The Case for the Small Journey

 

The Case for the Small Journey

We tend to think of travel as something that needs a suitcase, a booking confirmation and at least a week of annual leave. Which, for most of the year, means we don't travel at all. We just wait for the "proper" trip to happen, and in the meantime our weeks fold into one another.

Lately I've been drawn to a much smaller idea: microtravels. A few hours, a few kilometres, a different road home. A forest path you've driven past a hundred times. A town twenty minutes away that you've never actually stopped in. A village café on a Saturday morning, with nothing on the agenda but looking around.

It sounds almost too modest to count. And yet I've started to suspect that's exactly the point.

A big trip works on us because it breaks our routine. Everything is unfamiliar, so we pay attention: to the light, to the food, to how people talk, to the sounds we can't quite place. Attention is the real souvenir. But here's the thing I hadn't noticed before: you don't need a plane ticket to get it. You just need to step slightly outside the loop you usually walk, even by an inch.

Autumn is a very good teacher of this. The same park looks like a different place in October. The same road changes its colour almost weekly. Nothing has to be far away to feel new — it only has to be looked at properly.

I also like what microtravels quietly ask of us. They don't require perfect planning, a perfect budget or the perfect moment. They're easy to begin and easy to repeat, which is probably why they last longer than most good intentions. A small journey you actually take beats a grand one you keep postponing.

And there's something generous in it, too. You come home with a story, even if it's a small one. A conversation with a stranger, a wrong turn that turned out well, a view you'd never have seen from the car window at speed. Small stories are the ones we tell the next day, and the ones that make an ordinary week feel like it had a shape.

So here's my gentle challenge for this Sunday: this week, take one small journey. Somewhere close, somewhere you haven't really looked at. Go without an agenda, and notice what you notice.

And I'd love to know: what's the most interesting place you've ever found within an hour of your own front door?

This is part of my Book Espresso project published (almost) every Sunday morning, one coffee-length reflection for anyone who likes to close the week thoughtfully.

What September Still Teaches Us

 

 What September Still Teaches Us

There's something about late September that never quite lets me stay indifferent to it. The light changes first — it gets that low, honeyed quality in the afternoons — and then, almost overnight, everyone around me starts talking about beginnings again. New notebooks. New schedules. New resolutions, quietly made, as if January had somehow arrived three months early.

It's a strange thing, really, how much more naturally we accept change in autumn than we do at any other point in the year.

I think part of it is that autumn doesn't ask our permission. Summer just ends. The mornings get darker whether or not we feel ready, and there's something almost comforting about that. Nobody has to decide it's time to start something new — the season simply insists on it, and we go along, half without noticing.

Compare that to the changes we try to force ourselves into at other times — a diet we launch on a random Tuesday, a habit we announce to no one in particular. Those changes tend to wobble, because there's no current pulling us forward. In September, there is. The whole world seems to be resetting its rhythm together, and something in us relaxes into that collective motion.

I've been thinking about what this actually teaches us, beyond the obvious "new term, new start" cliché. I think it's this: change is far easier when it isn't a private, solitary act of willpower, but something shared — something the people and rhythms around you are also doing. We're not as self-sufficient as we like to imagine. We borrow momentum from each other, from the calendar, from the smell of the first cold morning. There's no shame in that. If anything, it's a rather practical thing to know about yourself.

It also makes me a little more forgiving of my own inconsistency the rest of the year. If I can't finish a book I started in July, or if a habit I tried to build in March quietly dissolved by April, maybe it wasn't entirely a personal failure. Maybe it was simply the wrong current to swim in.

At school, this is the time of year we feel it most sharply — new students walking in a little nervously, returning ones settling back into a rhythm they'd half-forgotten over the summer. Watching that always reminds me that beginnings rarely feel confident from the inside, however tidy they look from the outside.

So here's a smaller, gentler question for this particular Sunday, as the light keeps shifting whether we're ready or not: what is autumn quietly asking you to begin, or to finally let go of?

I'd love to read your answers in the comments.

This text is part of my Book Espresso, published every Sunday morning — a short reflection for anyone who wants to start the week with something to think about.

