Slow living in two parts: Inner Slow

Part 1: the difference between Inner and Outer Slow

(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. If you need or prefer to get your info via audio, I hope it’s helpful. Please note it is unedited, so includes life noises and word stumbles, and all sorts of stuff.)

“Slow living? Who has the time?”

This, or a version of it, is one of the most common pushbacks I hear about slow living.

Mindfulness, slow fashion, going plastic-free, meditation, self-care, community care, slow parenting, yoga, mending, decluttering, simplifying… When we look at the list of what slow living could and often does mean on social media, it’s a fair question. Who does have the time for all of those?

(Spoiler: No-one. No-one has the time for all of those at the same time. And if their books or newsletters or social media feeds or podcasts are making you think they do, then either you’re viewing them through the distorting lens of “everyone else has everything worked out” or they’re not being kind because they’re not being honest.)

The reality is that all these external efforts to live a slower life take time. Time we often don’t have as we try to navigate a world that is busy, overwhelming, full of noise and information and people telling us what to do, what to buy, how to live. We’re already worn thin and burnt out (recent research suggests that anywhere from 50-84% of employees are experiencing burnout in their current jobs) and adding “slow down” to our to-do list feels like a step too far. Maybe an entire marathon too far.

But I remembered something over the weekend, as I was trying to make a dent in the never-ending task of weeding our garden: slow living has two distinct parts to it.

The first part revolves around the creation of space; or how to slow down. How to create room, how to give ourselves the opportunity to stop, to move at a different pace, to find and defend margin in our lives. This is what I think of as “Inner Slow”.

The second part is what we can do with the space we create, aka “Outer Slow”. This is more about action; more about the changes we want to make that align with our version of slow living.

I used to rush almost exclusively towards the latter – gardening and second-hand shopping and meditating and mending and decluttering and slow cooking and plastic reducing and mindful travelling – because they were the external indicators of slow living; the things that made up the blogs I read, the IG posts I yearned to emulate. The people who did those things were living slowly, and I wanted to be one of them.

And there is nothing wrong with any of those things. Depending on the reasons why you want to slow down in the first place, these things may well be perfectly aligned with your values. The problem strikes when we don’t first create room in our lives for them.

Until we create space for those changes, and the benefits they bring, I don’t think slow living will ever feel entirely spacious or kind or gentle or sustainable. It will simply feel like another thing we need to do and eventually, will lead to burn out.

It’s probably the same reason that most New Year’s resolutions fail within a week or two. We usually neglect to create room for the very well-intentioned new habit, or to be realistic with what’s possible, and once the day-to-day commitments kick back in sometime later in January, we find ourselves with more things on our to-do list and less time to do them.

So, Inner Slow is about learning how to create space, time or energy and it often looks like a mixture of observing, reframing or removing. Some examples:

Observing:

• How much time we spend on our phone every day and how we feel during and after

• How we feel when we’re rushing around, trying to find shoes and lunchboxes and hair ties every morning

• The amount of time we spend tidying, cleaning and organising our stuff

• The change in self-worth after scrolling through TikTok or IG for a mindless hour 

• The sense of lightness we feel after going for a walk, or talking to a friend, or waving to a neighbour

• The way time feels slower some days

Reframing:

• The idea of success – what it looks like vs how it feels

• Enoughness – separating wants from needs, and shoulds from choose-tos

• Busyness – how many of the things we “have to do” in life are genuine needs and how many are arbitrary expectations set by ourselves or society?

• Self-care – recognising that caring for ourselves is the opposite of selfish. It’s the only way we can hope to show up long-term for the people/animals/causes/places we hold dear

• Rigid routines and unforgiving world views – replacing them with gentleness, rhythm, permission to grow and evolve

• Boundaries – learning how to create and honour them

Removing:

• The belief that we can do it all, all at the same time

• Unrealistic expectations of our homes, our bodies, our abilities, our faces, our relationships, our day to day existence, our strengths and our weaknesses

• Content that continuously peddles these unrealistic expectations

• Comparisons and the poor self-worth that comes with them

• Negative inputs like excessive news consumption, social media scrolling, comment-reading and spending time in spaces that drain you of your joy

• Guilt and shame from the conversation around self-care

Any one of these might represent genuine work, a lifetime’s work even, so please don’t see this as a flippant list of things you should be able to work through over the next week or month.

