Going fast to go slow

and sharing an excerpt from CARE

A huge part of slow living for me is embracing the ebb and flow of life’s busy-ness. Sometimes I live slow in order to live fast. Sometimes I live fast so I can then live slow. (And much of the time it’s a messy tango between the two). What this looks like in real terms might be a thousand different things.

Going fast: front-loading my work week so I have a buffer of time and energy on Thursday and Friday; making double batches of dinner and freezing half for a night where Future Brooke will say thank you; or a weekly WIP meeting with Ben every Monday morning so we can plot our work commitments and plan meals/errands/admin for the week ahead.

Going slow: taking a 20-minute nap when my body tells me to rest; prioritising an in-bed coffee chat with Ben one morning a week; a snails-pace barefoot bushwalk; or a weekend off-grid camping.

Another way I dance this messy tango (and I’d argue it’s one of the most important parts of the dance) is by trying to take the kids’ school holidays off. That means that this time every year I work really hard so I can wrap up work by the time they finish school and take as much of the holidays and January offline as possible. It’s the ultimate in ‘go fast to go slow’ and something I hold dear. (It’s also something I don’t take for granted. I know we’re incredibly fortunate for this to be an option.)

I still plan on doing that this year, though for a while there I wasn’t sure it would happen. When I recently learnt that CARE is being published in the UK early next year (Jan 5, 2023!) and North America not long after (Feb 7, 2023!) I was so thrilled to have a chance at getting this all-too-relevant book out into more parts of the world. But I have to admit, I also found myself stressed, wondering whether I should abandon my plans to go offline during the school holidays to support the book’s UK launch, or stick to my down-time intentions and potentially forego opportunities to get CARE in front of more people.

I realised earlier this week, however, that it doesn’t have to be an either/or choice. I just need to think creatively, go fast to go slow, and trust that the message of CARE will meet readers where they are.

When I set out to write CARE, I thought the practical ideas within it – finding connection, learning how to play, embracing creativity, practising rest – would help people navigate the pandemic; offering us ways to connect, commune and feel supported from within and without. What I didn’t realise is that it would become even more relevant nearly two years later, as we collectively move through the exhaustion and emotional aftermath of the past few years.

Small Care, the core idea of the book, offers us a gentle way forward. It’s the superpower we all possess and the thing I believe can change the world. (Yes, really!) Small Care is the gift I’m offering you (and me) as we make our way into a new year.

Starting today, and then every week between now and the end of January, I’ll be sharing large excerpts of CARE right here.

Today I’m sharing the introduction in almost its entirety, because I want you to know what I mean when I talk about Small Care. I want you to know why this book exists. I want you to feel my marrow-deep conviction that even the tiniest act of care casts ripples into the world. I want you to know there are always ways we can show up – for ourselves, for our people, for our communities – and that every single one of them matters.

So, grab yourself a cuppa and enjoy the first excerpt from CARE: The radical art of taking time. And if you think you know someone who might enjoy it, please feel free to share this post with them, or find out where to purchase/pre-order a copy of the book here.

Have you ever wondered where the days go once we live them?

When moments have turned into memories and stories and the slowly expanding growth rings of trees? Does time simply disintegrate, like ash on the wind? Does it live on in the smile lines around our eyes, the photos on our fridge, the lessons learnt and forgotten and relearnt?

Can we harness time? Can we expand and fill it as we choose? Or is it fixed and rigid?

I think time is a wonderful, infuriating, gelatinous thing that constantly shifts and morphs. Some moments seem to stretch out far beyond the seconds they inhabit, while others escape through our fingers no matter how tightly we try to hold them.

How else can we explain why some days slip swiftly by, while others are a slow-moving parade of moments that surely add up to more than twenty-four hours? How can some years leave us with hardly a memory and others leave everything transformed in their slow, boiling wake?

2020 was like that. One day everything felt normal, status quo in place (for better or worse) and, in the space of a few weeks, everything changed. It was the year time played tricks on us, when months seemed to last years while the year was somehow both the longest and shortest in memory.

2020 was the year our hearts broke. The year of kindness. The year of uncertainty. The year we craved each other. The year we hunkered down. The year of Zoom. The year of pause. The year of frustration. The year of hope. The year of sadness. The year we learnt the real value of a hug.

