I am a very passionate person. A force some would say. I am loud and all smiles and have deep convictions. My mother would say I am a zealot and my father would say he raised me to be strong. Intense is another word. This means I have an extreme work ethic and High morals. That
my standards are to shoot for the moon always and to dream really really big dreams. As a athlete and ballet dancer growing up I would sign my name with the caveat “striving to be my best” under it. At under 40 years old my knee’s are testament to how intense I can be. cracking. But as I had two babies in under 2 years and finished my certifications in life style coaching at the same time, I became intensely passionate about another subject. Ease. Rest. Slowness. For lack of a better vocabulary, I say it was the pursuit of Extravagant Indulgence for a better pace.
I was feeling thin. A quote from Lord of the rings comes to mind… “Like butter scraped across too much bread.” My pace of life was not frantic. In fact many would envy it truly but I was at that point. The feelings of my normal life speeding up at an unreasonable level. We rush so so much in our time. We assume our natural pace is noice, busyness, screens, commuting, and over stimulation. It was in this place that my soul found itself. My soul felt deep exhaustion and even sadness. I would get mad at myself for these feelings because I wasn’t dealing with
deep trauma, extreme illness or devastating loss. So what was it?
John Eldredge sums it up best: “The pace of life, the lack of any transitions and the state of always being plugged into our
phones and technology reduces our living to one continuous experience of being “on”. That’ll wipe you out for sure.”
This was it. I was the chronic situation and everywhere I looked it was an epidemic. I remember my mother going through a season like this when I was young. We would come home from playing and she would be sitting in the dinning chair flip through mail magazines without really looking at it. I wondered then but don’t anymore. Life’s Chronic Pace gets us all at some point and it doesn’t matter what age you live in. We expect immediate coffee. Immediate text responses. Immediate take-out and 24 hour delivery. our micro waves give us immediate food and our TV immediate entertainment. Our cars take us places faster and we get mad if traffic holds us back from a faster time. With all this incredible speed we also expect us to be Immediate in everything we do and we are loosing the art of process, transition, and slowness. and in this we are also starving our very souls. We are eternal beings and so time was never suppose to be a punishment but rather a gift. How do I make it a gift again? By being present and demanding space to go slower.
So in search for something different to feed my soul the way God intended I started looking back at different time periods and different ways of doing things. Things that would give me Divine kindness and space to transition slower from one thing to the next. Space to breath.
Now I do not need more on my to do list at this point and a list of “12 practices to find inner calm” was not what I was after but I did want to feel slowness and I did want to pause more. I am not a NY bestselling author that can live like the amish for 2 months without a blip to my family or budget. I am not retired and able to take weeks in the Rockies to hike and connect back to nature and pay for nannies to tutor my kids. And my book list is already longer than I live.
So what do we “mere mortals” do when we find ourselves in the space where life’s chronic disappoints start to chip away too much at ourselves? Yet we have zero money or resources to catch a breath? How do we recover without breaking the bank or leaving our family in the dust?
I recently read a book on a new fad called slow food. Where things are prepared from scratch and from fresher sources. Interesting I thought… then the sourdough bread craze happened. ALL over the internet suburban women + men started making their own bread. Which if you do not know takes 12-24 hours to make! Slower.
The biggest Netflix $$ making shows right now? Period pieces of a time long gone. A different pace at life. A different way of running. Slower.
Golf club memberships have wait lists out the door to become members. It takes 5 hours for one round of golf. Slower.
Chess. A game one looked on for retired on the smart lifestyles off the rich and famous has seen a big surge since 2020 and is now played by more age brackets than ever before. Slower.
Households in the U.S. spent more than $3890 in gardening in 2023. Thats a 20090 increase year over year. Slower…
It doesn’t matter what you choose I realized. It was that you find something to slow yourself down enough so that you could see, hear, and experience more of the wholeness of life not just the frantic parts. What activities do this for me? NOT something else on my to DO, Must Do but that truly bring me back to myself.
What things take away/extract and leave me feeling “thin”. Can I eliminate some?
What can I realistically do to give me grace and space to transition from one thing or season to another? I created my own ideas over time. I have shared some at them at the bottom of this blog post but the most important thing is that you know yours. We live in a world with extreme conveniences. May we use them to benefit and not destroy!
- Tea Time
- A whole cup of coffee w/ zero interruptions
- Watering my garden
- Journaling for 20 min solid
- Hammock + a book
- phone call w/o doing anything in the backgroundWalk my DOGS
- Star gazing
- Horses
- Bread Making
- Cross Stitching
- One task at a time
- A weekend Getaway – once a year
- Bubble bath
- Candles
Creating Exceptional 