Lagom

I was walking in the woods this evening.

Birdsong. Everything the most brilliant shade of light green — that particular green that only exists for a few weeks in spring before it deepens into summer.

A deer and a fawn stepped out onto the path ahead of me. Then a hare.

I was completely happy.

And then, right in the middle of it, The Manager arrived.

You should live here. You love this so much — why don't you actually live in the forest? You only live once.

She took a perfect moment and turned it into evidence of a life not fully lived.

More is Better

My brain has a setting I'm starting to recognise.

Whatever I love — it immediately wants more of it. All of it. The extreme version.

I love being in nature. You should live in the forest.

I love our camper trips. You should sell everything and live in the camper.

I care about the environment. You should be fully zero waste.

I want to grow some food. You should have a huge garden. A smallholding. A homestead.

I want financial breathing room. You should pursue financial independence, retire early, optimise everything.

Go big or it doesn't count. The small version is just a consolation prize for people who didn't want it enough.

I'm starting to see how much this wiring has cost me.

The Carrots

This spring I planted carrots.

Just carrots. A small bed. My hands in the earth, pressing seeds into the soil. My daughters helping.

Watching them push through. The tiny green threads of them appearing.

It means something. Genuinely. The smallness of it doesn't make it mean less.

And as I write that, the whisper is still there: but a huge garden would be better. More valuable. More.

That's The Manager. Right there. Mid-insight, still trying to scale it up.

But I know what a huge garden would actually mean. Every weekend swallowed. A list of things that need doing before I can sit down. Presence squeezed out by the weight of maintaining it all.

More carrots. Less time with each one.

The small bed gives me hands in the earth and eyes on the growing. The huge garden would give me more carrots and less of the feeling that made me want to grow them in the first place.

The Romance and the Reality

I romanticise things.

And I've started to notice that when I actually look past the romance — really look at what those lives would mean day to day — something shifts.

Living permanently in the camper sounds like freedom and adventure. But we don't have a garden in the camper. It's cramped. My husband loves his job. That life, honestly, isn't what we want.

The homestead sounds like the dream — growing food, close to nature, simpler living. But it would mean my husband spending every evening and weekend on projects. Animals tying us to a place so we could never take the camper away for a week. Less time with our daughters, not more.

The forest life sounds like heaven. Until it's an hour's commute every morning and the girls are exhausted before the day has started.

These aren't wrong lives. For someone else they might be exactly right. But when I hold the actual version of them — not the beautiful idea but the lived reality — they're not what I want.

The problem isn't the dream.

It's what happens between the dream and the reality — the comparison. The way the extreme version makes what I actually have feel small and insufficient by contrast. The camper weekend sitting next to the fantasy of the permanent camper life. The carrot bed next to the imagined smallholding.

But I'm comparing a fantasy to a reality. And that's never a fair comparison.

The weekend is real. The deer was real. The carrots are actually growing.

The Evening Walk

I don't live in the forest.

I live near it. Close enough to walk there on an ordinary Tuesday evening and meet a deer and a fawn and a hare in the green evening light.

That walk was not a lesser version of the forest life I should be living.

It was complete. In itself. Exactly as it was.

The camper weekend is not a consolation prize. It's two days of arriving somewhere beautiful and being fully there for it. The magic of it exists partly because it isn't always. Because we left our ordinary life and stepped into something different and then came home again.

And maybe that's what I'm finding my way back to without quite having the word for it.

Lagom.

Not too much. Not too little. Just right.

Not the Swedish cliché of mediocrity and keeping your head down. But the deeper thing underneath it — the right size. The amount that leaves room to actually be present inside it.

The Manager measures in scale. More is better. Bigger is better.

But I'm learning to measure in depth.

And depth requires space.

Not more.

Enough.

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