It was also the year I discovered I cared too much. And the year I discovered I didn't care enough.

“Care”. As far as words go, it’s a relatively simple one, isn’t it?

When we read it, maybe it conjures an image of a gardener tending their vegetable patch, a parent hugging a child, a nurse caring for a patient. Comforting, simple and wholesome. Dig a little deeper though, start to look at the multitude of ways we use the word ‘care' in our lives, and suddenly it's quite a complicated little four-letter word, one that we have a complex relationship with.

Care is both something we can have (noun) and something we can do (verb). It can mean love, compassion, empathy, tenderness, accuracy, attention, responsibility, caution, stewardship, maintenance, repair, watchfulness and assistance. We care when we show up for people (Let me care for you) and withhold it to shut people out (I don't care about that). We harness it to fight for causes we believe in (She cares passionately about this) and deploy it as a defence mechanism to protect our vulnerabilities (I couldn't care less what he thinks of me). We can give it, deny it, guard it, offer it freely, mete it out frugally, remove it without warning and devote ourselves to it. It's also a biological trait of every human being and sits at the evolutionary centre of our survival.

Even Charles Darwin (yes, the father of the survival of the fittest theory) hypothesised that the species with the highest levels of sympathy and care built into their social structure would be the most likely to survive and thrive in a brutal world.

In spite of this, 'I don't care', or one of its variations, is a response many of us give in the course of a normal day. Not, I believe, because of a lack of decency in the modern world, but because our hard-wired need to care didn't evolve in today's world. A modern world that is full and noisy and busy and ripe with endless opportunities to care about virtually anything.

Mere decades ago, our spheres of care were mostly limited to what was happening in our own communities or what we were shown on the nightly news. Now our devices feed us a steady diet of information, much of it simultaneously troubling and worthy of our attention.

We hear terrible news; we see vitriol and prejudice writ large on our social-media timelines. We see our planet suffering, our fellow human beings divided along an increasing number of lines, while callousness and judgement and disunity dominate the conversation.

Our ability to care is not limitless, our energy not infinite and, to put it plainly, we're exhausted. But because we're wired to, we try to care-even when it hurts. We care about the suffering of others, we care about the destruction of place, we care about injustice. And you know what? I think this capacity of ours to care is the superpower that will help us change the world.

Now, before you roll your eyes at the over-the-top grandiosity of that statement (and I'd understand if you did), let me add this—while yes, I believe that care is at the heart of changing the world, there are many, many ways of going about it and not all of them need to be big.

Like a lot of people, I spent the better part of 2020 caring hard. About the Covid pandemic, the climate crisis, racial injustice and social inequality. I gave almost all my attention, all my energy, all my care to reading and learning about these things, forming opinions about them, thinking about obstacles and solutions and actions at ungodly hours of the night. It seemed like every conversation, every interaction I had was seen through the lens of these enormous problems, and for a while, it felt good to care so much about them. It felt human.

But over time, the lens became grimy with frustration and anger, and I found I could no longer see clearly. I think I got tired. So tired, that one morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I was physically, mentally and emotionally spent and I found myself numb to most of the things that had previously brought me joy. I stopped writing, I stopped gardening, I stopped reading, I stopped working altogether. I had no desire to connect, no desire to care. I retreated inward to escape the exhaustion. I didn't want to matter and I didn't want anything else to matter because, seemingly overnight, it had all begun to hurt – too much.

I realise now that I had slipped into the trap so many of us do and fallen headfirst into what I call Big Care - caring almost solely about those complex, global problems that dominate the headlines. At the time, though, it felt like I had suddenly stopped caring, and that was frightening.

I've since come to believe that we each have a personal spectrum of caring. It's not used to rank things as more or less worthy of our care, but to identify the different kinds of care that exist in our lives. On one end is Big Care: those expansive, global issues such as politics and environmental crises. On the other is self-care: our physical and mental health, mindfulness and self-talk.

Both ends of the spectrum - as well as all the things in between - are valid and crucial, but I have a theory that much of what we experience as blind outrage or numbness or bone-deep emotional exhaustion in our modern lives actually comes from an imbalance in how we care.

