Six Months in the Fast Lane

dispatches from a slow living detour

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

It’s been nearly 6 months since my life took an abrupt, unplanned detour. It’s been a strange, scary, grief-fuelled and weirdly invigorating season. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? How life serves up these steaming dumpster fires at the most inopportune moments that are also precisely the perfect time?

I rarely get time to sit and think of late, but when I do, I’m kinda struck by how much there’s been to learn in this unsettling season.

Here’s what I’ve learned about Slow Living and the creative, intentional life so far on this decidedly unintentional sojourn in the land of busy.

I’ve written before about how back in art school, when we were in our first year drawing class, we were asked to turn our source material upside down. It was only through the intentional disorientation that the subject matter revealed itself.

This has been a lot like that.

(Expect it’s ME who’s been turned on her head.)

Slowness begets slowness. Speed begets speed.

Seems kinda obvious right? But I’ve been amazed how shifts in just one area of my life have caused cascading changes in others.

I’m working off-farm at the moment in a second job that is not extremely difficult, but is fast-paced. Speed.

My new commitment to work off-farm, away from home, has necessitated that all the living that used to happen while I was there, even often while I was working (laundry, dishes, supporting my kids), now has to be condensed into smaller parcels of time.

Because they are smaller, those parcels feel more precious, and I feel pressure to do ‘more’.

Suddenly, I looked up and realized that everything in my life was picking up pace and taking on a life of its own. I felt like I used to as a kid, running down hill, my legs moving faster than my mind. I knew that if I thought about it, even for a split-second, I’d be ass-over-applecart tumbling down the asphalt.

I saw how quickly a new way of thinking can seep in, even after years of practice.

I have always held my morning swim and sauna as sacred time. I know how important for they are for both my physical and mental health. I’ve protected them fiercely for well over a year now.

As soon as things got properly hectic, the moment when I needed that refuge the most, I allowed them to fall away. To be hacked at by outside demands, the needs of others, the daily, mundane responsibilities of life.

How did I let that happen?

My kids missed me, and what used to be a quiet, evening routine of reading in bed was also pulled away into motherly guilt.

I felt angry about it. Feel angry about it.

Why do we, especially as mothers, always put ourselves last? Even when we know better? Know that we need to put our own oxygen masks on first?? Damn those oxygen mask analogies. Seriously. Fuck.

I wondered if maybe Slowness is actually only for the privileged.

Was I an ignorant privileged twat all these years, rattling on about the benefits of Slowness? This thought has consumed my drives to and fro from this second job for weeks now.

Who gives a fuck about Slow Living if you have to be at work by 7:15 in the morning and no one in the goddamn house has clean underwear? How the hell is slowness gonna help me with that one??

Do you need money to live Slow? Was that why we managed? Because I’ve been blessed to have a business and a husband? God, this is the shits.

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This and more has been running ragged through my head these past months.

The self-doubt and grief have been, at times, unbearable. Grief at the loss of a life I’d planned, and then, on top of it - proper grief of a tragic loss. It has been a shitty year, there is no way round it.

But then again, there is always something to be gleaned. Our gifts are always wrapped up in our greatest challenges, are they not?

And there, quietly, humbly, sneaks in Slowness. And I know I have not been lost, or crazy. Mostly.

Because Slowness all these years hasn’t been about toxic positivity. It has been about learning to be present and alive to all seasons of my life, not just the beautiful ones. Even the drudgery, even the too much, the too fast, the unasked for and unwanted. Even the grief that brings me to my knees.

Why would this be any different?

And so, maybe, I haven’t been thrown so far off course after all.

Maybe Slowness isn’t a path we walk. Maybe it is a clear bright pebble we carry in our pockets. Small and smooth, oft times forgotten, to be found by wandering fingers, absently, sleeping cool and quiet amongst the lint and lost hair ties and detritus of motherhood.

It was with me all along.

And, maybe, this journey is simply another chance to learn. To practice. To attune my being to the voice of the universe, to my own voice, the one that whispers quietly on the cusp of sleep.

To read my body like a book, whose words I know by heart, but upon re-reading offers something new; some shock or delight as yet undiscovered, despite the dog ears, despite the chicken scratch in the margins, guiding the way.

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I have learned that Slowness is more difficult when we’re in survival-mode, and that this is - paradoxically, annoyingly - exactly when we need it most.

And maybe that’s ok.

What if, instead of feeling like failures or flawed, we simply allowed ourselves to enter these spaces of difficulty with curiosity?

What if these experiences are simply information?

I walk into my office and I feel proud that I’ve done it. Proud that I took a leap in service to my family’s greater goals. Proud that I stepped outside of my comfort zone. Proud that I am making the most of my time there. Proud that I have not let it diminish me or my larger intentions.

I have learned how to hold two things at once, to make space for effort and achievement while also being able to look the world in the face and say -

Yes, this is good, and it will be good for now. But I’m not going that way.

I’m not going that way.

Clarity. Direction. Purpose. These are all gifts of Slow.

Gifts from over a decade of practice, of falling down and getting back up. Of making do, of finding a way, of listening to the whispers of my heart.

I walk into my shop or sit down at my writing desk and my body simultaneously relaxes and shouts with delight. THIS is what I am meant to do. THIS is my highest calling.

But I don’t have a destination. YOU don’t have to have a destination, either. You don’t have to have some grand purpose for your life. Our lives can mean anything we want them to.

And so, if you, too, find your life wanting, find yourself wanting, lacking, coming up short, if your life feels too much, too fast . . . You are not alone. You are not failing.

Maybe these moments, these seasons where we feel off course are simply put in our path as reminders.

Reminders to savour moments like this, my feet in the cool, long, uncut grass in the shade of the maples. To watch the barn cats stalk the shadows on silent paws, where August berries are born on fragrant blooms. To relish in the temporality of things, the deliciously fleeting, fragile, temporary nature of our being.

To eat cherries by the handful, straight from the tree in early summer, our faces and fingers stained with joy. To revel in this scant window of time when they are just right, perfectly sweet and warm from the sun. To make no attempt to fight the birds who raid the treetops.

Don’t they, too, deserve a taste of this same deliciously temporary, overflowing joy?

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.