S3 E70: Embracing Slowness Instead of Urgency
The idea of slowness can be hard to embrace when there are so many outside factors encouraging us to act more urgently, at odds with the creative process and your ability to connect with your own intuition and inner guidance. In this episode I explain why this happens, share some of my experiences and struggles with slowing down, and provide tips and ideas for embracing a slower pace, if that’s what you’re craving.
MORE FROM REBECCA
Creative Wellness Letters (my every-other-week notes of encouragement for your creative life)
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Sign up for the free Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge (5 days of super easy creativity + wellness prompts)
My PDF workbook: Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity
RELATED RESOURCES
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey (creator of The Nap Ministry)
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Hello and welcome to episode 70 of Being A Whole Person. This is going to be our last new episode of 2022, which I cannot believe. How is it December already? But here we are. I have been in a multi-year process of trying to treat December as a slower time, and I might have mixed success with that this year, which I'll talk about more in this episode. .
This is always such a tough time of year, with the conflict between go-go-go holiday season activities and feeling like we need to pull back because it's getting darker outside. It's getting colder. We have the instinct to turn inward at the same time as all these things are happening. I did an episode about this a couple of years ago, Episode 20: Embrace Doing Less During the Darker Season. This will be kind of like a sequel to that episode, all about embracing slowness, not just during this season, but any time of year. It just feels particularly appropriate right now.
And usually, I think most of us find ourselves rejecting this idea of slowness, whether we are consciously doing that or not, maybe not outright rejecting it, but maybe having some resistance to it. I talk a lot about compassionate productivity as an antidote to hustle culture and toxic productivity culture, and those types of cultures really want us to go fast, go hard, do all the things, and that requires of us that we have a superhuman amount of energy. I don't know about you, but I certainly do not have a superhuman amount of energy!
Sometimes that creates even more tension when you feel like you don't have the energy to live up to the expectations that are being put on you, or that you think are being put on you, about how much you need to do.
Embedded within that is a sense of urgency. Urgency is really helpful for productive capitalistic culture as a way to keep us engaged.
If we feel this sense of urgency, we'll keep working. We'll keep doing all the things. And that urgency, if it always seems to be present, is the recipe for burnout, of course. I'm not saying that urgency is completely manufactured by this idea that we have to keep going. Some urgency is real. You might have financial concerns. You might need to tend to yourself or other important people in your life urgently. There are very real types of urgency, but asking the question, "Is this actually urgent, or do I just feel like it's urgent?" can help you stay away from overwhelm as quickly.
It can be overwhelming, if you are a multi passionate creative person, to think about all of the possibilities for what you could be doing, and to consider all those possibilities, especially if you are in kind of a figuring things out, or what I call a "scattering seeds" phase. You're just sort of scattering a bunch of seeds and you're not sure which ones will grow yet, so you're trying possibly more things than you would normally.
But if you're feeling super exhausted, you might have that impulse, plus this impulse to pull back, to go inward. And then, choosing not to do things, or perhaps taking a break from them, might make you feel like you're falling short, you're failing to keep up, you're missing out on things. These are all very real feelings.
So in this episode I'm hoping to give you some fuel for the fire of slowness. Not the blazing fire that you need to run from, but the roaring fire in your fireplace that makes you just want to curl up and watch a movie, or curl up with a pet - something cozy. This is the season of cozy. As long as you're in the northern hemisphere. If you're in the southern hemisphere, come back to this when you're feeling cozy or when it's winter for you.
So why should we embrace slowness, if results and achievements are really exciting and really important? Well, the first answer that comes to my mind is not a popular one. And it's one that comes up when I talk about burnout, which is that if you don't embrace slowing down, this slowness will embrace you, or the sickness, or whatever symptoms you are going through that are causing you to break down in some way.
We don't have an infinite amount of energy, we have cycles of energy. If you're in a winter, either a literal winter season or just a metaphorical one, you might be in a time of less energy, and pushing against that usually doesn't have good results, even if you're, on the surface, able to still accomplish the things that are on your schedule. So, doing less might be the answer, at least in the temporary.
There's always this calculus to prioritizing, right? You might be giving a ton of effort to one thing, and minimum effort to certain things a medium amount to other things. There's always a shifting balance on how we're treating our different priorities and how much energy we're giving to them, right? But no matter what that looks like at this moment, we always need to be able to slow down in order to hear what's happening in our minds, to receive messages about what the right thing is, to do the best next step in your creative project, in your business, maybe just in your life.
