My impressions were up 48%, engagements were up 50%, saves were up 33%, total audience was up 44%, and engaged audience was up 59%. The number I care about most is outbound clicks, because that is the one that shows people actually left Pinterest and landed on Simple Life Explorers.

That went up 47%.

I didn’t create a completely new content strategy. I took work I had already written, made the Pinterest doorways clearer, paid closer attention to boards, and linked pins to the most relevant posts instead of sending people vaguely towards the homepage.

That is what I wanted to test. Could older posts, useful resources and searchable ideas keep bringing people in after the day they were published?

Over the last month, the answer has been yes. Not wildly or magically, but clearly enough to be worth studying.

This post is the first in a new occasional series called Found Without Shouting. In this series, I’ll share what I am testing as I grow Simple Life Explorers: the numbers, the strategy, the changes I make, what works, what doesn’t, and what other writers may be able to use from it.

I have spent years working with words, readers, offers, sales pages and online marketing. Bringing more of those skills here makes sense, because writing is only useful if the people who need it can find it.

Simple Life Explorers will still be about midlife, slower living, narrowboat life and choosing a different shape of life. This series looks at another part of that same question: how do we build, earn, share and get found without handing our lives over to social media?

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Subscribe here to follow the experiment. I’ll be sharing what I test, what changes, what the numbers show, and what I learn about getting writing read without selling your soul to social media.

What I actually changed

The first thing I changed was how I thought about Pinterest. I stopped treating it like another social platform and started treating it more like a search engine with images.

That sounds simple, but it changed the way I wrote the pin titles, chose the boards, and decided which posts were worth pinning. On social media, a post can disappear quickly because it is tied to the moment it was shared, but a pin can keep being found long after the original post was published.

That makes Pinterest useful if you have essays, resources or evergreen ideas sitting in your archive. I began with work I had already created.

I looked at the posts and resources I already had, then asked which ones had a clear searchable angle. Some pieces were too reflective to pin easily without more thought, while others had an obvious route in: how to start a commonplace book, living with less, frugal living in a tiny home, narrowboat life, and growing a Substack in a quieter way.

That was the first useful lesson. Not every good essay is immediately easy to market, because sometimes the writing is strong but the route into it is not clear enough for someone who has never heard of you before.

I made the titles do more work

The biggest practical shift was making the pin titles clearer. Not colder, not clickbait, and not stripped of feeling — just clearer.

A Substack title can be more emotional, layered or essay-like because the reader may already have some relationship with your work. A Pinterest title has to work faster, because the person seeing it may have no idea who you are.

Someone scrolling Pinterest does not know me, Simple Life Explorers, or the longer story behind the post. The pin has to show what the idea is about and why someone might want to click.

That made me look again at titles I might have made too soft in the past. A lovely phrase may feel meaningful to the writer, but if it does not give the reader a way in, it will struggle to do its job.

This is copywriting as much as Pinterest. The words on the image, the title, the description, the board and the post all need to point in the same direction.

When they do, the whole thing becomes easier for a new reader to understand. That is the point of the work before the work.

I paid attention to the boards

The next thing I looked at was the boards. I used to think of boards mainly as a way to keep things tidy, but now I see them as part of the strategy.

A board helps Pinterest understand what kind of content belongs together. It also gives a reader a clearer sense of what they will find if they follow the idea further.

This is where the data became interesting. The strongest board in my export was Commonplace Book Ideas, with 2,789 impressions, 222 engagements, 146 pin clicks, 79 outbound clicks and 17 saves.

The most active board was not the broadest one. It was not simply “slow living” or “intentional living,” but something specific, practical and easy to understand.

That does not mean I need to abandon the wider Simple Life Explorers world. It means the practical doorways may be the easiest ones for new people to enter through.

A commonplace book still belongs completely inside the Simple Life Explorers world. It is about paying attention, gathering what speaks to you, and slowing down enough to notice what you want to keep.

But it is also a clear thing. People understand what they are clicking towards.

That changes how I think about future posts and resources. The broader idea may be slow living, midlife or choosing differently, but the way in often needs to be more specific.

A reader may want a more thoughtful life, but she might click first on a commonplace book, a tiny home habit, or a clear post about living with less. That gives me useful information about where to put my energy next.

One pin showed me what to study next

One of the most interesting things in the export was the difference between the top pins. The best-performing pin had 1,701 impressions, while the next one had 576.

That gap is worth looking at. It does not mean I have found a magic formula, but it does mean one pin created much more movement than the others.

Now I want to know why. Was the topic stronger, was the title clearer, was the promise more specific, did the image work harder, or did the board help Pinterest understand where to put it?

That is how I want to use the numbers. Not as a reason to panic or copy everything blindly, but as a way to make better decisions before I make the next batch.

This is the part of marketing I enjoy most. I like looking at what moved, working out why, and using that information to make the next piece of work stronger.

What I’d look at first

If you are using Pinterest for your own writing, I would start with the posts you have already written. Look for the pieces that answer a real question, offer a clear starting point, or speak to something people might already be searching for.

Those are usually easier to turn into pins than pieces that rely entirely on atmosphere or context. Then look at your titles and ask whether someone who has never heard of you would understand what the piece is about from the pin alone.

Next, look at your boards. Do they help Pinterest and the reader understand the topic, or are they too broad to be useful?

I would also make sure every pin has somewhere sensible to send people. Do not send everything to the homepage just because it feels easy; send the pin to the post, page or resource that matches the promise.

A person who clicks on a pin about starting a commonplace book should land on something that helps her begin a commonplace book. A person who clicks on a pin about frugal living on a narrowboat should not have to work out where to go next.

That is not complicated marketing. It is simply making the next step obvious.

A small note of support

If this kind of behind-the-scenes breakdown is useful, you can buy me a coffee here. It helps support the time I spend testing, writing, looking at the numbers, and sharing what I am learning as I build Simple Life Explorers in public.

What I am testing next

Next, I am going to keep testing Pinterest more deliberately. I will make more pins around the subjects already showing movement, especially commonplace books, living with less, slow living in midlife, narrowboat life, and posts that help people build or share their writing in a more sustainable way.

I will also keep improving the route from Pinterest to Substack. That means clearer links, better landing points, and making sure the posts people arrive on have a strong reason to subscribe.

I want to test more pins for older posts too. One of the things I like about Pinterest is that it gives older writing another chance to be found, rather than disappearing because it was published weeks or months ago.

That feels like a better fit for the kind of writing I want to create. If an essay has taken time, care and thought, I want to give it more than one day to reach people.

Pinterest is not the whole strategy for Simple Life Explorers, but it has earned its place in the strategy. It is showing me which topics have energy, which boards are worth building, and which older posts deserve another route back into the world.

Next month, I’ll be watching whether clearer titles, stronger boards and more pins around the best-performing topics increase outbound clicks again. That is the real test for me now: not whether Pinterest can send a few people once, but whether it can become a steady route back to the writing.

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August has been quite a month of highs and literal lows. The canal has been running short of water; we had one rather dramatic evening when Arwenack ended up firmly stuck on a mud ledge, and many boating friends are still staying put while we all wait for enough rain to make moving easier again.

At the same time, the month has somehow felt wonderfully full. There have been family visits, long evenings in the sunshine, blackberries, homemade beer, unexpected gifts, good books and rather a lot of things coming out of the tiny galley.

It has been one of those months when life hasn’t necessarily gone to plan, but there has been plenty to enjoy anyway.

Five centimetres can make quite a difference

I stood up one evening and immediately knew Arwenack wasn’t level.

The floor felt wrong beneath my feet, and when we looked outside, we could see that the water had dropped by about 30cm, enough for the boat to settle on the muddy ledge beside the bank.

Two paddles had been left open at the lock below us, quietly draining water out of the pound while we obliviously ate dinner. John grabbed the windlass and headed down the towpath to close them before we lost any more.

Stopping the water escaping was the easy part. Getting several tonnes of narrowboat off the mud was slightly less straightforward.

We used our plank as a lever against the bank, eventually persuading Arwenack back into deeper water. By the time she was floating level again, there was about eight feet between us and the towpath.

Two and a half metres doesn’t sound very far until you’re standing at the front of a boat, looking at the gap and wondering whether your plank will actually reach.

The water took most of the night to recover, so neither of us slept particularly well. Every creak seemed worthy of investigation at two in the morning, just in case we had started leaning again.

Thankfully, by morning the immediate drama was over.

The wider problem of low water isn’t. There has been so little rain that boats are moving less to conserve what water there is, and several friends are staying exactly where they are for now.

Fortunately, nobody needs to move very far until the end of September, so there are plenty of messages going backwards and forwards while everyone checks where everybody else is and how they’re getting on.

A little cruise — and finally a full tank

We did manage a small cruise ourselves this month, mostly because Arwenack’s water tank was almost empty.

There is something strangely satisfying about filling a narrowboat with water. As the tank empties, the bow gradually rises until Arwenack starts to resemble a drag-racing car — front end up, back end sitting lower in the water.

A full tank brought everything back where it belonged, and she is sitting level again.

After all the worrying about there not being enough water underneath the boat, it felt particularly good to have plenty inside it.

And after staying in one place for a while, even a small cruise felt rather lovely.

The curious currency of the towpath

We have also acquired a trout, a jar of honey and a pair of eclipse glasses.

Not from the same person, thankfully. That would have required quite an explanation.

They came from people we have got to know along the canal, where friendships often begin with nothing more than a conversation beside the boat. You learn somebody’s dog’s name, where they’re going or why they haven’t moved, and before long you’re checking how they’re doing when the water drops.

Or they appear beside your boat carrying a freshly caught trout.

I love that about life here. There is no great ceremony to it; someone has something they think you might like, so they give it to you.

Apparently the current towpath exchange rate is one fish, one jar of honey and a better view of a future eclipse.

I can live with that.

August from the galley

The hedgerows have been doing their bit too.

Blackberries are everywhere now, hanging over the towpath in dark, ripe clusters. The best ones seem to be positioned just far enough into the brambles to require a small sacrifice of skin before they’ll let you have them.

Some have been turned into crème de mûre and some into blackberry beer, both of which are now quietly doing mysterious things while we wait to discover whether we’ve made something delicious or industrial-strength paint stripper.

There have also been blackberry and apple crumble, brioche buns and lemon and ginger concrete, and the honey didn’t remain untouched for long.

I made a pizza with spicy chorizo, creamy Gorgonzola and golden honey, which sounds slightly as though I opened the cupboard and challenged myself to put as many strong personalities as possible onto one piece of dough.

It was fabulous!

I had every intention of taking a photograph. We ate it instead, and by the time I remembered, there was nothing left to photograph.

I have decided that is probably the best review a pizza can receive.

What I’ve been reading

My reading this month has included Dear Debbie and The Housemaid by Freida McFadden.

Both were exactly the sort of books I hoped they would be: gripping, entertaining and very easy to disappear into. Neither disappointed, and sometimes that is exactly what I want from a book — something that makes me keep reading when I really should be turning the light off.

They’ve made very good evening reading aboard Arwenack.

Things worth looking up for

August has also brought our wonderful family to the boat, which is always a treat, and plenty of evenings when the best thing to do has been very little.

We have sat outside as the heat softened, watched the sun disappear behind the trees and let the evening stretch out without feeling much need to hurry it along.

We watched the eclipse too, along with the otters and kingfishers that continue to make occasional appearances around us.

And then there was the cow.

He appeared from the hedge and made his way up the road with the sort of confidence usually reserved for someone who knows precisely where he is going.

We had no idea where that might be.

He did.

The light is changing

The evenings are beginning to feel different now.

There is still plenty of warmth in the day, but the light is softening earlier and the nights are starting to draw in as we edge towards September.

I always notice that shift on the canal. The reflections seem deeper, the towpath quietens sooner and the last light hangs over the water for a little while before everything settles.

We have had some beautiful evenings outside this month, watching the sun go down and making the most of them while they still stretch late enough to linger.

There is something about this point in the year that feels both generous and fleeting.

Summer is still here, but you can feel autumn waiting just beyond it.

If you’d like more posts like this — towpath life, changing seasons, good food, small adventures and thoughts on building a life with a little more room in it — you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

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A little bit of August to keep

When I look back at the month, I suspect the night Arwenack got stuck in the mud will become just one small part of it.

There have been blackberry-stained fingers, family arriving, books being finished, bottles quietly fermenting, sunsets, otters and messages travelling between boats as friends keep an eye on one another.

There has been honey passed across the towpath, a pizza too good to photograph and one particularly purposeful cow.

And, of course, there was the trout.

The canal could certainly do with a long drink of rain, and I hope everyone who is staying put can soon begin moving freely again.

But August has reminded me how much can fit into an ordinary month when I pay attention to the smaller things around its edges.

A little precarious in places, occasionally ridiculous and very generous in others.

Not a bad August at all.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

I read a lot on Substack. Some posts are useful in the moment and then quietly disappear from my mind. Others follow me around for a while.

They come back when I’m walking Drummer, making tea, or doing something completely unrelated. A sentence resurfaces. An idea nags at me. I find myself looking at something in my own life a little differently because of what someone else wrote.

These are five of those essays from this month.

They are all very different. One made me think about ambition, another about friendship as we get older, another about the versions of ourselves we carry with us. There is one about home and what we choose to make room for, and another about the small rules we can end up living by without ever quite deciding to.

What they have in common is that each left me with something worth carrying away.

So, if you’re looking for a few thoughtful things to read with a cup of tea this weekend, these are the five I’d send you to first.

1. The Pick and Mix Woman —

Alison’s piece made me smile almost immediately, but underneath the humour is an idea I’ve kept coming back to. She writes about all the different women she has been over the years — artist, writer, mother, homemaker, the woman who wanted one thing and then changed her mind completely — and questions why we are so often expected to choose one neat version of ourselves and stick to it.

What stayed with me most was her preference for accumulation rather than reinvention. I like that enormously.

There can be so much pressure around midlife to reinvent yourself, as though becoming someone new requires us to quietly dispose of the woman who came before. I much prefer the thought that we can take her with us. Keep the parts that still fit, put down some that no longer do, and leave room for interests, ideas and versions of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

Changing our minds doesn’t make what came before a mistake. I rather like the idea that we can all be a little bit pick and mix.

Read The Pick and Mix Woman →

2. Make Sure You’re Ambitious for Something You Actually Want —

Anna’s essay made me think about the difference between being ambitious because something genuinely matters to us and being ambitious because we have spent years proving that we are capable.

She writes about recognising how much of her earlier drive had been tied up with proving herself — to other people, but also to herself. What stayed with me was the question underneath that: is the thing I am working so hard towards still something I actually want?

I don’t think getting older has made me less ambitious. I still like creating things, earning money and having work that matters to me. But I am much more interested now in what that ambition is for, and what I am willing to give up in exchange for it.

There is something freeing about realising that changing what you want does not mean you have lost your drive. It may simply mean you have become more particular about what deserves your effort.

Read Make Sure You’re Ambitious for Something You Actually Want →

Enjoying these?

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3. Holding Life More Lightly —

Of all the bigger ideas in Alana’s essay, it was a very ordinary moment that stayed with me.

She writes about going for a swim at the time she would normally have been sorting out dinner. Instead of rushing back to make sure everything happened at the usual time, she swam, came home later and ate late. It sounds like such a small thing, but I recognised the feeling behind it immediately.

After years of being responsible for other people, it is surprisingly easy for preferences to harden into rules without us ever deciding they should. Dinner happens at this time. This gets done before I sit down. Everyone else is sorted before I disappear for an hour.

What I liked about Alana’s piece was the reminder that holding life more lightly doesn’t necessarily begin with a dramatic change. Sometimes it is simply noticing one of those old rules and asking whether it still needs to be there.

Read Holding Life More Lightly →

4. Composing Late Q3 —

I expected this piece to be about deciding what to get rid of as we get older. Instead, Avivah made me think about the opposite question: what do we still want to make room for?

At 65, when so much advice tells us to downsize, declutter and simplify, she and her husband have bought a larger country house. Not because they want more for the sake of it, but because they want space for grandchildren, friends, long meals, visits and the life they still intend to live.

That stayed with me because my own answer has been very different. John and I chose 40 feet and got rid of an enormous amount before moving onto Arwenack. But I don’t think that makes less automatically better.

The more interesting question is what earns the space it takes up.

For one woman, that might mean fewer possessions and a smaller home. For another, it might mean an extra bedroom and a table big enough for everyone she loves.

I liked being reminded that simplifying a life doesn’t have to mean making it smaller. Sometimes it means becoming clearer about what you want it to hold.

Read Composing Late Q3 →

5. Should We All Retire With Our Friends? —

Eliza’s piece starts with a question I had never really considered before: when we think about later life, do we spend enough time thinking about who we want around us?

She writes about women choosing to live near, or even with, friends as they get older, and about the importance of friendship alongside all the usual conversations about pensions, property and financial security.

What stayed with me was the idea that we spend years being told to invest for retirement, but rarely think of friendship in quite the same way.

Who will be around the table? Who will notice if we haven’t turned up for coffee? Who will still know the stories behind the stories?

I’m not sure I’m ready to sign up for communal retirement living just yet, but I loved the reminder that planning for a good later life is about more than money.

