Slow Down

Snow is falling lazily and I’m enveloped in a warm, scrap-yarn afghan, my feet encased in a fleece-lined foot warmer. Holidays are over, my tax file organized and just waiting for documents to arrive, the baby shower, for the most part, planned and ready and I’m eager to write. I’ve decided to slow down. Just slow down.

Slow down. Enjoy the process. Stop and savor the now of life. I, we tend to forget the joy of the process. We all forget that the joy of the journey is the journey.

I need to relish writing time, especially that time I’m not under deadline, the time when one of my novels is still unpublished.

Because when I do have a deadline I won’t have as much time to write poetry just because I feel it, or be able to try my hand at other kinds of writing because I want to. I can just bet most published writers would tell me to relish this time. This now.

I crochet afghans at night while I watch TV. It relaxes me, gives my hands a counter exercise to the typing. I crochet about an hour or so each night. I’ve finished over a hundred afghans, but sometimes I find myself hurrying through one so I can get started on the next one.

I have to remind myself why I crochet. I’m not crocheting to finish anything, I am simply crocheting to relax. It is not the end product that I am working toward, but the process. I really have all the afghans I’ll ever need, as do all my family and friends.

Parenthood, too, is often that way. Anxious for our child to take each new step in development. We forget that when they’ve taken all those steps they’ve walked right out of our lives.

Choose to slow down and savor. It takes discipline because our modern world evolves around multi-tasking, being super-efficient. But super-efficient at what? Living? We’re in the habit of doing two things at once so we have more time to do other things two at a time. Have we paid attention to either thing? Have we really paid attention?

As writer’s, we owe it to our writing to slow down. We hurry through life, missing 1000’s of stories, 100’s of incidents we could use in our work, details of life we miss. Life is the meat of writing; I don’t want to lose it, hurrying through it.

My garden teaches me patience, how to slow down, how to savor. You just can’t hurry the seasons. Come March I’d like to, so tired of snow and gray, but seasons take their own sweet time coming into full realization. I’ve planted 100’s of plants, but each spring I must wait until for the daffodils to flower on their own time. I have to wait for the soil to warm enough for planting.

Gardening is much more a process than a goal, for me anyway. It’s true the whole purpose is vegetables for my table and a beautiful garden, with lush flowers, but I would feel cheated if someone else planted, deadheaded, mulched. I went the route a few years ago and my fingers actually felt the withdrawal of the lack of dirt under my nails.

I can’t hurry the gardening and I wouldn’t want to try. There would be so much I’d miss. Rather, I like to savor every aspect. The sound of the hand spade scrapping into the dirt, the scent of the rich loam as I transplant pansies, the first blooms of my bleeding heart dangling from the arched stems, raindrops still glistening on the leaves.

I can do no less for my writing, for I love writing as much as I do gardening. Gardening, crocheting, and writing are part of me, something that helps define me. I owe it to myself to slow down and fully savor each part of the processes. My writing will be richer. I’ll be richer. That is my life I’m talking about, after all.