If you don't have the space to slow down, it's really difficult to even hear what you're thinking at any moment. As you know, we really need that quiet space in order to tap into the creative muse, or the creative energy, or whatever you like to call this mystical phenomenon that happens when we're creating, and we're receiving creation energy from somewhere.
If it sounds like I am preaching the idea of slowness and you're like, "This is impossible, I can't slow everything down. I can't just cancel everything," I'm with you. I can't cancel everything either, or, you know, if I had to cancel everything, I wouldn't want to do that, but it wouldn't be a horrible disaster. You know, if it had to happen, it had to happen, but that's not what we want to do, right? So, I struggle with this too. I have a very busy December coming up. I have a busy next few weeks, and that is not how I want December to be.
Instinctively, I'm feeling a real pull to turn inward, to reflect on what's happened over the last busy few months, to reflect on what I want from this holiday season, from this next year. So those two feelings are very much in conflict inside me right now. Last weekend was Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I was really excited to slow down, and have a four day weekend of basically nothing scheduled except for some family time.
I did that, but I also had a lot of stress because my cat Tsuki had a little stomach ailment and we had to spend time at the emergency vet. He's fine now, but it was very stressful there for a couple days, and we didn't know if he was improving, or improving fast enough. Then we were just kind of worried about him.
So, you know, I thought I was going to have those quiet days. I planned for them, and it didn't quite feel like enough to recharge me. So, that can happen, but it's also better than not taking that space at all. Like, anything is better than nothing, right?
In certain ways, I crave things to move quickly because that's exciting, and we want to see change move quickly when we're trying for some sort of positive change in our lives. But I also know that it's very much my nature to go slower. I am a Taurus, in my astrological chart there are many instances of being a Taurus, and the archetype of that is very slow and methodical and stubborn, perhaps, and you know, whether you buy into astrology and all that philosophy or not doesn't really matter. But I find that I really do identify with that archetype.
Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm behind everyone else, because I just am a slow burn kind of person. I need time to process what I'm doing. I need a lot of time to think about what I'm going to do next and to really internalize whether it feels right. I'm not usually a person who can make a decision quickly and you know, that is my nature, and sometimes that feels like there's something wrong with me because that is my nature, even though I don't want to feel that way.
So as much as possible, I am trying to embrace time for spirituality, where I get to just tune in with my inner guidance, with my intuition, what I need to be doing to feel like my truest self? That doesn't mean that I have a lot of time for it, necessarily. But at the very least, I try to carve out a few minutes in the morning to journal a tiny bit, like micro, like just a few sentences, just time to sit and be quiet. That is often hard for me to do, even though it's a short thing and it's a small thing.
My next level of that is creating this cozy corner in my bedroom. I live in the Bay Area. It's expensive here. I don't have as much space in my home as I did when I lived in Minnesota, which means it's challenging for me to feel like I have my own personal space. But I am now embracing this idea of the cozy corner.
I ordered a bunch of pillows and cushions, and it's not very glamorous, like it's not actual furniture or anything, but it feels really cozy to sit in this corner as it's coming together. I am not fully finished with it, but I can share a photo of phase one in the show notes.
So maybe finding your own little space is a way to help you embrace slowness. If that's hard for you to find inside your home, maybe it's that you're going out in nature, and that's where you're finding that quiet time in your head. That way you'll have the space to actually do that gut check about each thing that you want to do or feel that you should do, and maybe you don't actually want to do, but you hadn't taken the time to actually ask yourself that yet.
So just sit with whatever that thing is and see what feelings come up in your body about it, and that will give you a lot of good information about how you really feel. You might learn that you feel obligated to do something, and that perhaps there are reasons that you do want to do it, but it's not a wholehearted yes. Then you can say to yourself, "Okay, knowing that, do I want to go ahead with this?".
If you don't get a strong feeling, or a strong message one way or the other when you do that gut check right away, that's okay. It might not come right away. You might have to keep pondering that thing and kind of let it simmer for a while. But once you start to give it a little bit of attention, then your brain can kind of keep working on it in the background, and you'll find your way to whether it feels like the right thing or not.
You've probably heard the acronym FOMO or fear of missing out, but I've also heard and loved the acronym JOMO, The Joy of Missing Out. We have a lot of fears sometimes about what we're missing out on, and there's grief associated with missing out on things. I want to honor that for sure. But there are probably also things that you are happy to be missing out on, and they don't really bother you that you're not doing them, except for maybe somebody in your life expected you to, or you've always done it a certain way.