It is also about connection, companionship and the people we hope will still be beside us.

Read Should We All Retire With Our Friends? →

The thread I noticed afterwards

Reading these five together, I realised what stayed with me wasn’t one particular answer. It was the reminder that so much of life can be looked at again.

The way we work. The things we make room for. The rules we’ve carried for years. The people we want beside us. Even the version of ourselves we thought we had to remain.

None of these essays offers a neat prescription for how the next part of life should look, which is probably why I liked them so much. They simply opened another little window onto what is possible, and left me thinking about my own choices in a slightly different way.

I hope at least one of them does the same for you.

And if you have read something this month that has stayed with you, I would genuinely love to know about it. Leave the title in the comments — I’m already collecting possibilities for next month’s five.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

I have always loved the idea of keeping a journal, and over the years, I have started more of them than I care to remember. Each one was carefully chosen with the hopeful feeling that this time I really was going to keep it up.

Ironically, this is where the trouble usually started. I would choose a beautiful journal, one I really loved, bring it home, and then immediately become slightly intimidated by it. Those first crisp, new pages seemed to deserve something far more profound than anything I was likely to write on an ordinary rainy Tuesday.

Of course, I had to have the right pen too. It had to be one that would glide seamlessly across the paper, transforming my thoughts into words on the page. With the notebook and pen together, each time I was completely convinced that this would be it. I would be a proper journaler (is that even a word?).

And for a few days, I was.

I wrote enthusiastically, enjoying the anticipation of filling those first pages, already imagining what it might be like to look back through a whole year of my thoughts. Then life would get busy. One evening I would be tired, another I would think I’ll do it later, and after missing a couple of days, it became surprisingly easy to miss a week.

A few months later, I’d come across the journal underneath a pile of books or papers and feel that familiar little pang of disappointment. There it was, with four or five beautifully written pages, followed by an enormous stretch of nothing.

Another journal that had started with such good intentions and quietly ended up being used for notes, lists and anything else I happened to need a bit of paper for.

I thought the empty pages said something about me

The silly thing was that I didn’t desperately need a written account of every day.

I wasn’t going to be devastated in ten years because I couldn’t remember what we ate on a particular Wednesday or whether it rained on the second Tuesday in March. What bothered me was the feeling that I had once again failed to become someone who kept a journal.

Somewhere along the way, I had decided that journaling only really counted if I did it consistently. Preferably every day, dates neatly written at the top, pages slowly filling until future me had a lovely record of an entire year.

It seems I’m in good company, though. One survey cited by Psychology Today suggested that around half of people had kept a journal at some point, while only about one in six were actively journaling at the time of the survey.

I smiled when I read that. Somewhere there must be shelves full of beautiful notebooks containing five thoughtful entries from January, a shopping list from March and an anonymous telephone number scribbled sideways in June.

For years, I looked at mine and saw all the days I hadn’t written. But I don’t anymore.

I didn’t need a diary. I needed somewhere to think

The change came when I stopped trying to document my life and began opening a journal when I actually had something I needed to work out.

These days, I reach for one when a thought has been going around in my head for too long. When something feels wrong but I can’t quite explain why, when I have an idea that needs more room, or when a decision seems to grow another complication every time I think about it.

One of the times I used it most was when I was considering closing my business.

I knew there were things about it I no longer enjoyed, but I had also invested a lot in it. Time, work, identity, plans. Closing it sounded simple when reduced to a sentence; living without it felt much harder to picture.

So I wrote about what I didn’t like anymore, but I also wrote about what I might miss.

Then I tried to imagine the ordinary morning afterwards.

Not the practical process of closing the business or ticking off the final jobs. Just waking up one morning and knowing it was no longer mine to run. What would feel lighter? What would I miss? Was it the business I no longer wanted, or simply parts of the way I had built it?

Writing didn’t deliver a grand revelation at the bottom of the page. But gradually, I could see my own thoughts more clearly.

I have gone back to my journal for other big decisions since.

When John and I were thinking about buying Arwenack, there was plenty to be excited about. I could picture the water sparkling outside the window, cruising along the canal and owning far less than we had in the house.

There were less romantic thoughts too. Could we really live happily in 40 feet? What would we miss? Would the freedom we imagined still feel like freedom when it was raining, the batteries were low, and everything we owned had to fit into a boat?

More recently, when we started seriously thinking about John retiring early, the journal came out again. I wrote about what our days might look like if he no longer worked, what it could give us, what we might lose and whether the financial trade-off felt worth what we would gain in time.

Those decisions involved money and practicalities, of course. But underneath them were quieter questions about the kind of life we wanted to be living.

Sometimes I need to get the thought out of my head

There is one thing writing does for me that thinking alone rarely manages.

Inside my head, a thought can spiral in ever-increasing circles, collecting another worry with every turn. But somehow, as I transfer these thoughts to the page, they untangle, and problems which once seemed overwhelming shrink to a more manageable size.

I notice the things I am trying very hard to make sound sensible. I also notice the ones that bring an unexpected sense of relief when I finally put them into words.

None of this means my journal makes decisions for me. I have yet to reach the bottom of a page and find a wise little instruction telling me exactly what to do next.

Quite often, I finish writing and still don’t know.

But there is a difference between I have no idea what I think and I can see what is making this difficult. Sometimes that small amount of clarity is enough for the moment.

Apparently, the gaps weren’t the problem

What surprised me when I started reading about journaling was how little some of the best-known expressive-writing research resembles the daily diary I had spent years failing to keep.

Psychologist James Pennebaker’s work has often involved people writing about important thoughts and experiences for around 15 to 20 minutes on only a handful of occasions. It wasn’t dependent on filling a page every night for the rest of their lives, which I found quietly reassuring.

I’ve also discovered that not every notebook needs to be a journal at all. My commonplace book is where I keep the words, ideas and things I want to remember rather than a record of my days. If that sounds more like your kind of notebook, you might enjoy How to Start a Commonplace Book.

When I can’t quite hear what I think

I don’t sit down with a list of journal prompts every time I write. Usually, I already know what is bothering me, even if I haven’t yet worked out why.

There are, however, a few questions that I find invaluable. They are written at the front of my journal.

When I feel drawn towards something else

• What is it about this possibility that makes me feel lighter, more excited or more like myself?

• When I imagine this life, which part of it am I really longing for — freedom, space, purpose, adventure, rest, belonging?

• What feeling am I hoping this change would give me that is missing now?

When I’m frightened of making the wrong choice

• What am I most afraid I would regret if I changed things?

• What am I afraid I might regret if I don’t?

• When I imagine each choice a year from now, which one gives me a sense of relief — and which one makes something in me tighten?

Sometimes I write half a page and discover I don’t have much more to say. On other days, I fill several pages and end up somewhere quite different from where I began.

All of this is far easier now that I’m no longer trying to produce a good journal entry.

I’m simply giving the thought somewhere to go.

If you’re also beginning to wonder what you want the next part of life to look like, you’re very welcome here. Simple Life Explorers is where I write about the questions, choices, and practical possibilities that come with making life fit a little better — without pretending any of us have to have it all worked out first.

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Not everything useful has to become another obligation

My journal has enormous gaps in it now.

There might be several entries close together because I am trying to work something out, followed by months of absolutely nothing. When I eventually come back, I simply turn the page and carry on.

I still love beautiful notebooks. I still have a weakness for lovely paper and pens that make my handwriting look fractionally better than it really is.

What has changed is what I expect from them.

And I have begun to wonder whether we sometimes do this with other things too. A walk becomes 10,000 steps. Reading becomes a yearly target. Before long, things we once did simply because we enjoyed them have acquired rules, targets and another small possibility of falling short.

I don’t want that from my journal.

It has sat beside me while I thought about closing a business, buying a boat and how John and I might shape the next part of our lives. None of those pages matter less because there are months of blank paper between them.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

For women who are beginning to wonder what they want the next part of life to look like.

I’m Rebecca. I’m 52, my children are grown, and I live with my partner of 32 years, John, and our lurcher Drummer aboard a 40-foot narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal.

This wasn’t the life I imagined I would be living at 52. But perhaps that’s one of the things I love most about it.

Life changed. Our children grew up. The rented house that had suited one season of our lives began to feel like more space, more expense and more responsibility than we wanted for the next one.

Somewhere along the way, John and I began asking a question that sits underneath much of what I write here.

What do we want now?

Not what should we want, or what would make sense to everyone else. Just what might make this next part of our lives feel more like our own.

For us, the answer eventually involved giving up our rented house and moving onto Arwenack.

Your answer may look nothing like ours.

It may be working four days instead of five, moving somewhere smaller, travelling more, starting something of your own, owning fewer things, spending more time outside, or simply deciding you no longer want every part of your life to be quite so full.

That is what Simple Life Explorers is really about.

The narrowboat is part of it, of course. It is where I live and where most of these posts are written. But underneath the stories of canal life is something bigger: what can happen when life changes enough to make you look again at the assumptions you’ve been carrying about home, money, work, success and what a good life is supposed to look like.

When one season of life changes

For years, much of my daily life was shaped around raising our children. I loved being able to stay at home with them while they were small, and motherhood is still one of the most important parts of who I am.

What changed was not being their mother, but how much they needed me in the everyday ways they once had.

As they grew up, the shape of home changed too. They still needed me, of course, but not in the constant, everyday way that had shaped so much of my time for years.

And that left room for different questions.

My life hadn’t gone wrong. In many ways, quite the opposite. I had the enormous privilege of watching the children I had spent all those years caring for become adults and begin building lives of their own.

But the life which had fitted me very well for one season didn’t necessarily have to be the shape of the next one.

Perhaps you recognise some of that.

Maybe the children who once needed lifts, packed lunches and your attention from morning until night are building lives of their own. Perhaps work that once mattered enormously doesn’t hold quite the same place anymore. Or perhaps nothing obvious has changed at all, but you’ve started wondering whether the way you’ve always done things is necessarily the way you want to keep doing them.

I think there is something hopeful in that.

We can be grateful for the life that came before without insisting the next part has to look exactly the same.

Read: The Quiet Space They Leave Behind

The boat is proof, not the prescription

Arwenack has taught me more than I expected.

Our home moves every couple of weeks. We think about water, batteries, gas, weather and where we will moor next in ways I never had to when we lived in a house. Sometimes the towpath is muddy, the solar panels refuse to produce anything useful and a simple job becomes far more complicated than it has any right to be.

And then there are mornings when I open the doors to mist sitting over the canal, watch a kingfisher disappear in a flash of blue, or hear an owl while lying in bed at night.

Life feels closer here.

Moving onto the boat also made us question how much we really needed. There simply isn’t room for cupboards full of things kept for someday, wardrobes of clothes rarely worn, or six versions of something when two will do perfectly well.

I’m not a minimalist, and I don’t think fewer possessions automatically make anyone happier. But living with less has made me much more aware of what earns its place in my life.

The same has gradually become true of other things too: work, commitments, money, time, and the things I say yes to simply because I always have.

That is why I often say the boat is proof.

Proof that a life can change shape. Proof that home can look very different and still feel steady. And proof, at least to me, that reaching midlife doesn’t mean the interesting decisions are already behind you.

Read: How We Ended Up Living on a Narrowboat (and Life Began to Slow)

I still want work to matter

Choosing a slower life hasn’t made me less ambitious. It has changed what I want my ambition to be for.

John was made redundant, and we decided to see whether my work could support us both. He worked long hours when our children were small so I could be at home with them, and now I like the idea that my work might give him the chance to retire a little earlier than we expected.

It also means we are no longer tied to being close to a road so he can get to work. We can moor further out, stay in quieter places and let the canal take us somewhere we might not have been able to choose before.

So I am building something here.

I write for a living as a copywriter, and I’m also building Simple Life Explorers into work I hope to be doing for many years. I write, create useful things, work with clients and keep experimenting with how to earn without rebuilding the sort of exhausting life we deliberately stepped away from.

I don’t want work to disappear from my life. I enjoy creating things. I like earning my own money and the satisfaction of making something useful and watching it find the person who needs it.

I just want work to know its place.

I want enough energy left for a walk along the towpath, dinner with John, a good book, watching the light change on the water and whatever small adventure Drummer has decided we are having that day.

Perhaps that is part of getting older too. Not losing ambition, but becoming more particular about what I am willing to give it.

Read: A Life That Fits: What Does Meaningful Work Look Like Now?

When the question becomes practical

Of course, changing our life wasn’t only about deciding we wanted something different.

At some point, we had to work out whether we could actually afford it.

Before we moved onto the boat, I sat down and worked out what our new life would need to cost. Some expenses would disappear, others would take their place, and there were things I hadn’t initially thought about at all.

Having the numbers in front of us didn’t make the decision for us. But it gave us something real to make the decision from.

The question stopped being could we ever do this? and became what would it actually take?

That experience stayed with me because money can so easily become the point where an idea for a different life stops. Not necessarily because the answer is no, but because we don’t know what the answer is.

It’s why I created The Freedom Number.

It’s a practical workbook for working out what your own version of change would actually need financially. That might be reducing your hours, downsizing, moving, earning differently or creating enough breathing room to make another choice possible.

Not a fantasy number. Your number, based on the life you’re actually considering.

Find Your Freedom Number

What you’ll find here

If you’ve reached a point where life is changing — or you are beginning to wonder whether you might like to change it yourself — I hope Simple Life Explorers gives you somewhere to explore that.

Not by suggesting there is one right way to live, but by looking at the different choices available to us when we stop assuming the next part has to look like the last.

Here’s what you can expect.

Every week: a new Simple Life Explorers post

Stories and reflections for those moments when something makes you look at your life differently.

We’ll explore the things that often shift in midlife — home, work, money, family, identity, time, possessions and what enough looks like now.

Some weeks you may recognise yourself in what I write. Others might leave you considering something you hadn’t thought about before.

Either way, I hope you leave with a little more room to think about what you want.

Twice a month: The Practical Path

Sometimes the thing standing between I’d love to... and perhaps I could... is simply knowing how it might work.

The Practical Path is where we’ll look at the practical side of creating more choice: what life costs, working differently, living with less, downsizing, trying something before committing to it and making a change feel less like an enormous leap.

Not because every idea needs to become a plan.

Sometimes it is enough to discover that an option you had quietly ruled out might not be quite so impossible after all.

Monthly: A Life That Fits

There are far more ways to build a good life than any one of us can experience ourselves.

Each month, I’ll introduce you to a woman who has made a choice that helped her life fit better — whether that meant changing how she worked, where she lived, what she owned, how she spent her time or what she decided mattered.

I’m interested in the choices behind those lives rather than the polished end result.

What made her want something different? What helped her make it possible? What does she know now that she didn’t know before?

Perhaps her answer will be nothing like yours.

But it might help you see another possibility.

Monthly: From the Towpath

And because a good life isn’t only made from big decisions, there will be From the Towpath.

A monthly collection of the smaller things that have made life better, more interesting or simply more enjoyable: something I’ve read, somewhere we’ve moored, something worth trying, a useful find, a small pleasure or an idea I’ve carried around with me.

A little something to read with a cup of tea and perhaps take into your own month.

You may come here because you are contemplating a big change.

Or you may simply want a little more time, freedom, interest or space in the life you already have.

Both belong here.

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If you’re asking “what now?”

You may already know exactly what you want. Or you may only know that something feels different.

Perhaps your children have grown and you suddenly have more room in your life. Perhaps work that once suited you now asks more than you want to keep giving. Perhaps you have begun looking around your home, your diary or even your ambitions and wondering how much of it you still genuinely want.

I certainly didn’t begin with an answer.

Before the boat, there was simply a growing sense that we didn’t want to be in exactly the same place a year later. We didn’t have a dream house waiting in our imagination or a grand plan for a completely different life.

We just began paying attention to what wasn’t quite fitting anymore.

That is why I made The What Now? Mini Life Audit.

It’s a free printable reflection for those moments when you know something is changing but can’t quite see what you want to do about it yet. It gives you somewhere to look at what still fits, what feels heavy, what you want more of and what might be ready to change.

Download The What Now? Mini Life Audit

A few places to begin

If your children are older and you’re wondering who you are in the space they have left behind, begin with The Quiet Space They Leave Behind.

If you’re thinking differently about work, ambition and what you want your days to contain, try A Life That Fits.

If you want the story of how we went from our rented house to a 40-foot narrowboat, start with How We Ended Up Living on a Narrowboat.

If home itself is beginning to mean something different to you, you might like Home Does Not Have to Be Still to Be Steady.

If you know something needs to change but you’re not quite sure what yet, begin with: The What Now? Mini Life Audit — A Quiet Place to Begin

And if you have an idea of what you want but money is the thing making it feel uncertain, The Freedom Number is the place I’d go next.

You don’t need to read everything. Pick the place that feels closest to where you are now and begin there.

Come along for the next part

I don’t know exactly what the next ten years will look like, and I rather like that.

I know I want to keep living on the water for as long as it makes us happy. I want to notice the small things, own fewer things I don’t need, read more books, eat good food and keep discovering what is around the next bend in the canal.

I also want to build work that supports us without swallowing the life it is supposed to pay for.

And I want to keep writing about what happens when a woman reaches this part of life and realises that the decisions that shaped the first half don’t automatically have to shape the second.

