Note to self - you can't do it all

The slow life seesaw - this post took a week to write...

Dear Creative Soul,

This afternoon my house smells of rhubarb and apple, cinnamon and orange. I have just finished making rhubarb compote, using offcuts going cheap at the local fresh food store, an orange from our garden, and the last apple from a handful of baking apples a work colleague gave A. Later, I will spoon the cooled fruit into freezer containers, ready for our workday breakfasts - a mason jar layering of fruit, Greek yoghurt and homemade granola. But today is cold and grey, and I think I might reserve two portions of the spiced stewed fruit for a soul-warming dessert.

It is 2.30pm and I am at my desk, a heater at my feet - this room is the coldest in the house - wondering where the day has gone. I mentally tick off the tasks: morning coffee chat, shopping list and menu preparation, fresh food markets, grocery store, laundry, food preparation, dishwashing. In a few hours we will bring in the dry clothes and prepare our evening meal, but for now, this time is my own. We are living a slow and gentle life the best we can, but as I stare at the screen, once again I feel the pressure of not enough time.

Already I know that I won’t finish this post today and still have time to dabble with my watercolours … I must choose. And I freeze, stuck on the thought that time seems to move inexplicably faster when there is the gift of having nothing I have to do. I am stuck with indecision about how best to use my precious time. Do I need to write? Dig out the novel again? Should I paint? Or do I upcycle the two British Museum tea towels I was given through our local Buy Nothing group … and as I dither, time slips away.

I choose to paint. I light a candle, turn on music (a Rachel Portman playlist), mix paints. I lose myself in a forest of my own creation, an abstraction of creamy grey trunks, with patches of peeling bark in shades of pinky-brown and grey-green leaves. I am wandering through a Karri forest in south-west Western Australia, forest giants reaching to the sky, one of my favourite places to visit. When the sunlight streams like God’s fingers through the canopy, these trees are a glorious sight; when it rains and a soft grey mist forms, the colours and honey-eucalyptus smell of the forest are a sensory feast.

A and I are drinking coffee. He brews it methodically, having perfected the way that we like it, strong and bold, not too much milk. A strong flat white, maybe closer to a “long mac topped up”. We talk about travelling, how hard it is to find coffee we like since we are unashamed coffee snobs in the way Australians are known for. We remember Portier, the little coffee shop we found in Berlin, a short walk from our apartment, how the strong coffee warmed our insides on those below freezing mornings. It seemed easy to live slowly and gently while travelling. And we talk about how hard it feels to live slowly and gently while juggling full-time jobs, at-home responsibilities, and recent additional family obligations. Is it even possible? Are we kidding ourselves? Can you live slowly part-time? Or does that defeat the purpose?

Should we just write this ideal off as a privileged lifestyle that remains tantalisingly out of reach?

It is Sunday afternoon. Our evening meal of Southern-style pork and beans is in the slow cooker; later, we will share this with two of our adult children who come over every Sunday night. On the kitchen bench there are two warm baguettes and a pat of salted butter; earlier, I slapped the butter between two wooden paddles, reserving the buttermilk for later. In the fridge, a vanilla slice, made on impulse to use up the last two sheets of puff pastry. On my desk, a steaming cup of ginger tea, the last of the blend I buy in the Swan Valley. I make a note to order more tea, then begin my afternoon project - making tote bags out of the tea towels I was given. They were used as wall decor, stapled to canvases, and now they will have a different life. While soft music plays in the background, I stitch on handles made from curtain tape I found in a charity shop. An hour later, I’m done, but I don’t want to stop so I stitch my first-ever pincushion. It’s supposed to be a hedgehog but A thinks it’s a mouse. My friend calls it a mouse-hog. I stitch on buttons while drinking coffee with A and decide that it’s been a marvellous slow afternoon.

Craving calm

This desire to live slowly is not new to us. When our four kids were teenagers and we were blending our family, we yearned for a simpler life. Not a life without the kids, but one in a quieter place, one with less running around, a smaller mortgage. The desire for a simple life was the seed for my first novel - Wherever You Go - but of course, we were well aware that life by definition was - is - not simple. Life is complicated and messy and frustrating and beautiful and breathtaking all at once. And my privilege in having this life is not lost on me.

But …

I am - we are - trying so hard to push back against a world that feels increasingly disconnected from nature and community. And yet, five days a week, we commute to our day jobs; we come home, and our responsibilities continue. It is only on weekends that we are able to (mostly) slow our pace, to ease ourselves into the day, to take breaks, to pick and choose the things we want to do. But as we move into our fifties, it takes us longer to catch up with ourselves, to regain the energy lost through a week of busy-ness.

Sometimes it feels easy. We potter around the house and garden and eventually settle into a creative project or a good book until it’s time for a coffee or dinner. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try, it feels like we’re grasping for something we can’t quite achieve. To really embrace this kind of life, it feels that you have to completely change your life. Escape to the country. Quit your job. We don’t have the means to set ourselves up in the country for a completely sustainable lifestyle from scratch. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And we’re okay with that because we already have so much. We have a house. We have a backyard that gives us an abundance of fruit, full of bird-and-bee attracting native plants.

