“I try not to use the language of forward and backward, but I think if you subscribe to the kind of manifest destiny of linear progressive history it will look like going back, but I think it only looks that way from that point of view. From the point of view of health, and flourishing, and acknowledgement, and justice, it is productive. It’s productive of meaning.” - Jenny Odell interviewed on For the Wild: An Anthology of the Anthropocene
When I reflect back on the last three years, a pandemic, social and political upheaval, becoming a mom, quitting work and a Phd, I see how all these things precipitated a dismantling of my worldview, my identity, my ways of knowing and being. I’ve left behind a philosophy of the self that was bounded and legible (to borrow from Odell’s language) and adopted something more amorphous, comprised of constantly shifting and intersecting parts. There has been a great zooming out and an equally great zooming in. I am both a spec and a universe.
This change in my worldview is marked by a much greater allowance for complexity, for not knowing, for asking questions that don’t have clear answers, for being confused, and uncertain, and in process, for letting go of the idea that one day I’ll arrive at a right version of life. And ultimately, all these allowances are informed by a shift in my perspective on time.
Of course, the pandemic shook up our collective perceptions of time, albeit the particularities of that shake up differed person-to-person. The essential worker’s 24 hours looked and felt different than the furloughed travel agent’s which looked and felt different than the work-from-home graphic artist’s. And, as Jenny Odell reminds us, family structures, and socio-economics, and race, and class, and community change what 24 hours means for a person. Time is not a strictly quantitative measure, it’s a lived experience. Time stretches and time shrinks. When I was in 9th grade the the four years to graduation felt like an eternity, now four years feels like nothing. But wether your days felt like weeks or your weeks felt like days…or both simultaneously, the pandemic shifted our perception of time, and for me it’s never been the same.
In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkman writes about our cultural orientation toward time as a resource, “something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.” He says, that earlier in history “time was just the medium in which we lived.” We didn’t see time as separate from life. “Once time and life had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing to be used - and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways we struggle with time.” “Once time is a resource”, her writes, “you start to feel pressure to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working longer — as if you are a machine in the Industrial Revolution — instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.” He goes on to say, “soon your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate and control if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.” In her book Saving Time, Jenny Odell deepens Burkmans analysis by reminding readers that our culture frames the problem of time as an individual one rather than structural and systemic. The overwhelmed working mom needs better time management practices, say the Instagram optimization experts, ignoring the absence of systemic supports for mothers.
Decelerating, as Carl Honore calls it, is not easy. It requires deconditioning our internalized obsession with busyness, it means “challenging the cult of speed” as is the subtitle of Honore’s book, In Praise of Slowness. It requires sourcing self-worth from deeper and more sustaining places. Somatically, it’s the difference between checking off a quick to do and diving into a long term creative project. It’s the difference between hearting a bell hooks quote on Instagram and reading her long form work, examining the histories and contexts in which she wrote, and continually working toward critical feminist consciousness. It’s the difference between a mic-drop Twitter post, “a neat little package of ‘right information’,” and sitting in reflection, in the messiness of learning.
My deceleration has not been cute. I went kicking and screaming. For me, settling into a slower pace has elicited feelings of shame, and guilt, and a lot of discomfort. It’s made me feel lazy and boring and stupid sometimes. It’s made me feel pretentious and privileged and gross. But it has also made me feel embodied. Like I can take a full breath. Like a human. Like I’m spending my days the way I want to spend my life.
Slowing down was hard because I’d very much internalized a busy is better mentality. And even after I’d simplified the demands of my life, I was left with an internal hurry, a resistance to doing less, and the perplexing urge to fill my plate right back up. And, to be clear, my days aren’t empty stretches of nothingness. That is not the point. Obligation and responsibility and being in service is good stuff. This is not about consumerist self-care, perfected solitary morning routines, cutting yourself off from relationships and community to protect your peace. NONONO. I still have demands on my time (although I am very privileged to have paired down significantly) and these demands stretch me, require sacrifice, sometimes push me to my limits. But, I am learning to approach them with a mindset of slowness a relishing. I have the space now to move at my right pace as I engage with these things: writing, parenting, eating, maintaining my home, nurturing my relationships, engaging with community. And, of course, I fail at slowness all the time. In fact, I’ve been pretty awful at it lately.
In a the podcast interview quoted at the top of this post, Jenny Odenell was asked what it means to do nothing. What is nothing? She described nothing (I am paraphrasing) as something (ha!) that is not explicitly additive. Something that is an act of maintenance perhaps, like washing the dishes or preserving a piece of sacred land. Rehabilitation, renewal, dismantling, returning. These are some words she used. She described it as something with no finish line, no outcome, a goal-less activity, like bird watching, observation, learning, creating, playing, savoring, an act that leaves you with nothing to show for it. So much of mothering falls into these categories. So much of childhood falls into these categories. These are the things that make us human and connect us to the larger ecosystems in which we exist.
Okay, this may seem unrelated, but I was re-reading “Developing A Liberatory Consciousness” by Barbera J Love recently and this quote struck me:
A liberator consciousness enables humans to live their lives in oppressive systems and institutions with awareness and intentionality, rather than on the basis of the socialization to which they have been subjected. A liberator consciousness enables humans to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving in to despair and hopelessness about that condition, to maintain an awareness of the role played by each individual in the maintenance of the system without blaming them for the roles they play, and at the same time practice intentionally about changing the systems of oppression.
It is scary to slow down inside a society that rewards and valorizes speed. Odell writes if you have time you have power. There is great privilege in being able to slow down. To move at a speed that honors your humanity and wholeness and the humanity and wholeness of those with which you live, and commune, and work is a an act of reclamation that isn’t available to everyone. It is to live inside a culture sick with hurry without catching hurry sickness yourself. It is not frolicking or homesteading or minimalism or quiet quitting necessarily. It is giving yourself permission to move at your right pace, it is a respect for the meandering magic of being alive.
Learning about the Slow Living Movement has helped me honor this season of my life. I just started learning about it, but here’s what I know about this movement so far The Slow Movement started with the Slow Food Movement which emerged in Italy in response to the planned building of a McDonalds in Rome and the start of the sale of cheap wine. The Slow Movement has since grown into an international movement and advocates for an attitude of savoring in all aspects of life: food, work, relationships, leisure. It’s an acknowledgement of the far reaching benefits of shifting our minds into a slower gear, rather than applying the same rapid pace to everything we do.
“Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”
With love,
Stephanie
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