I’m not interested in throwing everything away and starting again.

I’m much more interested in looking at what we already have, keeping what still matters and giving ourselves permission to change the things that don’t.

That is the life I’m exploring here.

And if you’re somewhere around this stage too, I’d love you to come along and see where it takes us.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

I’m still figuring much of this out as I go, and that’s part of what I share here. If you’d like to follow life aboard Arwenack and the bigger questions it keeps raising about midlife, work, money and living with less, I’d love to have you here.

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For years, our children had a habit of leaving home and coming back again. There was university, travelling to far-flung places and periods of living elsewhere, but however empty their bedrooms became, there was always the expectation that sooner or later they would be back.

So the rooms never really felt redundant. They were waiting.

Then they left differently. One bought a flat with their partner and the other moved into a rented flat with theirs, and this time nobody was planning to come home to live.

They took the things they wanted with them. We tidied their bedrooms, closed the doors and carried on.

For the next three years, those rooms mostly stayed like that. We paid for them, heated them and occasionally cleaned them when somebody came to stay, but otherwise there was very little reason to open the doors.

The children were happy, settled and making homes and lives of their own, which was exactly what we wanted for them. But our house had been built around a family life that had quietly moved on.

It had once been exactly the house we needed

I don’t look back at our three-bedroom house and think we shouldn’t have had it. Quite the opposite.

There had been times when friends and family came to stay and it was bursting at the seams, with barely any floor visible beneath bags, shoes and people finding somewhere to sleep. It was noisy, crowded and thoroughly lived in — exactly what I think a house should be.

The garden had been the same. When the children were small, it was full of bikes and footballs, while Drummer dug holes with great enthusiasm before charging around like a mad March hare, apparently delighted with whatever destruction he had just created.

As the children grew older, there were evenings spent eating outside and sitting talking as the sun went down. None of that space had been wasted; we had lived in it.

The house fitted the life we had then.

Where we lived had needed to work for four people too, with schools, jobs, journeys and different routines to accommodate. By the time those bedroom doors were staying shut, the children had homes, jobs and lives of their own, and there were only two people’s plans to consider instead of four.

My work had changed too. I had deliberately closed the promotional-products business I’d run for years because I’d had enough of products, deliveries, boxes and all the physical paraphernalia that came with it.

That business had needed storage and office space. Copywriting needed little more than decent internet and somewhere to sit with my laptop.

One by one, many of the reasons we had needed that particular shape of life had disappeared. The house hadn’t.

The garden began to tell the same story

We still had the huge garden that had once been full of children, dogs and long evenings outside, but by then the part we actually used was fairly small. We had somewhere pleasant to sit; the rest still needed mowing, weeding and hedge trimming whether we used it or not.

There was petrol for the mower, hedges that seemed to grow overnight and weeds that showed absolutely no respect for our other plans. If we went away for a weekend, we seemed to come home to a small jungle waiting for us.

Most weeks, one of our two days away from work disappeared into maintaining it. We worked for five days and spent another looking after the garden, which left one day out of seven that felt properly our own.

That arithmetic was becoming hard to ignore. Not because I hated the garden or because the house had somehow become somewhere we desperately needed to escape.

The garden had once earned the work it required from us. Now, much of the time, we were maintaining it so that it looked nice when we looked at it.

And once I began to see that, the closed bedroom doors started to look different too.

Those rooms weren’t only costing us money

We tend to think about the cost of our lives in pounds: mortgage or rent, council tax, heating, insurance, cars and all the other regular amounts that leave the bank account each month.

But those pounds have to come from somewhere. They are also hours worked, days given to an employer, clients taken on and projects accepted because the life around us requires a certain amount of income to keep going.

That unused bedroom wasn’t only costing us money. Some part of our working week existed to pay for it.

The bedrooms took money earned during the week. The garden took one of the days we had left afterwards.

The house still required the same money from us. We simply required far less from the house.

And that made me wonder about something I had spent far less time thinking about.

What else could that money do?

What if the money had a different job?

For most of my adult life, when I wanted more financial room, the obvious answer had been to earn more. For many years, that was exactly the right answer.

We had two children at home, a family to support and a business to run. Every extra pound had plenty of useful places to go, and I don’t think there is anything particularly virtuous about needing less money.

But now I found myself looking at the other side of it.

Instead of asking How can we earn more?, I began to wonder, How can we free up some of the money we’re already earning and spend it differently?

Because we knew what we wanted more of.

We wanted time to visit our children and the rest of our family without everything being squeezed into the small gaps left around work and maintenance. We wanted to explore new places and go away for a weekend without the decision hinging on when we were going to mow the lawn.

We wanted to sit somewhere watching the sun disappear with fish and chips and a cold beer, without feeling there was a job waiting at home that we really ought to be doing.

That made spending less feel very different. It wasn’t about shrinking our life for the sake of saving money; it was about asking whether some of the money, time and energy tied up in maintaining one kind of life could be used to create another.

Less wasn’t really what we wanted.

We wanted more choice over what our money and our days were for.

Would we choose it again?

Perhaps your equivalent isn’t a spare bedroom or an enormous garden. But there may be something in your own life that still takes money, time or energy because it made perfect sense ten years ago.

The question isn’t necessarily whether you should get rid of it. It is simpler than that: would you choose it again for the life you’re living now?

We didn’t need to reject the life we’d had to admit that we wanted the next part of it to look different. But wanting something different also meant accepting that we might have to change things that were familiar and safe, and that some of those changes might feel frightening before they felt exciting.

Staying exactly where we were was a choice too. If we never looked at what else might be possible, we could still be staring at those same closed bedroom doors ten years later.

That possibility frightened me more.

Wanting something different wasn’t enough

Once we allowed ourselves to imagine using our money and time differently, there was still a much more practical question underneath it.

Could we actually afford to?

It was one thing to look at two bedrooms we hardly entered and a garden that swallowed one of our days every week and know we wanted another way to live. It was another to work out what that other life would really require from us.

We needed to know which costs would disappear and which new ones would take their place. We needed to know how much breathing room we wanted and how much income we would still need to bring in.

Looking at the numbers wasn’t about talking ourselves out of changing our life.

It was what allowed us to take the possibility seriously.

The rooms had done their job

I can still picture our old house when it was full: bikes in the garden, Drummer enthusiastically digging holes, people squeezed into rooms and evenings spent eating outside as the sun went down.

I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. We needed that house then, and it did its job beautifully.

But three years after the children finally left, those closed bedroom doors were telling us that the job had changed. Not that the life we’d built had been wrong, simply that it no longer needed the same things from us.

The question was no longer only How can we earn more?

It was What do we want the money we already earn to make possible now?

And before we could answer that properly, we needed to know what the life we were imagining would actually cost.

If this has made you wonder what your own life is still asking you to fund — and what might become possible if some of that money could do a different job — that’s the question behind The Freedom Number.

It helps you work out what your life genuinely needs now, how much breathing room you want, and what a change such as working less, moving, downsizing or earning differently would require financially.

Find Your Freedom Number →

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks, and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

If you’re new to Simple Life Explorers

I write about what happens when a good life no longer feels like the whole answer — and the practical questions around time, work, money and choosing what comes next.

You can subscribe for free to have new posts sent to you.

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For most of my life, more seemed like the obvious direction. More money meant more security. A bigger house meant more space. More clothes meant more choice. More things meant we were doing well enough to have them.

And sometimes more genuinely does make life better. There are times when more money is exactly what is needed, when a bigger home solves a real problem, or when having more choice makes life easier.

But I wonder whether we notice quite so readily when more stops giving us freedom and starts taking something from us instead.

We lived in a three-bedroom house before we moved onto Arwenack and, like most families, somehow managed to fill it over the years without really noticing.

There were things in cupboards gathering dust, the obligatory box in the loft that was still unpacked after nine years, clothes I didn’t particularly like, and all those things we kept because they might be useful one day. Some of it we’d forgotten we owned — and occasionally bought again.

I had an airing cupboard crammed with enough sheets and towels for a small hotel, so much so that finding a particular sheet, or a towel for a shower, felt like an Olympic event. On more than one occasion, a child disappeared beneath an avalanche of sheets and towels and had to call for help.

None of it seemed especially unusual. We weren’t extreme hoarders, and our house wasn’t disappearing beneath piles of possessions. We just kept buying things, being given things and finding room for them, so much of it simply stayed.

I suspect there are plenty of homes like ours, where nothing looks particularly excessive until you start trying to work out what you actually use.

When we decided to move from that three-bedroom house onto a 40-foot narrowboat, I assumed getting rid of our belongings would be one of the hardest parts. But there wasn’t really a choice: we either had to cut back our belongings or quite literally risk sinking under the weight of it all.

That didn’t seem like a particularly good policy for boat life, so we had to decide what was coming with us and what wasn’t. I expected that to feel like a loss, and thought I might resent having fewer things or wish I hadn’t been quite so ruthless.

Instead, something quite different happened. I felt an enormous sense of freedom, as though a weight was being lifted.

The things I hadn’t realised I was carrying

What I hadn’t realised was how much work simply owning things involved. Possessions don’t sit quietly in the background asking nothing of us. They need somewhere to live. They get moved, cleaned, sorted, insured, repaired and protected. We search through them to find something else and periodically have to make decisions about what to do with them.

In a way, we become carers and carriers of our things. It can seem like an easy enough job because, after all, they mostly just sit there minding their own business.

But they take up more time and headspace than I realised. We sift through them to find what we need, move them around, and try to remember where on earth we put something we haven’t seen for six months.

The strange part is that I hadn’t been aware of this slow drain while we were living in the house. It was simply part of life. It was only when much of it disappeared that I realised how much mental space it had been taking up.

My wardrobe had grown full to bursting, yet I regularly heard myself utter those familiar words: ‘I have nothing to wear.’

Instead of being full of things I loved, there were clothes that didn’t quite fit, things I’d bought and never really liked, and items I’d been given and didn’t want to throw away. Every morning began with me sifting through much of it to find something to wear. It wasn’t exactly an inspiring way to start the day.

Now there isn’t room for that, and I have the luxury of being able to pull out almost any top I own and know that it fits, and I am happy to wear it.

There is less choice in the literal sense, but it rarely feels as though I have less choice. I just have fewer things I don’t want.

The same is true elsewhere on the boat. We don’t have cupboards full of pots and pans to sift through before finding the thing we actually need. We have hardworking pots and pans that earn their place, sometimes cooking for two, sometimes for six.

That doesn’t mean everything has to be useful in some ruthlessly practical way. We have things that make us happy and things that are sentimental.

We have books, pictures, plants and a porcelain motorcycle and sidecar that holds the fir cones we use to light the fire. It belonged to a wonderful lady, and I would never part with it.

I have no desire to become a minimalist and count how many possessions I own. Living with less has simply made me more aware that everything we bring into our lives asks for something in return.

Space, usually. Often money. Sometimes time. And perhaps most easily overlooked, attention.

You may recognise some of this without having the slightest desire to move into a tiny home. I suspect most of us have indulged our inner squirrel at some point and continued to store, maintain and make room for things long after we’ve stopped asking whether we actually want them.

I don’t think the answer is necessarily to throw it all away. But living on the boat has made me much more aware of what I’m choosing to carry.

There is another side to this that I understood much more clearly once we started thinking seriously about changing our lives.

More doesn’t only take up physical space. It can make life more expensive too.

When more creates the need for more

I’ve noticed how easily more can become a perpetual cycle. We want more space, then gradually fill it. Before long, the house we once rattled around in can feel as though it’s bursting at the seams, and another cupboard, another room or more storage starts to look like the answer.

A larger life often needs more money to sustain it. And sometimes I wonder whether we ask ourselves the first question far more often than the second.

How can I earn more?

Rather than:

Do I still want everything I’m earning more to support?

That question would have sounded crazy to me once, because for years I never questioned the assumption that progress meant adding. More income gave us more options, and those options allowed us to buy more, travel more, improve things and expand our lives.

But more can create its own momentum, and it can come at a cost.

The new car costs more to insure and replace. The larger house costs more to heat and maintain. We earn more, our spending expands, and before long the level of income that once felt generous becomes the amount required simply to keep everything moving.

I sometimes wonder whether, in gaining more, we can end up tying ourselves more tightly to the treadmill that pays for it all.

I think that’s what surprised me most about our move onto the boat. I expected less space to feel restrictive. But in many ways, it widened our choices.

Our life costs less than the one we lived before. We need less furniture, less energy and far fewer possessions. There simply isn’t the space to keep buying things because they might be useful one day.

And because life requires less money to maintain, the amount we need to earn has changed too. This has given us a kind of freedom I didn’t expect. I had always thought freedom came from having more.

It isn’t that less automatically creates a better life. It’s that sometimes removing what no longer serves us reduces what life asks from us.

That might be possessions. It might be a house that has become more work than pleasure, a second car that is barely used, subscriptions we’ve forgotten about, habits that quietly drain money, or simply a standard of living that grew over time without us ever deciding whether we still wanted it.

I wonder if I notice this more now because, by midlife, I’ve been through the cycle enough times to recognise it. The next purchase, the next upgrade, the next little improvement was always going to be the thing that made life feel complete, or easier, or somehow enough.

And yet there always seems to be one more thing just ahead.

I was lucky enough to stay at home when my children were young. I know that isn’t something everyone is able to do, but when I look back, those years feel priceless to me. They gave me memories I will cherish forever.

Perhaps that is partly why I think differently about more now. Money can give us many things, but earning it can cost us time too — and time is one of the few things we can never go back and reclaim.

For much of my life, I assumed moving forward meant adding. Now I wonder whether progress can sometimes come from taking something away, from asking what I could stop carrying rather than what else I could add.

Not because I want to make life smaller or deny myself the things I enjoy, but because some of the greatest freedom I’ve found has come from needing less, not having more.

Knowing what our life actually needed

Of course, discovering that we were happy with less didn’t mean money stopped mattering. In fact, before John and I moved onto the boat, money was one of the things we had to understand properly.

We couldn’t simply assume that downsizing would solve everything. We needed to know the numbers: what we would still need each month, what would disappear, what expenses would replace the old ones and how much income would give us enough breathing room to live the way we wanted.

That calculation changed the conversation. Instead of asking vaguely whether we could afford a different life, we could see what that life actually required.

And once we could see that, we had something real to make a decision from.

That same calculation became the starting point for The Freedom Number.

I created it for women who are asking their own version of the question we were asking: Could I actually afford to do something differently?

It takes you through the numbers behind the life you’re considering — from what you need to keep things running to what would give you more breathing space and choice.

If you’re wondering whether you could work less, downsize, move, earn differently or simply create more room in your life, knowing your number can turn a vague “Could I?” into something you can actually make a decision from.

Find Your Freedom number

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has taken on a slower, simpler rhythm.

Here, I write for women in midlife who are quietly asking what they want now — exploring different ways to live and work, what enough might look like, and how to create more time, choice and breathing room without having to blow up a perfectly good life.



If you’re in midlife and quietly questioning what you want next, Simple Life Explorers is a place to explore different ways to live, work and make room for more of what matters to you.

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“We don’t want to be here this time next year.”

John and I said some version of that more than once, although neither of us could finish the thought. We knew we didn’t want to be here, but we had no idea where we wanted to be instead.

There was no dream house waiting in our imagination, no town we had fallen in love with and no carefully worked-out plan for a different life. More confusingly, there was nothing particularly wrong with the life we already had.

If we had hated the house or desperately wanted to leave, changing things would have been much easier to explain. Instead, we had built a good life there. We just didn’t want the rest of our lives to look exactly the same.

Perhaps you know something of that feeling too. Nothing has fallen apart, and you may still feel grateful for much of what you have, but when you imagine another five or ten years passing in roughly the same shape, something in you wilts.

For a while, I thought knowing that wasn’t enough. Surely, if you wanted to change your life, you should at least be able to say what you wanted to change it to.

We couldn’t. And as it turned out, we wouldn’t for quite some time.

We stayed for another two years

“We don’t want to be here this time next year” makes it sound as though we packed up immediately.

We didn’t. We were still in that house the following year, and the one after that, but once we had said the thought aloud it became much harder to ignore.

So we started looking, although not particularly efficiently. We considered places we might live, different ways we might work and versions of our future that sounded perfectly sensible but somehow left us cold.

Some ideas disappeared almost as soon as we mentioned them. Others lasted for weeks before quietly falling away, and for a while it felt as though all we were discovering was what we didn’t want.

Then something began to shift.

The possibilities we rejected were telling us something. We still couldn’t tell you where we wanted to live, but we were becoming surprisingly clear about how we wanted to live.

We wanted more freedom and more adventure. We wanted to spend more time outside and closer to nature, and we wanted less of our time and money tied up in maintaining things simply because we owned them.

None of that amounted to a plan. You couldn’t type “more freedom, less stuff and plenty of trees” into Rightmove and wait for the answer to appear.

But it gave us a direction.

The answer changed when the question did

We had moved house for work plenty of times before. At one point, we had packed up a family of four in a week, so the practical idea of moving didn’t particularly worry us.

This was different because the question was no longer simply, Where should we move next? It was becoming, What sort of life are we actually trying to move towards?

