Right before I left for Greece, Coach Lisa had a stroke.
The news hit hard. Over the past year, I had been slowly rebuilding trust in my body after an AFib diagnosis, a cardiac ablation, and the long, uneven process of finding my way back to running. I kept showing up—on trails and roads—trying to believe again that I could go far, that I could trust the rhythm of my heart, even after it had gone off course.
Lisa’s stroke brought all the fear rushing back. She is not only a coach, but a dear friend, a fellow traveler on the path of endurance, grit, and belief for over a decade. For Lisa, there was quick action. She spent days in the ICU. She survived. But for me, the questions I thought I’d left behind returned: Was I pushing too hard? Was I getting too close to the edge? Maybe I shouldn’t be signing up for ultramarathons. Maybe I should stop testing the boundary between courage and risk.
And then it was time to board the plane for Greece.
On the first morning in Lefkada, an island off the west coast of mainland Greece in the Ionian Sea, while everyone else was still sleeping in our mountaintop retreat, I slipped out the door to run. The winding roads were quiet, broken only by the distant bark of a dog. The air was soft, and cool, the morning dew lifting off the mountains. The island rose around me—green, mountainous, remote, edged by beaches and sea. I ran into that silence and felt grateful in a way that was immediate and bodily.
In motion, I am never afraid. It is only when I stop that the fears begin talking. In stillness, the old stories return and begin telling me who I am, what has happened to me, what might happen next.
In motion, I am sky and ground and air.
That first run became a thesis for the week. Greece was not only a place to visit. It was a place to remember something essential: how much freedom there is in stepping outside the machinery of your life and entering a day with no obligation except presence.
There were eighteen of us on the retreat, most of the women living in Bermuda, three from the United States, and we ranged in age from 25 to 73. I loved the generational diversity immediately. There was wisdom and freshness in the group, depth and lightness, experience and beginning. To live alongside women at so many different stages of life was its own education.
What struck me most, though, was how quickly the surface fell away. No matter our backgrounds, it was fascinating to hear about each woman’s relationships—with partners, with children, with family, with herself. The details differed, but the undercurrent felt the same. In the end, we are all seeking connection—and the possibility of deepening it, of understanding ourselves and one another more deeply.
I was drawn to the Bermudians—their stories of island life, of what brought them there, and why they stayed. There was a sense of community that felt different, more intertwined, with yoga as a quiet thread running through it. Bermuda intrigued me, but more than that, the women themselves did—their openness, their steadiness, the way their lives held both rootedness and movement at once.
We gathered each morning through yoga, then journaling, then breakfast. We talked, meditated, shopped, laughed, rested. We were quiet, too.
There is something powerful about joining a group of women in a remote place and letting routine become ritual. Yoga gave us a shared rhythm. The island gave us a container. And the distance from home made it easier to let go of all the identities that usually arrive before we do.
That was one of the great gifts of the week: the feeling of not having to be anyone in particular. Not a job title. Not a history. Not a fixed self. Just a person waking early, rolling out a mat, taking in the sea, sitting at a long table with others, trying to be present.
Emily, the retreat leader and founder of Salt Yoga Bermuda, often asked us after practice, “Where are you now?”
It is such a simple question, but it opened something in me. I remembered a fringe theater production of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I had seen decades ago in London, when Anna and Levin, from opposite ends of the stage, kept asking each other, Where are you now? Back then, it seemed like a question about drama and memory. In Greece, it became a spiritual question.
Where am I now?
I still do not always know. Sometimes that feels unsettling. Other times, it feels like grace.
In writing, a coherent story has a focus. It cannot go everywhere. It has to know where it begins and where it is heading. But life is not always like that. Life resists neat arcs. We carry old selves into new places. We revisit the same themes. We outgrow one story only to discover we are still living inside part of it. Maybe that is why Emily’s mantra asking us to show up and be present stayed with me all week:
No past, no future, no story.
As a writer, I was fascinated by that—and challenged by it.
So much of my life has been shaped by story—stories I tell, stories I write, stories I have survived. The loss of my mother. The loss of my father years later. Three careers. Relationships. Moves across places and versions of myself. Tens of thousands of miles run. Hundreds of races. Decades of yoga, learning, and trying to become more fully who I am. These are all true stories. They are authentic. They are relevant. But are they the whole truth of me?
