It might be to soon to be putting this out there, while people are still suffering and the risk is still high, but lockdown has been good for me.
There is a sign on my dresser that reads, “My dream job is now my reality”. I love that it hints at the difference between job and reality. The dream job: word-spinner, beauty-catcher, poet, travel writer, home-maker, philosopher, creator and curator, observer, keeper. It goes deeper. Clearly it isn’t just a job. Yes, you are allowed to say, it isn’t even a job. That’s really the point. It’s not a job, it’s a life, a distillation of an idealist, student fantasy. Remember when we believed in those?
Yet, it is now my lived reality. Slowness. Thoughtfulness. Observing. Trying to catch the moments with a view to sharing the echo or reflection of them. We cannot hoard moments, or save them, we can only savour them, lose ourselves in them, and then only if we take the time to notice them.
Taking the time to notice a moment is not something you can plan to do. You have to be open to what is there, inside and out, and be willing not to analyse it, not to seek anything from it, just absorb it. Let yourself be absorbed by it. Sometimes this becomes the mystical flow that artists and athletes talk about, and sometimes it is the sudden wow of an unexpected view – a sunset maybe, a starry sky, or an animal, or a child, just doing what animals and children do but awesome all the same, and sometimes it is a gentle oh, hello you…to a friend, or a stranger, or something wild if you’re like me and you talk to animals and insects and flowers and trees.
The technique of taking time to notice a moment requires nothing more than the willingness to be surprised: to learn or to see or to share something you did not expect to. And then doing so: being surprised by what you learn or see or share.
The thing about moments it that they are unique. The sea is never the same colour minute to minute; your lover will never sound and feel and smell exactly as they do tonight; that annoying magpie will one day lose the battle for first dabs on the food; the sand / grass / concrete beneath our feet feels differently with each footstep; the way light glances off and through your glass is irrepeatable.
Without expectation, was the suggestion. Give yourself permission to live the life without any expectation as to what will happen. Slowness means that not everything will get gone. It also requires that you make the choices about what to lose and what to keep equally slowly. Be open to surprises. Your choices must be slow because some of them you will resist. It takes reflection and memory and intention to figure out why.
After a necessary frenzy of clearing and selling and ditching, I ended up with a hoard of ‘not now’ boxes. Two years on, the whispers I’m hearing are saying “maybe never”. The reasons for keeping some of them that seemed so urgent have faded so quickly. Others are still too hot to handle.
Slowness requires you to listen to whispers. Kondo talks about having only the things that spark joy, but it is much more subtle than that. We also need the things that flicker with nostalgia, the things that sigh bitter-sweetness, the things that are comforting even if we haven’t figured out why. We need the things that itch with sadness if it’s a sadness we’re not ready to let go of yet, we need the treasures from the dreams we fulfilled, but maybe also the pebble in the shoe that might make us go after those that are still waiting. Don’t be too quick to throw everything away – you’ll be discarding your past, and maybe also one of your possible futures. Take it slow.
When I talk about ‘things’ I don’t only mean the tangible stuff. I have not now boxes in my head as well. Feelings. Habits. Mindsets.
With expectation, I was waiting for the lightbulb moment, trying to find the right switch to throw, when what I needed was someone to help me strip down the gears and re-grease them, unblock the mechanism of accumulated expectation. Without expectation clogging up the works, my mindset runs more smoothly, and – by deliberate choice – more slowly.
The surprise is: decisions are made more slowly but implemented more quickly. The surprise is: slow is not timid. It is certain and bold. It has no reason not to be.
When I quit my job all those months ago I said I wanted to live more slowly, more simply and singularly failed to do so. I did the opposite. I set up so many plans and goals and intentions that I completely over-engineered my existence. It’s taken a long time to dismantle all of that scaffolding, because that’s all it was…and it was serving no useful purpose, I wasn’t building anything.
Then lockdown hit. The universe said Ok, here you go then! I wasn’t ready. Or so I thought. It turns out that I was more than ready. I had been preparing for this for the last two years at least, probably longer, maybe my whole life.
Once I let go of how ‘slowing down’ was meant to occur, what living more simply was meant to mean, it all became, well, a lot more simple. Any concerns I had about burning bridges became irrelevant. I wouldn’t burn them, but most of them would fall into disrepair and collapse under their own weight – to be honest, by this stage most of them have already done so.
My version of slow isn’t minimalist. I am not going to sell up and live in a yurt – or even on a canal boat. I have spent two years turning an inheritance into a home that I love. It is far from perfect – because everything is. And it is so close to perfect I could squeal.
My version of slow won’t have me idling away all my days, and the days that look idle will simply be rest & refuelling.
My version of slow is following my own path, one step at a time – and if some of those steps are leaps into un-known waters, I’m ready to jump.
My version of slow is not driven, it is not ambitious, it has nothing to prove…but it is still about moving forward, growing, doing the work, being alive – being awake and refusing to be a bystander in my own life.
My version of slow isn’t about stopping. It’s about finally hearing the people who answered my I want to be… with but you already are.