But even choosing one tiny change, like reducing the amount of time you spend reading news sites, for example, can make space in your life. Perhaps you use your phone’s in-built screen time app or install something like Forest or Freedom to reduce the time spent on those sites.

Maybe 15 minutes of the time you save could be spent talking to a friend, or meditating, or slowly sorting through the clutter in your kitchen junk drawer. Or maybe you don’t spent it at all, but instead use it as a buffer in the morning, where you subsequently find yourself leaving for work slightly less stressed that you used to. However you use it, just allow yourself to see it as a real, genuine shift towards a different way of living.

Because ultimately, slow living is not about the external indicators, nor is it about the pace at which we live. It’s not about achieving slowness for slowness’ sake. It’s about taking what we gain and using it to act differently, think differently, and live differently.

Next Friday I’ll share some thoughts on the second part of slow living – Outer Slow. That is, the things we might do as we gradually create space, time or energy in our lives.

It’s where we get into what I think of as the fun stuff, and I hope you come back to read about it.

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In the meantime, pop over to the Tortoise Chat for our Friday Community Confab where today we’re talking about hobbies.

Currently…

Working on a children’s book manuscript. I finished one last year which is out on submission and have been working on another couple for the past few months. There’s something really challenging and really beautiful about the brevity required of a kids’ book (most are only a few hundred words). Every word has to count and usually has to count for more than one. No clue if anything will come of my efforts, but man it’s nice to be stretching my creative muscles in a different direction.

Wondering what to do with all the green tomatoes in the garden? I don’t think they’re going to ripen this year (summer left her run a little late) so if you’ve got any suggestions, I’m all ears.

Wishing I was going to the Harry Styles concert next week.

Thinking about this quote from Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry:

“Being booked and busy is not a flex to me. Being relaxed and aligned and living in leisure with hobbies you don’t monetise is a flex to me. Y’all be proud of overworking and constant labour. It makes no sense.”

and this quote from Adam Grant:

“In toxic cultures, you have to burn out to earn a break. Time off is how you recover.
In decent cultures, you take a break when you’re low on gas. Time off is how you refuel.
In healthy cultures, you’re expected to take regular breaks. Time off is encouraged to sustain energy.”

As a society, we land way closer to toxic than we do decent, I think. And the idea of taking regular breaks – whether they’re needed or not – feels almost dangerous. Add to this the concept of leisure for leisure’s sake and even thinking about it, with all of my own learning and unlearning in play, I feel like we’re suggesting something forbidden and almost shameful.

It’s just interesting to me to observe my own responses and thoughts to words like these, even as someone who fully subscribes to them, and makes me realise there is so much more to explore as we continue to question how we live.

Reading this post by Jessica DeFino about the rise of the de-influencing trend. At first it seemed like a much-needed course correction for the frankly bonkers hyper-consumption that is being driven by the influencer-internet, but now de-influencing is more about, well, influencing. I’d like to think I’ve become immune to this kind of stuff, but in truth no-one is completely immune to the glossy ideals we’re being sold (even if it’s selling under the guise of not selling.)

Rediscovering this playlist I made when I was writing Care a couple of years ago. I went through a period where I couldn’t listen to any of these songs without bursting into tears, but I have obviously healed from that time because I played it over the weekend and remembered how much I love it. Hitting repeat on this Thelma Plum song and this Rural Alberta Advantage tune in particular (the drumming gets me in this song every time. Literal goosebumps and I don’t even know why).

Here’s to a wonderful weekend.

Take care,
Brooke xx