Space to Grow: Settling In Without Settling Down

I just returned from a two-week trip in San Francisco, bouncing between friends' couches and spare bedrooms. There's something both humbling and illuminating about living temporarily in other people's spaces—you become acutely aware of what it means to truly inhabit a place versus simply existing in it.

The idea of "growing into a space" has been rolling around in my mind since I've been back. It's the process where a foreign environment slowly becomes familiar, where your personality, habits, and rhythms gradually leave their mark until the space becomes a reflection of where you are in this particular phase of life.

Looking at my current one-bedroom studio in the middle of Hong Kong, I wonder: can I actually grow into this place? Or have I been treating it like another temporary stop?

When do Spaces Finally Feel Like Home?

My friend in San Francisco recently moved into a loft space and bought himself a massive TV. "I finally feel like I have a place I can settle into," he told me, "and now I feel like it’s worth it to buy nicer things." There's something to unpack in that sentiment—the recognition that yes, I deserve nice things now. But it also made me pause. What about all the places before this one? Had he been holding back, waiting for the "right" space to fully invest in comfort?

I realize I've been doing something similar. For the past 15 years, I haven't found a place where I felt ready to buy the nicer things, to really settle in and make it mine. I've been perpetually preparing for the next move, the next opportunity, the next chapter.

But here's what I'm learning from watching my friends in their spaces: the magic isn't necessarily in having the perfect apartment or the ideal situation. It's in the decision to grow into whatever space you have, in whatever way you can. Families of four make studio apartments work. College students transform cramped dorms into their personal sanctuaries. Space contracts and expands to meet whatever life demands of it.

Digital Real Estate

Maybe my version of "growing into a space" looks different than traditional home ownership. This newsletter, this digital corner of the internet, feels like my version of putting down roots. It's a blank canvas where I can build anything I want—liberating and slightly terrifying all at once.

Unlike actual real estate prices in the US right now, digital real estate is refreshingly affordable. No 20% down payment, no refinancing, no mortgage rate calculators. Just me, a keyboard, and the freedom to decorate the landscape of ideas however I see fit.

I can ramble about anything here, or say nothing at all. I can spend time arranging thoughts like furniture, rearranging paragraphs like I might move a couch from one corner to another. This space grows and contracts with whatever I need it to be.

Making Space Yours

The friends whose homes I crashed in during my trip—their spaces weren't necessarily the most beautiful or expensive. But they were undeniably theirs. Weird pottery creations, phallic coffee mugs and travel trinkets are scattered in the right spots.  

Maybe growing into a space isn't about waiting for the perfect apartment or saving up for the ideal furniture. Maybe it's about the small daily acts of making any space yours: that seat that you always sit on on your transit to work, how you arrange your books by your bookstand, which corner gets the best light for reading.

Whether it's a studio apartment or a corner of the internet, perhaps the secret is simply deciding to stay long enough to leave your mark.

Staying with the theme of growing into spaces, let's talk about maximizing what might be the most important room in any space I occupy —the kitchen. This isn't about hosting dinner parties or doing a ‘Chef’s Table’ scaping but rather to make the most utility out of a tiny sized kitchen to meal prep. 

My apartment may be compact, but I have a regular size fridge is surprisingly generous. The real challenge here is that my cooking and prep surfaces are laughably small. Success in a tiny kitchen comes down doing the best you can given what you got .

The Electric Stove Top: Unlike the gas ranges common in the US, I've got a simple electric  stove top, and honestly? I've grown to love it. The precision is incredible—I can set exact temperatures and timers, and walk away knowing it'll shut off automatically. No more hovering over pots or worrying about forgetting a burner. The important thing is that the clean up is much simpler because its one uniform plated surface instead of all the crooks of a gas stove top should your pasta overbuild and the mess gets everywhere. An electric cooktop is clean, simple, sleek and gets the job done. 

