Slow Down, Work Hard

"What boulder, and which hill?"

For years, I have been feeling the pull to slow down, to take my time. Don’t hustle, don’t worry so much about productivity, be in the moment, do the work but don't stress, don’t press, don’t grind, slow down.

But.

I have been carrying around the same copy of Be Here Now since 1991, and yeah, sure, great, be here now, but what if I also really enjoy Being in the Dream Future?

Cosmo is yawning because he does not need this book, all he does is live in the moment.

I don’t like rushing, but also I don’t like lazing about. I will lie on my side and stare out the window looking at clouds, and that’s great, and a perfectly lovely way to spend 45 seconds of my day.

I went to the doctor because my throat hurt (I did not have strep, but was apparently reacting to all the pollen; my habit of sticking my nose deep into flowers has at last backfired). The doctor asked, “Is your cough productive?” and I was hit with a pang of guilt at the question—I’m sorry, no, my cough is not productive. If it just worked a bit more, maybe it would be.

I have been fighting these two horses for a while, where one horse is the Do the Work Horse of Productive Restlessness, and the other horse is the Quiet Contemplative Calm Horse of Slow Presence. I feel better when I work and make progress. I also feel better when I work calmly, when I monotask, and when I do things that build my ability to sustain focus and attention.

I finally figured it out. I figured out how I can feed both of these horses. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable working slowly and taking my time, because sometimes that is necessary. It’s that I’m uncomfortable working at the speed of the internet.

The fact is, even after years of awareness, I am still addicted to the internet. I’m off social media, but there are plenty of places to scroll. There are plenty of things to look at and read. And I can still fool myself into thinking I have done something when I spend an hour clicking around.

I think of the times when I’ve thought, “wow—that hour flew by!” and when it’s an hour on the internet, I always feel dusty and unsatisfied. I feel taken, like my time was stolen. If I’m writing, reading a book, walking, talking to a friend, and I suddenly realize an hour has passed, I feel a magical effervescence. A “wheeee!” That stolen hour on the internet never comes with a bubbly “wheeee!”

I do still have an account on Instagram, so I see when a photo of me shows up. We went to the No Kings protest in Portland and ran into my friend Samantha Hoyt (she is my sewing friend and runs A Gathering of Stitches, which I’d love to go to someday, and also she made that vest) (I made the sweatshirt I’m wearing in this photo but it’s not nearly as complicated as Samantha’s vest). We biked to the protest to avoid dealing with a car and parking, and Dave biked with that full-sized American flag strapped to his back.

And yet. Still, so many days, I check my email, and then click and click and click some more, and an hour has gone by and maybe I have read something, maybe I bought something, but mostly I feel dissatisfied, angry, and annoyed.

I have tried many tricks over the years. Keeping track of focus hours, finding my why, quitting the internet, blocking the internet, leaving my email out-of-office on for weeks at a time, changing my passwords and not saving them. All of them worked, but none of them worked enough and it’s because it’s pushing a boulder up a hill to try to avoid it all. We can push against it, but it’s still there.

Last year I had a transformative birth chart reading with Aerin Fogel and she pointed out all the places in my chart that indicate my love of working hard, of pushing a boulder up a hill. And then she said, “But you need to ask, ‘what boulder, and what hill?’”

Clicking around on the internet masquerades as work because of the presence of a boulder-shaped thing (searching for dopamine, for interesting factoids, for outrage, and the endless scroll). And I’m feeling really deeply that these hacks and tricks aren’t going to help right now. I need something different. I need something that comes from deep inside me rather than from outside (blocking the internet with an app, et. al.). My only thought is to stand in the middle of the room until I’m absolutely sure my next action is the right one. Which is a fairly unrealistic way to live, but no more unrealistic than staring at a glowing slab in my hand.

Pushing a boulder up a hill is slow work. When I’m spending too much time on the internet, I get to the top and realize I’m standing on the wrong hill entirely. Resisting the pull of the internet is about changing what is at this point an established and entrenched habit. I know, it’s just a metaphor, but that boulder still has weight. I can’t just pick up the boulder like it’s a papier-mâché prop and carry it effortlessly to a different hill. The way to change the habit is by rolling the boulder a little bit off its path, every day, until, after many months or years, you are on a different hill.