Later, I read at least three different posts from Substack writers with similar thoughts - wanting the idyllic lifestyle without the means to live it fully. It’s not just us! It is both affirming and surprising to find others questioning the practicalities and possibilities of living slowly. To see that we are not the only ones finding it hard to truly move more slowly and mindfully in whatever time that we have. Reading others’ experiences led me to

Allegra Chapman

’s recent thought-provoking opinion piece “Slow Living is easy. Unless you have a job”.

“Slow living is what it sounds like – taking life at a slower pace. It encourages us to move through our days more mindfully, to live in harmony with the seasons (resting a lot more during the dark, cold winter, and being more active in the summer).

Slow living involves spending time in nature, decorating your home seasonally, mindfully cooking meals using local and seasonal produce, taking part in creative activities and making time for friends and family. It all sounds wonderful. Unless you have an actual job.” - Allegra Chapman, “Slow living is easy. Unless you have a job.”

We are doing our best, we say later, as we make gnocchi together, shaping the dumplings, before dropping them one by one into boiling water. We eat the gnocchi with a Sicilian pistachio pesto, the recipe courtesy of Rosie Kellet, pairing the simple meal with a Chardonnay made from hand-picked grapes in the Ferguson Valley, wondering when we will visit our winemaker friend again.

We just need to slow down the slowing down.

And that’s something I’m not particularly good at.

The “everything all at once” approach

In The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook by

Kirsten

Bradley, a step-by-step approach to adopting permaculture habits and principles is encouraged. Aside from the financial considerations of going all in, all at once, Bradley suggests that taking things step by step leads to more solid foundational habits, while going too fast often results in failure, disillusionment, giving up.

“…it is very easy to have heaps of great ideas about doing all the things at once and then … fall in a heap and feel like a total failure.” - Kirsten Bradley

Sometimes, in my effort to take life at a slower pace, I go all in on the weekends. I try to fit in more than I can handle in the time that I have: baking bread, making jam, gardening, cooking from scratch, sewing/painting/writing, thrift shopping, walking in nature, catching up with family and friends. I get excited about learning new things and trying new ways … I tell myself that this is all part of slowing down, but really, often I’m keeping up the pace of my work week. Telling myself I’m slowing down because I’m doing things I want to do but … am I though? I’ve written about this before and it remains an ongoing life lesson.

There’s always a tipping point. That one extra thing that tips me over the edge - an unexpected invitation that I say yes to (and I want to go but don’t at the same time), the cake I decide to make, the sorting of fruit into bags for giving away. Sometimes I have clues that I’m near that tipping point and I listen (or not). Other times, I’ve fallen off the edge before I saw it coming, and overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted … even resentful … because suddenly it’s Sunday night and I have to prepare for work tomorrow and … where the time has gone?

It’s Saturday again. We eat baguettes filled with camembert, tomato and smoked ham and then walk in a nearby wetland, among the paperbarks and swamp banksias, listening to frogs and birds and rustlings of unknown creatures. And the responsibilities and should/musts fall away bit by bit, revealing an excited little-girl me who points and cries out: “Look at the mushrooms!”

Instructions for living a life

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

- Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”

I need to allow for blank time, A says as we sip our late-afternoon coffee, to do nothing for a bit. Stare out the window. Read. Play a game. And then I’ll want to do something again.

Yes, I agree. I’d rather be provoked into action than forced into inaction. I’ve been there before.

And then I sneak a peek at the clock because we are heading to a friend’s after dinner for campfire drinks, an unexpected invitation. For A, who agreed enthusiastically an hour ago, it suddenly feels like a tipping point because we were planning to make pasta tonight and now our timing has been compressed. But we make the pasta anyway, and once we are around that campfire, as flames lick the air and laughter ripples, we know we are in the right place. Friends, wine, conversation. Better than a movie on Netflix.

The thing about want

There’s another thing at play too, which

Don Boivin

writes about beautifully in this Substack post:

“I guess what I’m saying is that a majority of the time I look at the world through a filter of desire, with an eye for how it can serve my needs. I see my environment as a commodity for my consumption, as a stage on which to realize my potential. As a place that exists for me.”

Re-reading his post reminds me how often I fall into this trap of looking through a “filter of desire”. It happens subconsciously most of the time, this craving of more space and more time (and our own backyard fire pit) so I can live what I imagine is my ideal. Other times, I know I’m comparing, wishing, wondering. Little embers of envy. As Don writes, “We often feel empty or incomplete; we believe that something is missing, and that if we can only find, acquire, or achieve this missing thing, we will be happy.”

But I when I notice I’m doing that, and I’m getting better at the noticing, I stop and remember to enjoy what I have now. To remember that making the most of my time does not mean filling it with all the things at once.

Photo by Michael on Unsplash

Hope keeps me going

I can live slowly and gently.

I am already living a more connected and gentle life, treading lightly, moving mindfully.

I don’t have to move to the country or quit my job (unless I want to) to appreciate the slow and gentle times when they are there.

I simply need to say:

I can’t do all the things.

I can do some of them. 

I tried something new this weekend. I asked:

1. What do I want to do this weekend?

2. What do I need to do this weekend?

3. Am I creating a slower, calmer pace or keeping up the pace?

4. What do I need to drop in order to slow down?

Note to self … keep asking these questions. Keep checking in.

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