Do you feel like you’re failing at Slow Living?

“I used to be good at slow living.”

That was the first line in an email I received from a reader recently. It broke my heart.

The thing is – she isn’t alone. There are plenty of tales of Slow Living fails to be found on the interwebs.

As someone who’s worked to live a Slow Life for well over a decade now, I’m here to tell you – You’re not failing at Slow Living. You cannot fail at Slow Living.

(Have no idea what Slow Living is? No worries – my What is Slow Living (Plus 5 Things It’s Not) post breaks it all down)

Slow Living, as with anything that jumps the shark and moves into the mainstream, is having an identity crisis.

This shouldn’t be surprising, when some of the most influential personalities in the mix have been ‘doing’ slow living for as little as a year.

Couple that with the fact that these influencers also tend to be young, white, steeped in social media culture and relatively privileged  . . .

Well, you can see how easily things can get mixed up.

The notion of ‘self-care’ has gone through a similar transition. 

“Self-Care” started as something as simple and sane as – not trying to survive on less than four hours of sleep. Now it has morphed into something commercial that can be bought and sold.

Suddenly ‘self care’ sprouted strange and overly complicated rules with pseudo-religious rituals like turmeric lattes and those weird face roller thingys. It’s dominated by young, white, relatively privileged women with a very narrow life experience and a specific point of view. 

Check out my Hot Take on Self-Care from my Kitchen Sink Series podcast here.

The Slow Living movement is experiencing similar growing pains as it enters our collective line of sight.

This is to all of our detriment. 

To water down the notion of slowness, reduce it to a set of rules or an aesthetic or a narrow notion of what life should look like, drains it of its power to transform our lives, our families and the world at large.

This new notion and growing set of beliefs about what Slow Living ought to look like has become an unintentional form of gatekeeping. It quietly sends the message that Slow Living is just one, very specific way of being in the world.

That if your life doesn’t fit this very narrow mold – you are failing at Slow Living.

I’m here to tell you that’s rubbish.

Being Slow means doing everything at the correct speed: quickly, slowly or whatever pace works best. Slow means being present, living each moment fully, putting quality before quantity in everything from work and sex to food and parenting.

Carl Honoré

Are these ways of being – the linen ‘slow fashion’, homemade meals, fields of flowers and aesthetically pleasing laundry days wrong? Of course not.

In some ways, on some days, my slow life looks like that.

It ALSO looks like heaps of clean laundry piled on the living room couch with a dog fast asleep in the middle of it, long weekends with back-to-back-to-back soccer games, an entire house overwhelmed with veggie seedlings in springtime, frozen pizza on busy nights, escaped pigs, fighting kids and all the other stuff that is part of a NORMAL life. (K, maybe not the escaping pig part, but you get the idea.)

Sometimes, life is chaotic.

Some days, some weeks, some seasons, sometimes entire chapters of your life – it will be all you can do to make it through the day, to keep the lights on, to get out of bed each morning.

And if you only view Slowness through the narrow lens promoted on social media, one of the most valuable tools for dealing with times of chaos, overwhelm and stress wouldn’t be available to you.

My mum was diagnosed with cancer my kids were only 2 and 4 years old. I had only just dug myself out of a wicked bout of postpartum depression.

The farm was still young and demanded an ungodly amount of time, money and back-breaking work.

Not exactly the picture of ‘slowness’ you see on social media, right?

And yet, that was one of the Slowest periods of my life.

Because I wasn’t tied to Slowness needing to look a specific way, I was able to use it as a powerful tool to help myself and my family move through that horrific time with as much grace, courage and strength as we could muster.

• I already had practice saying NO. 
• I already had a simplified schedule for my kids. 
• I had cultivated a customer base of amazing humans based on relationships, not transactions. As a result, my customers became an integral part of my support system. They brought food and flowers and hugs of support.
• I knew the value of being present in the moment, no matter how difficult that moment was. That gave me the courage to spend as much time with my Mum as possible during her final days, despite how frightening it was.
• I had clear priorities and had already learned how to defend them without guilt. When my kids needed me to be present to guide them through their grief, even in my own grief, I was available for them, and attuned enough to them that I knew when they needed me.
• I took regular time for myself – to cry, to sit with my grief, to practice gratitude
• I was open to being vulnerable, even though it was uncomfortable. I remembered that asking for and accepting help is a gift to myself AS WELL AS the person helping.

If I was listening to the influencers, I’d have been failing at Slow Living during that time.

No where in there is there anything about Slow Fashion, Slow Food, hikes in scenic mountains, #vanlife, home decor, linen, pour-over coffee, tarot or any of the other trappings of the popular, narrow view of Slow Living.

CAN all those things have a place in your Slow Life? Sure, you bet!

But are they the be all, end all or even the main point? Nope. Not even close.

What IS the point of Slow Living, then, if it isn’t all these superficial, surface things?

• The point of Slow Living is to live our lives as well as possible, not as fast as possible.
• To be alive to our own life.
• To be present to the moment we find ourselves in instead of constantly being fixated on what’s next or where we’d rather be.
• It is about centring ourselves in our values and doing our best to honour them in our daily life.

There’s no magic formula. There is no right or wrong. There is no failing at Slow Living.

There is simply this moment. 

We can choose to spend it rushing from obligation to obligation, filling it with mindless, numbing distractions, endless busy work and other’s expectations or we can take a breath and turn our faces to the sun of our own life. 

It is always there. Waiting for you. Patient and unwavering.

Unclasp your hands. Unclench your jaw. Take a deep breath. Turn round. Soak it in.