41 and Rushing to Slow Down
I turn 41 tomorrow.
I had planned to spend this past weekend, while my children spent the weekend with their dad, going out with my wife, having a few cocktails, and celebrating. Instead, my planned weekend disintegrated in the face of a bad cold turned sinus infection. We spent the weekend binging Schitt’s Creek, knitting, and downing a gallon or two of spicy ramen.
And it was…perfect.
We sat each on one end of the sofa, one or several dogs piled between us, surrounded by skeins of yarn, Kleenex boxes, and abandoned cups of coffee. Every now and then, one of us would look up and smile down the length of the sofa, receive a smile in return, and then fall back into a comfortable quiet-not silence, for there was the television, the click of knitting needles, the occasional sniffle or cough from my end of the sofa…but quiet. The kind that is enveloping and warm, like an oversized comforter.
“We don’t do this enough,” both she and I commented more than once.
And we don’t. It took a skull splitting headache and an early morning trip to urgent care to ground me enough to spend a whole day quietly enjoying the company of my beloved, crafting, and just resting my spirit.
I want more days like that one. With my wife, with my kids, with myself. I want to be present in the moment, not just skidding through my life on one heel, always speeding along even when I’m sitting still, my thoughts constantly elsewhere. This weekend, I was just there, with her, with the yarn curling around my fingertips, and I really felt it. I felt present in the moment in a way that I haven’t glimpsed in a very long time.
I feel like I’m just beginning to understand how to live, and I’m halfway through my life. So now I feel like I need to hurry up and get that life started. The one where I make my own hours, live my life simply, and be present in my everyday.
But I have to fight that urge, because that’s just more avoidance, and more looking ahead without appreciating the moment. That’s not appreciating the space I am in right now. Which has so much beauty in it.
Slow living doesn’t have to be about upending your life and rejecting your full time job — though that certainly may be a part of it. It can be about seeing your present world differently, learning to appreciate the moments you’re already living, and just allowing yourself to expand within those moments and really live them.
I don’t need to quit my job tomorrow. I don’t need to sell my house and move to a cabin in the woods. I just need more days of comfortable quiet, the space to breathe within my own mind, and let my spirit rest.