What if the truest thing about me is not what has happened, but how I return to myself? What if my real story is that I find my way by going inward—through silence, through movement, through paying attention and feeling deeply?
I am my best self in that quiet space—thinking, reflecting, moving, taking in the world and shaping what I feel before it becomes language. Sometimes what I feel is too complex for words, or it loses something in translation. The magic, I think, lives in the silence and feeling. And yet, I love writing because of the connection it offers—the chance that something I put into the world might help someone else feel less alone, more understood, or see something differently.
That is part of what Greece gave back to me.
I spent time in Greece in my mid-twenties, when I was in graduate school and working full-time in publishing, spending two summers in Mykonos and Athens. Back then, I believed everything would be figured out—that life would eventually settle into clarity.
I remember sailing the Aegean, running through narrow alleys and open vistas in Mykonos, its white-and-blue landscape mesmerizing, and sitting with friends on Paradise Beach, laughing as the world felt enormous and unfinished. So much had not yet been decided—career, relationships, identity, direction. Anything could still happen.
Returning some twenty-five years later, this time to Lefkada and the Ionian Sea, I expected nostalgia. What I found instead was recognition.
I was still there.
Not the younger version of me, exactly, but the self who believed the world was wide. The self who looked at cascading waves and thought in terms of possibility rather than limitation.
Only now, what hasn’t been decided no longer frightens me. At twenty-five, the unknown could feel overwhelming. Now, I experience it differently. I may not have all the answers—but that no longer feels like something to solve. It feels like something to live. There is still mystery ahead, still magic to unfold. Life is not fixed. It is still becoming.
Anything can still happen.
Lefkada seemed to participate in that lesson. It was remote, rustic, lush, and wild. There were rock-lined beaches with water so blue, gentle, and clear they hardly seemed real. Cats everywhere. Dogs wandered with a sleepy confidence that made you envy them. One morning, a small terrier dog waited for me on the road near our retreat, then trotted alongside me for miles, joyful and light, stopping to smell flowers and trees—reminding me that wonder is not an abstraction; it is a way of moving through the world.
There were details I loved with disproportionate force. Each morning, I ran to the gas station coffee shop less than a mile from our house before my run ended, and every morning it was still closed at 7 a.m.—until the last day. On that final morning, the lights were on. I stood there and watched the middle aged Greek man make my latte with precision and certainty, fast and quiet, as though this small act were a craft worth honoring. It felt almost Hemingwayesque—the café attached to the gas station on the side of the road, ordinary and somehow perfect.
And then there was the food—Greek salads, salty olives, lemon potatoes, cucumbers, creamy hummus and tzatziki, chia puddings, fresh fruit, fresh baked banana and apricot muffins, and cinnamon raisin donuts—meals made with love, care, and generosity. We shopped in coastal towns, wandering into stores filled with pottery, scarves, jewelry, and linens. We bought evil eyes, the blue Greek mati, meant to protect against envy and absorb negativity. We sailed on the Ionian Sea, floated in its water, then ate in a magical mountain garden near a hilltop church, while dogs and cats lazed around us as if they belonged to another, better time.
One evening, as we celebrated one of the women’s birthdays, our chef, Adonis, told us he did not use birthday candles because blowing out a flame symbolized the end of life. A flame, to him, was life itself. You do not extinguish life during a celebration of being alive.
I loved that idea. Let the candle burn on.
That, too, felt like part of what I had come to Greece to remember.
As we get older, I think we become more fully ourselves—if we let ourselves. Although graduate school is long over for me, I have never stopped learning, and I do not intend to. In Greece, that part of me felt welcomed—not because I was performing it, but because the week reminded me that learning is not confined to institutions. Sometimes it happens around a breakfast table after yoga. Sometimes it happens in silence. Sometimes it happens while walking along a mountain road, or listening to women decades older or younger than you speak honestly about their lives.
By the end of the trip, I realized I had loosened around the edges. I had unwound. Not completely, not permanently, but enough to remember that freedom is often less about changing your life than about loosening the grip of the stories you carry through it.
Where are you now?
I am here. Still learning. Still becoming. Still trying to honor my story without letting it define me. Still running early in the morning toward whatever feels open and alive. Still believing that silence can heal. Still believing that movement can restore trust. Still believing that the world is larger than fear.
And still, thankfully, believing in possibility.
