The Wisdom of Chaos

on cultivating self-trust

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed. Notes and reflections from a decade + of life in the Slow Lane. If you’re ready to push back against busy to build a life of purpose and presence-over-perfection - please join me.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

I am late writing, again.

For the past month now, my days - days that used to be filled with writing and business and swimming and deep work - are suddenly not entirely my own. It has been a stormy season.

Do you, too, find yourself in a season of storms?

Of feeling as though someone or something else is steering your ship - fate, the news, the government, the economy or maybe just a toddler’s nap and nappy routine (undoubtedly the most demanding of the lot)?

Do you ever feel unmoored?

I dunno about you, but when I’m in the thick of it, I doubt everything. My values, my choices, my direction, myself.

Do you feel the panic bubbling up from your belly and into your chest? A heaviness in your lungs where the air ought to be; a zeppelin on fire?

Do you find yourself asking -

Will I still be able to do the things I’ve promised? What if I can’t make time for the things I know will keep me whole through the storm? Am I off-course completely? Will I ever regain my bearings? Is all the effort I’ve made to date lost, smashed to pieces on the rocks of some unknown and unwelcoming shore?

This is the part where I might say -

If we’re willing to sit with it, though, to allow the waves to crash over us, to breath, sometimes, if we’re lucky . . . something else emerges from the storm.

And that would be true. But let’s face it. There are days when I just want it to all be fucking over. When I want to light a match, or go back in time or maybe just smash every plate in the goddamn house.

And I wonder, if maybe, we ought to allow ourselves those moments.

I’m so damn tired of all the talk of ‘regulating emotions’ of late. Sometimes, I don’t want to take a goddamn deep breath. Sometimes, you need to feel them. Need to scream and yell and break some shit. Or ugly-cry your face off, then eat a whole bar of dark chocolate, the expensive kind.

A few days after I got the news of our big changes, I cried so hard while picking my kid up from her sports holiday party that the poor coach has barely been able to look me in the eye since. Pretending that we don’t feel like this sometimes doesn’t help anyone. We can acknowledge the truth of the situation - even when it seriously fucking sucks - and also strive to do the lemons / lemonade schtick, even if we don’t really feel like it.

(Spoiler - I don’t, and I am.)

If we have done the work slowness calls us to do, we can catch our breath, calm our racing hearts and remember - slowness has prepared us for this.

Even if our ship is blown off course, we will remember the compass in our pocket. We will recall that we packed nourishment to sustain us in moments just like this one. That our muscles are strong from purposeful effort in calmer seas.

I was listening to the Tim Ferris podcast yesterday. He interviewed one of my favourite thinkers in the slow space, the author of Essentialism, Greg McKeown. It’s a great listen, you can find the podcast here. ( All of Greg’s writing is fantastic; I re-read Essentialism once a year and always find something new to take away. )

In the conversation, Greg talks about research that has shown that if you take people into the woods and tell them to walk a straight line, if they don’t have something in the distance to use as a point of reference, they will invariably walk in circles without even knowing it.

What I’ve remembered as I move through this particular stormy season of my life is that Slowness has given me the tools to create that point of reference.

So even though the seas are rough and my boat doesn’t feel up to the task, I can lift my eyes to the sky in search of my North Star.

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So, how can we use slowness to orientate ourselves during times of chaos?

We go back to the beginning. Back to what we know to be true. Back to our North Star.

Not surprisingly (and this, I think, is the true gift chaos brings to our lives) many of us discover we need the storm to find it. Without the bracing cold of the wind and shock of a good shake up, we find it too difficult to cut to the quick, to tell ourselves the truth.

When we are buried in the busy of the everyday, it’s easy to get lost in the undisciplined pursuit of more. To be pulled in every direction by the needs and wants of others, to allow the non-essential to crowd out what matters most.

What if, though, it is the moments of disorientation that allow us to find our feet? What if a tidal wave of self-doubt is exactly what we needed to finally learn to trust ourselves?

What if a stormy season is precisely the setting we needed to properly apply the Hell Yeah! test?

( For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Hell Yeah! test is a highly scientific means of determining whether any given situation should warrant a yea or nay in your life. Essentially, if something isn’t an enthusiastic Hell YEAH! it’s a hard NO. )

Having a contrast to my usual daily life has proven a powerful tool for clarity. It makes me wonder if sometimes we are asked to walk a difficult path in order to be able to see our proper path with fresh eyes.

