Be Inspired..!!

Your totally honest, slightly embarrassing guide to actually enjoying this summer with just two things from Amazon.

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Let me paint you a picture. It’s a perfect Saturday morning in July, the kind where the light comes in at that exact golden angle through the blinds, and instead of soaking it in, I’m lying in bed scrolling through a listicle called “47 Things You Must Do This Summer Before It’s Too Late.” By item nine, I’m already behind. By item twenty-three, I’ve somehow signed myself up for a hot yoga retreat, a sourdough class, and a 5K I have absolutely zero business running.

Sound familiar? Because if it does, I want you to know, you are not alone, and you are not broken. You’re just American. And we’ve been sold the idea that summers are supposed to be performed. That the value of those precious 90 days lives inside how full the calendar looks, how many check-ins hit the Instagram grid, and how exhausted you feel by Labor Day. We treat rest like it’s something you earn after the doing is done. But what if the being is the doing?

What if the real flex this summer isn’t how much you accomplished, it’s how deeply you actually lived?

Here’s the honest truth I’ve had to wrestle with: I’m a chronic over-scheduler. I fill gaps in my day the same way I used to fill silences in conversations, with noise, with motion, with the desperate attempt to look like someone who has it all together. And every single summer I’d reach September feeling like I’d sprinted a marathon but couldn’t remember a single mile. The colors of the season had blurred past me while I was busy trying to curate them.

So this summer, I made a different kind of list. Not a bucket list. A permission list. Permission to be slow. Permission to be bored, even. Permission to exist in the season instead of just documenting it. And honestly? Two surprisingly simple Amazon products helped me actually do that in the most human, low-tech way possible. Let me tell you about them.

The Morning You’ve Been Skipping Has Been Waiting for You

Here’s a confession that’s maybe too real: my phone used to be the first thing I touched every morning. Before my feet hit the floor, before I’d even fully opened my eyes, I was already reading emails, stress-scrolling the news, and mentally assembling a to-do list the length of a CVS receipt. I told myself this was productivity. What it actually was, I’ve since learned, is a way to deny yourself the one window in the day where your nervous system is soft, open, and genuinely available to you.

The Hatch Restore 3 Sunrise Alarm Clock changed that. I know a clock. Riveting. Bear with me. This thing doesn’t jolt you awake with a noise that simulates cardiac arrest. Instead, it mimics a natural sunrise, gradually filling your room with warm light over the 30 minutes before your alarm, so that your body rises with the light the way humans did for the entirety of our existence before smartphones decided to ruin everything. It pairs with nature sounds — birdsong, soft rain, morning bowls, and critically, it does not require you to look at a screen to operate it. You simply wake up feeling like a person.

The first morning I used it, I lay there for a full ten minutes just watching the light shift from amber to gold across my ceiling. I didn’t pick up my phone. I didn’t write a single thing on a single list. I just existed in the room, in the quiet, in the warm glow of something that felt embarrassingly close to peace. My dog repositioned himself at my feet. A bird did something outside. It sounds so mundane, and it was, and that was entirely the point. That morning, I had breakfast at my actual kitchen table. I tasted my coffee. I looked out the window at a tree I’d apparently never noticed was there.

Now you might be thinking: isn’t this just an alarm clock? And yes, technically. But what it actually is, is a boundary. It’s a physical object that says: this space is for rest and for waking, not for consumption and performance. That boundary, as basic as it sounds, is the whole ballgame. Because how you start your morning isn’t just a mood, it’s a decision about what kind of day you’re willing to let yourself have.

The Radical Act of Lying Down Outside and Doing Nothing

The second thing is even simpler, and I’m slightly embarrassed it took me 34 years to figure out. A hammock. A proper, portable, set-it-up-anywhere hammock with a stand, the kind where you don’t even need trees, just the vague intention of being horizontal somewhere with a sky above you. I got the SUPER DEAL Portable 2-Person Hammock with Stand, and I say that with zero shame because that name is accurate, it is a super deal and something genuinely wonderful does happen when you lie in it.

I set mine up in my backyard on a Tuesday afternoon. Not a weekend. Not a vacation day. A Tuesday. I had seventeen things I was supposed to be doing. Instead, I climbed into that hammock, looked up through the leaves at a blue sky doing absolutely nothing except being blue, and I stayed there for forty-five minutes. My neighbor saw me. She waved. I waved back. Neither of us apologized for it. It was the single most defiant thing I’d done all summer.

There’s something about being suspended slightly off the ground, gently rocking, with no desk and no screen in front of you, that drops the body into a completely different register. Neuroscience backs this up, the gentle swinging motion actually synchronizes brain waves and deepens relaxation, the same way rocking calms a baby. Your nervous system, which has been running on high alert since approximately March 2020, gets a few minutes to remember what it feels like to just be a body in the world, not a productivity unit behind a laptop.

I’ve had entire conversations in that hammock. Real ones, the kind that don’t start with an agenda or end with action items. My sister and I lay in it side by side on the Fourth of July and talked about things we hadn’t said out loud in years. I’ve read three chapters of a novel I’d been carrying in my bag since January. I’ve napped. Actual, unapologetic, mid-afternoon naps. Each one felt like a small, private revolution.

This Isn’t About Products. It’s About Permission.

I want to be honest with you: I’m not suggesting you buy your way to presence. That would be the same trap in a different wrapper. What I am saying is that sometimes we need a physical prompt, something tangible in our environment, to interrupt the default mode of relentless doing that our culture has wired into us since childhood. A sunrise alarm clock that keeps the phone across the room. A hammock that makes “doing nothing outside” feel like an activity with a setup and a ritual and a reason. These aren’t luxuries. They’re infrastructure for a life that actually includes you in it.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to, and I want you to really sit with this: nobody on their deathbed has ever wished they’d answered more emails. Nobody looks back at their summers and says, “I really treasure the August I was maximally optimized.” They remember the afternoon they fell asleep outside and woke up to crickets. They remember the morning they had nowhere to be and didn’t rush the coffee. They remember the Tuesday they inexplicably lay in a hammock and watched clouds and felt, for a few blessed minutes, like a human being instead of a human doing.

Being isn’t the absence of doing. It’s the presence of you. This summer, the most productive thing you can do might be to stop producing, even just for forty-five minutes on a Tuesday afternoon with the sky wide open above you.

So I’m asking you directly: when is the last time you were just somewhere, without a purpose or a caption or a next thing to get to? When is the last time your morning started slowly enough that you actually noticed what it felt like to be awake? What would change, in your days and in yourself, if you protected even a sliver of this summer for the person you actually are, not the one your schedule says you should be?

I’d genuinely love to know. Drop a comment, reply to this, tell me what you’re protecting this summer and what you’re letting go of. This stuff matters. You matter, not just what you accomplish.

Enjoying this? Every week I write about living slower, thinking clearer, and building a life that actually feels like yours. No noise. No hustle-porn. Just honest words on the things that matter. Subscribe on Substack, it’s free, and you can leave any time.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases, but this does not affect my recommendations.I only suggest products I’ve personally vetted.