The Inherited Toaster Oven: A hand-me-down from a former coworker who was moving out. This multi-use workhorse lets me bake, roast, or reheat anything that fits inside. The catch is that the temperature is wildly inaccurate. What is set at 450 F but really only be 400 F but if you somehow twist the right knobs, it can get you to 425-435. It’s eccentric but it works and the only real solution I have found is a small oven thermometer that shows me what's actually happening in there. Trust but verify, as they say. If you want a really even bake/braise, the ideal thing is to flip the baking tray halfway through (say if it’s a 40 min bake, flip it at the 20 min mark). It is cumbersome but hey an evenly roast chicken just looks and tastes better than one that is too brown on one side and not the other. 

The Rice Cooker: Far more than just a rice maker, this doubles as my slow braiser. Perfect for long, gentle cooking of chicken thighs, beef, or any protein that benefits from time and patience. My current one is a bit too small for serious meal prep, so I'm due for an upgrade. I have not yet mastered the Chinese housewife level of rice cooker where you can make porridge, soups, Cantonese desserts with them, but it is on my radar to expand into the upper realms of culinary domesticity. 

One thing about meal prepping in small space -  using just one stove top is most likely not going to be efficient and effective enough to feed you for the week. Instead, you learn the choreography of simultaneous cooking. While rice simmers in the cooker, vegetables roast in the toaster oven, and protein cooks on the hot plate.

It's like culinary Tetris—every appliance has its role, every surface serves a purpose, and timing becomes everything. The result is a week's worth of meals from a kitchen the size of most people's closets.

Growing into a space means making the most of what you currently have. Because here's my theory: if you can't maximize a small kitchen, you won’t know what to do in a larger one. Master your constraints and rhythm and dinner will be fineeee.

Like many people, I first encountered Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" during that devastating scene in Love Actually—Emma Thompson's character discovers her husband's affair, allows herself one private moment of heartbreak, then composes herself to get the kids ready for their Christmas recital. (Kit Harrington agrees.) She doesn't even have time to properly process the betrayal; life keeps coming at you and you're just trying to stay afloat.

This song came back to me recently during the 2024 Grammy performance where Mitchell sang it live, and something about hearing it again struck me differently. Ten years prior, she'd suffered a brain aneurysm that left her paralyzed, forcing her to relearn basic motor and speech skills just to sing again. What's remarkable is that Joni wrote this song in her twenties, yet it has remained deeply relevant through every decade of her career—her forties, sixties, even into her eighties. I can't imagine writing something so truthful to the human experience at such a young age that it would continue to resonate across an entire lifetime.

The song's structure is simple. The narrator reflects on life from different vantage points—clouds seen from above and below, love experienced through giving and taking, life viewed through winning and losing. What started as daydreams from one perspective becomes something much more complex and textured from an older one. Those "ice cream castles in the air" that felt so achievable when you're young now seem as distant as they ever were. Things don't appear to be coming closer; they seem to be either getting farther away or keeping their distance entirely.

Now in my mid-thirties, with some life under my belt, I understand what the song captures so perfectly. All those certainties from youth—that working hard, being diligent, saving and investing would naturally lead to the life you envisioned—sometimes that just doesn’t pan out. The more you live, the more you realize that life is fundamentally unpredictable. You can do everything right and things still don't work out as planned.

What draws me to this song is its honest acknowledgment that perspective changes everything, and that growing older means learning to hold multiple truths simultaneously. The clouds that once inspired daydreams might now represent obstacles, but they're still the same clouds.

— 

Mitchell made something rare: a song that could grow with her, remaining relevant from early life through midlife and beyond. In a way, isn't that what we're all searching for? Finding spaces—physical, emotional, creative—that we can grow into and that can expand to accommodate whoever we become. Whether it's an apartment, a relationship, or a piece of art, the best discoveries are the ones that reveal new depths as we change. They don't become obsolete as we age; they become richer.

What does "growing into a space" mean to you? I'd love to hear about the spaces—physical or otherwise—that have shaped you.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L