People often ask why we keep going back to Paris.
It’s a fair question. There are countless cities left to explore, and yet we continue returning to the same one and my answer is: I have a relationship with Paris.
The first time I went was in 1999. I travelled with a friend, knowing very little about the city itself beyond its intellectual and artistic history. During my years studying theatre at the University of Washington, I had become fascinated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They seemed like they had so much fun creating their own world. August Strindberg also favored our beloved city. I was deeply drawn to these artists, playwrights, writers, and philosophers. It was as if their ideas and creativity still lingered in its cafés and streets.
When Midnight in Paris was released years later, I immediately understood why it resonated with me. I didn’t experience it as fantasy, to me it was a recognition. I’ve always believed that I lived in Paris during that era, in another dimension, another lifetime. It was evident to me from my very first visit that I knew the streets, and recognized the energy of the city.
I remember walking for hours without a map and not feeling lost. Somehow I always knew which direction to turn, as though the city and I were in a dialogue. I adored the smallest details: sandwiches wrapped in impossibly thin paper and tied with string, coffee served in heavy porcelain cups beside tiny silver creamers, beautiful brass door handles polished by generations of hands. Those details have stayed in my heart.
Another layer to my Parisian affair is that my husband feels the same way about having been there before this lifetime. Long before we were together, we both happened to be in Paris during the same spring break. At the time, we only knew each other professionally and had no idea we were walking the same streets, each quietly contemplating the end of relationships that would eventually make room for ours. We’ve always loved that piece of our story. Somehow Paris belonged to both of us before we belonged to each other.
Paris is a seductive city, enchanting and dressed in architectural gems with grand doors and hidden messages tucked into doorways, cafés, and romantic balconies that make you slow down to admire generations of craftsmanship.
This spring, 2026 we spent eight days there, roaming favorite spots while discovering new pathways, galleries, restaurants, and corners of the city that felt both familiar and entirely new. We rented a small luxury apartment in a Haussmann building in the 8th arrondissement, just off Saint-Honoré, a street I know by heart, stretching into the 1st arrondissement and lined with many of my staples: La Coupe D’Or, Hotel Costes, beautiful boutiques, and some of the city’s most compelling people-watching.
Paris always delivers and I inevitably find something special: design that shifts my perspective, vintage pieces that I cannot leave behind, a beautiful object for home. I leave feeling as though I’ve quietly elevated the script of my existence, returning with a more confident point of view, fresh ideas, and a renewed appreciation for beauty as art. My heart arrives at destinations long before my mind can explain why it belongs there.
My morning ritual begins with breath and journaling. My gratitude practice spans two pages: current gratitudes on the left, future gratitudes on the right, from one month to a year into the future, followed by black tea with honey and lemon.
One of my favorite Paris habits is putting on workout clothes first thing and walking for miles before the city fully wakes. At that hour Paris belongs to dog walkers and early risers before people head to work with cigarettes in hand.
Long lunch is a luxury Americans rarely celebrate. During my years in marketing and advertising, I ate more salads at my desk than I ever did enjoying proper lunch. Nothing feels more luxurious than a meal that stretches well into the afternoon: foie gras, escargot, bread, butter, crisp green beans, and voluptuous salads. There is a simplicity and decadence living side by side during Parisian lunches, everything arriving perfectly curated on silver trays with little ice buckets that somehow make every table feel like an occasion.
The city feels both masculine and soft, confident and poetic. Ornate façades coexist with quiet gardens. The design scene is unmatched, it understands permanence. Paris has never struck me as a city interested in reinvention. It knows the value of history, timelessness, beauty, and old-world charm.
One of our go-to excursions remains the flea market at Saint-Ouen, an hour’s walk each way to roam among antique and vintage treasures. Over the years we’ve brought home silver trays, cutlery, old hotel pieces, and decorative objects that now quietly live throughout our apartment in New York. This trip it was a small copper pot for heating my morning bone broth, a large tray with legs destined for our bar, and a little Parisian ice bucket that felt impossible to leave behind.
Paris always rewards curiosity and has the habit of showing me handbags I would most likely not find in New York. This trip I found an air-balloon-shaped bag on Saint-Honoré that practically introduced itself. There was no discussion, it was coming home with me.
One of our evenings at Bar Vendôme at the Ritz - highly favorite places in the city. I adore the red velvet booths, dramatic martinis adorned with tall feathers, generous olives, eggs with caviar, filet, and what may be the best bread and butter on earth. Lounging beneath photographs of Oscar Wilde and Simone de Beauvoir, wearing a fuchsia dress with enough volume to have its own personality and black Dior heels, I found myself thinking about becoming.
De Beauvoir famously wrote that one is not born, but rather becomes. I’ve always loved that sentence. Perhaps that’s why Paris has always felt like a place of becoming and unfolding. It taught me that identity is something we participate in shaping. It grows from the places we return to, the conversations we seek and have, the books we read, and the beauty we surround ourselves with. Another reason why Paris always feels so close to my heart. In many ways, the art of living your story is deciding what place deserves to live in the script of your existence.
I’ve come to realize that we curate travel with remarkable care. We choose the hotel because of how we want to feel. We choose neighborhoods, restaurants, museums, outfits, books, scent, and even the pace of our days. Yet when we return home, many of us quietly hand our lives back to routine, forgetting that the same creative authority exists on an ordinary Tuesday.
In our everyday lives, we can curate our mornings, our conversations, the books we read, the music playing in the kitchen, the flowers we put on the table, the people we spend time with, the objects we choose to live with, and even the thoughts we repeatedly allow to real estate in our minds. When we proactively curate our lives, we’re better equipped to embrace the unknown chapters of our story.
That realization has become central to my work through EVOKE Living. Not because it asks us to become someone else, but because it invites us to look honestly at the story we’re already living. How much or little power do we give to the curation of one’s life. Your surroundings play such a huge part of your wellbeing AND you’re the art director of your own life.
Lately I’ve found myself returning to a simple question: What if life gets to be easy? Not easy because challenges disappear or because every chapter unfolds according to plan, but because we stop living from stories that no longer fit and begin trusting what the heart has been quietly pointing toward all along.
Paris always reminds me that there is more available than the life I am currently living, not because my life is lacking, but because life itself is still unfolding.
The beautiful paradox is that I can be deeply grateful for where I am while remaining completely open to so much more. Maybe that is what expansion really is: not abandoning the life you have, or forcing a reinvention, not performing some polished future self for approval, but quietly elevating the script of your existence one conscious choice at a time.
Life, after all, is less a problem to solve than a story to shape, one action at a time - and that’s how you practice the real art of becoming
