When I slow down, I can dive deeper—and that’s how I prefer to live. — Cait Flanders In 2023 my word for the year was SLOW. If you’re new to my blog, you can catch up with the posts throughout the year about my journey here. To summarise what I learned before I share a few of my favourite quotes collected throughout the year, here are a few takeaways that have found permanent homes in my mind: Slow living is, above all, an act of self-preservation and self-compassion. If you wish to slow down and are looking for some more practical suggestions, Courtney Carver provides a fantastic list to kick-start…
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Fast or Slow? You get to choose!
This year, I have been exploring what it means to wrap a philosophy of slowness around my life. I haven’t posted about it as much as I had expected, but that’s ok! The focus continues, and I am here to update you now. The concept that has been messing with my head for the last six months is that some things cannot be slowed down. I mistakenly and very naïvely thought everything could be slowed down to a more manageable pace. Wrong. Not everything can be slow, but conversely, not everything has to be fast. Certain things fall into either end of the spectrum, and there is a whole range…
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The slow and gentle work of love
I came across this quote from Maria Popova in someone else’s newsletter a couple of weeks ago (I wish I had noted who it was.) and wanted to share it with you. “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.” — Maria Popova. What a tender…
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Does Slow equal Lazy?
I have been trying to write this article for several weeks now, which in and of itself is not really a problem. What has been tying me in guilty knots is that I had set myself a publishing schedule and was not sticking to it. I kept putting it off because I was too tired or more interested in painting or whatever. I have procrastifaffed left, right and centre. I called myself lazy. This guilt is silly because I am not being paid for these posts, and nothing happens if I don’t post on schedule. And yet, I have been berating myself for not publishing when I told myself I…
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Slow down, you move too fast!
My word for 2023 is SLOW! Which is kind of odd, because I like to drive fast. Ha! I chose slow because it feels like the natural next step after last year’s word – Presence – where I discovered that presence is simply paying attention. The thing is though, I cannot pay attention if I don’t slow down and perhaps even stop from time to time; life is going by at warp speed, and I want to see if I can put on the brakes a little. My choice was reinforced towards the end of last year when my physio guy kept telling me to slow down with my weight…
