The holidays are here. There’s no denying it. During this busy time, I need extra reminders about slowing down and staying sane. One word: Breathe. We all know how important breathing is — check out this recent NPR piece.
Here are a couple of really nice ways that help me to take it easy during stressful times:
Get a massage. (If you are in Austin, and like deep tissue massages like I do, the folks at Austin Deep are incredible).
Write a letter to someone you love. That would be something really nice to give and something wonderful to receive during the holidays.
Take a walk, or, if you are like me, yoga really does the trick. In Austin, I’m very fond of Matt Borer’s Ashtanga and Vinyasa classes — check out his blog here.
So in the spirit of slowing down this holiday season, and being together with your loved ones — check out these songs by Jack Johnson:
This is what Andy Rooney said on 60 Minutes last night. Sounds good to me.
(CBS) ” We’re doing a lot of complicated things in the world these days and we’re doing them too fast. Something’s got to be done about the passage of time. It’s got to be slowed down. The days, the weeks, the months and the years go by too fast. Our lives go by too fast.
We’re always hurrying time along by looking forward to things tomorrow instead of enjoying today.
Last weekend I heard a television weatherman say that summer was right around the corner. Well, summer is not around the corner. Summer starts on June 21. The corner is still 71 days away. I mean what’s the rush?
Planning is bad for the passage of time. Planning anything a month in advance makes that month pass quicker.
In March I was looking forward to the beginning of April because I like April but I was so busy looking forward to April that I forgot to enjoy March which isn’t bad, but first thing I knew, March had passed and I’d hardly noticed it.
The days that drag are the days when we have nothing coming up in the future. We could use some of those days because they’re what we need more of to make time last longer – days that drag.
You know how it is. You get a new haircut, and you can’t help paying extra attention to all the haircuts around you.
It’s the same way with boredom. You start to think about it, and then it’s everywhere.
British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner (1950) Bertrand Russell wrote:
“A certain amount of boredom is…essential to a happy life.“
And he also wrote, giving a push for slow living:
“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
Leo Tolstoy wrote “Boredom: the desire for desires,” which partly explains why we cover up those slow moments with shopping, eating, drinking, rushing to and fro. But it might be nice to embrace a slow moment sometimes, to stop for a sunset, instead of twittering and tweeting it away.
Sloth is considered one of the seven deadly sins (along with wrath, greed, pride, lust, envy, gluttony). It is defined as a certain spiritual and emotional and physical apathy. In other words, a general neglect of everything. Doesn’t sound like a quality to nurture. And it isn’t.
But there are times when a little inactivity makes room for a lot of creativity. These days, stimulated as we are every second of the day and punching the buttons on various gadgets and constantly fed sensory impressions from various media, a little stillness is sometimes needed to balance the chaos.
And what about boredom? Listlessness, inactivity, staring at the ceiling, twiddling thumbs, often precedes a rush of creativity. Sometimes we need that inner silence in order to find our voice.
The Sloth itself, the animal, has much to teach us about slowness in these hectic fast-paced days. They move really slowly. Imagine moving five feet per minute. That’s about the pace. For a portrait of the Sloth, check out ‘What Does it Mean to be a Sloth’ by Craig Holdredge.
You might call Sloths lazy, or maybe meditative and dreamy, but the fact is they often sleep more than 15 hours a day. Bet you could use some of that extra sleep now and again.
Maybe it’s the Puritan work ethic, but sleepy and dreamy people aren’t generally rewarded in this culture and the meditative are regarded as quacks or yogis. But I think we can take a cue from the sloth. Every now and then, stop and be still. Really still. Let your mind rest or let it wander. Dream a bit.
Cultivate a moment of two of boredom. In fact, scientific studies have shown that when people claim to be bored, lying in an MRI scan, for example, their brains are firing away (read this ‘boring’ NY Times article which references the study). And have you heard of the word micro-boredom? That’s a term to describe what happens when your cell phone looses signal, or you are waiting in line with your carton of milk, idle for just a moment. (Read more about micro-boredom in the Boston Globe ). Funny, even boredom itself, when it happens, is now speedy and short, micro.
The summer before 4th grade we moved to Spring Valley NY, in Rockland County. Rockland County is a gritty place for the most part, with an eclectic blend of towns and hamlets. There’s Monsey, where an established group Hasidic Jewish people live — one of the largest such communities in the world, I was once told. There’s Nyack, an artsy place nestled along the banks of the Hudson River. And downtown Spring Valley itself, which has nurtured a vibrant Haitian community since the 1950′s.
My mother rented a little brick house on Hungry Hollow Road which some people called the Turtle house because of a turtle drawn into the cement on the wall out front. Out back there was a creek and a little bridge, heaven for an exploring child.
Our little corner of the county was (and is) beautiful — farmland, gardens, swimming ponds, apple orchards, old gracious white homes.
But despite the beauty, I was not happy about moving there. First of all, I loved Detroit. I had a lot of great friends there, including a fiancée named Chris–we had exchanged many notes and the deal was sealed. We had been engaged since the second grade so it was a pretty long term relationship. I had also made my theatrical début there, having played the wolf in the class play. I was a Star. I doubted I could shine so brightly anywhere else.
