> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.softsacredslow.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Life I'm Not Waiting To Start - URL: https://blog.softsacredslow.com/the-life-im-not-waiting-to-start/ - Published: 2026-09-10T12:00:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-13T23:10:16.000Z - Description: I used to think the soft, slow life I wanted was waiting in a different house. Turns out it was just waiting on me. - Author: Antonisha-Soft Sacred Slow - Tags: Home I was three house listings deep before I noticed what I was actually doing. Scrolling through houses I'm not buying, picturing a kitchen big enough to spread out in, a porch that doesn't exist yet, a garden out back. I do this more than I'd like to admit. I build a whole life in my head — the one I'll have *someday*, when there's land, when there's a mudroom, when there's room to actually breathe. I locked my phone, looked up at my actual apartment kitchen — small, city-loud, nothing like the pictures — and felt that familiar little sting. Like the life I actually want hasn't started yet. Like I'm still in the waiting room for it. Except I looked around that same kitchen a few nights later, while I was pulling a loaf out of my bread machine — the one I still lean on because I'm still new to this whole bread-making thing — and something didn't add up. I was already doing it. The bread. The slow Sunday soup. The kitchen cabinets I'd just started the process of painting, and the gallery wall still coming together, frame by frame, on the wall behind me. The intentional little rhythms I'd been telling myself were waiting on a different zip code. They were happening right here, in a much smaller, very different space than the one I picture when I imagine "someday." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a9/6f/a96ffb7f-097a-46e6-a23d-dd5d9bb6a08d/content/images/2026/08/bread-maker-collage-2-1.png) My 32-year old bread machine I got for $7 from the thrift store!! ## **So What Exactly Was I Waiting For?** If I'm honest with myself, I think I was waiting for permission. Somewhere along the way I decided the soft, slow, earthy coastal cottage kind of life — the from-scratch cooking, the unhurried home, the sense that every ordinary task matters — required a certain set of props first. A house I own instead of rent. A yard instead of a balcony. A "real" chapter instead of this in-between city one. But nobody ever handed me that rule. I made it up. And it's a convenient one to make up, honestly, because it lets you off the hook. If the life you want is on hold until circumstances change, you don't have to actually start it today. You just get to keep picturing it. I wrote to you earlier this week about the reordering happening in this house — about learning to give my family the first and best of me instead of whatever's left over after everyone else. This is the other half of that same shift. It's one thing to reorder *who* gets your presence. It's another to stop waiting for the "right" circumstances before you actually build the life you keep saying you want with the people already in front of you. ## Does My Ordinary Life Actually Count? There's a verse I keep landing on lately, almost by accident — it shows up in my Bible reading plan this week, and then again in a devotional, and then again in a conversation with a friend, the way God sometimes says the same thing to you three different ways until you actually hear it: *"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him."* (Colossians 3:17, BSB) I used to read "whatever you do" as a nice sentiment for the big stuff — the ministry moments, the visible acts of service. But sitting in my little kitchen listening to my bread machine hum through its cycle, it hit differently this time. *Whatever* isn't reserved for the impressive things. It's the bread. It's the soup. It's wiping down a counter in an apartment I don't own, in a city I didn't plan to still be living in at this point, in a season that doesn't look anything like the pictures I scroll at night. Paul isn't asking me to wait for better circumstances before any of it counts. He's saying the ordinary thing already in front of me, right now, in this apartment — that's the whatever. That undid the whole premise I'd been operating on. I don't need a bigger kitchen to do this in the name of Jesus. I have a kitchen. I don't need land to tend something with care. I have a home, however small, however rented, however temporary it might turn out to be. ## **What This Has Actually Looked Like For Me** So I stopped waiting. Not with some big overhaul — just with what was already in front of me. I started making bread every week — in my bread machine, because I'm still new enough at this that I haven't graduated past it, and I'm not sure I need to — not because I have a bigger kitchen to do it in, but because measuring out the flour and yeast and pressing start still slows me down in a way I need, apartment or not. I hung some shelves. I've started the process of painting my kitchen cabinets — not finished, barely underway, really — and I started a gallery wall that's really just a handful of frames so far, with more to come. I've even started sketching out plans for a little balcony garden, even though there's nothing growing out there yet. None of it is done. None of it is even close to done. But none of it is waiting, either. I stopped needing the finished version before I let it count as starting. ![Empty terracotta pots and a hand-sketched garden planning notebook on a city apartment balcony.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a9/6f/a96ffb7f-097a-46e6-a23d-dd5d9bb6a08d/content/images/2026/08/balcony-garden-planning-1-1.png) None of it required a different house. It just required me to stop treating this one like a placeholder. I still catch myself scrolling those house listings sometimes. I don't think that longing is wrong, exactly — I think it's fine to want land and a bigger kitchen and a porch someday. But I don't get to use "someday" as an excuse to withhold the life I want from myself today. The soft, slow, intentional home I keep picturing isn't actually about square footage. It's about whether I'm willing to do the whatever — the bread, the cabinets I've barely started painting, the still-growing gallery wall, the balcony garden I'm still just planning, the unhurried Sunday soup — right here, with what's actually in my hands. ## **The Life That's Already Started** If you're waiting on a different house, a different chapter, a different season before you let yourself live the life you actually want — I understand that waiting more than I can say. But I don't think the life you're picturing is on the other side of a move. I think it's available to you exactly where you are, in whatever's actually in front of you today, the moment you decide it counts. Mine started in a city apartment with a bread machine humming on the counter and a gallery wall that's still just a handful of frames, one at a time. I'd love to hear where yours might already be starting too, even if you haven't called it that yet. --- If this resonated, I'd love to have you subscribe and become a member of my community — you'll get The Sunday Sabbath in your inbox every week, plus the ability to reply and share your own story right here on the blog. Come sit on the porch a little longer. If this stirred something in you, I'd love to hear it — reply and tell me what this brought up for you, or share your own story below. This is a space to process together, not just read alone.