 The Courage It Takes to Sound Like Yourself

This week's book is a bit of a departure. Gabor Maté's When the Body Says No isn't about happiness, or trust, or workplace culture. It's about something rawer: what happens when we don't let ourselves feel what we actually feel.
One idea in particular won't leave me alone. Maté argues that real autonomy starts with knowing yourself — and knowing yourself means understanding what actually drives you, what sets you off, what that does to your body rather than just your mood. Here's the uncomfortable bit, though: sitting with those questions honestly is stressful. Far easier to skip them altogether, suppress what we feel, and quietly convince ourselves we're doing better than we are.
That ease has a price, though. Indifference, Maté says, isn't some neutral, safe middle ground — it hollows a life out from the inside. What's left looks outwardly put-together, but there's nothing underneath. Letting yourself feel the ugly stuff, instead of managing it into silence, is — in his telling — the braver option, not the weaker one.
He ends up asking two questions I haven't been able to shake since: Do I live my own truth? And how much of what I do is actually me, versus just there to keep other people happy?
I'll be honest — I wasn't expecting those questions to land anywhere near language learning. But they do.
Think about what it actually takes to speak a language that isn't yours, out loud, in front of someone, knowing full well you might get it wrong. That's the exact courage Maté is talking about — choosing to feel exposed instead of faking a confidence you don't have. Most learners do the opposite, and honestly, who could blame them. They suppress the discomfort. They rehearse the safe sentence. They wait for the grammar to be perfect before they'll say a single word out loud. Admitting I don't know this yet feels too vulnerable, so they perform fluency instead.
Which is Maté's indifference, just wearing a classroom badge. A student who never risks the wrong word, who only ever says what they're already sure of, ends up with something tidy — a nice, safe little phrasebook of correct English — and completely hollow. It isn't them. It's a performance of what a "good student" is supposed to sound like.
So maybe those two questions deserve a second life, slightly rewired: Do I speak my own truth in this language, or only the approved version of it? How much of what I say is actually me — and how much is just there so I don't get it wrong in front of someone?
Real fluency, the kind that actually lets you connect with another person, starts right where that second question stops being comfortable. Not in one more grammar rule. In being willing to sound foolish, exposed, unfinished — and speaking anyway.
This is a slightly different kind of Sunday than usual, I know — less book report, more something I've been quietly turning over. I keep coming back to the idea that learning a language isn't just a skill you pick up. It's a practice in courage: the courage to be heard badly, before you're ready to be heard well.
So here's my question for you this week, and it goes well beyond English: where in your life are you performing the tidy, correct version of yourself, instead of the real, occasionally clumsy one?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

This post is part of my Book Espresso project published (almost) every Sunday morning — a short reflection inspired by whatever I'm reading, for anyone who wants to start the week with something to think about.

How Do You Know What You Actually Believe?

 

How Do You Know What You Actually Believe?

    I want to try something a little different this Sunday. No book, no chapter, no author to credit. Just a thought that's been sitting with me for a while, and that I finally want to write down properly.

    Here it is: I think it's become genuinely difficult to know what you believe.

    Not in some dramatic, existential sense — I don't mean the big philosophical questions. I mean the small, daily ones. Should I let my child have more screen time, because everyone else's child seems to have more? Should I say yes to one more commitment this week, because saying no feels like falling behind? Should I measure my day by how productive it looked, rather than by how it actually felt?

    We are surrounded, almost constantly, by other people's decisions dressed up as facts. Someone else's parenting choice becomes, in the algorithm's hands, a subtle judgment on yours. Someone else's business milestone becomes a quiet accusation that you're moving too slowly. It's not that anyone is deliberately trying to unsettle you — it's just that there is so much noise, and so little space left to ask the much simpler question underneath it all: what do I actually think is right here?

    I've noticed that when life speeds up, values are usually the first thing to blur. Not because we abandon them, but because we simply stop consulting them. We react instead of choosing. We copy instead of deciding. And then, months later, we look up and wonder why something feels slightly off — why a decision that seemed reasonable in the moment doesn't quite sit right in hindsight.

    I think this is why having a small, clear set of things you actually stand for — even if you never say them out loud — matters more now than it probably did a generation ago. Not as a slogan. Not as something printed on a wall. Just as a quiet compass you can return to, especially on the days when everything else is shouting for your attention.

    This has been on my mind lately partly because, at the school, we've been working through exactly this — sitting down and asking ourselves, plainly, what we actually stand for as a team, rather than assuming it's obvious. It's a slower, less glamorous exercise than it sounds, and it's made me think about how rarely we do this in our personal lives too.

    Because here's the thing about values: children absorb them long before they can name them. Not from the lectures we give, but from the thousand small decisions they watch us make when we think no one's paying attention — how we handle a mistake, how we talk about people who disagree with us, whether we apologise, whether we listen. Long before a child understands the word "respect," they've already learned, from watching, what it looks like in practice — or what its absence looks like.

    Which makes me think the real question isn't "what values do I want to teach my children." It's quieter than that, and a little more uncomfortable: what am I already teaching them, simply by how I live, whether I've chosen to or not?

    I don't have a tidy conclusion for this one — just the question I keep returning to myself. So I'll leave it with you too.

What values do you pass on to your children, even when you never actually say them out loud?

