desiring the slow life

I think I’m not alone when I say we want to live “the slow life”. The question I would pose next would be, “Well, what does that mean?”

We have dreams of the slow life being lived out on a farm. It seems the most natural place for one to be at peace, surrounded by bleating sheep and rolling hills.

In fact, we seriously considered it for a few months, meaning we looked at price per acreage, learned about wells and septic tanks and borrowed books on grazing techniques, permaculture, inspiring tiny home designs.

But all that came to a grinding halt when we took an honest look at our financial situation – me on my PhD stipend, Peter working part-time so he can pursue the pastoral call on his life.

In one night, our daydream scribbles of land surveys etched with keyline water systems and topographical dotted lines and daytime musings of what it would be like to use our hands to milk cows or repair fences instead of type on little black squares all day crumbled into a pile of dusty dreams to be stowed away in our memory chest.

The emotion we felt first was disappointment, although more in ourselves for our naivete and poverty than anything else.

Isn’t this what we were taught to avoid by accruing education and wealth for ourselves?

We were never supposed to come to this point – where we had a desire but no means to fulfill it.

Our education and wealth were meant to protect us from that. Meant to allow us to get whatever we wanted. To fulfill the desires we had.

This led to the real question, which is why we found ourselves in our current predicament.

Did we somehow mess up, make the wrong choice? Were we not smart enough to get the right job to earn enough money to protect us from this?

The truth is that it is situations like these that cause you to stop in your tracks, and take a hard look at the choices that have led you here. The truth is that your choices reveal something about what you truly value.

Sometimes, you start with your values and make choices.

Other times, you look at your choices in hindsight because in examining them, they tell you something about what you actually value.

The truth is that while my fellow Princeton graduates went on to work at Bain and McKinsey, earning 6 figure salaries straight out of college, I chose to head the opposite direction and head to a remote village in China to serve children who would not give anything back because I believed that was more valuable than a life of financial security.

I chose to marry someone who also did the same thing out of college, and was now trying to faithfully obey the calling of ministry and pastoring he feels on his life.

These choices had real consequences which I may not have fully realized back then, but I was experiencing now.

The consequence was now that I had limits on what I could do.

It meant we couldn’t just decide to fly to the south of France or go scuba diving in the Galapagos simply because we wanted to. And in this case, it meant not being able to fulfill a desire of moving onto land.

What were the values underlying these choices, I wondered.

Why did it feel like we were doing something wrong by bumping into these limitations?

Was it because we had bought into the idea that life is all about maximizing experiences?

To see as much of the world and have as many experiences as you can in the time you have?

And that the point of money was so we could be as unconstrained as possible? To have the freedom to do absolutely whatever our heart led us to do?

Or were these values we had unconsciously observed all around us, but then realized through our choices, that they weren’t at all what we believed.

Maybe what we really believed is that a good life is not necessarily an unconstrained one, but one with limitations that help you be more human.

Maybe a slow life is not just moving onto a farm, or meditating for 6 hours a day,

but it’s not getting what you desire and still being okay.

I see us all desiring the slow life, one that is free from technology and the idol of work and productivity, and yet we can’t seem to let go of the need to be unconstrained so we can pursue whatever we desire.

And yet that is exactly what is driving our anxiety.

It is the anxiety that we won’t be satisfied. Or provided for.

I was talking to my close friend Nahrie about the concept of time.

Time is not a measurement word, she said, but rather a space we can enter into.

It is not a container into which we try to stuff as much as we can in order to alleviate our anxiety of not having enough.

It is not a metric we use to measure ourselves against others to see if we are behind or ahead so we can finally be at ease knowing that we are going at the right pace (but what is the “right pace” exactly?).

Rather, it is an opportunity to enjoy whatever God has for us in the moment.

There is no behind or ahead.

There is only this pace we are going at.

What if we weren’t afraid of missing out but rather actually believed that God is giving us exactly what we need for each moment, not any more or less?

That He actually holds all things together, our past, present and future.

And that we have infinite worth that does not derive from how capable we are to fulfill our desires –

in fact, we can have unfulfilled desires and still be infinitely valuable to God.

This state of freedom is my true desire.

In fact, I think it’s what the slow life is really about.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

– The peace of wild things, by Wendell Berry

On a lighter note, here’s a song I recently discovered that won’t stop running through my head: