October slinking out like a wry cat, tip of the striped tail barely visible turning the corner. The 31st. A candy bonanza, and then on to the Big Holidays, the true cold – I could see my breath for the first time this morning in Pittsburgh – the nights that start at 5 pm, all the knits and the red cheeks.
For this final week of our October Reset, I want to focus on a new theme for this newsletter and for the winter: slow living.
What do I mean by that? It’s a bit faddish and ridiculous of a term, I know, and oh-so-American: defining something by what it should inherently be, in opposition to the way we’ve twisted it in our postmodern crazyworld. (“Real cheese!” advertised as a luxury on the bag of Cheetos.)
We are living so fast, often contrary to the basic needs of our bodies, communities, and hearts. Online, every day – swamped with information begging us to take action, to express the appropriate emotion, to react, to share, to engage, to educate ourselves further about this thing over here and that over there – and also in daily life, racing between work and school and activities and spending so much time in cars, on phones, inhaling eggs and sausages while scrambling through parking lots (me, last weekend, at a high school pool in suburban PA).
Some of this is inevitable, particularly at certain stages of life (e.g. thirties and forties with small children! 😅). But some of it just becomes so ingrained as a pattern and an ethic – many of us are descended, after all, from religious fanatics for whom dancing to Taylor Swift in one’s pajamas or reading a Wendell Berry essay mid-afternoon were dreadful and dangerous sins – that we just rush rush rush as a manner of course and shame.
So slow living is the practice and intention to release oneself from this – often unconscious – process, and to become more present and embodied; connected to local people and place; and in tune with natural rhythms, cycles, and longings. “Natural” here defined as connected to nature, but also as natural to oneself: growing out of one’s own unique personhood and needs.
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