The Swim that Fixed Nothing
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Hello Reader, I swam this morning. Mid-October, and the water is warmer than it was in early summer, which is the part about this coast that nobody believes until they have lived a year of it. Thirty minutes in the sea. I go in tired or feeling like I need a “cleansing” and return energized and renewed. I came out steadier than I went in. It seems I always do. Almost everybody who comes to me has already made a diagnosis before we speak. They tell me they are tired. The evidence is good. Too much travel this year. A hard season. A parent who needed more than anyone had planned for. What they need, they say, is a break. So they take one. A week somewhere warm, the phone face down, long sleep, decent food, somebody else doing the cooking. And it works. For about eleven days. Then they are back inside the same week, moving at the same speed, making the same decisions in the same order, and the tiredness returns exactly as it was. They read this as evidence that the break was too short, or that they failed to maintain it, and both readings put the fault in the wrong place. There was a man in my life once who I kept meaning to make time for. I canceled for work. I canceled for travel. I did it often enough that it stopped being an occasion and became a pattern neither of us bothered to name. One afternoon we were planning a weekend, and he said, lightly, with no edge in it at all, "I'll pencil you in." Pencil me in. He had stopped believing I would show up. He was not wrong. No amount of rest would have touched that. I could have slept for a month. The problem was not that I was depleted. The problem was that I had built a life in which the people I loved had learned to expect very little of me, and I had not noticed it happening, because it happened one reasonable cancellation at a time. That is what a holiday cannot reach. Rest restores a body. It does not answer a question, and most people arrive here carrying a question they have never once said out loud to another person. Not to their partner. Certainly not to their team. Sometimes not in a complete sentence to themselves. A week of sleep changes how you feel on Sunday. It does not touch how you are living on Wednesday. This is why the good feeling has a shelf life, and why people blame the wrong things when it expires. I notice the shift most often on the second or third day, when someone stops telling me about their schedule and starts telling me what they actually think. There is usually a pause just before it. Then a look of mild surprise at their own sentence, as though someone else had said it. That is the moment the week becomes useful. Not the sleep, though the sleep helps. The words spoken without censure. One woman put it better than I can. "With Alicia, I connected the dots of my identity and life story more clearly than what I've been able to glean in years of therapy." What happened in that week was not restoration. She said things in sequence, out loud, to someone who was not going to flinch, and the sequence did the work. The swim this morning was good for me. It was not the thing that changed my life. The thing that changed my life long ago was hearing a kind man say he would pencil me in, and letting the sentence land instead of explaining it away. That changed everything. Today's Threshold QuestionWhat if you are not tired? What if you simply have not been listened to in a very long time? If that lands somewhere uncomfortable, I suggest leaving it there for a few days rather than resolving it. Discomfort that survives a week is usually pointing at something. With care, P.S. I keep a small number of private retreats here in the Algarve, November and January, then spring. And a few advisory conversations each quarter for those that are unable to travel to Portugal.
Write Your Healing Story - November 7, 2026Saturday, November 7, 2026, from 9:30 am (arrival) to 6:00 pm. Location: Carvoeiro A one-day memoir writing retreat in the Algarve for:
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