That small change opened up possibilities we might otherwise have dismissed. Once we stopped assuming the answer had to be another version of the life we already had, we began looking at things differently.

Eventually, one of those possibilities wasn’t a cottage, a smaller house or a flat somewhere new. It was a 40-foot narrowboat built in 1977.

Arwenack had never been the dream.

I sometimes wonder whether we would even have considered boat life if we had begun with a detailed picture of what our future was supposed to look like. We might have admired the idea, decided it belonged to other people and carried on looking for a house.

Instead, we could ask a different question: could this give us more of what we already knew we wanted?

More freedom, more adventure and more time close to nature were all there. The boat fitted the direction before we knew whether it would work as a practical plan.

That part came next. There were finances to work out, possessions to deal with and all the decidedly unromantic questions involved in turning an interesting idea into somewhere you actually live.

But the change hadn’t begun with a narrowboat.

It had begun much earlier, when the same thoughts kept coming back.

The clues were already there

I think this is one of the strange things about wanting something different before you know what that difference is. The answer can be completely unclear while the clues are already turning up all over the place.

They appear in the article you save, the place you keep looking at, or the woman whose life fascinates you even though you don’t actually want to live as she does. Sometimes it’s an idea you dismiss as unrealistic, only to find yourself thinking about it again six months later.

Perhaps “simpler” is the word that keeps appearing for you. Or more time, different work, travelling, making things again, spending more of your days outside or living somewhere smaller.

None of those thoughts has to become a plan. But I’m less inclined than I once was to assume that something means nothing simply because I can’t yet explain what to do with it.

Sometimes we notice what matters before we understand why it matters.

That’s one of the reasons I keep a commonplace book. I started mine because I wanted somewhere to put the things I didn’t want to lose — a line from a book I was reading, a quotation, a recipe, a place to visit or an idea that made me stop for a moment.

What I hadn’t expected was what happened when I began looking back through it. Things I had written down months apart sometimes seemed to belong together.

A thought about home might sit beside something about work. A place I wanted to visit might echo something I had saved about getting older, while ideas about simplicity or freedom appeared again and again in completely different forms.

None of it told me what to do. What it did was show me what had been holding my attention.

And I think that matters particularly for women, as many of us have spent decades paying attention to what needs doing and who needs us. Work, children, homes, bills, parents and appointments can take up so much of our attention that our own interests become easier to overlook.

They don’t necessarily disappear, though. They show up in the article we save, the place we keep thinking about, or the part of somebody else’s life that makes us think, I’d like a little more of that in mine.

We didn’t need the whole answer

By the time Arwenack came along, we still hadn’t solved every question about what we wanted from the rest of our lives. I’m not sure anyone ever does.

But we knew enough to recognise something worth exploring.

That feels very different from the way I once imagined decisions were supposed to happen. I thought clarity would arrive first: you would know exactly what you wanted, make the plan and then start moving towards it.

Our experience was almost the reverse. First came the repeated thought, then the clues, then a direction, and only much later did something resembling an answer appear.

Of course, eventually we had to become practical. Could we afford it? What would have to change? What would we need to let go of, and would the reality of this life work beyond the appealing idea of it?

Those questions were important, but we couldn’t have asked them usefully until we had something worth exploring.

And for us, that began with a sentence that sounded almost embarrassingly incomplete: “We don’t want to be here this time next year.”

We didn’t know where there was. We only knew we were ready to look.

Perhaps you have a thought like that of your own — something that keeps popping up even though you can’t yet turn it into a plan. What keeps coming back for you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments, even if you have absolutely no idea what you are going to do with it yet.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

P.S. This is one of the things I use my commonplace book for — keeping hold of the words, places and ideas that catch my attention before I understand why. I made the Commonplace Book Starter Kit for anyone who would like somewhere to begin collecting their own.

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

If you’re beginning to wonder what you want the next part of your life to look like, you’re very welcome here. Subscribe to Simple Life Explorers for more posts about choosing differently, living with less, and working out what matters now.

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She was suffering, but she did not seem to believe she had the right to call it suffering.

Her mother had never had any trouble with perimenopause, she told me. Neither had her grandmother. Or, if they had, they certainly had not spoken about it.

They had simply got on with things.

What stayed with me was not only what she was experiencing, but how quickly she dismissed it. Her symptoms were real and affecting her life, yet the women before her appeared to have endured the same stage without complaint.

Their silence had become the measure of how she believed she should cope.

I think many of us know some version of this. Something is uncomfortable, exhausting or quietly making us unhappy, but before we allow ourselves to take it seriously, we look backwards.

My mother managed. My grandmother never complained. They had fewer choices than I do and still carried on.

Who am I to want something different?

Sometimes nobody else needs to dismiss what we feel because we have already learned to do it for ourselves.

The things we learn to tolerate

I remember a similar kind of comparison after I had my daughter.

A few women spoke about giving birth without pain relief as though it made their experience more natural, or somehow more worthy, than the birth of a woman who had needed medication.

It was not always said unkindly. Sometimes it was simply there beneath the conversation: the suggestion that one woman had endured more and therefore done it better.

But every birth is different. Every body is different. There is no fair way to place one woman’s pain beside another’s and decide who was braver.

Still, women’s lives are full of these quiet comparisons. Who coped without help, who kept everything moving and who carried on without admitting that it had become too much.

Somewhere along the way, endurance became tangled up with goodness. The less we need, the more capable we appear. The less we say, the more quietly admirable we become.

But I am not sure silence has ever been a fair measure of strength.

When carrying on stops being strength

I know how easily carrying on can be mistaken for coping, because for a long time, I kept functioning without understanding what was happening to me.

I did not recognise my brain fog, anxiety or itchy skin as symptoms of perimenopause.

The brain fog was horrendous. I had always trusted myself to think clearly and make decisions, but suddenly I could no longer rely on my mind in the same way.

Whenever one of my children called, anxiety rose before they had even spoken.

Oh no. What is wrong?

An ordinary phone call could fill me with dread.

My skin had also become incredibly itchy. I was moisturising as though my life depended on it, without understanding why any of these things were happening.

I had thought of perimenopause in a much narrower way. It was only after watching an interview with Davina McCall and hearing her mention itchy skin that I began to put the pieces together.

That prompted me to do some research and visit the doctor.

At first, he told me medication was not for me. I firmly disagreed. After looking into it further, he prescribed it later that day.

The difference was huge. The brain fog eased, the anxiety settled, and I felt like myself again.

What surprised me most was realising how far away from myself I had become.

The changes had arrived gradually, and I had adjusted around them. I expected less of my memory, accepted the anxiety and did not notice how much confidence in myself I had slowly lost.

I had been getting on with it, but I was not coping.

Does taking medication make me less of a woman?

Of course not.

Medication was the right choice for me, but it will not be right for every woman. Each of us should be able to make that decision for ourselves, with the information and support we need.

Taking it did not make me weaker than a woman who did not need it or made a different choice.

Nor does asking for help, sharing a responsibility or admitting that something you have managed for years no longer works for you, make you less capable.

That experience made me wonder how often we adjust around something that is hurting us until we barely notice what it is costing us. We carry on because carrying on is familiar, and because we have been taught that enduring things quietly is what women do.

If this is the kind of honest, thoughtful company you want in your inbox, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

If this is the kind of honest, thoughtful company you want in your inbox, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write for women in midlife who are beginning to question what they have been taught to tolerate — and who want to build a life with more honesty, choice and room to breathe.

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We do not know the whole story

Perhaps the woman I spoke to was right. Perhaps her mother and grandmother experienced very few symptoms.

But perhaps they struggled without understanding why. Perhaps they had no language for it, no useful support or no reason to expect anybody would listen.

Silence does not always mean that everything was fine.

We often know surprisingly little about what the women before us felt. We know what they did, what they managed and what they kept going through, but we do not always know what it cost them.

They may have stayed in work, relationships, homes or roles that left little room to ask what they wanted. They may have put their own tiredness, disappointment or ambitions to one side because there were few practical alternatives.

What they endured may tell us more about the choices available to them than about what women should still be expected to tolerate.

Yet their endurance can become an invisible rule in our own lives.

She stayed, so perhaps I should stay. She never complained, so perhaps I should be more grateful. She put everyone else first, so perhaps wanting time, space or something different is selfish.

We can love the women before us and still question the lives they were expected to live.

The life we continue because we can

By midlife, many women have become very good at managing.

We know how to keep work moving, remember birthdays, arrange appointments and notice what everyone else needs before they ask. We have spent years becoming dependable.

Capability is valuable, but it can also hide a great deal.

A woman can continue performing well in a job that is draining her. She can maintain a home long after it has become too expensive, demanding or full of things she no longer wants.

She can remain constantly available to adult children, relatives, colleagues and friends while wondering why there is so little room left for her own life.

Nothing has to be visibly falling apart for something to be asking too much.

Yet we often wait for a crisis before we feel entitled to change anything. We tell ourselves it is not bad enough, that other women have managed more or that our mothers would have been grateful for the opportunities we have.

But gratitude and honesty can exist together.

We can value the life we have built and still admit that parts of it no longer fit. We can be grateful for our choices and decide to use them differently.

We are allowed to notice what is asking too much before it becomes unbearable.

That might mean changing the way we work, sharing more of the responsibility at home, needing less space or fewer things, or creating more room for a life that feels like our own.

Change does not have to begin with a dramatic decision. Sometimes it begins with allowing ourselves to ask a question we have pushed aside for years:

Am I continuing this because it is right for me, or because I have learned that a good woman quietly manages?

Their endurance is not a contract

There is much to admire in women who carried on through circumstances they could not easily change.

Their resourcefulness, courage and determination may be part of what made our own lives possible. But I do not think we honour them by refusing choices they never had.

We do not betray a mother who worked until she was exhausted by deciding we want work to occupy less of our lives. We do not disrespect a grandmother who stayed silent by speaking honestly about what no longer feels right.

We are not less grateful because we want fewer obligations, more ownership of our time or a life that asks less of us.

Perhaps breaking this pattern is not only something we do for ourselves. It is also a way of passing on a different inheritance—one that shows our daughters, and the women who come after us, that their worth does not depend on how much they can quietly endure.

What the women before us endured is part of our history. It does not have to become a contract for our future.

Perhaps the question is not whether we are capable of continuing. Women have already proved how much we can carry.

A more useful question may be whether we still want to carry the same things in the same way.

We are allowed to notice what no longer fits before it becomes unbearable. We can respect the strength of the women before us while using the choices, knowledge and voice available to us to shape a life that feels more fully our own.

That does not diminish where we came from.

Perhaps choosing differently is one way of honouring what their endurance made possible.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks, and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

It was an ordinary Sunday evening. Nothing was wrong. The washing was folded, and the fridge was full. John was reading on the sofa with Drummer curled up next to him, napping after his walk, and I was sitting with a cup of tea that John had made twenty minutes earlier, and I still hadn’t drunk.

And I remember thinking, ‘Where did the weekend go?’

Not in a dramatic way. Nothing had happened. That was almost the problem. Two whole days, and I couldn’t point to where they’d gone, only that Monday was already knocking at the door, and some part of me was already tired of it before it had even arrived.

I nearly didn’t let myself finish the thought. Because straight after it came the other one, the one I suspect you know well too: what right do you have to want more, when so much of your life is actually good?

I want to say this as plainly as I can, because I don’t think anyone says it to us enough: you do not have to be unhappy to want more of your own time. Nobody needs to have let you down, or worn you out completely, or pushed you to breaking point before you’re allowed to want this. You can love your life — your people, the home you’ve built, the version of yourself who holds it all together — and still feel your own name quietly sliding off the list of things that get looked after. Wanting an hour that belongs to no one but you is not ingratitude. It’s not selfish. It doesn’t mean you’re failing to appreciate what you have. It just means you’re a person, and people need some part of their life to be theirs.

I think so many of us have learned to treat that want as something shameful, so we bury it under everything else we’re carrying. There’s the job, the house, the people who need feeding, remembering, reassuring, chasing up, checked in on. There’s the mental list that never actually finishes, just pauses.

And somewhere underneath all of it is a much smaller, quieter feeling — I would just like one hour that nobody has a claim on — that gets pushed back down every single time, because it feels indulgent to say out loud, and because there genuinely doesn’t seem to be room for it.

That’s the part I want to gently push back on: the idea that there’s no room, and no choice. It can feel that way. It felt that way to me for a long time. But feeling like something is fixed is not the same as it actually being fixed. Most of us are living inside arrangements — of work, money, time, expectation — that we agreed to years ago, for reasons that made sense then, and have simply never gone back to question since. Not because they can’t be questioned. Because nobody ever told us we were allowed to.

I didn’t always let myself question mine either. There was a stretch of years when, from the outside, everything looked fine — busy, capable, holding it together — and it took me a long time to admit that “fine” wasn’t the same as “mine.” I remember driving home from something completely ordinary, gripping the steering wheel like I was late for something, when nothing was actually due anywhere.

Nobody was chasing me. I was just so used to the feeling of being behind that I couldn’t stop performing it, even alone in the car with no one watching. I’ll tell you the rest of that story another time. For now, I’ll just say: it’s entirely possible to be doing everything right, and still feel like your week belongs to everyone except you.

Somewhere in working my way out of that, I landed on something I keep coming back to: work should sustain your life, not organise it. Not as a slogan — as a test. When I ask myself whether a day has gone well, it’s rarely about how much got done. It’s whether I still had any say in how it went.

Here’s what I want you to actually hear, though, underneath all of this: something else is possible. Not a different planet, not a different life entirely — just a different shape to the one you already have.

For us, right now, that looks like a Tuesday where nothing is asking anything of me until I decide otherwise. Making lunch slowly instead of eating it standing at the sink. Noticing the weather’s turned and being able to do something about it, instead of just clocking it through a window on the way to somewhere else.

I’m not telling you this to hold it up as the answer. I’m telling you because five years ago, I would not have believed a Tuesday like that was available to someone like me, and it turned out it simply required asking the question.

Yours won’t look like mine, and it doesn’t need to. It might be ten minutes with your coffee before the house wakes up. It might be one evening a week where nobody needs anything from you, and you don’t apologise for it, even in your own head. It might just be putting your phone in another room for an hour and not explaining yourself to anyone. Small, ordinary, entirely possible — and still yours to ask for.

None of this requires your whole life to be wrong first. It requires being honest that you miss having some hours that are simply, unapologetically your own — and letting that be reason enough to start paying attention, instead of something to feel guilty about wanting.

So if you recognised any of this — the tea going cold, the guilt that arrives right behind the wanting, the sense of being fine and still somehow missing from your own week — I’d like this to be a place where all of that gets to be said out loud. Not fixed. Not diagnosed. Just recognised and taken seriously.

If that's you, I'd love for you to stay. I'm Rebecca — I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks. After years of arranging my work around other people's businesses, I'm building something of my own instead. I write here for women in midlife questioning how much their current life asks of them, and starting to explore what more time, choice and breathing room could look like — guilt included, still figuring it out in real time.

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So here's the question I'd ask you: if one ordinary day this week belonged entirely to you — no explaining required — what would you do with it? I'd genuinely love to know — tell me in the comments.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

I think many of us reach a point when being capable of carrying everything no longer feels like a good enough reason to keep carrying it.

Nothing has collapsed. The responsibilities are met, the diary is managed, and you may feel grateful for much of what you have built.

And yet, beneath all that competence, a quieter question begins to appear.

How long do I want to keep living like this?

You are still doing what needs to be done, and probably doing it well. But you have started noticing how much of your time and energy it takes to keep everything moving in the same direction.

The life is not wrong.

It may simply be asking more from you than you want to keep giving.

When capability makes it easy to continue

I have been thinking about this a great deal in relation to work.

For years, I believed self-employment would give me freedom. I would choose my hours, decide where I worked and build a life without an employer deciding when I could take a day off.

In some ways, it did.

But I could also fill every part of my week with client work. One employer had been replaced by several businesses, each with its own deadlines and moments of urgency.

My diary may have belonged to me in theory, but much of the time inside it still belonged to somebody else.

I was good at the work. That capability made it easy to continue.

There was always another project and another reason to believe the quieter week would come later.

The problem was not that I had stopped wanting to write, create or earn. I had simply become less willing to arrange our life around work that belonged to other people.

It would have been easier if I had hated the work. It is much harder to question something when it still functions perfectly well.

Perhaps you have a job you are good at, a home you worked hard to create or responsibilities you have carried so long that nobody asks whether they should still belong to you.

Being able to manage something can hide the fact that it has become too heavy.

Other people see your capability and assume everything is fine. You may see it too and wonder whether wanting less pressure means you have become ungrateful or unmotivated.

I do not think that is necessarily what is happening.

When success begins to mean something different

It may be that your understanding of a good life has widened.

Success may once have meant earning more, proving yourself or building something solid. Those things may still matter.

But midlife has a way of making time feel less theoretical.

The years ahead no longer seem endlessly renewable. Ordinary Tuesdays begin to matter as much as distant plans, and the way a life feels while it is being lived becomes harder to dismiss.

Security may still matter, but perhaps not if maintaining it takes every useful hour. Ambition may still be present, but perhaps you no longer want to direct all of it towards work.

You may want some of that energy for your health, your relationships or the parts of yourself that have waited behind everything more urgent.