When we focus solely on Big Care we can become obsessive and overwhelmed, caught in a pattern of doom-scrolling and anger, and as a result lose sight of smaller, powerful, more accessible acts of care. Similarly, if we live exclusively in the realm of self-care, we risk becoming self-indulgent, sheltered and caught up in ever-shifting wellness trends without enjoying the wider benefits of community care. Living solely at either end of the spectrum can be exhausting and limiting in equal measure and will impact our health, relationships, self-esteem, families, communities and work.

Enter, Small Care.

It can be found somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and is something I discovered in 2020, totally by accident, at a time when I felt completely wrung out by the world.

I first noticed it in inconsequential actions like stopping to feel spring's first warm breeze on my face, cutting a bunch of flowers for my mum, smiling at a stranger, stargazing with my kids or picking up litter at the beach. Each tiny act was a choice to care, but to care in a way that left me feeling uplifted, buoyed somehow and part of something larger than myself. I didn't find these acts of care exhausting. I found them life-affirming.

Gradually, these small, outwardly trivial acts became a daily practice that helped me to heal, to reconnect, to find peace in a noisy world, to strengthen my relationships, to rebalance the scales in my own life, while also sending ripples of kindness into my relationships, my family, my community.

By practising Small Care I was able to find my way back to a wobbly kind of equilibrium, and in doing so discovered just how powerful these tiny acts can be.

None of which is to say that Big Care is unimportant. Far from it, so please don't mistake any of this for cynicism or laziness. If we're going to fix the big issues, we need good people - people like you and me - to care about them and to care enough to work towards change. But we can't only care about these big, world-sized issues. If we ignore our own health and wellbeing and the relationships and communities that weave together to make a life, then we will see the foundation of our personal world crumble. It's simply not possible to engage in long-term world-changing if we are sick, lonely, disconnected, without wonder or curiosity or kindness or joy. There's no point having the most loving, generous heart if you're too fatigued to use it and, my friend, let me tell you, the world needs your heart.

Typically, this might lead us into a discussion of the importance of self-care. And while I think self-care is a vital part of living well, I don't think it's the only part. Yes, it's a soothing, necessary balm for the scrapes and scars we acquire living in a hard-edged world and if that's what you need right now then know this: you are worthy of self-care and no, it isn't selfish. But if you find yourself in a place where self-care feels stressful or inaccessible or a personal responsibility that is too much to bear, that's okay too. That's less a reflection of you and more a reflection on the present-day, capitalist version of self-care we're currently being sold.

To illustrate, let me share a story.

When I was a teenager, I used to wear a silver ring on my right thumb. It was a little too big, very shiny and stamped with the symbol for anarchy - a red paint-slash 'A' inside a circle. I bought it from a stall at a market in Sydney selling mass-produced crap, where you could find rip-off versions of pretty much anything you wanted -'Luis Vitton' bags, 'adihash' tracksuits, 'Pogo Ralph Laruen’ T-shirts.

I bought that ring not because I was a budding anarchist (at fourteen years old I couldn't have explained to you what that meant) but because I'd seen someone else at school wearing one and thought it looked cool. I thought that by wearing one, I would look cool too. As a now late-thirty-something year-old, the irony is not lost on me. The symbol of a stridently counter-cultural movement being mass-produced, stripped of its meaning and sold to a clueless teenager who really just wanted to fit in? It's funny, and a fairly common tale, because as long as there have been counter-cultural movements there has been the bastardisation of them.

If there's even a whiff of profitability attached to these movements, there have been people trying to profit from them, while simultaneously diluting them - making them more palatable and infinitely more marketable. Jazz music, hippies, hip-hop, punks, van-lifers, tiny houses, slow living: all counter-cultural movements, all with their roots in honest attempts to redefine freedom or success or joy or expression or community. All of them were first ignored by the mainstream, then openly derided, then grudgingly accepted and eventually even applauded, before the originators were shuffled aside, the Mad Men brought in and the question asked-how can we package this up and sell it back to the public in a neater, more lucrative way?

It's in this shuffle that the guts and heart of these movements are often lost or adulterated beyond recognition, the essence of what made them good and real and attractive stripped away to fit in the mainstream.