For instance, maybe you've always gone to a certain person's house in your family for the holidays, and maybe this year you just can't muster up the energy to travel and it doesn't feel right this year, and that's how you've always done it, so you just kind of default to that, but maybe your heart is really telling you, "I need to do something different and I'm actually OK missing out on it this year." That's just one example. I'm sure you can think of many from your own life.
If you haven't yet had the space to slow down and you're like, "Whoa, I wish I could slow down, that would be so cool. I don't even know what I'm going to discover when I actually slow down," look for little signs. If you're saying to yourself, "I just have to get through this thing and then I'll rest," or "I just have to get through today. I just have to get through this week," and you find that you're saying that over and over and over again and you're not actually getting the space that you need, that's a really good piece of information. Hopefully you can look to the future for a time when you can make that space for yourself.
A good sign that I need more slowness is also feeling like I don't have extra energy for anything fun that I want to do. Or losing the desire to do something that I usually consider fun, like hanging out with a friend who I haven't seen in a while and I'm really excited to see, but I'm like, "Oh, I'm just so exhausted that I barely even have the energy for this fun thing." That's a good sign to slow down wherever you can.
Seasonal depression is also a really common thing to happen, especially if you live in a northern area. The further north you live, or the less sun you get, the more likely that is to be a thing for you. And I'm not here to diagnose any sort of mental illness because that isn't my job description. Please consult your qualified mental health professional for sure, but I just like to mention this, because sometimes seasonal depression can show up as that sort of disinterest in fun stuff.
Even though you're not feeling sad or completely overwhelmed, you might be just feeling this kind of general numbness, or like a flatness to your emotions. Like, not a lot of high emotions or not a lot of really low emotions. And so that might be a time when you realize, Okay, I could be doing more to support myself, maybe I need more vitamin D, maybe I need to talk to a therapist. Maybe I need one of those SAD lights. I find it super helpful to have a well, I guess I'll call it a happy light because it helps you with SAD, seasonal affective disorder. I have found that to be such a helpful tool.
Then asking yourself, what can you take a break from? What can I pull back on temporarily? Even if it doesn't feel comfortable, if you don't want to take a break from that thing, just embracing the idea that there might be seasons to different activities. And just because you're taking a break from something for the month of December doesn't mean you can't return to it in January, and you might even feel more refreshed and excited about it.
For instance, I've been trying to play more gigs where I get to play my own music and music that I choose to play. I've done that a couple of times during this month, and I'm not seeking anything else new for December. I'm just, I'm full for December. I'm not adding anything else to my schedule unless it's like a really big exception of something awesome. I know that once January comes around after the holidays are over. If I take a break, I will have more capacity and more excitement to do something cool and plan more gigs after that.
So breaks are good because they fuel us for the future. I'm not going to get super into this topic because I did a whole episode on this, Episode 16 Why You Should Take More Breaks. And you know, I'm not really into should-ing you, but I did use the word should in that episode title because I think we could all use a little bit more space in our schedules, and that's never a bad thing.
So if you're feeling the need for slowness. I am here to champion you in that. It is okay to need to slow down more in the winter, or any time that you need to, but especially in the winter, as it is right now when I'm recording this.
If that's one of your personal values that you don't want to be full speed ahead obsessed with productivity, but you're finding it hard to put into practice, keep practicing. I'm here to cheer for you in that.
There are lots of sources on the Internet where you can find fuel for this, but especially the Nap Ministry is a fabulous Instagram, and Tricia Hersey, who runs it, has a new book out called Rest is Resistance. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I haven't read it yet, but everything I've heard from other people about it has been fabulous. And I know that it will be fabulous based on all the stuff that she's been putting out for years in terms of praising us for resting and rest being its own reward, not a reward for something else.
So like I said, if you ever need someone to justify needing to slow down or take more breaks, I'm here for you. I will be back in your ears with new episodes probably sometime in January. I am considering taking a longer winter break than just December because I think that might be something I need, to recharge a little bit more. I'm just not sure as of recording this, but I will air some of my favorite winter season and slowing down episodes during December, and I'm hoping to pop in with a beginning of year episode on, you know, recapping and looking ahead to the year, even if I take a longer break.
So I will be back soon after this winter season, whatever this metaphorical winter season will look like. Wishing you all the best for the rest of this year and start to the next year, and be well!
