I Don't Want To Die Tired
Think week
I arrived excited and worn out
The kind of exhaustion that you feel in your very bones.
There’s a reason it’s called “full” time — because it takes most of your energy.
I was intentionally here to do absolutely nothing.
My off-grid Unyoked cabin was in the middle of nowhere and I didn’t want to be found.
Laying on the bed, I tilted my head backward, staring out to the secluded bushland I thought to myself; I don’t want to die tired. I really don’t.
My greatest ambition in life is to be well-rested.
And yet here I was, rundown and on the edge of full blown fatigue.
I didn’t want just a dose of nature. I needed a whole medicine cabinet of it. Time spent alone with nowhere to go and no one to see. Solitude is how we get ourselves back and I was overdue for the freedom of being in my own company.
Being in nature is not about achievement
It's about taking the time to read uninterrupted. Waking up with no alarm. Cooking without rushing. Having a lot of space and very few plans.
I think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s words, ‘I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent, and working at a pace so slow, that I would be able to hear myself living.’
If this is all I was to achieve in my life, I would be very happy about that.
We all have this internalised idea that being busy is being important.
I had come to the cabin with the intention of doing “nothing”, and ironically–that takes planning.
I had still brought a backup of various things to do (personal essays, journaling, an application) and yet the moment I arrived on the land, I only wanted to just be. Not needing to churn out anything was a relief.
Laptops have no place in nature
I hiked to my cabin, hauling an overzealous amount of baskets in a wheelbarrow and dragging a suitcase along an uphill mossy trail (take the suggestion to ‘pack light’ seriously).
30 minutes later, after abandoning various bits at different points in the journey and going back for them, I arrived at my cabin called Nolan as the sun was setting.
I have never felt more deserving of anything in my life. I kissed the trail maker post.
I was a sweaty, hot mess. Then I noticed I had left my laptop, Bluetooth speaker and a basket of things ‘to do’ in the car. I was definitely not going back.
As I walked into my Unyoked cabin I saw a retro tape player on the kitchen bench with Tracy Chapman’s New Beginning cassette at the top of the stack. Then I realised- I couldn’t for all the money in the world remember where the eject button was. I fiddled, I prodded, turning it 360 degrees, and wracking my brain inside and out. I am a child of the 90s and I even wrote a thesis on mixtape culture, this was inexcusable! After a solid 20 minutes of failure, I legitimately had to google (I wish it weren’t true), “how to play a cassette tape” and finally had the ah-ha moment and got it open.
Tracy’s warm honey timbre filled the cabin, making it feel instantly like home. Along with the forest green linen sheets (made especially for Unyoked), the other high quality touches include the cinema screen windows, surprising ocean views (you are in the bush), an amazing rain shower head, and a stovetop kettle with an elegant pour. All Unyoked cabins are the same worldwide with slight interior tweaks (hello Welsh Black Mountains) – and have surprisingly soft towels for the wilderness. There’s a bookshelf with well-picked reading material, herbal tisanes for an evening brew, premix negroni cocktails, and (bonus) a bottle of sriracha in the bar fridge.
Unyoked is not simply tiny cabin porn.
Although the Unyoked design lords do a great job at that.
It is more like nature therapy and a place to truly rest, with a side of accommodation.
The experience begins before you arrive. A friendly text arrives a few weeks before prompting you to download a Field Guide app with all the need-to-knows, curated playlists (‘Me, Myself and I’ is first on the ‘Self-Love’ playlist and I chuckled hard) and recipe suggestions to get your ingredients all sorted before you head off. Pro-tip: bring pizza bases.
The location of each cabin is somewhat secret — you are given coordinates for a destination, as they say, "3 hours South-ish of Perth".
I brought a tea ceremony
Whatever you bring you have to hike to your cabin. And I brought a tea ceremony.
Tea is my daily meditation practice and on the second day, I hiked to a small clearing in the bush that I found surrounded by trees and a moss floor. I sat out there all afternoon — drinking bowl after bowl of old-growth shou puerh tea in beautiful silence and a rustling breeze.
I could feel it, the burnout was slowly leaving my body.
As I walked back, I collected fallen branches and tinder (the real one) on the way to later make vegan mushroom pizza outside my cabin on a campfire.
The sound of crackling flames is some kind of primal joy.
Burrowing into bed later that night, I read a whole book from start-to-finish, and watched the stars outside my wall-to-wall windows. It was one of the most satisfying Saturday nights of my entire life.
What is making you tired and is it worth it?
I ask myself this a lot. The gifts from time spent alone can help you figure this out.
Anyone can be busy. The challenge is to be well-rested.
There doesn’t always have to be a productive purpose to leisure time. Restoring your energy is the thing. Life is very big. We all need to prioritise small moments of rest for self-preservation.
We also need to change our language.
‘Time off’ does not have to be ‘spent’ well. It cannot be ‘wasted’.
Time is not something we ‘use’ - we exist within time. If your life is full, it is going to go very fast. Our lives, like the seasons, need downtime.
Why do we delay doing the simplest things that would make us the happiest?
I didn’t stray far from the cabin and the surrounding property during my four-day stay except to visit my friend Paul in a nearby town.
We were chatting about what all of his time goes to, and he remarked (in a wicked Liverpool accent);
“When will I be able to listen to a record that I want to play and just enjoy it?”
Paul said this to me while standing in his record store. And it struck me. Why do we all delay doing the simplest of things that would make us the happiest?
The reality is that one day, we will have no time left in this world. As my tea teacher Wu De more eloquently (and bluntly) often says: ‘In a short time, you and I will not be here forever’.
Certainly makes you think of all the things you’ve been putting off.
When I am tired, I am my worst self and no one gets the best of me. I am empty and have nothing to give.
I don’t want to die exhausted. I want to die full of life. I want to be overflowing. So I have to prioritise rest, solitude in nature, and being uncontactable for a few days. This is when all the richer parts of me come alive and then I hear it, I am living.
Looking to reset with a four-night nature stay? Book a Think Week at Santi, 2.5hr East-ish of Melbourne.
Ready to get some mud on your boots and get out into nature? Find cabin availability near your city.”
