Life Wish #5: Developing Slowness

Good morning y’all! How are you holding up? Hope you are resting and taking some time off the internet and saving your energy to do what feels important for you to do right now. 

As for me, I spent Saturday diving all the way into a book for the first time in I don’t know how long. The book -- The Overstory -- is the intertwined story of about a dozen humans, all told under the canopy of trees. Maple trees planted when babies are born. Chestnut trees planted by immigrants migrating from Brooklyn to the Midwest. So many trees, grown up over millennia, all communicating with each other and with us if we can grow quiet enough to hear. 

It’s a lovely book, and it oriented me to a different scale of space, time, and depth -- forest time. Where meaningful growth happens not instantly but inexorably, over the ages. Where the web of relationships is so dense that you can observe it your whole life and still not grasp all the details. Where growth and decay are best friends, wholly dependent on each other in every moment. 

The scale of the forest is at odds with the way our culture is set up now. We don’t like slow. We don’t understand or respect the deep intertwinement between all species. We don’t appreciate subtle complexities that unfold themselves to our understanding only in stillness and concentration. And we don’t like decay at all -- only growing growing growing. 

Our biases toward the short term show up in just about everything we do, from the stock market relentlessly seeking its returns every single quarter, to monoculture farms where diversity is stripped out in favor of efficiency. And clearly, we know that this bias toward the short term is at odds with how nature works. Ever since I was a child in the 70s, scientists have been telling us that we’re consuming in days resources that took centuries for nature to develop. But we set that knowledge aside, because operating in the short-term feels more manageable and rewarding.

Our culture has an adversarial and utilitarian approach towards nature, but our bodies get it. We feel amazing in the forest, breathing in all the yummy compounds released by plant life, listening to the wind as it rustles the leaves. We exhale more deeply. Our shoulders and jaws relax. Our minds de-focus and float free. We slow down. 

I’ve mostly been more of a hare than a tortoise -- I think fast, I talk fast, and I get annoyed with those who don’t, fast. But over the last few years, I’ve been noticing how good slowness feels, when I can get a taste of it. And I’m circling around this idea of slowness as something I can develop in myself -- the capacity to let something sit and come back to it with fresh eyes. The trust that unfolding is happening, and you don’t always have to grab hold of it and monetize it. The humility to realize that I don’t always know the answer.

Hoo boy, that last one is especially hard, because some part of me really does feel like if everyone would just do what I say, we’d all be better off. When people are going slower than I want them to, on the sidewalk or the highway or in their cultural thinking, I have a tendency to get BIG MAD.

But even I in all my time-traveling, tiara-winning glory do not have the capacity to build an interconnected design for the whole world and assign every creature on Earth a specific role to play in it … hard as that is to believe ...

I was thinking about all of this last week when I did my Deep Canvass phone-banking shift. The idea with deep canvassing is to slow down and have a 15-20 minute conversation with someone, where you build rapport, share your own thoughts and feelings vulnerably, and invite them to do the same. Then you hold non-judgemental space for them to process any conflicts that come up, and ask them for support. It’s an elegant and powerful strategy -- inviting and inciting folks to change their own minds. 

On my shift, I had a bunch of hang ups, a couple of trolls, and a few great calls. One woman I spoke to, Doris, was a life-long Republican and a retired nurse who voted for Trump last time but now felt a conflict between her conservatism and Trump’s constant lying and horrible handling of the pandemic. She was upset when she told me that she hadn't seen her grandkids in person since the spring.

She just got out of the hospital herself, so hadn’t yet taken the time to consider what she was gonna do in this election. I listened to her, reflected back what she was saying, and shared my own concerns. Yes, I’m also concerned about Trump’s lying. It seems to me like he doesn’t think about much of anyone but himself. And Biden wasn’t my first choice, but to me he seems like a decent person who is gonna be thinking about what other people need, at the very least. 

What surprised me about this was not that this woman went from undecided to strongly leaning Biden, but that I was able to listen to someone who didn’t already agree with my progressive views. Because honestly? That is something that I have had a harder and harder time doing these last few years. I hear certain combinations of syllables and am ready to go to war. 

But speaking to this conflicted 79-year-old woman fighting a MRSA infection was easy, and it was good for both of us. It was good for her to have a listening ear, and it was good for me to get some practice in slowing down my instincts for war, to be still and let myself witness the unfolding of a person on the other end of the line. 

I keep thinking about the morning after the election results in the US. Even if our dreams come true in a few weeks, and a blue wave engulfs the nation, all up and down the ballot, we still have a lot to deal with. Unrepentant Trumpies are still gonna be here. Brute-force short-term capitalism is still gonna be running the show. Climate change and ableism and racism and misogyny are all still gonna be things.

Many of the people we are voting for do not yet seem to understand the full scope of what we are facing. We’re gonna have to work together to sort it all out -- to whatever extent we can, with whoever we can mobilize for our cause. 

These brittle structures have to come down, and it’s scary because all we’ve ever known is tied up in them. But when they fall, they’ll no longer be blocking the sun, and new life will spring up everywhere. 

You and me are the new life in this scenario <3

Madge

PS: Of course I’m writing this at the beginning of another bullshit hard fucking week. Hope you can find a minute to do something sweet for your central nervous system. Here are some soft gentle links to help with that:

• A lovely lil LoFi track that made me go siiiiiiiigh

• People walking places I can’t go right now is my favorite quarantine genre -- here’s a forest walk and a Venice cam

• Toshi Reagon singing a song from her Parables opera -- more here -- and WOW this week’s Parables podcast was FIRE

• A magical painting video that makes me feel something still and quiet and strong

• A podcast with Sam Irby where she wraps up all the horror and hilarity of being a human with a body like she always does

• A podcast that helps me drop right off to sleep

• Lizzo + Jameela Jamil = <3