Growing up, every year my best friend J. went away for a week at summer camp. I stayed behind in Napa, unable to afford the getaway to cabins, woods, swimming holes and ghost stories around campfires. She would come back sun-darkened and loose-limbed, buzzing with adventure. I listened, smiled, and filed the longing inside myself.
Most of you know that our move to Lisbon was its own kind of deferred rite of passage. The gap year. The post-college backpacking summer. These are the things that shape a certain kind of freedom in a person — a lightness, a comfort with drifting — and I missed all of them. I worked instead. Pretty much non-stop since I was 15. No sabbaticals. No seasons of purposeful wandering. Just the relentless, honorable, exhausting rhythm of American labor.
I had imagined a “senior gap year” — the first year of retirement as one long, golden exhale in Europe.
We decided not to wait. What arrived instead was a working sabbatical in Portugal: still earning, still doing, but breathing different air. That was eight years ago. Lisbon has become home in the way that only happens when you stop treating a place as temporary.
And yet. The missing summer camp lingers. A small, unresolved chord.
Last month, sitting on a catamaran in the Aegean Sea, I heard a voice. Clearly enough that I looked up to find its source. But no one was there — only open water, the arc of the horizon, and the particular blue silence of the Aegean. My shoes were off, surrendered to a plastic container at the start of our day-long sail around Santorini. And into that stillness came these words, unhurried and certain:
You need to be barefoot more often.
I sat with it. What does it mean to be barefoot more often? It means you have nowhere urgent to be. That your soles are touching the actual earth. It is the posture of children on summer afternoons, of people who have, for a moment, stopped performing productivity and simply exist in a body, in a place. Casual. Wild. Luxuriously, unapologetically unscheduled.
That voice from the Aegean has become a compass. I am going to create my own summer camp.
No self-improvement agenda. No project milestones or morning routines dressed up as liberation. No required sunrise yoga. Just long days of reading until I lose track of time. Swimming in whatever water I can find. A campfire if anyone will let me have one. Watercolors and friendship bracelets — not because they are useful, but because they are the opposite of useful, which is the whole point. Hiking. Eating outside. Watching the light change.
The details barely matter. What matters is the spirit: a reclaiming of the unhurried, unproductive, alive self that never quite got its week at camp.
Here is the question I want to leave with you:
What did you miss? Not the grand losses — those we tend to know and name. I mean the smaller, quieter ones. The summer you worked instead of traveled. The season you were too practical, too responsible, too broke, or too afraid. The version of yourself that wanted to make something with your hands, sleep outside, disappear into a forest for a few days — and who got set aside.
That longing does not expire. It waits, surprisingly patient, for you to take it seriously.
You don’t need to quit your job or move to Portugal. You need, perhaps, only to take off your shoes more often. To ask yourself what your version of summer camp looks like — and then, stubbornly, lovingly, to go build it.