This is part of my Book Espresso project, published every Sunday morning —  a short reflection for anyone who wants to start the week with something to think about.

 

Balancing Short-Term Pleasure with Long-Term Happiness

"Balancing short-term pleasure with long-term happiness." I wrote that sentence down as a note to myself while reading this week, and then I sat there staring at it for a lot longer than I expected to.

Because here's the thing that started nagging at me almost immediately: doesn't the very idea of pursuing happiness quietly assume that we're not happy yet? If long-term happiness is something out there, something we're working towards, aren't we implicitly telling ourselves that today doesn't quite count — that we're still not there, still somehow deficient, still waiting?

But then I thought about it differently. What if long-term happiness isn't a distant destination at all, but simply the sum of days like today?

Take yesterday, for example. I finished a work task that had been genuinely difficult. I spent the evening with people I love. I slept reasonably well, ate reasonably well, moved my body a little. Was that a good day? Yes, without much hesitation. Was I happy? Probably — though I couldn't measure it precisely, and I'm not sure I need to. But if I string enough days like that together, over months, over years, I'd say the honest word for the result is: satisfied. And in the bigger picture, satisfied looks an awful lot like happy.

So maybe the pursuit isn't about chasing some future emotional state. Maybe it's about protecting the conditions that make good days possible, and simply letting them accumulate.

Which raises the real question: what actually leads to that feeling?

A few things come to mind immediately.

Autonomy — the simple freedom to choose. Not necessarily big choices, but the ordinary ability to decide how you spend your morning, which task you tackle first, how you want to do your work.

Flexibility — because not everything can be planned. Emergencies happen, at work and at home, and a life that has no room to bend around them is a life that will eventually break a little under the pressure.

Accepting failure — and I don't mean the dramatic kind. I mean the small, unglamorous failures: the email you forgot to send, the bill you paid three days late. Even the most capable people fail at small things constantly. Making peace with that seems to matter more than most of us admit.

People — we spend most of our adult lives surrounded by colleagues, and this, I suspect, deserves its own post entirely. It's too big a topic to do justice to here, so I'll leave it — deliberately — for another Sunday.

Silent work — this one is very personal for me. I've noticed that one of the things that helps me most isn't more time, but protected time: closing the door, switching off the phone, focusing on a single task for a set stretch of minutes. Interruptions don't just cost me a few seconds — they knock me out of focus entirely, and getting back in can take far longer than the interruption itself.

Whose the boss? — and here's a question I keep circling back to. One of the best decisions I ever made was starting my own school. And yet, if I'm honest, there are days when I'm simply tired of carrying every decision alone. So I don't think the answer is quite as simple as "be your own boss." I believe an employee who is genuinely empowered, given autonomy and flexibility, can feel every bit as much ownership over their work as someone who owns the company outright. That feeling of participating in building something — rather than merely executing instructions — might matter more than the job title itself. But that, too, feels like a topic for its own Sunday.

For today, I'll leave you with the smaller, more immediate question: think about yesterday, or the day before. Was it a good day? What, specifically, made it one?

I'd love to read your thoughts in the comments — and if any of today's threads (people at work, or the "whose the boss" question) resonate with you, tell me. It might just decide what I write about next.

This is part of my Book Espresso, published every Sunday morning — a short reflection inspired by whatever I'm reading, for anyone who wants to start the week with something to think about.

Are You Happy?

 "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." Aristotle wrote that a very long time ago, and yet I keep coming back to it — probably because it sounds so simple, and turns out to be anything but.

I've been sitting with this quote all week, mostly because of something small that happened on Tuesday. My daughter was in the garden with her cousin and his dog, and for a very long time nobody needed anything from us, the adults. It was a genuine pleasure to watch three creatures chase each other around in circles, absolutely delighted with the world and with each other. And I remember thinking: this is it, isn't it? This is the thing.

But here's where it gets interesting — and where I had to stop and think harder than I expected to.

Aristotle didn't actually mean happiness the way we usually use the word today. He used a Greek term, eudaimonia, which doesn't translate neatly into "happiness" at all. It's closer to something like flourishing, or living well. And he drew a sharp line between this and what he called hedonia — pleasure. A nice meal, a comfortable afternoon, a moment of fun: that's hedonia, and it's lovely, but Aristotle thought it was too fleeting, too shallow, to be the real aim of a human life.

Eudaimonia, on the other hand, comes from living in a way that reflects your values, your character, who you actually are — not just from a single good feeling, but from the whole shape of how you're living. A person could be going through something difficult and still be eudaimon, if they were meeting it with integrity, courage, love.

So which one was I feeling in the garden, watching my daughter laugh?

