the pace of life
What happened to simply ‘taking a break’? It’s as if there has to be a purpose to our slowing and stopping, when slowing and stopping should be the purpose in itself.
Sundays are supposed to be a day of rest but they are often a day of intense striving to get things done in our household. We’re doing a huge renovation job, new floors, new paint. What I’d really like to be doing is sitting on my sofa knitting and chrome-casting a good drama. But today I’ve been petrol-blowing leaves around my front garden, de-cluttering the house courtesy of Gum Tree, polishing wooden furniture, and feeding my husband periodically when comes up from laying the flooring planks.
Sundays have got the better of me sometimes. If I put too many things on my list and get overwhelmed, the result can be a meltdown.
‘I get a bit manic sometimes,’ I remarked recently at the dinner table.
‘We know!’ my daughter replied with heavy irony, rolling her eyes.
I’ve got to the age where I don’t really want to be dashing about achieving things. I don’t want to be renovating my house, buying more furniture (shouldn’t I have all the furniture I need by now?) or de-cluttering stuff I’ve unwittingly accumulated. I’d like to have it all sorted so I can stop.
If we’re having more of a light-on Sunday, I make a point of sitting down in the afternoon and knitting along to Downton Abbey. Truly my idea of a good time.
I look forward to retirement. If I hadn’t mucked up my working life and sacrificed a decade of superannuation contributions, I’d retire tomorrow. Instead I’m constantly thinking about what I can do as a side-hustle. As if I need more hustle!
When I stopped work to have my first baby, I spent the last two months of my pregnancy trying to ensure I had everything the books told me I needed and writing my three page birth plan. I enjoyed that pregnancy but I wish I had enjoyed it quietly, simply and in front of the television with some knitting and the cat.
After my daughter was born, we did something every day. Of course you have to do things or you’d go stir crazy but quite often I overdid it with things that didn’t feel that good. Like Baby Gym with all the hot mamas from inner-city Paddington. Such cliquey bitches they were.
When we moved to Tasmania, things slowed right down. Our life changed completely as we became preoccupied by things we’d never given any thought to before. What to buy at the latest farm auction (a garden bench and a Miele vacuum cleaner). Whether to keep chickens for meat as well as eggs (no, you can buy them ready made from a butcher and it’s much easier, you need four hours to kill, gut and pluck a chicken and the last thing you’ll feel like doing after that is cooking the bastard).
Over the years things picked up again, as I started micro-businesses and tried to earn an income while staying at home with the kids. Once more unto the breech and onto the lifelong roller-coaster of speeding up and slowing down and trying to get the pace right.
Sometimes I like being ill as I get to stay in bed reading and watching Downton Abbey, and having my meals brought to me on a tray. I loved lockdown. Apart from the terror of not knowing whether I’d get to see my parents again on the other side of the world, stepping off the roller coaster was rejuvenating.
Multi-tasking has a lot to answer for, and women’s liberation. The idea of women having it all has worked out better for men in the long run. They haven’t added much to the list of things they’re supposed to achieve, just parenting more attentively. There are more sensitive men now, but there are also the ones who endanger their spouses, as the recent data in Australia shows. Most men still get to work for a living while the rest of their life mostly rolls out in front of them, their bodies un-ravaged by childbirth, their children raised by a retainer, their weekends preserved for fishing and boating and mountain-walking, hopefully in the company of their family. (Sorry, cynical paragraph.)
But if your husband is like mine they pay you back bigtime by doing massive jobs around the house. Mine is on his hands and knees laying a click-together floor right now, and it’s harder than you’re told in the shop.
We could all live a bit more slowly if we still had household staff and I can see why people had them in the past. What I can’t understand is why we did away with them. I’d like a cook and a gardener and a lady’s maid, someone to put hot water bottles in my bed and lay out my evening wear for me.
I was watching a program once by an ex-SAS man who, like many of them, has unexpectedly found a new career as a television presenter. He was spending some time with a tribe in Borneo and went out with the men into the jungle to do some hunting. They spent the morning tracking their quarry and after a quick lunch of dried stuff and bugs found in a log, they had a nap together on a platform of branches and leaves.
