Real 🗞️ Slow News Day #81

Hey,

I’ve not been very slow recently. I’ve been work-heavy and life-stagnant. I’ve been waiting and waiting for progress on the house we’re buying. We’re getting there, but it’s not as fast as I want.

Try as I might—and forewarn myself as I did—I’ve felt a bit like my life’s in limbo.

Everything’s good, really. But I’m caught between places and selves.

I’m an adult in my childhood home, I’m a partner without a nest, I’m a bundle of ideas of what life will be like when the thing happens.

But life is happening whilst I’m living in some imagined future.

That’s kind of why I haven’t written to you for a few weeks. I don’t think I’m doing a great job of living what I preach at the moment.

With all that angst expressed, I’m remembering that I don’t write this newsletter to preach. Far from it.

I write it to share. To give a little slice of my world and how its tides collide and coalesce with the meltwater of slowness.

Sometimes it’s sludgy and the demarcations are clear. Salt and freshwater. An oilslick.

Sometimes I’m in blissful peaceful slowness, a glacial blue harmony.

It’s ever-changing, basically. My efforts to live a life that feels true to myself and what I value are never fixed. Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe…

Worth remembering, worth bearing in mind. This future I imagine won’t be so perfect or easy when it finally arrives.

The frustration will never last. Nor will the slowness. Nor will the limbo. Nor will the struggle.

Huh. That little refrain feels a bit more like it.

:)

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’m chucking some more beans in the coworking coffee machine. Currently, I’m making my way through Roastworks’ dedicated roast for Some People. I stopped trying to deny my ascent into bougie millennial madness when I started visiting a barber shop that had its own coffee on sale. Never been happier.

And I have to share with you the most fitting song for the limbo I’ve bemoaned today. Colin Hay’s Waiting for My Real Life to Begin has, quite literally, resounded in my head for many weeks. I don’t want to feel this way, but damn it, I’m finding it hard not to. If I’m going to be in this spot, I might as well soundtrack it with the dulcet Aussie tones of Mr. Hay.

Take it easy,