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TLDL

Five Simple Ways to Slow Your Roll

What are some practices you can adopt in 2023 to slow yourself down and delight in life? Here are a few of my favorites, even if I don’t practice all of them all the time:

* Write! Whether it’s poetry, journaling, blogging, or that novel you’ve been dreaming about writing, putting fingers to keyboard or pen to paper slows us down and makes us think about our experiences, emotions, opinions and beliefs. (Side note: It’s why I’m not using Chatbot AI to write this blog. It might save me time, but I need to take that time.) It’s incredibly hard to be both deeply reflective and quickly productive at the same time.

* Practice Solitude and Silence. This one’s harder and harder to come by as a new parent, but it’s all the more precious for that. In solitude there are no people to care for and few if any tasks to complete. In silence there is no content to devour or words to generate. I’ve never been slower than in a yurt, or a monastery, or a cheap Airbnb in the woods completely alone except for the presence of God’s Spirit.

* Schedule Your Limitations. Is the pace of your life too fast because your calendar fills up every week? Are you one of those people who does great with two or three nights of fun per week but is exhausted by four or five? Block out “slow time” on your calendar, and keep it like you would a commitment to a friend. (By the way, there’s a whole robust practice around this called Sabbath, but that’s a blog for later in the series.)

* Do One Thing. Have you ever been watching Netflix while scrolling Instagram and replying to a text thread, during which time you were munching that amazing banana bread you just finished baking? I’m horrible at this one, I admit. But in our world of pings and screens, it can be a joy to turn off the phone and simply delight in one thing. Listen to one person. I know. It’s a radical practice, but I believe in us.

* Pray and Meditate. Prayer is conversing with God at the pace of your soul. Sometimes it starts out frenetic and anxious, but in my experience God’s presence has a calming and quieting influence. Prayer recalibrates our spirit to the tempo of God’s Spirit. Meditation, of which there are many forms, can slow us down by helping us to hold one thought, one feeling, one verse of Scripture, or even one part of our body in our awareness, until we’ve had time to truly savor the experience.

And it’s to that type of attentiveness we will turn in Part 3 of this series next week.

How Do You Practice Slowness?

I’d love to hear about your practices of slowness! Take moment to leave a message in the comments and share your experience with me and the community.

We have so much to learn from each other.

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