Self-care has suffered the same fate. A movement that began with the desire of medical professionals to provide institutionalised patients some measure of independence by teaching them skills such as personal grooming and exercise (i.e. learning to care for themselves) has become a commodified shadow of its original form.

After the term was coined by doctors in the 1950s, self-care was adopted by the civil rights movement in the United States in the late 1960s and became one of the key tenets of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s as they fought for equality in health care for Black communities, which are historically underserved in healthcare and social services.

Self-care was rebooted by medical professionals in the early 2000s as PTSD diagnoses were on the rise in a post 9/11 world and offered as a complementary form of self-guided therapy for those suffering from work-related trauma. In today's world, self-care is still a technical term used by doctors to encourage us to care for ourselves in four key areas-our mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual health - by focusing on things such as nutrition, sleep, mindset, exercise and improving general wellbeing. In reality though, the term is used far more broadly and often for commercial ends.

The global self-care industry has well and truly boomed, with an estimated value of nearly half a trillion dollars. When people talk about self-care today, it's more likely than not that they mean products and services - face masks, yoga retreats, meditation app subscriptions and home-delivered liver-cleansing regimes - rather than the intentional practice of taking care of their whole self. In fact, at least based on many of the millions of #selfcare social-media posts, it appears that to practise self-care (and presumably achieve wellness) we need to start by being affluent and already well.

If you've spent any time in the Instagram self-care/wellness sphere over the past few years, you've no doubt come across this quote from poet and activist Audre Lorde's 1988 book A Burst of Light: 'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.' The modern self-care conversation seems to have focused more on the first half of this quote rather than the 'act of political warfare', hearing the words as a clarion call to guilt-free pampering, rather than to the necessary, self-driven, internal support required by people who are bone-tired from fighting for equality.

Now, I understand that we live in a capitalist society, but why does self-care suddenly require us to buy things in order to take part? And why are so many of those things making us feel a bit shit about ourselves at the same time? (Take time for you, girl. You deserve it. Here's a $39 sheet mask that will help you unwind after a tough week and will shrink those large pores. Win-win!)

There's no doubt that self-care, in its truest form, is vital to each of us. If we're exhausted or worn down or all cared out, it's important to give ourselves the opportunity to recharge, and taking time to care for yourself is a very powerful way of doing that. It's just that so much of what passes as self-care now is inaccessible or makes us feel like we're not good enough.

The kind of care I'm exploring in this book is not the Big kind, nor is it solely the self-focused kind. It's respectively smaller and more expansive than either of them. It's gentler, closer and more accessible. It's the yin to Big Care's yang, and the pepper to self-care's salt. I'm talking about care that is small, slow and sustainable but also surprisingly powerful.

This book, at its heart, is about the hundreds of acts of Small Care that are available to every one of us, every day, regardless of our circumstances, geography, income, physical or mental health, abilities or disabilities. It's about the many faces of care and why some of its most transformative effects come when we simply take a little time. When we connect, are kind, find awe in the world, spend time in nature, rediscover play, create, heal and even do nothing at all, we are caring.

I have a firm belief that by learning how to weave these acts into our daily lives, we will discover the key to unlocking the door between our close, personal lives and the world at large. And, by extension, discover how those small, personal acts of care can be acts of care for the world too.

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If you already have a copy of Care, thank you! I can’t tell you what it means every time I see it out in the world, or every time someone sends me a message about the impact it’s had on them. It’s about the best thing I could have hoped for during the long days of writing.

I’ll swing by again on Friday to wish you all a happy holiday season and open up one final Friday Confab in chat, before heading offline for a while.

Until then, please consider subscribing to The Tortoise so you don’t miss any of the excerpts I’ll be sharing over the coming weeks, or if you have the means, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Both options support my work (thank you!) and allow me to keep doing things like sharing big chunks of my book with as many people as possible.

Take good care,
Brooke xx

I’m currently…

Listening to the entire back catalogue of ALO. Zach Gill’s music makes me so happy.

Getting ready to go to our son’s final primary school assembly. I will then officially have two high schoolers in the house and can’t quite believe time has gone this fast.

Waiting patiently for our plums to ripen. The tree is heaving and I have a plum jam recipe I can’t wait to try.

Wondering if it will ever feel like summer?

Planning Christmas menus.