Now, when I walk into my farm shop or carve out time to curl up at my writing desk with a hot cappuccino, I feel it in my bones. Every cell of my body simultaneously both relaxes and positively shouts - YES!! This is it. THIS is the good stuff.

This weekend, I hugged my favourite farm customers just a little bit tighter, a little bit longer. Gave thanks for this strange and beautiful life. For the honour of bearing witness to their lives unfolding in this raw, real and vulnerable way that so few of us are blessed with in this age of bullshit ‘connection’. I am so freaking grateful to know each and every one of them.

Maybe we’re gifted these detours of difficulty in order to return to our true path with fuller hearts, more gratitude, a sense of urgency to trust ourselves - we know the way. These stupid moments of suckiness encourage us to ask more beautiful questions of ourselves and our lives.

Find your more beautiful questions.

Ask yourself -

• What’s my highest point of contribution?

• How can I continue to move towards my North Star, even if that movement looks or feels different than I had hoped or planned?

• If I have to sit still a moment, how can I continue to include elements of my North Star into my daily life, to keep me company while I wait?

• What is this moment trying to teach me? What information can I gather from this experience that might provide clarity, insight or direction when I emerge from the storm?

• How can I encourage my tender spaces and soften into them through this challenge? How can I avoid becoming hardened by my hardship?

• Conversely, what places can I fortify and strengthen for the better with this gift of stress?

Sometimes the answers to these questions appear to turn us back the way we came. My current situation might, from the outside, look like a step backwards. But because I am clear on what matters - my family and our bigger purpose of a slow, grounded life - I am able to reframe an unasked-for change in a more useful way.

Instead of viewing my recent changes as a setback, I (am trying to) think of it like pulling into a siding on the railway tracks when someone has pulled a switch.

When those lines switch, it’s no longer an option to continue on your current track. You don’t get to do the choosing. But you are still moving forward, using the best or perhaps only route available to you in that moment.

A siding, in rail terminology, is a low-speed track section distinct from a running line or through route such as a main line, branch line, or spur. It may connect to through track or to other sidings at either end. Sidings often have lighter rails, meant for lower speed or less heavy traffic, and few, if any, signals.

My highest point of contribution to my family in this time of change is to move along that siding, even though it’s a track I haven’t chosen, in order to continue to move us towards our shared North Star.

How might your feelings about your own stormy seas shift if you recognized them as a necessary part of the path to your life’s purpose?

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As always, the road less travelled secrets gifts for those willing to foray into the unknown.

But only if we are willing.

For me, the self-doubt that dislodged during this recent shake up caught me unaware, like something falling on my head from a height. I felt dizzy and disoriented and dumbfounded as to what the heck had just happened and why, why on earth did this have to happen, and why NOW??

The thing that has kept me going, the star in the distance that has kept my direction clear and true, has been the fact that I know, deep in my belly, that this mess has a purpose. That there is a lesson on offer, if I’m willing to endure what is required to receive it.

I’m not religious, so instead I often turn to poetry as grounding tenents. One of my favourites is the poem Desiderata by Max Ehrmann :

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

And that is my mantra. No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Every time I’ve been asked to endure hardship, whether life-shattering or merely the banal difficulties of daily life, it has been a gift. Even when the sky fell. Even as I lay in my mother’s hospice bed, holding her frail and fading body; that, too, was a gift. The value of each gift was tied irrevocably to the cost demanded.

Why should this be any different?

And so, as dark as that seems, that is where I lay my trust.

Trust that the universe is unfolding as it should. That the most difficult moments contain life’s greatest gifts.

If we choose to believe that we are, as Rumi says, the universe in ecstatic motion, and we choose to trust the universe - then must we not also, necessarily, trust ourselves?

And so this is where a lifetime of slowness has delivered me.

On the front stoop of a difficult year ahead, practicing acceptance of the unknown. Embracing uncertainty. Steering my boat into the wind and towards my star. Determined to trust both the universe and myself. Despite my doubt. Despite my fear.

The obstacle is the way. The universe is unfolding as it should. You ARE the universe in ecstatic motion.

Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. - Rumi

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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.

Are you ready to build a life - and a living - you actually love?

I help rebellious solopreneurs and creatives build businesses rooted in Slow Values. If you’re ready to step into your own Slow Life and finally claim your calling, let’s chat!