I need to slow down

How a kitchen running on island time reminded me what I actually came to this world for

Sometimes the universe doesn’t ask you to slow down. It just makes you wait for your salad.

We fled to Puerto Rico after March buried us under two feet of snow. Two feet of “we’re done with winter” that had my husband booking flights before we’d even finished shoveling the driveway.

We had only desperate prayers for sun and whatever fit in our carry-ons.

Day one took us to the west coast, where we found a beach that felt like it hadn’t been told it was supposed to be on a tourism brochure. No hotels. No crowds. Just us and the kind of quiet you forget exists when you’ve been in survival mode for too long.

Then lunch.

I’d been looking forward to this meal for weeks. Something light, something good, something that felt human again after months of eating on autopilot. We found the perfect spot right away: open-air seating, a menu that actually excited me, the whole thing.

We ordered. We sat back. And then we talked.

And talked.

And kept talking.

An hour in, my stomach was staging a revolt. Where was our food? I did what any person who cannot leave well enough alone would do: I went to ask. The waitstaff looked at me like I’d asked something strange. Meanwhile, my husband was completely unbothered, sipping his drink like time was someone else’s concern.

“It hasn’t been that long, has it?”

Yes. Yes, it had.

So there I was, running their entire kitchen through my head. How does a salad take this long? Is there a bottleneck somewhere? Did they have to source the lettuce from another island? I couldn’t help it. This is how I’m wired. I take things seriously, maybe too seriously.

But here’s what I didn’t see coming: by the time that salad finally arrived (and no, it wasn’t worth the wait, just lettuce doing its leafy best), something had already happened without me noticing. We’d just had one of our longest uninterrupted conversations in months. No phones. No notifications pulling us in different directions. No problems to solve or deadlines to remember. Just two people at a table on the west coast of Puerto Rico, accidentally given time by a kitchen that ran on its own schedule.

Maybe that salad knew exactly what it was doing.

The rest of the trip confirmed it. Every restaurant took forever. Every meal turned into a long conversation. We talked about things we’d put off, plans we’d been too busy to actually make, memories we hadn’t thought about in years. I spent the whole week fighting my instinct to fix things, to speed things up, to make it more efficient. And slowly, reluctantly, I started letting the island do its thing. Not everything needs to be productive. Not every moment needs to go somewhere.

Sometimes what looks like a problem is just what you needed.

We came home rested in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. The snow was still there when we landed, but we weren’t the same people who had left it. Sometimes the universe doesn’t ask you to slow down. It just makes you wait for your salad until you remember what you came for in the first place.