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Lessons from 10 Years of Slow Living Part One | Simplicity From Scratch

How to Live Slow : Lessons from 10 Years in the Slow Lane

We all know what Slow Living looks like on Instagram. But what does Slow Living look like in real life? Could it be, it’s not what we think?

I’ve spent a lot more time on instagram than usual lately, as I work to intentionally grow this little heartfelt endeavour of mine. You know what I’ve noticed? 

Overwhelmingly, the Slow Living feeds look nothing like my life. As in – even after 10 years I caught myself wondering – Maybe I’m totally out to lunch? Maybe this is what Slow Living is supposed to look like.

But rather than feeling that all these beautiful polished feeds are wrong, I realized, that for me – they simply didn’t feel TRUE.

So I thought I’d share some of the practical details of my real, messy, imperfect Slow Life to pull back the curtain a little and well . . . More than that. I want you to give yourself permission to live a life that feels true to you, too.

Cause if I’m being honest – as much as I love these feeds – I mean honestly, they make doing laundry look so charming – they also make me feel kinda of awful. 

It’s true what they say, you know. Comparison truly is the thief of joy.

So anyway.

What does my Slow Life look like, 10 years in?

How do I shoehorn slowness into my modern life, with all the demands of running a household and a business and a farm and somehow still manage to get the kids to soccer on time (in a clean uniform to boot)?

1) I’m clear about what matters.

Losing my Mum to cancer brought a lot of ugly shit into focus. The perspective afforded by the horrific experience has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. 

Read about how my grief helped me simplify here.

I KNOW what matters to me most, and I’m not afraid to disappoint other people in order to put first things, first. 

This clarity, knowing what matters – if you don’t have it, Slow Living will always dissolve into aesthetics and superficial fluff.

2) I say no. A lot. All the time. As much as humanly possible.

Gosh. Lemme tell you, 10 years in, I still hate it. I’m a born people-pleaser and knowing that it isn’t good for me doesn’t change it.

But setting clear boundaries is crucial if you want to live slow.

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3) I suck at email. On purpose.

This is my number one way of filtering out customers who aren’t a good fit for our farm and values.

I refuse to be chained to my email. I don’t let it set my priorities or my schedule or anything else.

This is in pretty aggressive opposition to societal norms and I gotta admit, I kinda love the subversive undertones such a conscious decision carries.

4) I don’t use social media.

My use of Instagram for this blog is done at arm’s length via Tailwind. I do my best not to dive into the IG environment directly. I don’t use it at all for personal purposes. Ditto for Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve never had a TicToc account, same for Snapchat and the gobs of others whose existence never even registered on my radar. 

The few times I have to dip in, I always come away feeling – gross. My mood is always worse after exposure to social media, without exception. 

When I first quit Facebook, my social life (this was in my 20s) took a nose dive. But you know what I realized? All those relationships? They were superficial. They fell away so easily because they didn’t really matter.

The relationships that survived my cord-cutting were deeper, more meaningful and much more durable. Over a decade and many life changes and relocations later, they remain.

(Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is a great read on the subject. I love his perspective.)

5) I embrace my quirkiness.

This sounds like an odd one, right? But actually, when I think about it, accepting myself and all my faults has been key to my being able to live a big, juicy, purposeful life.

I used to do the 9-5. I had a pretty intense career with a government human rights agency.

Life was heels and pencil skirts and lawyers, so many lawyers. An office with a view of the city and mountains and drinks with girlfriends before catching the train after work.

It made me so sick that I ended up taking a six month medical leave from work. I just wasn’t suited to it. Wearing my heart on my sleeve meant that I was shitty at office politics, felt too deeply the pain of my clients, became frustrated by my lack of ability to take action on obvious injustice, raged at the legal barriers to my providing help.

It was the worst.

I was great at my job, but my job wasn’t great for me.

Here on the farm, I lean into my weirdness, my earnestness, my sensitivity. It’s not perfect, but it is so much more rewarding doing work where I’m not afraid to be seen. Where all those things that made me unsuitable for a ‘regular’ career became assets.

This shift in perspective has coalesced into something I call Slow Work, which you can read about here.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

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The Comments

  • Fatam
    May 21, 2021

    Thank you for this article thats just what I needed after being overwhelmed to live a slow life like we see on social media and its not happening its like a continuous running especially with kids but when you said “ life that is true to you “ it awake me that I should seek my priorities not others and also I will add a lower expectations to what will happened I think that will help too.

    • Stacey | Simplicity From Scratch
      > Fatam
      May 27, 2021

      Social media is, for the most part, in opposition to slow living. It is a thief of both time AND joy.

      Setting expectations that feel true for you is so important. And setting tiny goals, especially if you have kids, can really relieve the pressure of expectation and keep you from burning out in your pursuit of slow.

      Good luck!

  • Christa Sterken
    June 14, 2021

    Hooray for this message! I am glad to have come across your blog. I too have been going against the flow in this area for many years. When my children were small, people were mortified I didn’t sign them up for “all the things”. We carefully let them choose ONE thing at a time, and kept our most important things (family time) front and center. As adults now, they really appreciate that perspective even though at times it disappointed them in the moment. “I” too am more peaceful in this life. Being a deep thinker and someone who loves people, but also absorbs their emotions easily, setting the boundaries of a slow life has been the best lifestyle choice we could have made. Have you heard the old quote “It’s okay to be happy with a calm life”? I appreciated your words “I refuse to be chained to my email. I don’t let it set my priorities or my schedule or anything else.” The phone is included in that for me too. As a writer, people think “well you are home, why don’t you answer?” But a phone, like email, is a tool. Not my taskmaster. I don’t carry it around and if I did, nothing else that satisfies my soul in a productive way would EVER get done. Distractions. 🙂 God bless you on your slow life journey, well done!~

    • Stacey | Simplicity From Scratch
      > Christa Sterken
      July 24, 2021

      You nailed it. My mental health suffered terribly during the season of my life when I had a normal, ‘successful’ career and all the attending lifestyle accoutrements. The moment I removed all of the expectations and pressure my ‘illness’ – that had crippled me to the point I couldn’t work – simply went away.

      And YES To the idea that these things are tools – meant to serve us, not the other way round. Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism did a great job of challenging how most of us think about tools – that just because something has SOME utility, it doesn’t mean that it has ENOUGH utility to justify the costs.

      Nice to hear that your kids grew and appreciated your choices, even if they were sometimes tough at the time. Mine are still little, but even at 10 and 7, its amazing to see how much insight these choices have provided them with. They can see their friends being run all over hells half acre and seem to intuitively understand that that life of more would be inherently less in all the ways that really matter.

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