I went to Italy to learn a language. I learned how to slow down.

I was sitting on a bench near the port in Genova, eating focaccia, no itinerary, listening to conversations in a language I couldn’t follow. Just me, in a new place, for once, with nowhere to be. For six weeks, I enrolled in an Italian course, cut my workweek to three days, and blocked off some weeks entirely. Here are some of the things I learned:

I used to think slowing down meant deciding one day to just… slow down. Turns out it takes weeks of setup. I told my team early about my plans. I said the part that we are often afraid of saying out loud: here’s what to expect from me; here’s what I can’t do. At times, I felt a bit uncomfortable and guilty because I didn’t want to let my team down, but by communicating with transparency, nobody was left guessing.

This one took longer to sink in. I’ve spent years working like every task has the same temperature: urgent. Sitting in Italian class, trying to conjugate a verb while my brain screamed about an email I hadn’t answered, taught me something. Most things can wait a day, and some can wait a week. 

I noticed shop owners in Genova closing up in the middle of the afternoon. Not because business was bad, but because life comes before work, and everyone seemed to agree on that without having to discuss it. Nobody’s shop burned down because they took two hours off in the afternoon. Learning to tell the difference between what’s actually urgent and what just feels urgent is its own kind of leadership practice, and it’s one I’m still not great at, but I’m continuing to learn from.

We are often super fixated on the future. And yes, the future is important, but experiencing the present is just as important, if not more. My time in Italy healed something in me that I didn’t even realize needed healing: Through each experience, I learned how to slow down to be present to the moment.

I noticed people sitting at open windows and on tiny balconies, just watching the world go by. Entire families gathered around the dinner table for hours, talking, no phones in sight, like the meal itself was the whole event and not something to get through. I walked through a piazza at night, and the entire town was there together, bambini playing, teenagers eating pizza on the steps, grandparents talking on benches, all in the same space at the same time. 

One evening, I watched as tons of people gathered by the sea in Boccadasse just to see the sun go down, like it was something worth showing up for and not just something that happens every day, whether you watch or not. I heard church bells mark the hour instead of checking my phone. I swam in the Ligurian sea and felt my whole body remember how to slow down. I saw buildings that had survived hundreds of years, standing there, proof that not everything has to be new to be beautiful. I watched people in their eighties and nineties out for their evening walk, together, the way they’d probably done for sixty years. Even caffè became a ritual instead of just caffeine, something you stop at the bar or sit down for instead of something you grab.

I remembered that not every moment has to be productive to be valuable, and that joy doesn’t always come from doing more. Sometimes it comes from slowing down long enough to notice what’s already there.

I don’t think slowing down is a summer trick or a one-time reset. I think it’s a practice, the same way anything worth doing is a practice. You plan for it, you protect it, you keep learning from it, and you keep choosing it even when the fire alarm in your head is going off.

So if you’re reading this in the thick of a hard summer, still going through your to-do list, I hope you find your version of Genova. It doesn’t have to be six weeks in Italy. It can be one real day off, or practicing having moments of your day intentionally protected.