Why We All Need a Sanctuary

We are more porous than we realize.

Welcome to Making Time. What makes a life feel vivid rather than rushed? These are my reflections from rural Oregon on attention, ritual, and making things by hand. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

The garden, early last summer

For the last 2 weeks, our house has been torn apart. We finally decided to replace our stained, dog-trampled beige carpet with wood floors, and it feels as if we’ve been living in a snow globe that’s been turned upside down.

Everything is in boxes, dust and debris are everywhere, and the house is screaming with saws and hammers.

Each morning, I’d wake up in the dark with a knot in my stomach.

This is what anxiety feels like to me. My mind isn’t quite sure what’s wrong, so it skips around, turning over every rock looking for the source of all this stress. And when I look for problems, I always find them. I start to worry – about work, about my to do list, about my family, about the future.

But sometimes the stress is not a problem that needs to be solved, but just the way the world around you is at the moment. Sometimes things are simply an uncontrollable mess.

I wasn’t anxious about anything in particular. I was elated that we’d finally saved enough money to do these renovations. It’s just that I’d just been surrounded by ear-piercing noise, unable to concentrate, for over a week.

Instead of fighting my anxiety, I decided to spend at least a part of each day outside. Most days, I’d head up to the garden, the dogs happily trailing me.

As I stepped through the rose-covered arbor into the fenced area where I grow my vegetables and flowers, I could feel my jaw begin to unclench. As I puttered around, pulling weeds here and there, checking on the progress of each seedling, it felt as if I were turning the volume down somewhere inside.

We’re more sensitive than we realize. Our great capacity to think and solve problems leads up to believe that thinking is the answer to everything. Thinking through things helps us over and over in our daily lives, so we come to believe that it is the only tool worth using.

As a result, we lose touch with other vital capacities, like feeling and experiencing. But that doesn’t mean they go away. I still felt the stress of all that noise and chaos in my house.

But my logical brain responded to that feeling in an unhelpful way: by looking for a sense of control, by worrying, by finding more problems.

So what do you do when the world is too loud? When the ugliness and chaos feels uncontrollable, and you find yourself in the grip of an unknowable anxiety?

We are porous creatures, and we absorb far more than we realize. So when the world is crazy, sometimes you just need to extract yourself from it, even just for a little while.

Think of it as a sanctuary. We all need a place to go where things are quiet.

We can create a space that is intentionally wholesome. There, we can absorb goodness, beauty, and peace instead of all the ingredients of anxiety.

Whether it’s a garden, a writing desk, a sewing room, or a neighborhood park, just having a place to go and be with yourself gives you an alternative to worrying. Instead of useless churning, you can create a place that lets you come back to your true self.

Try This

Give yourself a quiet place. If it’s in your home, decorate it with anything that encourages calm, whether it’s artwork, family photos, a candle, fresh flowers.

When you’re there, just take a moment to let the goodness inside. Give your mind a chance to dissipate.

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