Sunday from the Porch
Quietly. Firmly. On purpose.
There’s a part of me that still flinches when I say this out loud:
I want stability.
Not as a phase. Not as a hedge. Not as something I tolerate until the next chapter announces itself. I want it plainly, deliberately, without wrapping it in justification or future-facing caveats.
That’s new.
For a long time, I felt the need to soften that desire. To explain it away. To pair it with ambition so it wouldn’t sound like settling. I wanted stability, but—I’d say—I still planned to move, to travel, to keep things loose. I wanted stability, as long as it didn’t mean getting stuck.
What I was really doing was apologizing in advance.
Somewhere along the way, stability became synonymous with giving something up: momentum, possibility, identity. As if choosing steadiness meant forfeiting growth. As if wanting a reliable base signaled a lack of imagination or courage.
But the last few months have been instructive in a quieter way.
Living without a firm structure doesn’t make me more alive. It makes me more occupied. More inwardly noisy. More focused on maintenance than meaning. When too many fundamentals are unsettled at once - housing, income rhythm, timelines -everything else has to work harder just to compensate. Even good things begin to feel heavy.
I don’t want to live like that anymore.
What I want now is deceptively simple:
A life with a cadence.
A sense of where things live.
Enough predictability to let the deeper questions surface.
That doesn’t mean I’m done evolving. It means I’m done pretending that uncertainty is a virtue in itself.
There’s a particular kind of honesty that arrives when you stop trying to be impressive with your choices. When you let yourself want what actually supports you instead of what looks expansive from the outside. For me, that honesty sounds like this: I do my best thinking when I’m not braced. I do my best work when my foundations are boring. I live better when not everything is provisional.
And I don’t need to defend that.
I’ve noticed how much softer my body feels when I imagine a longer lease. How much calmer my thinking becomes when plans extend beyond a few weeks. How creativity feels less like a scramble and more like a current when it has something solid to run alongside.
That’s not fear speaking.
That’s discernment.
I’m not retreating from my life. I’m choosing to inhabit it more fully. I’m not shrinking my world. I’m giving it a shape that can hold me as I grow.
So yes, I want stability.
I want it because I know what it gives me.
I want it because I’ve lived without it long enough to feel the difference.
And I’m done apologizing for that.
March doesn’t need to be dramatic to be decisive. It just needs to be honest. And this—this clarity, this willingness to choose what actually sustains me—feels like a claim I can stand behind.
Quietly. Firmly. On purpose.