LTM Classic: 6 Benefits of Slowing Down
Your innate value has nothing to do with your level of busyness
I’m wiped out today. I’ve been walking a lot over the past month, and today my body said, “Nope. I need rest.” I trust my body to tell me the truth, and I listen to it, even when my brain doesn’t agree. To wit: The part of me that wants to maximize my fitness is whining, even though my experience is that—in all areas—going slow leads to bigger gains than rushing and pushing.
Slowing down is essential to our well-being, emotionally, physically, cognitively and spiritually. In a world that demands we be ‘always-on,’ slowing down is downright revolutionary.
I wrote about this seven years ago, in one of the most popular posts on the original Living the Mess blog:
In 2012, Tim Kreider wrote a brilliant manifesto against busyness, “The Busy Trap,” for the New York Times. He captured something I’d been noticing, which is that complaining about being ‘busy’ is a humblebrag, an ego-reinforcing concept. He also pointed out that it was almost exclusively white-collar or creative professionals who tried to one-up each other with how busy they were.
“Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in.”
—Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,” New York Times, June 30, 2012
I want to be clear that I’m not trying to shame people who are scrambling to scrape by. I’m not trying to shame anybody. I’ve been super-addicted to busyness, and I’ve been annoyingly Busier Than Thou (complete with superiority complex). I was…not a pleasant person to be around (and I’m by no means ego-free today). But if you’re genuinely unhappy with the pace of your life, and your obligations don’t directly affect your survival needs (food, shelter, safety), there are options.
Complaining about being busy is one of the ego’s ultimate ways of making itself seem important. If so many people are relying on me, it says, then I really must have something valuable—more valuable than others—to offer. I matter. And of course, we all want to matter to others. We all want our lives to make a difference. The mistake is in assuming that busyness equals value.
To read the rest of the post, please click here.
A quick administrative note
I’d like for Living the Mess to someday be a book (or five). In order to do that, the publishing industry requires that I build a "platform” (readership) first—i.e., that I grow this newsletter. To do that, I’m going to be pitching (and hopefully placing) articles in various outlets like TinyBuddha, Spirituality & Health, Mindful and others.
In turn, that means I may not send newsletters quite as often in the next few months, and/or they might be like this one, directing you to earlier content you may not have seen. I apologize, but eventually—I hope—I’ll have enough of a list that I can re-focus on deep dives for the newsletter, too.
If you’d like to help me grow readership for Living the Mess, please share this (or any post or newsletter) with your social networks. Thank you in advance!