That does not make your earlier ambition false.

The work you did and the responsibilities you carried helped create the woman now asking different questions.

Something can have been right for you once and no longer be right now.

We sometimes imagine that changing our minds requires us to reject everything that came before. We look for proof that the job was terrible or the choices were misguided.

But a life does not have to become bad before you choose to change it.

You can appreciate what it gave you without carrying it into every year that follows.

For me, this has meant beginning to build work around offers I own rather than returning to a diary filled with multiple clients.

It is still a business. It requires effort and patience, and the transition is not complete.

But the direction matters.

I want to create work that can support the simpler life John and I have chosen rather than quietly taking control of it.

Life aboard Arwenack has made that desire more visible.

The weather changes. Water levels rise and fall. A mooring becomes noisy or no longer right for us, and we may decide it is time to move.

We do not want every cruise to wait for a clear space between client calls.

We value mornings without an alarm clock and the freedom to respond to the day in front of us. Sometimes work can happen later because the water or weather is right now.

That freedom is not the absence of responsibility.

Water needs collecting, batteries need watching, and something always appears to require John’s attention just as we begin to feel organised.

It is not an effortless escape.

But it is a life whose shape we chose deliberately, and I want my work to respect that choice.

Your version may look entirely different. You may have no interest in narrowboats, self-employment or creating offers of your own.

More freedom might mean working four days instead of five, moving somewhere smaller, changing careers or owning fewer things.

It may mean becoming less available, handing back a responsibility or deciding that a larger income is no longer worth the life required to earn it.

The destination matters less than the decision to look honestly at what your current life asks from you.

Sometimes the demands will be worth it. Some responsibilities, work or financial commitments may need to remain for now.

Clarity does not always lead to immediate change.

But it can help you distinguish between what you are choosing and what you are continuing simply because you have always managed it before.

Capability is valuable, but it can become a trap when being able to continue is treated as evidence that nothing needs to change.

You may be perfectly able to manage another project, absorb another responsibility or make another compromise while quietly knowing that you no longer want to.

Perhaps your ambition has not disappeared. It may simply be turning towards a fuller life — one with enough purpose and income, but also enough room to notice where you are and change your mind.

Enough space for an ordinary Tuesday to contain something other than work, recovery from work and preparation to begin again.

If this is the kind of question you are beginning to ask too, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write for women in midlife who are not trying to blow up their lives, but are beginning to wonder what might change if more of ordinary life started to belong to them.

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A smaller place to begin

The first question does not have to be, “What should my new life look like?”

That can feel far too large when you are still standing inside the old one.

A more useful place to begin may be:

Which part of my life is asking too much of me now?

Not which part looks worst from the outside, or which part somebody else thinks you ought to change.

The part that repeatedly consumes more time, energy or identity than you want to keep offering it.

Work, money, home, relationships and responsibilities are rarely separate. Changing one can affect all the others, which is why the possibility of change can feel overwhelming.

But the first step need not be dramatic.

It might be gathering information, testing a different routine or noticing which commitment leaves you feeling least like yourself.

So I wonder whether there is something in your life that still works perfectly well, but asks you to remain someone you are no longer sure you want to be.

Something you are capable of carrying, but no longer certain you want to carry in the same way.

The answer does not require you to dismantle your life tomorrow.

It may only ask you to become curious about what still fits, what no longer does and what you would like your capability to build next.

So I wonder whether there is something in your life that still works perfectly well, but asks you to remain someone you are no longer sure you want to be.

Something you can continue carrying, but no longer want to carry in quite the same way.

The answer does not require you to dismantle your life tomorrow. It may begin with noticing what still fits, what has become heavier than it once was and where a little more room would make the greatest difference.

Perhaps that is where change often starts.

Not with a dramatic plan, but with the honest recognition that being capable of continuing is not the same as choosing to.

I would love to know whether this resonates with you. Is there something in your life that still works, but asks more from you than you want to keep giving?

With quiet gratitude,

Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, founder of Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and we have built our days around a slower, simpler way of living.

After years of arranging my work around other people’s businesses, I am now creating offers of my own that support the life John and I have chosen. Here, I write for women in midlife who are questioning how much their current life asks of them — and beginning to explore what more time, choice and breathing room might look like for them.

I thought I understood slow living until a badly sprained ankle left me on crutches.

For the past three years, our slower life has been shaped by the boat moving every couple of weeks, the kettle on, the towpath outside, and the ordinary rhythms of weather and water.

But there is the slow you choose because it gives your life more room, and there’s the slow your body insists on. I’m learning the difference one awkward step at a time.

The slow you don’t choose

I’ve been on crutches for the best part of three weeks now, and almost everything takes longer. Moving across the boat takes thought. Carrying anything becomes a small logistical puzzle.

Even manoeuvring around each other has become more complicated. There’s not much spare width at the best of times, and adding crutches into the mix doesn’t exactly make for graceful passing.

But in some ways, the narrowness has helped. There’s almost always something to lean on: a worktop, the edge of the bed, the table, the side of the boat. I think in a house, with wider spaces and more empty floor between one thing and another, I may have felt even more exposed.

It’s made me think about my nan, who, by my age, was using two walking sticks because of arthritis. At forty-eight, she could easily walk four miles. Four years later, her life had changed beyond recognition.

And yet she was one of the most cheerful, adaptable people I knew.

I can still picture her finding ways around things. Her litter picker was never far away, ready to rescue whatever she’d dropped before anyone else could get to it. She had a quiet way of adjusting to what life had asked of her, without making a drama of it or pretending it was nothing.

I think about that more now, because when you have to think about every step, you realise how much of ordinary life depends on not having to think about every step. You realise how casually you usually cross a room, carry a plate, step down into the boat, or fetch something you’ve left just out of reach.

Rest sounds gentle until it’s not optional.

There’s a kind of slowing down that looks peaceful from the outside. A book. A blanket. A cup of tea. Permission to do less.

Then there’s the kind where your body keeps reminding you that it’s in charge for a while. The kind where you’re tired not because you’ve done very much, but because everything you’ve done has required thought.

I know this is temporary. I know I’m lucky. The sprain is healing slowly, and I’ve been told it may take around two months on crutches, and closer to three months before I’m properly back to normal.

Three months isn’t a lifetime, but it’s long enough to change the shape of my days.

When the place starts to reveal itself

Normally, we move the boat at least every two weeks. That rhythm has become part of our life now: the planning, the water points, the next mooring, the little shift in view, the fresh stretch of towpath.

But this is the longest we’ve stayed in one place in the last three years, and something strange has happened. The place has started to reveal itself.

Not in a grand way. No great revelation. Just the small, steady details you only notice when you’re there long enough for them to trust you with their pattern.

As evening settles, there’s a single glow-worm on the towpath, shining her small green light like a miniature lighthouse. I find myself hoping she attracts a mate, because she looks so bright and so alone.

After dark, the otter arrives, catches fish, and devours them noisily on the bank opposite the boat. By morning, the moorhen strides in like a very efficient cleaner, picking up the precious morsels left behind.

The otter and the moorhen seem to have an arrangement, although I doubt either of them has discussed it. The otter eats well at night. The moorhen clears up in the morning. By the next evening, the bank is ready again for another private dining experience.

There’s a mouse too, who pops out on the towpath and eats tiny snacks from the side, as if he has always lived there and we are the ones who have only just started paying attention.

I’ve come to know this little routine because I’m still here. Not passing through. Not planning the next move. Not looking ahead to the next water point or the next mooring.

Just here, long enough for the place to stop being scenery and start becoming company.

Because my ankle has said no to moving on.

We’ve stayed still, and the world around us has carried on introducing itself.

There’s something humbling in that.

The tenderness of being helped

I often write about choosing a slower life, but this has reminded me there’s nothing romantic about being forced into slowness by your own body. It can be interesting, yes. It can make you notice things. But it can also be frustrating, awkward and tiring in ways I hadn’t quite expected.

There have been moments when the crutches have made me cross. The careful steps, the needing to ask, the having to wait, the realisation that I can’t just get up and do the thing myself in the way I usually would.

John has helped me so much. He’s fetched the things I can’t reach, cooked dinner when I couldn’t stand for long, walked Drummer, and gone into the local town for supplies.

It’s all ordinary care, really. The kind of care that happens in the middle of a life together. But when you’re the one needing it, even ordinary care can feel quite tender.

Independence is a funny thing. We can talk about community, kindness and accepting help, but when help actually arrives, it can still catch on something inside us.

I’ve had so much kindness these past few weeks. Friends have offered help, and a lovely woman from the local town lent me her crutches, which still moves me when I think about it.

Such a practical thing, and yet not a small thing at all when you suddenly need help to cross the room.

And I’ve been grateful.

Truly grateful.

But I’ve also noticed how hard it can be to receive help when you’re used to being capable.

There’s a part of me that wants to say, “I’m fine,” even when I’m clearly hobbling. A part that wants to make the inconvenience smaller. A part that finds it easier to be the one who manages than the one who needs.

Not because the help is unwelcome, but because needing it touches something tender.

Perhaps you know that feeling too. The strange discomfort of being looked after. The urge to prove you’re still useful. The instinct to minimise your own need before anyone has even suggested it’s too much.

I think many women know this, especially by midlife. We’ve spent years becoming practical, capable, prepared, thoughtful and reliable. We remember what needs doing, carry the lists in our heads, notice what’s running low, who needs what, and what has to happen next.

So when life makes us stop, even briefly, it can feel like more than physical rest.

It can feel like an interruption to the identity we’ve built around being able.

If this is the kind of honest, slower company you need in your inbox, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write for women in midlife who are asking what matters now, especially when life has slowed, shifted, emptied out, or started asking different questions.

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The small wealth of staying still

And yet, there’s been beauty in it too.

There’s been the wildlife I might not have watched so closely. There’s been the stillness of this mooring becoming familiar. There’s been the kindness of people. There’s been a reminder that I don’t have to earn care by being endlessly useful.

There’s also been cake.

This week, a boat appeared in the distance, and we thought the people on board looked a little familiar. As they came closer, we realised they were friends we’d met two and a half years ago, when everything about this life still felt so new.

That’s one of the wonderful things about canal life. You never quite know who’ll cruise into view.

One minute you’re watching the water, and the next there’s someone from another chapter of your life coming slowly towards you, ready for a catch-up before they carry on their way.

This is why I always try to have cake available, just in case the situation arises. Although I admit this may also be a convenient excuse, because I’m very partial to tea and cake.

I don’t listen very closely to the health gurus who say cake should only be eaten occasionally, as a treat. For me, that would make for a fairly miserable existence.

Besides, on a boat, cake feels practical. Space is limited, the weather is often inconvenient, and someone you love may appear from around the bend at any moment.

Surely that’s enough reason to keep something sweet nearby.

Perhaps that’s part of what I love about this life. Not that it’s always easy. It isn’t. The mud, the water runs, the repairs, the weather, the tight spaces and the winter dark all have their moments.

But it has shown me how often the good things are small, ordinary and easy to miss if I’m only looking for the next place, the next job, the next thing that needs doing.

Being moored somewhere beautiful while I heal has felt like its own kind of wealth. So has knowing the otter has been again because the moorhen is tidying up after him. So has John bringing what I can’t fetch, friends arriving by water, and borrowed crutches offered without fuss.

And cake, obviously.

Underneath all of that, there’s also been the reminder that life is still happening even when you’re not moving quickly through it.

That’s been the surprising thing.

I thought being forced to stay still would make life feel smaller. In some ways, of course, it has. My physical world has shrunk to the boat, the towpath, the nearest practical distances, and the careful calculation of how many steps something will take.

But in another way, the world has opened.

I’ve had to look more closely at what’s already here. I’ve had to let other people help. I’ve had to admit that rest isn’t always graceful, that independence isn’t always the same as strength, and that being slowed down doesn’t mean life has stopped offering small, generous things.

It may simply mean I’m here long enough to notice them.

I don’t want to pretend there’s always a neat meaning in being injured. Sometimes it’s just annoying. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient and boring.

But this has made me think about my nan and her cheerful adaptability. It has made me notice how kindness is easier to offer than receive. It has reminded me that even a slower life can be slowed further.

Staying still isn’t always the same as being stuck.

Sometimes staying still is where the small world finds you.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home usually moves every two weeks, although lately life has made me stay still for a while.

By day, I work as a copywriter. Here, I write for women in midlife who are asking what matters now — and beginning to notice the slower, smaller, more honest life that may already be trying to meet them.

It wasn’t until we met Sarah, on a frosty Sunday morning in January, that we even realised people lived full-time on narrowboats.

Not for a holiday or as a romantic break from real life. Properly lived on them, with work, shopping and all the things you still have to do wherever you call home.

Until then, narrowboats had belonged in a slightly separate part of my mind. They were lovely to look at, something you might hire for a week, but not something you could live on 365 days of the year.

But Sarah was there, moving her boat through the lock with her husband and their dog, Doris, living their normal life. I can still picture the cold air, the lock gate, Doris nearby, and this ordinary woman doing something I had quietly filed under impossible.

And something in me lit up and refused to go out.

The question changed from, “Wouldn’t that be lovely?” to something much more alive.

Could this be possible for us, too?

That kind of question doesn’t go away once it has been thought, not for me anyway. It followed me around while I made the tea, while I looked at the rooms we barely used, and while I lived a life that still worked on paper but no longer felt like the whole answer.

The question that wouldn’t leave me alone

At the time, John was still going out to work, and I was working from home, so this was not a simple daydream.

We had very ordinary questions to answer. How would John get to work? How would I work from a boat? Did they have Wi-Fi, electricity, water and the essentials you need to live a comfortable life?

It’s amazing how quickly a beautiful idea becomes less dreamy when you start asking these kinds of questions. But underneath all the practical questions was the one we kept coming back to.

What would make this possible?

Not in a vague, hopeful, “we’ll work it out somehow” way. We needed to know the numbers properly, because we weren’t trying to escape responsibility. We were trying to find out whether a different life could be responsible too.

We wanted the freedom, yes. We wanted to stop paying rent every month on a house we only used half of, and we wanted to know whether that money, energy and effort could be moved into something that felt more like the life we were beginning to imagine.

So we sat down with a notebook.

Nothing fancy. Just a notebook, figures, crossed-out sums, and the strange feeling that this idea was no longer floating somewhere in the distance.

We worked out how much we could put towards a narrowboat. We looked at the costs of living aboard: the boat licence, insurance, fuel, gas, maintenance, petrol for John getting to work, and the things we knew we probably didn’t know enough about yet.

Then we looked at what would disappear. Rent. The usual house electricity bill. The cost of holding on to a home that had become too big for the life we were actually living inside it.

Slowly, the dream began to take shape.

The number that changed everything

There was still fear. Numbers don’t remove fear completely, but they do something else: they give you a base to work from.

From that base, you can look at the situation more honestly. You can ask better questions, make better choices, and see whether the thing you’ve been imagining is impossible, possible, or simply asking for a different plan.

That notebook became the beginning of our Freedom Number, although I didn’t call it that then. At the time, it was simply the number underneath the question. The number between the life we had and the life that was beginning to seem possible.

From the outside, choosing differently can look like one brave, sweeping decision.

They moved onto a boat. They changed their life. They must have just gone for it.

But from the inside, it was much more planned than that. It was a conversation at the table, a page of sums, a list of bills, and a careful look at what we needed, what we could let go of, and what would give us enough room to breathe.

We were not looking for certainty. We were looking for enough clarity to take the next step. And even then, we didn’t get everything right.

There were costs we underestimated hugely because we didn’t know the right questions to ask. We had budgeted £4,500 for some of the vital early boat work, then found ourselves facing a bill closer to £8,000 for blacking and plating.

To us, that was not a small difference.

I can still remember the feeling of hearing, “It will be about £8,000, unless the price of steel rockets, then it will be more.” My stomach dropped, as it often does when the practical world hands you a bill bigger than the one you had made peace with.

But fortunately, because we had done the work, looked at the figures, and left ourselves some stretch and some just-in-case room, we found the extra.

It was tight. It was uncomfortable. But it was possible.

And sometimes the word that changes everything is possible.

Not easy. Not perfect. Not without wobble.

Possible.

What I wish I’d known

I think about that gap now and again.

Not because it meant we had done anything wrong, but because it showed me how important it is to leave room for real life. The extra bill didn’t mean the dream was foolish. It meant the dream needed enough honesty around it to survive contact with the practical world.

So many women I know are not short of longing. They’re not short of intelligence, courage or imagination. They’re carrying quiet ideas about a life that might fit them better now, but the practical part can feel too frightening to look at directly.

Money can feel like the place where a dream might be taken away from you. It can feel easier to leave the idea soft and untested, easier to say, “Maybe one day,” than to sit down and look at what one day would ask of you.

But the numbers are not always there to say no.

Sometimes they show you what might be possible.

They may show you that the change needs longer, or that the first version might need to be smaller, slower or more carefully built. They may show you where the gap is and what would have to happen before the next step feels steady.

But they may also show you that the thing you’ve been quietly carrying is not as impossible as it feels.

Before Arwenack was our home, she was a question. Before the towpath mornings, the kettle on the stove, the water points, the winter mud and the doors open in summer, there was a page of numbers on the table.

