How to Enjoy Slow Living and Mindfulness in a Busy Life
We all know someone who seems to have endless tasks and responsibilities, yet always manages to get things done, be graceful to others and truly enjoy life. What is their secret? I believe their secret is that they know how to maintain connection: to themselves, their needs, their environment, and the people around them. We could give it endless names, but for the sake of simplicity, I call it mindfulness, or slow living.
When I share about slow living, I sometimes receive comments like, “If only I could slow down and have less on my plate.”
I want to clarify that slow living is not necessarily about doing less or shunning very real responsibilities. For me, it is not so much about how much I do, but how I do it.
We all have to do certain things daily, like brushing our teeth or preparing a meal. When applied to such activities, slow living simply suggests to do them mindfully. Not necessarily more slowly—unless you want to—but with more presence and attention. In other words, what kind of quality are we going to bring to these activities, these few minutes? Nothing in our days needs to change besides the quality of our presence. I believe that's what slow living, or mindfulness, means.
If you want to experiment with this a bit, pick three tasks in an ordinary day for you: one task you love to do; one task you feel indifferent about; one task you detest. Try doing each mindfully, allocating the same amount of time to it as usual. For me, one task I love to do would be crocheting. A task I feel indifferent about would be brushing my teeth. A task I detest would be a phone call. Without exception, bringing mindfulness to each of these tasks makes them more enjoyable, more meaningful, but also I do them more thoroughly, the outcome is better, the process is more easeful.
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unnily enough, by electing a slow living lifestyle and mindfully practicing it, things generally get done more quickly, with less fuss and with better results. What’s not to like!
But why choose slow living? What is the point of mindfulness?
Choosing slow living means bringing more discernment to the activities we give our time, attention and resources to. Being as aware as possible of where our energy goes and whether changes might be needed.
As we learn to be mindful, we reveal a friend in ourselves. What I notice as I grow my mindfulness practice and unfold my commitment to slow living, is that I get the same amount of stuff done, but I get less frazzled when doing it: being mindful brings friendly attention and gentleness to the most mundane of activities.
It also furthers the friendship with ourselves, which is the most important relationship we will ever nurture. When we slow down in mindful presence, we learn to treat ourselves as the treasured person we are. We give ourselves that undivided attention we deserve, with warmth and presence. We easily do that for loved ones, so why not cultivate that quality in the relationship to ourselves.
Ironically, a side effect might be that we achieve higher productivity on some days, because energy is focused, channelled and used in the most optimal way. Instead of coming from stress and overwhelm, we come from calm, centred presence. Our days remain exactly the same, we do the same things, the demands remain the same, responsibilities don’t magically disappear, yet the quality of those days completely changes because we have shifted the depth of our responses.
We shift from utilitarian attitudes to warm-hearted presence and curiosity.
This really does create more spaciousness around daily tasks, events and relationships. We might find that we feel less rushed, more poised and alert in a helpful, balanced way. Let me know what happens when you try it.
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