Languid Will

I will meditate on this image to further my aims
(photo thanks to Make: http://makezine.com/craft/giant_kitty_couch/)

2015, what will you be?

Over the past week of lounging and lolling at my mother's house I have thought about what intentions I would like to set for the new year. I have been dissatisfied with the options I present for myself. They are all so unmanageable. More, more, more. How can I do more of 10 different things when I can't even do enough of what I am already doing? Ok, then less. Less, less, less. I still feel tired. Less, as they say, is just another kind of more.

Last year, my intentions were about daily routines (this, I think was a kinder way of trying for the more, more, more). Over the course of 12 months I have done better and worse at them. And yoga. I am still straying off the path there. All I can say is I trust that yoga will still be there to receive me lovingly when I manage to return.

Yesterday, I caught a friend's Facebook post about celebrating a busy year by slowing down for New Year's Eve. This is a friend I might put in more than one "more column" - She is a person I would like to spend more time with, we sometimes talk about playing board games - more board games (actually that might be a really great resolution), we are partly connected through writing and also through food (more, more), and so on. Her post inspired me, though, to finally find the resolution I was looking for.

My wish for myself and for you for the year 2015 is to slow down. Slow down. That's it. On different days that will mean different things. Sometimes it will make for less. Fewer things on the schedule for a given day? Less anxiety? One hopes it will also mean more. Slowing down opens up space for the kinds of things I hope to grow -- walking, family time, good food, and always, writing.

Slow down and see what happens. (Didn't Thoreau say something like that? Also, this has nothing to do with the NYPD.)

Part of what I hope will happen is this blog will be rejuvenated as a document of slower living. I am going to step back from social media for a while. It is fast in a way that eats time and eats concentration, even though it brings me so many benefits (like the post that inspired me and friends I see only in the ether). In its absence I will, at a stately pace, try to return this blog to its original, observational, catching the shiny things, purpose.

We'll see how it goes.

Reading: I was excited to find an article in the current Writer's Chronicle title "Reading, Writing, Teaching, Time: a round-table discussion," and I was all ready to declaim how it helped to bolster my slow down philosophy. I read the first few pages and found that it was more about the crisis in the humanities (and how this phenomenon is not so new as we tend to think). This is a worthy topic, but not what I want now.

Dear reader, if you have anything to recommend that considers how to be a reader, writer, and teacher and cope with the limitations of space/time, please send it my way.

Writing: This.

Dinner: I got a pressure cooker for Christmas. Tonight I inaugurated it with white beans that I turned into a garlicky, creamy pasta sauce.

Soundtrack: Late 60s R&B.

Random thing: I found this delightful advocate for the slow: International Institute of Not Doing Much (www.slowdownnow.org). Hee.

Also, perhaps I will get around to reading this book, In Praise of Slowness.