There was a dream we were brave enough to take seriously, and there was the moment we stopped only asking whether we wanted it and started asking what it would take.

Perhaps that’s where your next question begins too. Not with a grand announcement, a dramatic decision, or knowing exactly how everything will unfold, but with a notebook, a cup of tea, a calculator, and enough honesty to ask what might make the next part possible.

That’s why I made The Freedom Number. Because I remember what it felt like to sit at the table with an idea that seemed too big to hold in my head and try to bring it down onto paper.

I remember the fear of missing something important. I remember the relief of seeing that the answer was not a clean yes or no, but something more useful than that: a starting point, a gap, and a possible way through.

The Freedom Number will not make the decision for you. It will not tell you to be brave before you feel ready, and it will not pretend money is the only thing that matters.

But it will give you somewhere to put the question. What would this need? What would have to be covered? What would make the next step feel steadier? What number sits underneath the life I keep quietly wondering about?

Sometimes that is where change begins. Not with certainty, but with a page clear enough to tell the truth on.

Find Your Freedom Number →

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

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About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has learned to slow down. By day, I work as a copywriter. Here, I write for women who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.

There comes a point when even the most reasonable woman can taste the bile of compliance in her throat.

I’ve been thinking about the anger that can begin to surface in midlife.

Not always obvious anger. Not the kind that throws plates, slams doors or announces itself loudly enough for everyone else to notice.

More often, it’s a quiet heat beneath the tiredness. A tightness in the throat. A flash of irritation when someone asks one more thing of you, followed almost immediately by guilt for feeling it.

Looking back, I don’t think I always understood what that feeling was.

I might have called it exhaustion. Restlessness. Hormones. A difficult week. I might have told myself I was being unreasonable and carried on with whatever needed doing.

Perhaps you know something of that, too.

You fold the feeling away between the food shop and the washing, between answering messages and making sure everyone else has what they need. You expect it to pass, but it keeps returning.

Underneath it is a small, hot question.

What about what I want?

For much of my life, I thought being adaptable was simply part of being capable.

I adjusted. I made things work. I noticed what needed doing and got on with it. I became the person people could rely on because that was what responsible, loving women did.

I still think there’s something generous and valuable in that. Caring for people, keeping things moving and making a life work are not mistakes.

But I have begun to wonder what happens when adapting becomes so automatic that we no longer notice how much of ourselves is being moved aside.

We soften what we really think. We make our wants more convenient. We wait until everyone else is settled, and nobody will be too disrupted by what we might need.

Sometimes that time never quite comes.

Long before John and I found Arwenack, our narrowboat, I’d begun to feel the strain of the old shape of our life.

Nothing was dramatically wrong. There was no great collapse or single moment when everything became unbearable.

There was simply a growing awareness that the life we had built no longer felt like the whole answer.

That was difficult to admit. It felt ungrateful to question a life we had worked hard for, especially when there was so much within it to value.

Yet the question kept appearing in ordinary moments.

What do I want now?

I didn’t have an immediate answer. Sometimes the question itself felt almost rude, as though wanting something simply because it felt more honest was not quite a good enough reason.

I suspect that is where some of the anger begins.

Not because we don’t love the people in our lives, but because we have become so accustomed to making room for everybody else that our own wanting can feel like an intrusion.

Women are often praised for the very qualities that make this easy to miss. We’re called capable, dependable, sensible, kind, and easy-going.

A good mum. A good wife. A good daughter. A safe pair of hands.

Those things may all be true. But sometimes, underneath the praise, there’s another message: you’ve become very good at not inconveniencing anyone with the full truth of who you are.

I recognise that in myself.

I know how quickly “I can manage” becomes “I must manage,” and how long it can take to notice the difference.

Perhaps midlife brings that difference into sharper focus.

Not always through crisis, but through a strange private honesty that makes itself known while you are standing at the sink, walking the dog, driving home or sitting in a room you used to love.

You look around at the life you have helped create and realise that, somewhere within it, you’ve started to feel like a guest.

That doesn’t mean the life was wrong.

It may have been exactly right for the woman you were when you chose it. It may be full of people you love, memories you treasure and decisions you would make all over again.

And still, something may have changed.

The old bargain begins to feel harder to accept. The one where everyone else is allowed to grow, need, change, want, fall apart and begin again, while you continue adapting around them.

The one where your wants are welcome, provided they are small enough not to alter the shape of anybody else’s life.

The one where change is understandable when life demands it of you, but harder to explain when your own heart does.

I think that’s why the feeling can become so fierce.

Not because you want to hurt anyone, abandon everything or become some dramatic new person nobody recognises.

You may love your children so much that it still catches you in the chest. You may love your partner, your home, your family, your work and the life you have made with all its history, effort and tenderness.

And still there may be a part of you that wants to stand in the middle of it all and ask:

What about me?

What about the woman underneath the roles? The part of me that has waited quietly while everyone else needed something?

What about the things I once wanted, before life became a series of responsibilities and practical decisions?

What about the dreams I talked myself out of because they were inconvenient, expensive, unrealistic, too late or too difficult to explain?

These aren’t always comfortable questions.

They can sound dangerous, even inside our own heads. They can make it seem as though we are about to burn everything to the ground.

And perhaps sometimes, in the private truth of it, that is exactly how it feels.

I have felt the appeal of a clean break. The fantasy of walking away from every obligation, expectation and version of yourself that other people have become used to.

Not because you truly want to destroy your life, but because you’re tired of making yourself acceptable inside it.

Tired of swallowing the words, smoothing the edges and shrinking the want until it can fit neatly into a life that no longer quite fits you.

Sometimes the fantasy is not really about destruction.

Sometimes it is about the relief of finally telling the truth.

No more explaining. No more making the truth easier for everyone else to hear. No more pretending the old shape still fits simply because other people may find your outgrowing it uncomfortable.

That doesn’t make you bad. It may simply mean you have adapted and adapted and adapted, and are finally beginning to notice the cost.

Perhaps this is why the words “Oh, you’ve changed” can sting before anyone has even said them.

We can hear them coming.

The raised eyebrow. The little joke. The concern dressed up as common sense. The suggestion that we are being selfish, reckless, dramatic or not quite ourselves.

Sometimes the fear of that reaction is enough to make us retreat before we’ve changed anything at all. We pull the idea back inside, make it smaller and reassure everyone — including ourselves — that nothing is really going to be different.

We remind ourselves that we should be grateful.

And of course, there may be so much to be grateful for. But gratitude can become a cage when it’s used to silence every honest longing.

I’ve come to believe that gratitude and wanting are not opposites.

I can honour the life I’ve lived and still admit that I want something different now. I can love the people within it without disappearing inside what they need from me.

When John and I began talking seriously about changing our lives, we didn’t immediately know that the answer would be a forty-foot red narrowboat.

The boat came later.

First came the recognition that the old shape was no longer enough. Then came conversations about money, work, family, freedom and what we wanted the next part of our lives to feel like.

There was excitement, but also uncertainty. More than once, we asked each other, “Could we really do this?”

Looking back, the biggest change was not moving aboard Arwenack. It was allowing the question to become real and no longer treating our wanting as childish or inconvenient.

The boat was our answer. It’s not the answer.

Your life may not require a move, a dramatic reinvention or anything that looks unusual from the outside.

Your change may be quieter: different work, more space, fewer commitments, a room of your own, an afternoon that belongs to you, or simply the ability to say no without giving a six-page explanation.

But I wonder whether the private permission is similar.

The permission to stop assuming that your wants matter only after everyone else’s have been met.

Taking our own wants seriously didn’t make us less responsible, less connected or less grateful.

It gave the wanting somewhere to go.

Before that, it had often appeared as restlessness. Frustration. A sense that I should be happy with things as they were, and a quiet shame that some part of me was not.

Once we began paying attention to what was underneath it, the feeling became clearer.

I don’t think every angry or restless impulse needs to be acted upon. We don’t need to quit our jobs, sell everything or burn down our lives by Friday.

But I no longer think the feeling should always be dismissed either.

I’ve begun to see anger less as an instruction and more as a clue.

It may point towards the places where life has become too tight. The places where you have been over-giving, staying silent or continuing to perform a version of yourself because everybody else finds her easy to live with.

And beneath the anger, there may be grief.

Grief for the years when you didn’t ask what you wanted. Grief for the parts of yourself you put away because there was no room for them then.

Grief, perhaps, for how long you’ve been waiting for permission that nobody else knew you needed.

But beneath the grief, there may also be a want.

Not necessarily a whole plan. Not a grand vision or a perfect five-year strategy.

Perhaps only the beginning of an honest sentence.

I want more room.

I want work that doesn’t drain the life out of me.

I want adventure. Or rest. Or both.

I want to know what I want now.

That sentence can feel dangerous when you have spent years being rewarded for adapting.

The feeling may arrive as irritation, envy, tears in the car or an unexpected fury at something small that’s not small at all.

It may simply be carrying the truth that you no longer want the rest of your life to be shaped entirely by habit, duty, expectation and other people’s comfort.

That’s not a soft little self-care moment.

There is something powerful about a woman asking what she wants after years of adapting around what everyone else needs.

Not because she must immediately act on every answer, but because she’s finally included herself in the question.

When you have spent years listening for everybody else’s needs, your own voice can sound unfamiliar. You may wonder whether the want is real, sensible or fair.

You may try to talk yourself out of it before it has even had a chance to become clear.

I think this is where we need some gentleness with ourselves, but not the kind that pats the feeling on the head and quietly puts it away again.

A more honest gentleness.

The kind that allows the question to remain open.

What do I want now?

Not what should I want. Not what will be easiest for everyone else. Not what keeps me comfortably recognisable.

And what might need to change for my life to make room for the answer?

You may not know yet.

There may be no boat waiting around the corner, no sudden revelation and no neat solution. There may simply be a growing awareness that something in your life deserves a closer look.

Perhaps the anger is not here to destroy anything.

Perhaps it’s the part of you that has grown tired of being quietly erased. The part that wants more room, more truth and more of a sense that the life you are living belongs to you as well.

I don’t think choosing differently means the end of being loving, dependable or connected to the people who matter.

It may simply be the beginning of being included in the life you keep helping everyone else live.

So I wonder where you’ve become very good at adapting.

And if the feeling you’ve been calling tiredness, irritation or restlessness were allowed to finish its sentence, what might it say?

I would genuinely love to know.

I’m creating something for women who are beginning to ask what they want now, especially when the answer still feels tangled, inconvenient or hard to admit.

It will not be about blowing up your life. It will be a quiet, practical way to notice what no longer fits, what still matters and what may be asking for your attention next.

For now, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers so you don’t miss it when it is ready.

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With quiet gratitude,

Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has learned to slow down. By day, I work as a copywriter. Here, I write for women who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.

I think one of the reasons we avoid looking too closely at the numbers is because we’re frightened of what they might tell us.

Not the tidy numbers we already know about. The bills. The food shop. The direct debits that go out whether we are ready for them or not. I mean the deeper number beneath the question many women begin asking in midlife.

What would a different life actually need to cost?

It can feel safer to keep that question soft around the edges. To let it stay as a feeling rather than turn it into something with figures attached.

Because what if the number tells us the life we quietly want is impossible?

What if it proves we can’t work less, live differently, change direction, downsize, slow down, build something of our own, or make the next part of life feel more honest than the last?

I understand that fear.

There’s a strange moment that comes after you’ve begun asking what you want now. At first, the question is emotional. It lives somewhere in the chest. It arrives as a longing for more space, more quiet, more freedom, more room to hear yourself think.

But sooner or later, the question moves closer to the table.

It asks for a notebook. It asks for a pen. It asks, gently but firmly, what enough would actually need to look like in real life.

Not in a fantasy life. Not in the life someone else has built. Not in the version that looks impressive from the outside.

In yours.

When we chose boat life, there was plenty of dreaming involved. Of course, there was. There was the idea of a smaller home, moving water, a slower rhythm, and a life that felt a little more ours.

There was the thought of fewer things, simpler days, towpaths, changing views, and mornings where home didn’t have to be still to be steady.

But there were also numbers.

Diesel, gas, insurance, licences, maintenance. The unexpected jobs that appear because boats, like houses and bodies and lives, have a way of asking for attention at inconvenient times.

There was romance in it, yes.

But there was also a notebook.

I still have that notebook now. It’s a little battered, but I can remember sitting with John at the kitchen table in February, with the dark pressed up against the windows and winter feeling as if it would never quite loosen its grip.

We went through the numbers I’d already been through twice on my own. I remember the relief of realising I hadn’t left anything important out, and that this life we were imagining was something we could make work, as long as we were careful for a while.

The numbers didn’t make the dream less beautiful. They made it more real.

And I think that’s important to say, because choosing differently isn’t only about courage. It’s also about looking honestly at what the life you want will ask of you.

For a long time, I had quite vague ideas about money. More would be better. Less pressure would be lovely. Enough would be nice, although I’m not sure I could have told you what enough actually meant.

Maybe you know that feeling too.

You know something needs to change, or soften, or become more spacious. You can feel that the old shape of life no longer fits in quite the same way, even if nothing dramatic has happened.

You may want to work less or work differently. You may want to travel, move somewhere smaller, build something slowly, or stop making every decision from a place of panic.

But then the practical question arrives.

How much do I actually need?

And suddenly the whole thing can feel foggy.

I think this is why many of us avoid the number. Not because we are careless, but because we’re frightened it will make the quiet thing we want feel impossible.

But sometimes the number does the opposite.

Sometimes the number doesn’t trap you. Sometimes it releases you.

It can show you what is truly needed. It can show you what is being carried out of habit. It can show you where the pressure really sits, and whether the life you’re imagining is closer than you thought, or whether there’s a bridge to build first.

Either way, knowing is kinder than circling.

We’re often taught to think about money in big, blunt ways. Earn more. Save more. Spend less. Be sensible. Be careful. Keep going.

But I don’t think midlife always asks for more in the way we once imagined.

Sometimes it asks for clarity.

I don’t think there’s only one number. I think there are layers of enough.

There’s the survival number. The bare minimum. The roof, the food, the bills, the absolute essentials. It matters, of course it does, but it’s not the whole story.

There’s the steady number. The one that lets you stop bracing quite so hard. The one that gives the month a little more shape and a little less fear.

There’s the breathing-space number. The weekend away. The train fare. The birthday present. The unexpected repair. The small amount of room that means ordinary life doesn’t feel permanently squeezed.

And then there’s The Freedom Number.

Not necessarily yachts and long lunches and never thinking about money again. For many of us, freedom is much quieter than that.

For one woman, freedom might mean travelling the world. For another, it might mean choosing a smaller home, building something slowly, or simply having enough room in the month to stop making every decision from panic.

I think this is where the idea of enough becomes interesting.

Because enough isn’t always as much as we think. And it’s not always as little as we hope.

It’s personal. It’s practical. It belongs to the real shape of your life now.

For one woman, enough might mean staying exactly where she is, but with more margin. For another, it might mean moving, downsizing, changing work, earning differently, or finally admitting that the life she has been maintaining costs more than money.

That’s the part we don’t always count.

The cost of staying too busy. The cost of keeping up a version of life that no longer fits. The cost of saying yes because the numbers feel too uncertain to say no.

And I don’t mean this carelessly.

Money matters. Bills matter. Practicality matters. I’m not interested in pretending you can simply light a candle, write a wish in a notebook, and float into a different life without doing the sums.

But I also know that fear can make the sums feel bigger and blurrier than they really are.

Sometimes we don’t need the whole plan first. Sometimes we need one honest page.

What does this season of life actually need?

What needs to be paid for? What needs to be protected? What could be softened? What has become expensive in ways that are not only financial?

And what would enough look like if you were allowed to define it honestly?

Not ten years ago. Not when the children were small. Not when the house needed to hold everyone. Not when your work had to serve a different season.

Now.

I’ve been thinking about this because the calculations we made for our own life eventually became The Freedom Number.

I created it for women who are asking some version of the same question we were asking at that kitchen table: Could a different way of living actually work financially? It takes you through the numbers gently, without turning your life into a spreadsheet you dread opening.

You’ll work out your survival, steady, breathing-space and Freedom Numbers, so you can see what your life really needs now and what a change might actually ask of you.

Find Your Freedom Number

It won’t make the decision for you. But it can bring the question down to earth, so it no longer has to stay floating around as a feeling you can’t quite hold.

Because sometimes we need the emotional truth.

And sometimes we need the number.

Not because the number has all the answers, but because it gives us somewhere solid to begin.

It can show us what’s essential. It can show us what’s optional. It can show us where the bridge might need to be built.

And perhaps that’s the quiet relief of it.

Not that the answer will be perfect. Not that everything will suddenly be simple. But that you’ll no longer be trying to make decisions inside a fog.

Enough money. Enough space. Enough work. Enough rest. Enough freedom. Enough room to choose.

And perhaps the first step isn’t a five-year plan, a dramatic reinvention, or a brave announcement that everything is about to change.

Perhaps it’s much quieter than that.

To sit down and work out the amount that would let you breathe.

The freedom number.

Not because the number will decide your life for you. But because it may help you see where the ground is and what kind of bridge might come next.

I’d love to know: when you think about enough now, does it feel clear, or is it still a bit of a blur?

