Where I Come Back To

This past week, we traveled as a family—my core five.

Exploring Chicago, walking new streets, stepping outside of our usual routines… and somehow, in the middle of something new, I felt something familiar.

A return.

Not to a place, but to a feeling.

To what anchors me.

There is something about leaving your everyday life—your schedules, your responsibilities, the constant motion—that creates space to see more clearly.

And what I saw, again and again, wasn’t the city.

It was us.

The four I love most… and me.
Together, the five.

Not perfect.
Not always in sync.
Not without the small tensions that come with real life.

But real in a way that felt grounding.

Steady.

Good.

It showed up in the simplest moments— Walking side by side with nowhere we needed to be. Sitting together, lingering longer than usual. Laughing at something that didn’t matter, but somehow did.

And I kept coming back to the same quiet thought:

This is the core.

This is the place I return to.

Not physically—but internally.

Because we all have something like this.

Something that, no matter where we go or how far we stretch ourselves, pulls us back to center.

Something that reminds us who we are underneath everything else.

For me, it’s my family.

My five.

Being with them this week felt like stepping back into something that is always there—but not always fully felt.

A kind of pure goodness.
A kind of quiet joy.
A kind of grounding that doesn’t need to be earned.

Just returned to.

And it made me wonder how often we move through life disconnected from that core—

searching, striving, reaching for something more— when what we actually need is not more… but a return.

My hope for you is this:

That you find what sits at the core of your life.
The thing that anchors you.
The people, the place, the feeling that brings you back to yourself.

And that you give yourself permission to return to it—again and again.

Because in a world that is constantly pulling us outward, there is something powerful about knowing
exactly where you come back to.