I don’t do well with beginner’s mind.
I’m good at things. That’s not a brag — it’s actually the problem. When you spend enough years building competence in the things that matter to you, you start to quietly avoid the things you might be bad at. You stop signing up. You stop showing up uninitiated. You curate your experiences the same way you curate everything else — toward your strengths, away from exposure.
So I signed up for a cake decorating class.
Not because I wanted to become a baker. Not because it fit some vision board or five-year plan. Because someone mentioned it and something in me said yes before my brain could talk me out of it.
For nearly two hours, I didn’t think about my inbox. I didn’t think about the chapter I’m supposed to be finishing or the email I’ve been drafting in my head for three days. I thought about frosting. I thought about whether my piping pressure was even. I thought about how to shape fondant into cherries.
The cake was imperfect. Visibly, cheerfully imperfect. And I held it up at the end like I’d made something worth keeping — because I had.
There’s a particular kind of rest that only comes from doing something your brain can’t optimize. Not sleep, not a walk, not scrolling something beautiful. Full presence. The kind that only happens when your hands are busy and the stakes are low and you remember, briefly, that you don’t have to be good at everything to deserve the afternoon.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to slow down on purpose — not from exhaustion, but from intention. This was one of those afternoons.
Watch the short from that day here.
What do you do to slow your mind down? Let me know in the comments.
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