If this is the kind of quiet, practical reflection you need in your week, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers. I write about midlife, money, slower living and the practical choices behind building a life that feels more your own.

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With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has learned to slow down. By day, I work as a copywriter. Here, I write for women who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.

There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being capable for too long.

Not the ordinary kind that can be fixed with an early night, although that would be lovely too. I mean the quieter tiredness of being the one who notices, remembers, sorts, carries, plans and keeps going.

The one who says, “It’s fine,” even when it isn’t quite fine. The one who finds a way.

I’ve been thinking lately about asking for help, and why something so ordinary can feel so difficult.

I noticed it again this week in a small, ordinary way. Someone offered to help me with the lock gate, and before I’d even properly thought about whether I needed it, I heard myself saying, “No, it’s fine.”

It was the old answer. The automatic one. The one that makes life look handled, even when it would be kinder to let it be shared.

I don’t know exactly when asking for help became hard for me.

As a child, I must have asked for help. We all do at some point. None of us arrive in the world knowing how to tie our shoes, make sense of our feelings, or carry everything alone.

So somewhere along the way, something changed.

I sometimes wonder whether part of it came from school. I have a memory, or maybe more a feeling than one exact memory, of being taught that you just had to work it out yourself.

Keep going. Try harder. Don’t make a fuss.

As if asking for help wasn’t a sensible thing to do, but a sign that I’d failed to understand quickly enough. As if tapping into someone else’s experience, wisdom, or steadiness was somehow cheating.

Of course, I don’t believe that when it comes to other people.

If someone asks me for help, I don’t think less of them. I don’t see weakness or failure. I’m glad they asked.

I want to help, to be useful and make the load a little lighter if I can.

But when it comes to asking for help myself, something else happens. The rules quietly change.

Suddenly, help can feel like evidence that I’m not coping. Evidence that I’m not as capable as I thought. Proof that everyone else somehow knows how to manage life properly, while I’ve missed a vital instruction sheet.

Which is ridiculous, I know. But knowing something in your head and feeling it in your body are not always the same thing. You may know this, too.

You may be the woman other people come to. The one who remembers the birthdays, books the appointment, answers the message, finds the missing thing, and quietly keeps the wheels turning.

You may be very good at helping others, and still find it strangely exposing to say, “Can I get some help here?”

I think many women learn to be useful before they learn to be honest about what they need. I certainly have.

Not because anyone sat us down and said, “You must carry everything yourself.” Usually, it’s much quieter than that.

We’re praised for being sensible. Helpful. Mature. No trouble. Good at getting on with things.

Then life adds more. Work, children, home, parents, money, relationships, illness, loss, change, and the thousand tiny tasks that never look like much from the outside but somehow fill every corner of a day.

And because we can cope, we do. And after a while, independence can start to look like our whole personality.

From the outside, it may even look impressive. Strong. Reliable. Capable. The kind of woman who has everything handled.

But from the inside, it can feel a little lonely.

Because if you always say you’re fine, people begin to believe you. If you always refuse help, they may eventually stop offering it, and if you always step in before anyone else has to, you quietly teach the people around you that you don’t need much.

Then one day, you may find yourself feeling unseen by a pattern you helped create.

That’s a hard thing to admit. Not because it makes you wrong, but because it asks you to notice the cost of being endlessly capable.

I know I’ve done this.

I’ve made independence look like strength when sometimes it was fear. I’ve struggled on because asking felt harder than carrying. I’ve told myself it was easier to do the thing myself, and sometimes, in the short term, it was.

But the short term has a way of becoming a life if we’re not careful.

And I don’t want a life where help only moves in one direction.

I don’t want to be so practised at giving that receiving always feels awkward, to mistake being needed for being connected. Or for the people who love me to feel shut out because I’ve turned coping into a private performance.

Maybe you recognise some of this too.

Perhaps you’re not refusing help because you’re proud, difficult or ungrateful; instead, you’re refusing it because you learned, somewhere along the way, that needing less made you safer. More acceptable. Less of a burden.

Perhaps you became capable because you had to.

And maybe now, in midlife, something in you is beginning to ask whether capable has to mean alone.

I don’t think it does.

I think there’s a different kind of strength available to us now. Not the strength of pushing through at all costs, or being the last woman standing with the list, the plans and the spare pair of everything.

A quieter strength.

The kind that can say, “I don’t know,” without turning it into a personal failure. The kind that can say, “Can you show me?” or “I’m tired,” or “I could do with some help,” and let those words be ordinary rather than shameful.

It sounds simple, but I don’t think it always is.

For some of us, asking for help isn’t one small sentence. It’s undoing years of habit. Years of being the one who managed, coped, carried on, and made things look easier than they were.

And maybe that’s why it can feel so emotional.

Because the moment we ask, we’re not only asking for help with the thing in front of us. We’re also admitting that we’re human, with edges and limits.

That we’re not here simply to be useful.

I’m still learning this.

I still catch myself choosing the harder route because it feels more familiar, and I have to remind myself that asking for help isn’t cheating, weakness, or proof that I’m failing some invisible test.

It’s part of being alive with other people.

And maybe this is one of the quieter invitations of midlife. To stop proving we can carry everything, and begin letting life be a little more shared.

Not dramatically or perfectly, and not with a grand announcement that we’re now transformed women who can ask for what we need without any emotional aftershock.

Just gently, and one small ask at a time.

Can you carry this? Can you sit with me while I work this out? Can you tell me what you think?

Can you come with me? Can you help me?

Perhaps those aren’t weak questions, but doorways to let love, friendship and ordinary human kindness find their way back in.

If you’ve spent years being the help, I hope you know this.

You’re still allowed to need some.

You’re still allowed to learn from someone else’s experience without making it mean you should have known already. You’re still allowed to say, “I can’t quite do this on my own.”

And if that feels uncomfortable, perhaps that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Perhaps it only means it’s new.

Maybe this is how we begin. Not by becoming less capable, but by becoming more open to being supported. By doing this, we’re not giving up our strength; we’re letting it soften enough for other people to meet us there.

I’d love to know: what kind of help is hardest for you to ask for — practical help, emotional support, advice, company, or simply admitting you’re tired?

Subscribe now

If this is the kind of quiet reminder you need in your week, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write from life aboard our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, for women in midlife who are beginning to ask what they want now — and who want gentle, honest company while they work it out.

There are some beginnings we only understand properly when we look back.

I was talking to a friend last week about being young mums. We were remembering what it felt like to suddenly have a small bundle to look after, and how frightening that responsibility could feel when we were barely adults ourselves.

I was twenty-one when I became a mum. My friend was even younger.

At the time, I don’t think either of us fully understood what we were stepping into. How could we? There are some things you can only learn by living them.

You may know this feeling too. That strange moment when life gives you a role before you feel ready for it, and somehow you still have to grow into it.

We stumbled at first, of course we did. We were young. We got things wrong. We learned through tiredness, worry, repetition, instinct, and the kind of love that makes you keep going even when you have no idea what you’re doing.

And then, slowly, we grew into it.

We became mothers. Cooks. Rememberers of appointments. Washers of uniforms. Makers of packed lunches. Finders of lost things. My children always said Mom eyes were far better at finding things than theirs, which was usually true, although I suspect the missing item was often exactly where I said it would be in the first place.

We became negotiators, too. Not in boardrooms, perhaps, but in supermarket aisles, bedrooms, school mornings, late nights, family tensions, and all the ordinary places where life asks a woman to keep everyone moving without completely losing herself.

A full-scale meltdown in aisle three can require the kind of calm diplomacy the UN would admire.

I say this lightly, but I mean it seriously.

Because so much of what women learn through family life is treated as if it doesn’t really count. As if it is soft experience. Domestic experience. Invisible experience. As if raising children, holding a home together, navigating change, managing feelings, stretching money, making decisions and carrying responsibility are not real skills.

But they are real skills.

They are human skills. Practical skills. Emotional skills. Strategic skills. The kind of skills that do not always fit neatly onto a CV, but shape a life all the same.

And if motherhood has not been part of your life, you may still know this in another form. The role you had to grow into before you felt ready. The work you learned by doing. The people you carried. The responsibilities that shaped you without anyone stopping to call them qualifications.

This is where I think many women in midlife get sold a very unkind story.

We’re told, sometimes directly and sometimes just through the air around us, that if we want to change direction now, we’re starting again. Starting late. Starting behind. Starting with less.

But I don’t think that’s true.

I think you’re starting with years of evidence.

You’re starting with all the times you adapted because life asked you to. You’re starting with the roles you grew into before you felt ready. You’re starting with every difficult conversation you survived, every practical problem you solved, every day you carried more than anyone saw.

You’re starting with the knowledge that you’ve changed before.

That matters.

It matters because when you reach a point in midlife where the old shape of life no longer fits, it can feel as if you have to become someone entirely new. You may look at the next part of life and think you have no map, no certainty, no obvious route, no permission slip.

But you’re not arriving empty-handed.

You’ve lived. You’ve learned. You’ve watched things change and changed with them. You’ve been a beginner before and survived the awkwardness of not knowing.

That’s not nothing.

I thought about this again this week while we were deep in boat maintenance, which may not sound like the most inspiring place to continue a thought about midlife, but this is where life keeps handing me the best metaphors.

Arwenack is a wooden-top boat, which means she is warmer in winter and cooler in summer. It also means she asks for extra care when the weather is dry enough to do the work.

Every summer, there’s something. Sanding. Painting. Sealing. Checking. Looking again at the places where water might get in. Learning which job can wait and which one absolutely cannot.

Up until three years ago, I hadn’t given much thought to fibreglassing. It was not a skill I expected to need in my life. I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be watching YouTube videos, trying to work out how to patch holes on a narrowboat roof and hoping we weren’t about to make an expensive mess of it.

The first time, we were slow and unsure. We watched the same bits of video more than once. We paused, guessed, checked, worried, and did our best.

Now, we’re not professionals, but we are better than we were. Much better. We know what the materials feel like. We know what not to do. We know which part needs patience, which part needs confidence, and which part needs you to stop faffing and get on with it before everything starts setting.

That’s how learning often happens.

Not in one clean, impressive leap, but through doing the thing badly enough at first that you can do it better next time.

And isn’t that true of so much of life?

Motherhood. Work. Love. Money. Home. Change. Courage. Beginning again.

We learn by living our way into things.

I think we forget that when we look ahead. We see the thing we want to do next, and all we can feel is the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

We notice what we don’t know. We notice the fear. We notice the awkwardness of being a beginner again.

But we forget to notice what we bring with us.

You may not have done this exact next thing before. You may not have built this version of your life before. You may not have made this decision, started this work, changed this rhythm, moved to this place, spoken this truth, or asked this question in quite this way.

But you’ve adapted before.

You’ve grown into roles before. You’ve learned by doing. You’ve made hard choices with incomplete information. You’ve carried responsibility before you felt ready.

You’ve lived through enough to know that not feeling ready doesn’t mean you can’t begin.

That’s one of the quiet gifts of midlife, I think. Not that we suddenly become fearless, because we don’t. But that we can begin to see our own history differently.

Not as a list of things we failed to do perfectly, but as proof.

Proof that we can learn. Proof that we can change. Proof that we can keep going while we work things out. Proof that we can become someone slightly different without losing who we are.

And perhaps this is what we need to remember when the next part of life starts asking something of us.

You’re not starting from nothing.

You’re starting from experience. From instinct. From all the small and enormous things you’ve already found your way through.

You’re starting from the version of yourself who has been knocked sideways and still found a way to make dinner, answer the message, pay the bill, make the phone call, or begin again the next morning.

That woman is coming with you.

She may be tired. She may be unsure. She may need a quieter pace now. She may not want to prove herself in the old ways anymore.

But she’s not empty.

She’s full of evidence.

So if you are standing at the edge of something now, wondering whether you’re too late, too rusty, too uncertain, or too far behind, perhaps begin here.

Sit down with a notebook, or a piece of paper, and write down what you’ve already done.

Not just the impressive things. Not just the neat things. Not just the things another person would recognise as achievement.

Write down the roles you’ve grown into. The changes you’ve lived through. The problems you solved because no one else was going to solve them. The moments you had to be brave without calling it bravery.

Write down the negotiations in aisle three. The homes you made. The people you cared for. The work you learned. The seasons you survived. The times you began before you felt ready.

Then look at it properly.

Because that’s not nothing.

That’s a life.

And perhaps the question now is not, “Am I starting too late?”

Perhaps the better question is, “What am I ready to do with everything I already know?”

I’d love to know: what is one thing you’ve lived through, learned, carried, or grown into that you don’t always give yourself credit for?

If this is the kind of quiet reminder you need in your week, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write from life aboard our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, for women in midlife who are beginning to ask what they want now — and who want gentle, honest company while they work it out.

Subscribe now

And if this post has stirred something in you — a feeling that there may be more experience in you than you’ve been counting — The What Now? Mini Life Audit might be a good place to begin.

It won’t ask you to reinvent your whole life by Monday morning. It’s simply a quiet way to notice what feels heavy, what feels true, what you already know, and what might be asking for your attention now.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has taught me to notice what feels heavy, what feels honest, and what no longer fits.

Here, I write for women in midlife who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.

I’m not sure who I am writing this for. You, me, or both of us.

I suppose it’s for anyone who needs to be reminded that they’re more capable than they realise. And I’m including myself in that, because even now, after all the years of doing hard things, starting again, keeping going, holding life together in all the ways women often do, I still forget.

I still wobble. I still make something small feel much bigger than it probably looks from the outside.

This week, I made a £17 Stripe payment link for something small I’d created elsewhere, which feels slightly ridiculous, because I’ve written copy for courses and offers worth thousands. I know how to help other people put their work into the world.

I was sitting at the small table on the boat, tea going cold beside me, staring at the screen as if Stripe had asked me to do something far more dramatic than copy and paste a link.

Not a huge thing. Not a life-changing launch. Not a grand business move. Not something anyone else would necessarily look at and think, well, wasn’t that brave?

But it felt like something to me.

You may know this feeling too. The strange gap between what you can do for other people and what suddenly feels enormous when it belongs to you.

It wasn’t really about the £17. It was about the quiet, familiar feeling of putting something of mine into the world and hoping I wouldn’t immediately want to hide behind the nearest large object.

Because putting yourself forward can feel strangely exposing when you’ve spent years being useful, capable, responsible and available in all the ways other people needed you to be. After a lifetime of putting everyone else first, even a small act of saying, “Here’s something I made, and here’s how you can buy it,” can feel far bigger than it should.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. How easy it is to be brave for other people.

How naturally many women learn to carry things, organise things, remember things, make things easier, hold themselves together, stand up for others and keep life moving. And how uncomfortable it can feel to do one small thing for yourself.

Not in a selfish way. In a “this matters to me too” way.

By the time you reach middle age, chances are you’ve already had your fair share of knocks. You’ve probably been winded a few times. You may be, in your own quiet way, still in the ring, probably a bit bruised and bloodied, but still here.

And that counts. It counts more than we often let it.

Because sometimes we forget to give ourselves credit for the ordinary courage it’s taken to get this far. The decisions we made without knowing how they’d turn out. The losses we carried while still getting dinner on the table.

The changes we survived before we had language for them. The days we kept going because there was no neat alternative.

Take this as a reminder. You’re more capable than you feel today. I’m writing that down because I need to remember it too.

There is a quote I keep coming back to: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” I’ve always liked it, not because it makes the first step easy, but because it tells the truth about beginning.

Most of the time, we don’t see the whole way. We see the next small piece of ground, and we decide whether to put our foot on it.

That’s all. Not the whole road. Not the neat five-year plan with every fear removed before we begin.

Just one step, and then the next.

This is the part I have to keep learning. I want to wait until I feel ready. I want the thing to look more finished.

I want the confidence to arrive first, preferably wearing a coat and carrying a clipboard, telling me exactly what to do next. But confidence rarely arrives like that.

More often, it follows the doing. It comes after the payment link is made. After the post is published.

After the conversation has started. After the first small, awkward, imperfect step has already happened.

I know “just do the thing” can sound too simple. But some days, it’s the only advice that has ever really helped me.

Not because the fear disappears. It usually doesn’t. But because fear often gets louder when I stand still with it for too long.

In my experience, the best way to get rid of those fears is to meet them head-on and gently stub them out like a cigarette in the dirt. Not with drama. Just with one small action.

Make the link. Write the page. Send the message.

Open the notebook. Say the thing exists. Put your name to it.

Let the first version be the first version.

There’s something very steadying about a small practical action. It doesn’t need to change everything overnight. It doesn’t need applause.

It doesn’t even need to feel especially brave while you’re doing it. It only needs to move you one step closer than you were before.

And perhaps that’s the part I like more than the idea of getting 1% better each day. One step feels more human to me. Less like a graph, more like a road.

One step today. One step tomorrow. One small honest thing the day after that.

And if you take one step a day for a year, you’ll be 365 steps closer by the end of it. That’s not nothing.

That’s how a life begins to move. Slowly, perhaps. Untidily.

Without a grand announcement. But still moving.

And maybe that’s enough for today. Not a full reinvention. Not a new identity.

Not the whole future made visible. Just one thing that reminds you that you’re not stuck in quite the same place as you were yesterday.