I’ve already done it. I went from obsessively tweeting and checking Twitter circa 2018 to happily deleting my account (something I have never once regretted). I am comfortable not checking my messages for a day. Something amazing will happen and I’m peaceful, not documenting it.¹ It didn’t used to be that way.

I still have a long way to go. I still get pulled in, all the time. When I sit on the couch in my office and write or read, there is a tiny voice in my head that’s wondering if I should get up and check something on my computer. Another triumph—that voice used to be so much louder.

Rushing doesn't usually produce work that I feel good about, but the internet wants us to hurry up and make more content. It really does feel like a robot’s directive at this point. What human could possibly want a greater quantity of content at this point? I never log in and think, “I hope there are fifty new newsletters for me to read!” I’m craving instead one brilliant essay, one article that opens my mind, one gorgeous drawing made by human hands.

As soon as I log off, I’m more productive, even if I’m not actively making something. I need quiet—I don’t even need actual quiet, but the lack-of-outside-inputs quiet that allows me to hear my own voice.

I’ve come to see that, for me, slowing down isn't so much about rest but about allowing myself the quiet space to hear my own thoughts and to listen for inspiration. I am influenceable. If I see a smoothie, a cleanser, a pair of pants that someone else is raving about, I immediately want to buy them. The pull of the internet for me is often a desire to know who I am—but via someone else’s recommendation. Sometimes I do have a strong somatic yes or no reaction to something (“I love that” or “ew, no, not for me”) but often it’s a numb sort of “maybe?” feeling that just means I’m witnessing someone else’s yes. Slowing down means removing myself from the vast stream of other people’s strong opinions that don’t have anything to do with me (and the even vaster stream of mediocre nothing content).

Because when I think about it, I do not want to slow down, at all. I have so much writing I want to do, and so many other things I want to create. I do not want to rush, but damn do I ever want to keep my nose to the grindstone. I will take time off if I need to, but not for long. I have too much I want to do.

The two horses can exist together. I will get my work done, but on my own time, and not so I can post on the internet. I hate that it’s such a rare thing now to take huge swaths of time off from posting on the internet, so you can get other work done. I still think all the time about Courtney Summers writing a newsletter where she said she hadn’t put out a newsletter all year because she was writing a novel, and going deep into it, and it was the best novel she had written so far. Why isn’t that more normal?

Slow down for long enough to notice what boulder you’re pushing, and what hill you’re pushing it up. Is it your boulder? Is it a hill you want to be on?

Thoughts and Links

• Mark your calendars! Fail Better Club is back, for the week of July 21. More information to come soon. Find that weird story that you love but that is absolutely not working. Let’s fix it!

• I’m always excited for a new post from Iva-Marie Palmer, because she interviews writers like no one else does (Costco! Tote bags! Tap dancing!).

• I know I just posted about Bob Shea last week, but if he keeps doing interesting things, I’m going to keep posting about them. I listened to his interview on Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk podcast after I wrote this week’s essay, and it helped solidify some of my thoughts about how to do creative work. Mostly: just be yourself, and relax enough to do the work that reflects that. Also, remember that going for a walk and talking out loud counts as work.

• “You can say anything and be critiqued. You can say nothing and be critiqued.” The world is hard to look at these days. This list from Lisa Olivera helps.

• “No one mastered “We’re all gonna die” quite like the artists of the 80s.”

• Two Smitten Kitchen salads that I make all summer long because they make great cold-from-the-fridge lunch salads: the beach bean salad (it’s a salad you can bring to the beach, not a salad made of beans you found in the sand), and this roasted carrot sunflower seed pasta salad. (Both are vegan.) (I think there’s optional meat in the bean salad? Obviously it’s not vegan if you throw that in.)

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• I just read Sorry, Snail by Tracy Subisak, and it’s so great. You know I love a book that takes what could be a predictable story, but then you’re reading it and you get to a page that is hilarious and surprising and not at all what you expected. This book is page after page of surprises.

1. In the past week I’ve seen: a baby deer frolicking in a field, a woodchuck that I thought was a chunk of wood until it unfurled itself somewhat menacingly, and two cows being led slowly down the street behind a Subaru station wagon. They were amazing, and I felt no need to film and post them.