How Your Body Learns a Space Faster Than You Think
unfurnished
My dad, like a lot of fathers, always told me I was a princess. We’re Dutch, and I grew up hearing that we came from a noble family. We had a castle that was taken from us in the 1800s. We don’t have it anymore, but we do have a coat of arms, which felt official enough growing up.
It was one of those stories that just sits there. You hear it enough times that you don’t question it, but you also don’t picture it as something real.
So I had to see it for myself.
A college adventure.
Seeing it in person was… kind of cool.
It’s in the town that still has my last name. Around 39,000 people live there now. A manageable kingdom, honestly.
I walked right up to it and showed them the last name on my passport. That was enough for the princess treatment. They let me in without paying the €3 ticket, like it was mine.
Inside, it’s pretty bare bones. Walls, a tower, not much else. You’re there maybe twenty minutes. Still, it felt good knowing that at one point, it was ours.
Almost 30 years later, I ended up at another one, this time in Tuscany. This one will be home for a week in September.
The first one was a shell. This one comes furnished.
Furnished
Heavy rooms, long tables, doors that don’t quite close the way you expect. The kind of place where your footsteps sound different and you notice it at first.
There are costumes, which… makes sense.
You go up to the turret and it opens over Tuscany. Hills in every direction. Quiet in a way that doesn’t feel empty, just settled.
Within a couple of hours, I was moving up to the turret, down the stairs, across the kitchen, through the courtyard. My feet knew where to land. My body knew the path. No thought required.
The castle became muscle memory.
That’s what starts to happen when I layer cues the right way. Your body starts choosing better without you thinking about it. You just move.
That’s the real luxury.
Though I wouldn’t have said no to the castle.
If you want to keep reading along, you can subscribe here.
About
Melissa Van is a Pilates instructor, retreat leader, and writer based between the US and Europe, with over 20 years of teaching experience. She helps women over 45 stay active with a portable Pilates practice that fits into their lives through personalized coaching, retreats, and weekly reflections on movement and travel in her newsletter, Notes from the Road. Join her in Tuscany to move, laugh, and make friends with women who refuse to slow down.