pressure points under my eyes, a strange fog in the morning that no amount of caffeine could lift—that I realized there was another way.

It started slowly. First, I began running again—not the compulsive kind of running to beat a number on a watch, but the kind that gets you out before sunrise, alone with the rhythm of your feet and the sound of the world waking up. I remember a stretch in Basel, summer 2014, where I ran along the Rhine at dawn. The city still asleep. The river whispering. I had just moved there. Everything was unfamiliar except for the sound of breath and heartbeat.

I wasn’t running away. I was running back to something. Myself, maybe.

—

Then came the conversations. At first, they seemed unimportant. The kind of talks you have in line for coffee or while waiting for the tram. But some of them lasted hours. With friends from other cities. Strangers who became mirrors. I remember one autumn evening in Regensburg, sitting on the stone steps of the old bridge with a girl who grew up near the Danube. We didn’t know each other well. But we talked about fear, about missing our mothers, about how silence sometimes says more than words.

When we got up to leave, she said, “This is what people forget—that being heard is how we stay whole.”

She was right.

—

Nature. That’s the other place I go to when I forget myself. Not as an escape, but as a reminder. There’s something about being surrounded by things that don’t care about your ambitions—mountains, rivers, crows—that softens the ego. In Yakushima, I once spent an afternoon just watching moss grow on ancient rocks. It was raining gently. Everything smelled alive. I didn’t feel healed. I just felt like I didn’t need healing in that moment.

Sometimes that’s enough.

—

And sleep. Oh, sleep.

I used to hate it. Saw it as wasted time. I remember my first year in Ljubljana, in a flat in Šiška where you could hear the ambulances tearing down the street all night. I slept with one eye open, trying to do more, be more, achieve something vaguely impressive. But I was tired in ways I didn’t know how to name.

Now, sleep is sacred. Not just because it resets the body. But because it gives the mind a chance to fold into itself and sort the pieces. I make tea now before bed. I put my phone away. I sleep like someone who trusts the world enough to let go for a while.

—

There’s also this:

The quiet rituals.

Drinking coffee slowly in the morning. Writing a single paragraph, even if no one will ever read it. Sweeping the floor. Cleaning the dishes while music plays softly in the background.

These are not glamorous acts.

But they are acts of care. Of tending.

Of saying—I matter. My space matters. The way I move through this day matters.

—

Wabi-sabi Lessons from the Everyday

Self-care is not the reward. It’s the soil.

You do not earn rest. You return to it.

The body knows what it needs. The soul does too. You just have to listen.

In a world that constantly asks you to be more, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to simply be.

Be tired. Be still. Be open.

And in that stillness, watch how quietly everything begins to return to you.

—

So when people ask me now: How do you practice self-care?

I don’t give them a list.

I give them a memory.

Of a quiet run in Basel. Of a conversation by the Danube. Of a forest soaked in rain. Of sleep, finally embraced. Of one cup of coffee savored slowly while the world waits.

That’s how I practice.

That’s how I stay whole.