Honestly — both, I think. There was pure, uncomplicated pleasure in it, the hedonic kind: sunshine, laughter, a dog too excited for his own good. But underneath that, there was something sturdier too. That moment existed because of years of small choices — the kind of home we've tried to build, the relationships we've protected, the time I've fought to carve out between lessons and Book Espresso and everything else. That's the eudaimonic layer. It wasn't just a nice five minutes. It was a small piece of evidence that the life I'm building is, in fact, going somewhere good.

I think this is why Aristotle's quote unsettles people a little, if they sit with it. It doesn't ask "did you enjoy yourself this week?" It asks something much bigger: is your life, as a whole, oriented toward something worth living for?

That's a big question for a Sunday morning. So let's make it smaller.

Are you happy?

Not "generally, in the abstract" — but this week. Take a moment and think back over the last seven days, since we're back here again exactly one week later. Try to find three to five moments — they can be tiny — that made you smile without you even deciding to. A cup of coffee that was exactly right. A message from an old friend. Your child, or someone else's child, laughing at something ridiculous. A sentence in a book that made you feel understood.

Write them down if you can. Not to prove anything, but because Aristotle might be onto something: perhaps happiness isn't a destination we arrive at, but something we notice, piece by piece, in the ordinary texture of an ordinary week — if we're paying attention.

I'd love to know — what were your three to five moments this week? Tell me in the comments, I read every one.

Why do you do it? Part 2: Job Crafting

 

Job Crafting: Why I Never Do My Job the Same Way Twice

I promised myself I wouldn't turn every blog post into a Meik Wiking fan letter, and yet, here we are again. This time it's job crafting — a concept I stumbled across in The Art of Danish Living, and one that, once I read it, I realised I'd been doing for years without ever having a name for it.

So, what is it?

Job crafting is the idea that a job description is really just a starting point, not a cage. Most of us assume our role is fixed: here are your tasks, here are your hours, off you go. But research on workplace happiness — and the Danes seem to have made a national sport of studying this — suggests something rather liberating. We don't just passively occupy our jobs. We can actively reshape them, in small and large ways, to fit who we are.

There are, broadly, three ways people do this:

Task crafting — changing what you actually do day to day. Leaning into the parts of the job that light you up, and finding ways to minimise, delegate, or redesign the parts that drain you.

Relational crafting — changing who you spend your working time with, and how. Seeking out the colleagues who challenge or energise you, deepening certain relationships, adjusting how you interact with the people around you.

Cognitive crafting — and this is the quiet one, the one that happens entirely in your head. It's reframing the meaning of what you do. Not "I drill grammar into six-year-olds" but "I open a small window onto the world for someone who's only just learning to see it."

None of these require permission from anyone. That's rather the point.

How I do it, as a teacher

Running a boutique school like English with Maria, in Wołomin, with five teachers and around a hundred students ranging from toddlers to grown adults, I've had a lot of unplanned opportunities to notice this in myself.

Task crafting, for me, has looked like protecting Sunday mornings for Book Espresso — my little weekly ritual of publishing a short text and pulling different levels of learners into the same conversation. Nobody asked me to do this. It isn't in any job description, mine or anyone else's. But it lets me combine two things I genuinely love — reading and language teaching — into one task that feels like mine, rather than something imposed.

Relational crafting shows up in how I structure my week across age groups. Teaching a room of four-year-olds in the early afternoon and a group of thoughtful adults in the evening isn't just variety for variety's sake — it's a deliberate choice to keep both the playful and the philosophical sides of teaching alive in me. I need both. I'd wilt with only one.

And cognitive crafting — this is the one I catch myself doing almost daily, usually without noticing until afterwards. On the days when a lesson feels like an uphill slog, I remind myself of the "why" I wrote about a few weeks ago. I'm not correcting homework; I'm building someone's confidence to speak in a language that isn't their own. Framed that way, even the dull bits stop feeling quite so dull.

Why this matters beyond me

I think job crafting matters especially for small teams like mine. With only five of us, there's no HR department dreaming up "engagement initiatives." What there is, instead, is a genuine amount of autonomy — each teacher gets to decide, within reason, how they want to shape their corner of the school. Someone who adores working with toddlers can lean into that. Someone who finds their spark in exam preparation with teenagers can build more of that into their week. It isn't chaos; it's craftsmanship.

And I suspect this is true well beyond teaching. Whatever your job is — accountant, nurse, barista, translator — there's very likely a version of it, hiding just beneath the surface of your job title, that you could shape a little more deliberately toward what actually gives you energy.

So here's my question for you this week: if you looked closely at your own job, where's the one small corner you could reshape — a task, a relationship, or simply the story you tell yourself about why it matters?

I'd genuinely love to hear your answer in the comments.

This post continues the conversation started in "Why do you do it?" — part of an ongoing series on meaning, motivation, and happiness at work.