The second reason that I was not happy about moving, was because I had already moved enough. My early childhood was spent moving. We moved around the State of Florida, then to Denver, then to Detroit. At that point we had been in Detroit for four years, and it felt like home to me. I felt settled.
And there was one more reason I did not want to move to Spring Valley: even though the setting of the community itself was lovely (the pictures shown are from the 20′s when it really was ‘in the country,’ now it is an oasis within a suburb), it didn’t feel rural enough for me. In our quest for a new home, we had also visited a town in upstate New York called Harlemville. I had recently devoured the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and I could really imagine myself living in that very rural area, milking cows and wearing prairie girl dresses. Plus I had really truly been a prairie girl for the past five Halloweens, so I had some actual experience.
I love that Cat Stevens song, “Father and Son.” It’s all about taking it slow. He sings “I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy, to be calm when you found something going on. But take your time, think a lot, think of everything you’ve got, for you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not…Just sit down, take it slowly..”
Cat wrote that song in 1970, but the beginning of the Slow Movement is usually pinpointed as starting in 1986 in Rome. That’s when McDonald’s opened at the Spanish Steps, setting off a reaction which was the beginning of “Slow Food.” Slow Food is a movement whose mission (according to Slow Food International) is “to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and peoples dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes..“
What’s that saying? – “Stop and smell the coffee.” Or is it “Stop and smell the roses?”
Slowly, over the past twenty plus years, (As time races by), the concept of “slow” has spread — it’s a new/old concept, really (life was pretty slow, naturally, once upon a time). And now we’ve got slow parenting, slow love, slow sex, slow travel.
The truth of the matter is, that in the present time of constant tweets, emails and crashing economies, we have to make an extra effort to ‘take it slow.’ With our fast-paced days, racing around from school to home to work, with all the meetings, emails, responsibilities, and loads of laundry, meals to prepare, and with the abundance of information to sift through and experts to listen to, slow is especially relevant for parents and homemakers.
Slow Living means lots of things. It means taking time to make purchases, pondering over whether the item is really needed. It means having a family meal, everybody all together. It means taking a moment to relax on the front porch or by the fire with a cup of tea. It means having long conversations, not just 140 character tweets.
Many of us have lost our confidence as parents; and this has contributed to the whole helicopter parenting thing, the parenting as a competition thing, the view of homes and children as products to be refined, to be made ever bigger and better, smarter and faster. This loss of confidence makes parenting and homemaking less fun, more fraught with insecurity and fear. it makes us vulnerable also. So slow down.
Taking it slow is a way to provide a little balance to the fast pace, of, well, everything! Stepping back and slowing down also helps parents gain a little perspective about what is really important for our families. Taking it is slow and thoughtful is one way to regain the confidence we have lost in our abilities to effectively and lovingly parent our children.
Five ways to take it Slow:
Unplug. I can’t say it enough, even to myself (here I am triple-plugged: glued to the laptop, listening to Cat on YouTube, with my little Blackberry in it’s holster, ready). A recent study showed that Americans are assaulted with 34 Gigabytes of information daily — unplug for an hour, two hours, whatever you can reasonably manage.
Play. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. One of the downsides to busy schedules is that our children have less time to play. If you have to schedule in “free play” for your children, then do so, and send them out into the backyard to roam around. And play yourself — what makes you happy, refreshed, fulfilled? Paint, read, take a bath. Do whatever it is that rejuvenates you and helps you to slow down.
Take a Walk. it’s that simple.
Write a letter. By hand. (Hopefully your handwriting is still legible, mine is a little iffy these days). Nowadays, writing a letter by hand feels really slow! Even just a short note to a friend can be a wonderful way to express gratitude and to connect with loved ones who are far away.
Wash every load of laundry, by hand. (Just kidding)! However you can include your children in sorting the laundry, and folding it. Some people swear that folding laundry is a form of therapy, kind of like origami. So instead of just rushing through it — and I confess, I have rushed through many loads of laundry — take it slow. It feels better that way.
In other words: Hold your horses. Or at least rein in the gallop and get those horses down to a trot. (Just Sit Down, Take it Slowly).
Over the past week or so I have been mulling over an article in the NY Times by Arlie Hochschild, titled ‘The State of Families, Class and Culture.” Citing various studies about the American state of mind, Hochschild describes our fast, restless and reckless American society where we buy quickly and often indiscriminately, and where we discard things rapidly, soon after we have acquired them.
This mentality lends itself, Hochschild figures, to the American phenomenon of high divorce rates and multiple relationships. We speed date, get into relationships, and then break up, in a faster and faster cycle of discontent. In things and in relationships, we are always seeking the next new thing.
In response to Fast Food, we have the Slow Food movement. In response to Hurried Parenting, we have the Slow Parenting movement. Maybe, Hochschild proposes, we need a Slow Love movement to balance the American tendency towards having “a curiously consumerist approach to love.”
It does seem true that it is harder and harder to slow down (we are all so busy) and that this tendency towards speed and rushing invades many facets of life, love including.
The holidays are here. There’s no denying it. During this busy time, I need extra reminders about slowing down and staying sane. One word: Breathe. We all know how important breathing is — check out this recent NPR piece.
