Aligned & Awake: Whoever Invented the Siesta Deserves a Parade
I went to Mallorca to rest and accidentally clocked how far I'd come.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
Two weeks in Mallorca. Orange trees, church bells, mountain air, and an alarming volume of hazelnut gelato. I regret nothing.
That’s a lie. I regret not adopting the Spanish siesta a decade ago. Whoever invented the afternoon nap deserves a Nobel Prize, or at the very least a parade with a brass band and a commemorative stamp.
Every afternoon, sometime after lunch, the whole town exhaled. Shops shuttered, streets emptied, and the heat settled over the stone like a linen blanket somebody forgot to take off the line. And I, a woman raised on productivity and colour-coded to-do lists, would lie down in the middle of the day thinking, “well, this feels wildly irresponsible.” Ten minutes later I was unconscious. The Spanish are onto something.
I spent the fortnight in a small town tucked into the mountains, staying with friends I love dearly. Friends who don’t require updates, who already know the story, who never once asked, “So what do you do?” for the nine hundredth time. I didn’t have to become anyone. I just arrived.
For someone who’s spent the better part of two years moving through airports, co-livings, hotels, and borrowed homes, that landed in a surprisingly tender place. For once, a place asked nothing of me. I rested inside it.
Mornings started with coffee for them and tea for me. Orange trees outside the window, mountains rising beyond. Some days we’d pick the oranges straight off the branch and squeeze them for breakfast. There’s something deeply satisfying about eating food that has travelled approximately six feet. An orange so fresh it never met a label or an ingredient list as long as a Harry Potter novel. An orange, off the tree. Done.
The town looked painted. Narrow streets, green shutters, stone warmed gold by the sun, orange blossom drifting through the evening as if someone were perfuming the place on purpose. Lemon trees buckling under their own fruit. Swallows stitching the air overhead. And above the peaks, red kites circling, slow and effortless and patient, every single day. I watched them for long stretches. Not searching for meaning in it. They were just beautiful, and sometimes that’s the whole job.
That’s what the fortnight handed me. Space. It arrives when you finally stop trying to solve your own life for five bloody minutes.
Somewhere between the siestas, the mountain views, and the long conversations around the table, I caught myself looking back with the steady gaze of a woman who’s stopped running long enough to clock how far she’s actually come.
These two years have asked a lot of me. I've lost things, built things, grieved things, carried more than I was sure I could carry. And sitting on that terrace, surrounded by people who know the whole messy story, I felt something I hadn't felt in a while. Pride. It sits beside you as the sun drops behind the mountains and says simply, "Well done." The plain recognition that I've survived things that could have broken me, and somehow stayed open. To new places, new people, dreams I haven't named yet.
As I write this, I can feel another chapter coming. Movement. A shift in the air I can’t quite explain and won’t try to. The details can wait.
For now I’m grateful for the pause. For the mountains, the oranges, the friends who made room for me to simply be. And for a small Spanish town that reminded me of something I’d let myself forget.
Life isn’t always asking you to move. Sometimes it’s asking you to stop. Lie down, take the nap, order the gelato, watch the birds. Let the chapter end before you go scribbling the next one.
Tell me…
When did you last catch yourself looking back and feeling proud instead of panicked?