Welcome to Episode 12 of The Tortoise, the podcast (plodcast!) that digs deep into the possibilities of slow.
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The Topic: Curveballs
You know the feeling. Life is motoring on in roughly the way you expected it to, you’ve got plans, you’ve got goals and then — BAM — a curveball gets whacked your way. Suddenly the plans, the goals, the vague idea of what we thought life would look like are shaken.
Sometimes these unexpected challenges or out-of-the-blue hard turns are health-related, sometimes they’re attached to our career, our relationships, our families or our circumstances. And as much as we think we’re prepared for any eventuality, the curveball is, by definition, something we weren’t expecting.
Today, Ben and I dive deep into curveballs — what they are and what they aren’t — while also looking at what slow living offers us by way of tools and stategies for dealing with them.
In this conversation we explore:
our definition of a curveball
examples of some we’ve faced ourselves over the past few months
the role that simply noticing — our emotions, our stories, our egos — can play in accepting and moving forward once we face an unexpected challenge
“feeling our feelings” as the first step in moving on from a curveball, and why there are many different ways to do that
how acceptance of what is can help us to move forward and why it’s such a difficult thing to achieve
the rising movement of Stoicism and concerns about the difference between being stoic and spiritual bypassing
two different ways of using perspective to reframe our curveballs over time
the role of gratitude in moving on from an abrupt life change, and why we can’t always rush straight to it
how I use writing to both process my feelings and plot a way forward once I’ve been dealt a curveball
why that approach won’t work for everyone
In light of my current curveballs, this episode was really helpful in framing some of the ways I’ve managed to navigate uncertainty, but also reminded me that it is a process. Being knocked sideways by a curveball isn’t a failure, it’s just what life does sometimes.
I’m really glad to go through that process armed with a few tools I picked up on my slow living journey. Things like mindfulness, meditation, practising acceptance, gratitude, 10,000-foot view thinking and tiny little detail thinking, letting go of expectations and focusing on small steps have all made up part of my slow living experiences and they’re all proving to be useful as I navigate this period of uncertainty (and I’m sure, many more).
If you have any tools that help you move through periods of uncertainty, please feel free to share them. It’s always so helpful to learn from the collective wisdom here.
The Links
Below is a list of links discussed in today’s episode. If I’ve forgotten any, please let me know in the comments:
Subscribe to the podcast in your favourite app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc)
Thanks so much for tuning in. I’m still on leave as I recover from surgery so will not be as active in comments as normal. I will get to them as I can, so please feel free to keep to conversation going and I’ll be back on deck soon.
Brooke 💚💚
Curveballs: Episode 12