Back here in civilization, we’ve lost the knack of such simple restorative habits. (Well, some of us have: it has to be said I’m a devotee of afternoon naps and have them on my sofa unashamedly.) But often we have to be reminded to slow down and it seems necessary to have something to do when we rest, like knitting, so we can call it ‘self-regulating’. What happened to simply ‘taking a break’? It’s as if there has to be a purpose to our slowing and stopping, when slowing and stopping should be the purpose in itself.
I spent some time self-regulating last year by watching Great Canal Journeys on SBS. Yes, I’m that pedestrian. I’ve always had a hankering to live on a canal-boat, in the same way I could live in a Tiny House (hours of YouTubing available there if you’re interested). Everything small, humble and cosy, neat and tidy, unless it’s the day when you’re emptying your composting toilet.
The later series of Great Canal Journeys was presented by Giles Brandreth and Sheila Hancock. He’s an ex-Etonian, ex-politician and ex-television presenter and can seem like a bit of a buffoon but he has wisdom to offer. In the space of one year, he told Sheila, he lost his father, brother, best friend and seat in Parliament. Two hundred thousand people came out to vote and tell him they didn’t want him. ‘That’s quite something’, he said.
To cope with the resulting downturn in his spirits, he saw the psychiatrist and television presenter Anthony Clare weekly for years and they devised a three-part plan to help Giles look after his mood. It was quite simple, he said. ‘Don’t resist change; cultivate a passion; and be happy.’
That last one seems simplistic but the idea is that you adopt it on the days when you feel able. It was the second point that made me think. Cultivate a passion.
What was my passion, I asked myself? I was puzzled that it didn’t come to me immediately. What was it: photography? Walking? I enjoyed them both but didn’t do them often enough for them to qualify as a passion. Finally it came to me: writing.
Writing. Sitting down at a keyboard and putting one word after another in ways that make sense and seem pleasing, perhaps even have musicality and give someone else a moment of joy, recognition or reflection. Even if it’s only myself, that’s fine. If I’m journaling to make sense of the world or make my way through a difficult time, that’s a worthy pursuit, validating and self-preserving. Moreover, women should document their lives because ours are still the lives often lived more quietly, internally, with love and in the service of others. My mother’s certainly was, and mine is.
The pace of my life now as I’m into the second half of a century is often on my mind. I don’t believe in a life of working for the man and aiming for retirement as a distant pleasure ground. I believe we should enjoy it all as much as possible, and if we have to work in jobs there’s no alternative to, we should be able to work for fewer days in the week.
We should be spending more time with our families and in our communities, not at work. Working days should end at three so we can all be at the school gates or in the dog parks. On our deathbeds we won’t be glad of certain emails we sent, we’ll be glad about the friends we kept or the children we had, the dogs and cats whose simple loving souls kept us company, and if we’re lucky the people we’ve loved.
To my utter astonishment, over the time when I stayed home and ran a business from there so I could be with my children, I accumulated enough skills to be sought after for a job I now do three days weekly and no more. The other two days are ostensibly for writing but in fact I write in odd moments of the day, usually before people are up. Mondays and Fridays are for my sanity. They are my slow days.
On Sunday we all strive to get stuff done, and on Monday I get the house to myself. It’s the day when I clear my head, do the ironing for my working week, tidy my desk and work through the detritus that gathers there, wash some sheets, shower and wash my hair for the week. And sit in front of the television with my knitting in the early afternoon. Am I alone in needing some calm and solitude to feel ready for the outer world? I don’t care. This is how I like it.
That’s Monday. Friday is for yoga. I read once years ago in Marie Claire (so it must be true) that the only form of exercise you will ever stick to is the one you enjoy. For me, it’s yoga and it has looked after my joints, my sanity, my chakras, my blood pressure, my whole self and my sense of worth for three decades.
It is the one thing in my week that I’m guaranteed to do slowly, breathing deeply, often lying prone, and sometimes with my eyes closed. Bliss, entirely and absolutely.
This is a bit of journaling that came to me in a slow moment. If you like it, please follow along! It’s FREE, unless you’d like to support my writing a bit more, in which case you can be a paid subscriber and you’ll get an exclusive post once monthly. Either way, I’d love to have you along.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article over breakfast.
I agree we all need to step back & take a break , take things a little slower .
Wish I could move to Tasmania & put it into practice 🤞😊
Thoroughly enjoyed this, as I’ve been embarking on my own journey to try to slow down!