I think many of us reach a point in midlife where the old ways of measuring ourselves stop making sense. We don’t always want louder, bigger, busier, more impressive.

But we do still want to feel alive. We still want to feel useful. We still want to make things, try things, earn money, change direction, begin again, and feel some quiet evidence that our life still belongs to us.

That’s not foolish. That’s not too late. That’s not asking too much.

It can be hard to remember to put yourself forward when you’ve spent years making sure everyone else has what they need. But you’re still allowed to have something you’re moving towards.

You’re still allowed to want. You’re still allowed to begin.

If this is the kind of quiet reminder you need in your week, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write from life aboard our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, for women in midlife who are beginning to ask what they want now — and who want gentle, honest company while they work it out.

Subscribe now

So this is my note to myself, and maybe to you too. You’re more capable than you feel today.

You don’t have to see the whole road. You don’t have to feel ready. You don’t have to make a dramatic change by tomorrow morning.

You only have to take one step. And then the next.

If you already know your one small thing, I would love to hear it. What will you do today?

And if you’re not sure what your one small step is yet, The What Now? Mini Life Audit might be a good place to begin. It’s not there to map out your whole future. It’s simply a quiet way to notice what feels heavy, what feels true, and what might be asking for your attention now.

It’s available here if you’d like to begin there.

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has learned to slow down.

Here, I write for women in midlife who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to believe they are still allowed to choose a life that answers.

There’s a strange space after the children grow up that people don’t always talk about.

Not the first raw ache, or the obvious grief of bedrooms going quiet, fewer shoes by the door, or meals no longer stretching to feed unexpected friends.

The space after that.

When the ache has softened a little, but you still don’t quite know what to do with yourself.

That ‘s the part that surprised me.

There was space, yes. More time. Fewer meals to think about. Less washing. Less daily arranging around everyone else’s needs. But I didn’t wake up one morning full of bright plans for the next part of life.

Life just felt empty, like the house had grown overnight and my role within it had shrunk.

I was still moving through the day in the old way, reaching for jobs that no longer needed doing, buying food we didn’t need, keeping myself useful because usefulness was familiar.

And I think this is where many women in midlife find themselves.

Not broken.

Not ungrateful.

Not desperate to start again in some dramatic way.

Just standing in a life that’s changed shape, wondering what they’re supposed to do with the space that’s opened up.

I can see now that this was the beginning of my own life audit, although I wouldn’t have called it that then.

It wasn’t a spreadsheet. It wasn’t a big, dramatic review of everything we owned, earned, wanted and feared. It was quieter than that.

It began with discomfort. A house that felt too big in a village that felt too still.

The life we’d built with love began to feel as though it belonged to an earlier version of us. That’s a difficult thing to admit, because it sounds ungrateful if you say it too bluntly. And I wasn’t ungrateful. I loved so much of that life. I loved what it had held, what it had given us and what it had made possible for our family.

But a life can be good and still no longer fit in the same way.

You may know this, too.

There can come a point in midlife when nothing is exactly wrong, but something keeps pressing at the edges. The house is fine, but it asks too much of you. The work is fine, but it takes more than it gives. The routines are fine, but they feel as though they belong to a woman you used to be.

And because nothing is obviously falling apart, it can be easy to ignore.

I did, for a while.

I kept trying to make the old shape feel right again. I wondered whether I needed a better routine, more discipline, more gratitude, more sensible thinking. I thought perhaps the answer was to settle myself down inside the life we already had.

But underneath all that, another feeling was growing.

I wanted more life.

Not in a dramatic way. I didn’t want to disappear or throw everything away. I didn’t want a life that looked impressive from the outside. I just wanted something that felt more alive from the inside.

At one point, I thought it might mean a house by the sea. At another, I thought it might mean a campervan for weekends away. I had pictures of both. I could see them clearly enough to pin them to a board and imagine myself in them.

But neither of those things became our life.

The feeling underneath them did, though, and that’s what I can see now.

The picture was wrong, but the wanting was true.

I didn’t need the exact house I’d imagined. I didn’t need the campervan. I needed the sense that life could still be full.

I think we can be too quick to dismiss those early wants because they arrive in strange shapes. A picture. A sudden envy of someone else’s freedom. A longing you can’t quite justify or a small pull towards something that doesn’t yet make practical sense.

We tell ourselves not to be silly.

We remind ourselves of the bills, the family expectations, and the fact that we should probably just be grateful. We talk ourselves out of listening before we’ve even understood what we’re hearing.

I did that too.

I thought wanting something different meant I had to know exactly what it was. I thought I had to justify it properly and that it had to sound sensible before I was allowed to take it seriously.

Now I think the wanting often comes first.

The understanding comes later.

When I look back, the clues were there long before we bought Arwenack.

The beach house. The campervan. The restlessness. The feeling of being hemmed in by a house that had once fitted us perfectly. At the time, I thought these were separate thoughts. Now I can see they were all saying the same thing.

Life was asking to change shape. Not all at once. Not recklessly. Not in a burn-it-all-down sort of way. But honestly…

And then, one frosty morning, John and I met a woman moving her narrowboat through a lock.

It was one of those ordinary moments that doesn’t announce itself as important. We were out walking, wrapped up against the cold, and she was there with her boat, talking about her life on the water as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

I don’t remember every word she said. But I remember the feeling, and something in me leaned closer.

Until then, I don’t think I’d realised people lived like that all the time. Properly lived. Not just for holidays, not as a romantic weekend, not as a little escape from real life, but as life itself.

A narrowboat had never been on my vision board. It’d never been the plan. But suddenly there it was, not as a perfect answer, but as a possibility with a pulse.

After that, I couldn’t quite unsee it. I started looking at boats, reading about them, wondering what it would take, imagining what we’d have to let go of and what we might gain.

Not in a clean, fearless way, in a real way. There was excitement, but there was also worry. Money worry. Practical worry. What-will-people-think worry. The kind of worry that arrives whenever you start taking your own wanting seriously.

Still, the idea stayed.

Eventually, it became Arwenack.

A small red narrowboat from 1977. Not glamorous or polished, and not the sort of thing that made perfect sense on paper. She needed work. She still does, in one way or another. Boat life is not a soft-focus version of freedom. It has mud, leaks, damp mornings, and days when the fire takes forever to catch.

But she gave us something I’d been trying to name for years… A smaller life that felt bigger.

That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t.

Our home became smaller, but the world came closer. The towpath, the herons, the rain on the roof, the swans knocking against the side for snacks, the community, the kettle steaming in the galley and the slow work of moving from one place to another. I began to feel the day around me again.

Not every day beautifully. Not every day, gratefully. I’m still human. I still get tired, irritated, worried and overwhelmed.

But I feel here.

I feel myself living.

And when I look back to that old discomfort, I can see it differently now. It wasn’t only restlessness. It wasn’t only grief. It wasn’t me being difficult, ungrateful or unable to settle.

It was information.

My life was trying to tell me something before I knew how to listen.

I think that’s what we often miss when we’re standing in the space after a big life shift. We look for the answer too quickly. We want to know whether we should move, stay, change work, simplify, travel, rest, begin again, or finally do the thing we’ve been quietly postponing.

But before the answer, there are clues.

What feels heavy now?

What gives you energy?

What are you tired of maintaining?

What do you keep imagining, even if the picture changes?

What do you miss?

What don’t you miss?

What would you choose if you stopped trying to make your old life fit the woman you are now?

These aren’t small questions.

They’re the beginning of finding your way.

And no, they won’t always lead to a narrowboat. They may not lead to any kind of dramatic change at all. Your answer may be quieter, more practical, more ordinary-looking from the outside.

It might be clearing one room and making it yours.

It might be changing the rhythm of your mornings.

It might be earning money in a different way, or finally giving less of yourself to work that drains you.

It might be learning something new, taking your own creativity seriously, travelling alone for the first time, making your home simpler, spending more time outside, or admitting that the life you keep maintaining is costing more than money.

It might be a conversation, a notebook, or one honest decision.

It might be the first time in years you ask yourself what you want and don’t immediately bury the answer under everyone else’s needs.

That may not sound much.

But it is.

Because this part of life doesn’t have to be an afterthought.

The years after the children grow up aren’t only the years after something. They can also be the years before something. Before a different home, a braver choice, a softer rhythm. The years before a life with more room for the woman you are now, not only the roles you’ve carried for years.

I don’t say that lightly.

I know there are practical things. Money, family, health and fear. There are always things that make change more complicated than it looks from the outside.

But I also know how easily we can use those things to avoid listening altogether.

I did that for a while.

And maybe that’s why the quiet matters, even when it feels uncomfortable at first. Once the noise settles, you may start to hear what’s been trying to speak underneath it all.

A tiredness you’ve ignored.

A longing you’ve made smaller.

A part of yourself you keep postponing.

A life that’s beginning to ask whether it could change shape.

Perhaps the question isn’t something you have to answer all at once.

Perhaps it begins more simply.

What still fits?

What doesn’t?

What do I want more of?

What might the next part of my life be quietly asking for?

These are the questions I wish I’d stayed with sooner.

Not because they would’ve given me an instant answer, but because they might have helped me trust the pull when it came. They might have helped me see that the beach house and the campervan weren’t failures of imagination, but clues — and that I wasn’t being ungrateful for wanting something different.

I was becoming honest.

That’s what this season can ask of us, I think.

Not to stop being mothers. Not to stop loving, answering the phone, making space at the table, or keeping a part of ourselves open to the people we’ve raised.

But to stop disappearing into only that. To begin asking what else is still here. What else might grow if we stopped filling every quiet space with usefulness.

I don’t have a neat answer for that.

I have a small red boat, a life that still needs work, and a growing belief that the next part can be chosen more deliberately than we were led to believe.

Maybe that’s enough for now.

A question. A little honesty. A willingness to notice what keeps tugging at us.

And the courage to believe that even after the house goes quiet, we’re not finished becoming.

That is why I’ve made The What Now? Mini Life Audit.

Not because I think you need to overhaul your whole life by next Tuesday.

Not because there is one correct answer waiting for you.

And definitely not because every woman needs to move onto a narrowboat, become more productive, or turn the next part of life into another project to manage.

I made it because sometimes we need a quiet place to notice what is true before we rush towards answers.

A way to look gently at the shape of our days, our energy, our responsibilities, and the parts of ourselves we may have been postponing for years.

If you’re in a season where the house has gone quiet, the old shape has shifted, or you can feel yourself beginning to want something different, you can find The What Now? Mini Life Audit below.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Begin gently and honestly. You don’t have to know the whole answer yet.

You only have to start listening.

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

If you’re in a season where life has changed shape, and you’re beginning to ask what you want now, you’re very welcome to subscribe to Simple Life Explorers.

I write from life aboard Arwenack about choosing differently in midlife, finding meaningful work, and noticing the small practical shifts that help a life feel more like your own.

Over time, I’d like this to become a gentle place to explore those questions together through essays, useful prompts and steady encouragement for the next part of life.

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About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has taught me to notice what feels heavy, what feels honest, and what no longer fits.

Here, I write for women in midlife who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.

The house is still there. The people you love are still there. The washing still piles up, the emails still arrive, and from the outside, everything looks pretty normal.

But something’s changed.

And that can be the confusing part of midlife.

Because nothing dramatic has happened. No great collapse, no obvious crisis, no clear moment you can point to and say, there. That was when it all changed.

Instead, it’s quieter than that.

The rhythm of your days feels different. The roles you stepped into years ago don’t fit quite as comfortably as they used to. The things you once carried without thinking suddenly feel much heavier.

You’re needed differently now by grown children, ageing parents, your partner, your work, or the people who have always assumed you would manage.

And whilst you feel grateful for your life, you’ve become quietly aware that something needs to change.

You have no desire to burn everything down.

But you also know you can’t keep pretending the old shape still fits.

And underneath all of that, one small question keeps appearing.

What now?

Not in a dramatic way.

Not in a shiny reinvention way.

But in the private, honest way that asks:

What do I want now?

What no longer feels like mine?

What am I tired of carrying?

What would make life feel lighter?

What small choice might help me feel more like myself again?

That is why I made The What Now? Mini Life Audit.

It is a free printable reflection for women in midlife whose life is changing shape — and who want somewhere quiet to begin.

Not a plan for your whole future.

Not another project to manage.

Not a demand to become a completely new person.

Just five gentle questions to help you pause, listen, and notice what your life may already be trying to tell you.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I made the audit because I wish I’d been handed something like it years ago.

Not a bossy life plan.

Not a ten-step reinvention guide.

Not another piece of advice telling me to be braver, clearer, more organised, more grateful, or more certain than I actually felt.

Just a quiet set of questions that helped me sit down and ask myself what was true.

Because I know what it’s like to reach a point where the old shape of life no longer fits, but the new one is nowhere in sight yet.

I know what it’s like to feel the pull towards something different before you can explain it properly.

And I know what it’s like to want more freedom, more space, more honesty, more life — while also feeling responsible for the life and people already around you.

Choosing a different life didn’t happen for me in one clean, confident leap.

It came through noticing.

Then admitting.

Then choosing one small thing, and another, and another.

I’m writing this from my small, narrowboat home, where life has taught me that change doesn’t always arrive loudly.

Sometimes it arrives as a quiet feeling that the old shape no longer fits.

For me, choosing a different kind of life began with noticing what felt too heavy. What no longer belonged to me. What I wanted less of. What I wanted more of, even though I had no idea how it could happen.

You don’t need to live on a boat to know that feeling.

You may feel it in a house that has grown quieter.

In work that no longer means what it once did.

In a calendar that is full to bursting, but gives little nourishment.

In a life that looks fine from the outside, while something inside you is quietly screaming for more room.

The Mini Life Audit gives you a place to begin.

Inside, you will gently look at:

Where you are now

So you can name the real season you are in, not the polished version you explain when someone asks how you are.

What has changed

Because even natural, good, expected changes can leave you feeling unsettled.

What feels heavy

So you can begin to see what you’re carrying, what may no longer belong to you, and what lighter might look like.

What you want less of and more of

Because wanting less doesn’t mean wanting a small life, and wanting more doesn’t make you ungrateful.

One small choice

So you can begin where you are, without needing to fix everything at once.

By the end, you won’t have a perfect plan for the rest of your life. But then who does?

You’ll have something more useful to begin with.

A clearer sense of what’s changed.

A name for what feels heavy.

Permission to admit what you want less of.

Space to notice what you want more of.

One small choice that could help this week feel a little more like yours.

And that’s all you need to begin.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• This is for you if your children are older now, and you’re still learning who you are in the space they have left behind.

• It’s for you if you feel grateful for your life, but tired of using gratitude as a reason to ignore what no longer fits.

• It’s for you if you’ve spent years being useful, available, capable and needed — and now you’re wondering what you actually want.

• It’s for you if you don’t want to burn your life down, but you can’t keep pretending the old shape still fits.

• And it’s for you if you want a slower, steadier, more intentional life, but you don’t want another complicated workbook you will never finish.

The Mini Life Audit is intentionally short.

Because when life already feels full, the last thing you need is another thing asking too much from you.

You need something you can actually use.

Something you can print, sit with, write into, return to, and finish without feeling as though you’ve failed before you’ve even begun.

There are no complicated exercises.

No forced positivity (we’ve all had enough of that!).

No five-year vision board.

No pressure to make a brave announcement, change your whole life, or suddenly know exactly where you’re going.

Just simple, honest prompts that help you begin to see what’s true.

Sometimes that is the first brave thing.

Not making the big decision.

Not knowing the whole answer.

But admitting:

I am tired of carrying this.

I miss that part of myself.

I want more space.

I want less rushing.

I want to feel like my life belongs to me again.

If one of those sentences catches in your chest, this is probably for you.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Because that quiet pull matters.

The feeling you keep pushing down matters.

The part of you that wants something different isn’t selfish, silly, or too late.

It’s simply asking for your attention.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit gives you a gentle place to begin listening.

Download it, print it if you like, make a cup of tea, and give yourself twenty quiet minutes with the questions.

You don’t have to solve your whole life today.

You only have to stop ignoring the part of you that knows something has changed.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Intentional living doesn’t always begin with a dramatic reinvention.

Sometimes it begins with one quiet page.

One honest answer.

One small choice.

One moment where you stop rushing past yourself and finally ask:

What do I want now?

If your life has started to feel different, you’re not behind.

You’re not too late.

You’re not wrong for wanting more from the next part of your life.

You’re allowed to begin from here.

Download The What Now? Mini Life Audit and give yourself the quiet space to hear what your life may already be trying to tell you.

The What Now? Mini Life Audit

413KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

With quiet gratitude,
Rebecca

If these words have met you in the middle of something you haven’t quite been able to name, you’re very welcome to stay.

Simple Life Explorers is a quiet place for women in midlife who are learning to listen to themselves again, choose more intentionally, and build a life that feels more like their own.

Subscribe now

About the Author:

I’m Rebecca Harrison, the writer behind Simple Life Explorers. I live aboard Arwenack, our narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal, where home moves every two weeks and life has taught me to notice what feels heavy, what feels honest, and what no longer fits.

Here, I write for women in midlife who are quietly asking what they want now — and beginning to build a life that answers.